Liquid Smelting System

So basically instead of hiding that everything is turned into liquid or it happening in the background, it becomes more apart of the game.

For early game: (the game works as it currently does)

• You put an ore in, and click to produce an Item directly or an Ingot.
• From there the ore is melted into a liquid. (hidden action in the smelter)
• The liquid (hidden and all done within the smelter/assembler) is then formed into the ingot or item.
• So time elapsed to smelt the ore, and produce the item.

In the later game: (you have an option to store liquid metals)

• You put an ore in, and click to produce an Item directly or an Ingot.
• The crafting bench you are using, draws the liquid from a vat of pre-melted ore.
• And then liquid is formed into the ingot or item.

The later game method is possible because:

• There are pipes that pipe liquid.
• You piped your smelter to a couple of sorters
• The sorters break off into 14 pipes
• Each pipe sends liquid ore to its corresponding vat for storage.
• The vats are then linked somehow to an assembler/fabricator perhaps through the same system.

This means you basically do all your smelting before hand, store the liquid, and now there is no smelting step in the end game because you draw molten ore directly from the vats to craft things. This essentially speeds up production.

How would you power this?

• Well we could later on have thermal generators or nuclear energy at high energy cost.
• Or we could use magma/lava from the earth, which could be directly piped to the system to keep the vats molten forever at low energy cost.

I researched this, and we keep things molten today and the energy cost is not outside our reach to do it in manufacturing facilities. At this scale it might take the power of a small town? But SE2 is set enough in the future that this wouldn't really be an issue at all.

Below is an example where we kept metal molten (terminator 2 had a facility like this).