How Many?

Refining and practice at Wade's bench used to be all or nothing. Press Start and the work kept going until you stopped it or ran out of material, which meant a trip to the Processing Yard to refine a few pieces of shale could quietly eat the whole stack.

Now both of them ask first. Before you start, pick how many: it starts at one, and the minus and plus buttons change it by one, up to as many as your materials pay for. When the last one you picked is done, it stops by itself. Or press Max, and it keeps going the way it used to — until there is no material or no room for another. While it runs you can see how far along you are.

At the Processing Yard the number counts batches, and a batch counts whether it succeeds or fails — five batches is five attempts. A Max run has no number to reach: a failed Galvaferrite pour that hands back one of its inputs just leaves more to pour, so how many attempts it makes depends on how the pours go. Whichever you pick, if there is no room or no material for the next batch, the run ends there and tells you why. At the bench it counts whole practice welds, and a half-finished weld waiting on the bench is the first of them. Stop After Current Weld still works partway through a run, finishing the weld you are on and leaving the rest.

If your inventory changes between choosing a number and pressing Start, neither one will quietly run fewer than you asked for. It tells you how many your materials now cover, and you choose again.

Reaching Refining 5 also opens two new recipes for when you need Slag and do not feel like waiting for a bad pour: two Ferrite Shale into one Slag, or two Galvanite into two. They never fail, they are quick, and they pay about what a failed attempt does — useful, not a shortcut for training.