You realize the properties of the Promethium asteroid chunk can subtly improve the quality of your machines' components. The next logical step was to think of ways to industrialize its usage...

This mod adds a new machine to the end-game, the Refinery. You unlock it after researching promethium science, alongside research productivity.

It has a base quality effect of +100%. Out of the box, it directly upgrades an item to at least the next quality level, with no resource loss.

This technology however, also comes with four major caveats:

• Promethium chunks spoil to an oxide chunk, from the beginning - its special effects wither away after 2 hours. You can turn this off in mod settings.
• Speed module effects break the upgrade guarantee. You can't place quality modules in the Refinery itself to undo that effect.
• Even though most items can be refined - even science packs - their refining time also depends on all the ingredients of the production chain.
• 1 promethium chunk satsifies 1 Refinery for 10 minutes of constant operation. If you use them extensively, you're gonna have to design logistics for delivering promethium chunks, of all things, to your planets.

More technical details

• This mod has no control scripts; it's purely based off prototypes.
• Science packs have hard-coded refining times. You may use this to your advantage.
• Refining end products is faster than it should actually be. Speed module 3 with crafting speed 1 still takes an eternity though!
• Refining uranium-235 is not possible. You're forced to setup quality Kovarex enrichment process instead. As such, any end products that need uranium-235 - Portable fission reactor, Spidertron and Biolab - are not directly refinable.
• Refining ammo and explosives in general is slow due to their delicate nature, and so that you can't cheese your way out of military research for space platforms.
• Organic items can be refined, but eggs and fish don't play well - they are way slower.
• Some end products that gain no perks from quality - tiles, transport belts and similar - can't be refined.

Missing / experimental features

• Report incompatible mods! Because of how refining recipes are generated, some modded items might be impossible to refine.
• Refining time for vanilla items should feel balanced, but you
• Sound effects of the Refinery may change in the future if I find better samples to play with.
• The Refinery can freeze on Aquilo but has no frozen cover.

Credits

• Hurricane (Discord @hurricane046), for the gorgeous Refinery graphics & animation. Used with CC BY license
• Wube, for related icons, reference in autogenerating recipes, and this amazing game
• Many people active in #mod-dev-help over on the Factorio Discord