Plastic Bar to Battery Chain

Lore & Background

In the alien world the Spaceman calls home, the ground runs rich with petroleum veins that seep from the bedrock like dark blood. The first Pumpjack is a humble thing, a clanking mechanical beast that drags crude oil upward in slow, rhythmic pulses. But that oil is only the beginning. Fed into an Oil Refinery, it splits into three streams—Light Oil, Heavy Oil, and Petroleum—each destined for a different corner of the factory. Petroleum, the heaviest and most versatile of the three, is the raw soul of the Plastic Bar. The Plastic Bar itself is a curious hybrid: part refined hydrocarbon, part raw iron ore, fused together in the glowing heart of a furnace. It is not a plate, not a circuit, not a component in the traditional sense. It is a material that feels almost organic, as though the alien planet's own chemistry is being coaxed into a shape the Spaceman can use. When that bar is paired with copper and iron plates in an assembling machine, the result is a Battery—dense, humming with potential, ready to be slotted into a pole or an engine. In the broader narrative of the game, the Battery chain represents the moment the factory stops being a collection of isolated workshops and becomes an interconnected system. Electric poles need batteries. Electric engines need batteries. The rocket, the ultimate goal, needs thousands of them. Every bit of petroleum that trickles up from the ground is a step closer to the sky.

In Their Own Story

The night the Oil Refinery finally caught, the whole base shuddered. Three months of wiring, three months of watching the Pumpjack cough and sputter, and then—*hiss*—the pressure gauges climbed, the internal pipes glowed amber, and on the output belt a single drop of Petroleum rolled out like a bead of dark honey. I stood there in the blue glow of a single electric lamp, my Spaceman suit still stained with iron dust, and I laughed. Not a triumphant laugh. A tired, relieved one. The biters were clicking in the tree line to the east, patient as always. But tonight I had Petroleum. Tomorrow I would have Plastic Bars. And the day after that, Batteries. And the day after *that*, the poles would come up, and the lights would go on, and the factory would finally stop being a collection of lonely machines and start being a *world*. I pulled my welding mask down, walked back to the furnace, and fed it another lump of iron ore. The biters clicked. I fed it another. The night was young, and the chain was long.

Reader's Guide

The chain begins underground. A Pumpjack extracts Oil, which feeds an Oil Refinery. The refinery simultaneously yields Petroleum, Light Oil, and Heavy Oil per unit of Oil input—Petroleum is a co-product, not a standalone output. In parallel, Mining Drills extract Iron Ore and Copper Ore from their respective patches. Plastic Bar (Furnace): 1 Petroleum + 1 Iron Ore → 1 Plastic Bar. Note that raw Iron Ore goes directly into this recipe; no intermediate smelting step is needed for this particular input. Battery (Assembling Machine): 1 Plastic Bar + 1 Copper Plate + 1 Iron Plate → 1 Battery. The Copper Plate and Iron Plate each require one Furnace cycle from their respective ores. Optimal resource ratio per Battery: 1 Oil, 2 Iron Ore, 1 Copper Ore. The Oil Refinery is almost always the bottleneck because its cycle time is long and it cannot be trivially parallelised without additional Pumpjacks. The Plastic Bar furnace is the second most common choke-point, especially early on when furnace count is limited. As the factory scales, expect to add a second or third Oil Refinery, dedicate a full row of furnaces to Plastic Bars, and ensure your Iron and Copper mining drills are sized to supply both the Plastic Bar line and the Plate line simultaneously. Downstream, every Electric Pole, Electric Engine Unit, and Battery Pack will pull from this single Battery output, so plan your assembling-machine count for the total demand, not just one consumer.

Did You Know?

• The Oil Refinery produces Petroleum as a co-product alongside Light Oil and Heavy Oil, meaning you literally cannot make Petroleum in isolation—every batch of Plastic Bar material also generates fuel and lubricant as bon
• The Plastic Bar recipe is unusual in that it consumes raw Iron Ore directly in a furnace rather than a processed Iron Plate, making it one of the few 'ore-in, bar-out' recipes in the game.
• Batteries are a prerequisite for the Electric Pole, which in turn is required to power advanced assembling machines and research labs—so this mid-game chain quietly gates a large portion of late-game progression.
• Because the Oil Refinery has a long crafting cycle, players often find that a single Pumpjack cannot keep up with even two refineries, making the Pumpjack-to-Refinery ratio a classic early scaling headache.