Everything you build in Stationeers traces back to ingots, and ingots come from smelting ore in a furnace. But Stationeers smelting isn’t “insert and wait” — it’s a pressure-and-temperature puzzle. This guide covers mining ore, operating the furnace, the gas conditions for ingots and alloys, and the advanced arc furnace.
Mining ore
Use a mining drill on the deformable voxel terrain to extract ores — iron, copper, gold, silicon, lead, nickel and more. Carry them back to base for processing. Early on, iron and copper cover most of your needs (and combine into steel), so prioritise finding those veins.
Operating the furnace
The furnace smelts ore into ingots, but it needs the right internal pressure and temperature. You feed gases into the furnace — typically a mix of volatiles and oxygen, which combust to raise temperature and pressure — and manage those conditions to produce ingots. Add the ore, hit the target conditions, and it smelts. Getting comfortable reading the furnace’s pressure and temperature gauges is the core skill.
Alloys need precise conditions
Basic ingots are forgiving, but alloys are where smelting gets technical. Each alloy — steel, solder, invar, constantan, electrum and others — needs a specific pressure and temperature window and the correct ratio of input ingots in the furnace at once. Miss the window and you get the wrong output or waste material. Many players automate the furnace with IC10 to hit and hold those exact conditions reliably — see the IC10 guide.
The arc furnace
For simple, single-ore smelting the Arc Furnace is a fast, power-only option that turns one ore into one ingot with no gas management — great for bulk basic ingots. Use the regular furnace for alloys (which need mixing and precise conditions) and the arc furnace for quick single-metal smelting.
From ingots to components
Ingots feed the autolathe and electronics printer to produce the kits, cables, pipes and parts you build with. A steady ore-to-ingot pipeline is what lets your station keep growing, so set up reliable smelting early.
Heavy production and furnace automation run smoothest on strong hardware. Stationeers hosting from $8.50/month on Ryzen 9, 30% off with XGAMEON.
