@Parsifal,
Example: usually, in the beginning of a level, when you have 3-4 smelters with 5-6 recipes and 2 crafters with 2-3 recipes, you notice that your smelters working full time on copper and tin bars cannot keep your crafters 100% busy crafting copper and barbed wire. In cases like these, I say buy the tin bars! An idle crafter doesn't make profit. A smelter smelting zinc or nickel makes more profit than one smelting tin.
When you get the screw recipe, look if crafting screws from boughy iron bars is profitable. If it is, buy the iron bars, let your smelters smelt lead or silicon.
I don't sell the nickel and zinc bars, I know I'll need them later. Even if I made more items than needed for techs, I don't sell before getting the two +15% item price techs.
Once you get the tin can recipe, you might have 3 crafters, and since I kept the crafters busy, I probably have all the barbed wire, screws and nails needed. Tin bars cost ~10% of the selling price of a tin can, so I put my crafters to work on tin cans from bought tin.
Later, recipes like rivet and struct might bring more profit than tin cans when crafted from purchased ingredients. I switch my extra crafters to work on the most profitable recipe.
By the time I get the two techs increasing the price of items, I have enough items to sell for ~500B.
At this stage, the cost of ingredients doesn't matter. I might craft boiling flasks, spending 3B/hour on gold bars, getting 5B/hour selling the items.
For an easy comparison between recipes, I calculate profit per minute per crafter. Let's say boiling flasks make a profit of 40M/minute/crafter. Exploding bolts might make a better profit, case in which I switch to them, no matter how much the platinum bars cost, the sale price covers them, and more.
Magnets used to make over 100M/minute/crafter profit, but on latest maps they aren't profitable anymore. I still craft them from smelted neodymium bars. Here, if I used my silver ore to smelt silver bars, I realize silver ore is what keeps me back from smelting neodymium bars. That's why I try to smelt a minimum amount of silver bars (also gold, platinum), preferring to buy the bars for crafting and keeping the ore for later alloys.

My recommendations, in short:
- Keep your crafters busy, even if you craft from bought alloys, as long as they still bring a profit.
- Keep your smelters busy, even if they din't work on the currently most profitable alloy.

I agree with you on most of the points but your argument breaks apart if you keep the crafters busy with items that you only intent to use to unlock techs. Then, every invested money for buying alloys is not an investment but totally lost. Unless you count your tech benefits towards the profits of buying those particular alloys. But that will be a messy calculation.

I'm not saying that your approach is wrong or that I know better. I'm just saying that buying alloys for the sole purpose of keeping crafters busy is only profitable if:
1.) the item recipe is profitable even after buying the ingredients. If not, every second the crafter is running, it is burning money.
2.) the crafted items will be sold later on. If not, all costs will never be recovered.
3.) you have the money to buy from markets in the first place. As you said yourself, you don't sell the (more profitable) nickel/zinc at that point, so you need other sources of money to be able to keeping your crafters busy.

If one of the above isn't fulfilled, a (partially) idle crafter is better. Then, rather work with alloys produced yourself and accept that every now and then the crafter will wait for more alloys.

So, if you intent to unlock all techs, then all crafters will - at first - work towards tech requirements only. And therefore, they don't produce items that will be sold. Hence, every bought alloy is a net loss.

If you plan to sell the produced items eventually but intent to keep them until you unlocked some of the item sell value techs, you can very well craft items that - at the time of crafting - mean a slight loss. But still, if these items get turned into techs, they will make no money.

Real example, Asia: Population Density, about 25% into the game.
I have 2 markets, 6 smelters and 4 crafters.
I need 2k copper wire, which the market sells for 3.4M each, for a total of 6.8B. Since I have plenty of copper ore, imperfect logic says I should smelt and craft the wires. Crafting needs 9 copper bars, so the entire project needs 18000 bars; 6 smelters, so 3000 bars each. 8 seconds per smelt, so 6h40min of smelting. Crafting takes 43 seconds, 4 crafters so 500 wires per crafter, 5h58min. Total, 6h40min with 42minutes of idle time for each crafter.
Tin bars are sold for 5.28k each. Tin cans require 78 bars, and crafting takes 5min25sec. Each crafter can make 73 cans in 6h40min. Ingredients cost little over 120M, cans sell little over 15B, profit 14.9B over the same amount of time, and this leaves my smelters free to smelt anything else. I could set my smelters to smelt tin bars to squeeze out the full 15B profit since I have plenty of tin ore, but I prefer letting them smelt higher level bars. Out of these 14.9B, I can pay 6.8B to purchase the copper wire, and still make a profit of 8.1B.
I can also smelt welding rods from bought aluminum bars. Over the course of 6h40min my 4 crafters can make 80 rods, the ingredients cost 28.8B, the bars sell for 47.6B, profit 18.8B, slightly higher than for tin cans. True, the ingredients cost a lot, but I can use the smelters to smelt aluminum ore into bars, gaining a bit more. My mines cannot support 4 crafters running nonstop, that's why I buy the bars I need. Upgrading the aluminum mines is unprofitable past a point, and soon I'll switch to rivets out of bought nickel bars for higher profits, later structs, flasks, and exploding bolts, as long as the recipes get more and more profitable.
Recipes like metal pipe, if crafted from bought ingredients, have a negative profit, that's why I only craft them from smelted bars, and only as many are needed for the tech tree. If the metal bars aren't needed right away, I keep playing, later I might decide to buy them, since a crafter crafting exploding bolts from purchased platinum bars is usually more profitable than one crafting metal bars from smelted alloys.
The profits above are without using my rare Crafting Speed artifact, that rises my output (and profit) by 53.8%, about 1.2M per second using all 4 crafters crafting welding rods. Currently my standard income is 413k/s, can be boosted to 596k/s using rare bonus boost and rare territory boost. So, my main source of income comes from crafting, surpassing income and money caches combined.
Warning, later maps have smaller margins, to a point where welding rods are crafted at a loss. Twine is almost always crafted at loss if you buy the silicon bars. Check your math before crafting from bought ingredients.

Once I get access to recipes that are profitable, I buy tons of resources from Markets to avoid having to use my Smelters & Crafters to make lesser valued items b/c that means not making the profitable items. If those profitable items can still generate profit by buying their ingredients from markets, I'll do that too but lately this seems to not be the case other than Tin Can. I used to be able to buy Nickel/Zinc/Gold/Platinum for Rivets/Bolts/Boiling Flasks/Explosive Bolts and still turn good profit, but lately the buy prices have gone up so much that this actually loses money, so need to smelt the alloys for these now, which makes it even more important to not tie up the smelters by producing stuff for Techs if possible, else there is risk to not having enough to keep the Crafters going.

Some info: The market price equals to 7 times the sell price, when no modifiers are presented.

The problem is that it's the market price of ingredients of an item are 7x the sell price of those ingredients, which are often 4x-10x the sell price of that crafted item.

This model is obvious broken with intent to force players to smelt/craft ingredients instead of buying. If the world worked this way, car manufacturers would have to also manufacture their own glass, tires, radios, interior fabrics and materials, plastics, etc, and computer manufacturers would have to develop their own power supplies, processors, RAM, hard drives, video cards, etc. Some companies do some of these, but nowhere does all.

Then again, injecting logic into WZI is a mistake to begin with ... WZI is after all a weird world (set of worlds) where you require massive quantities ore of cheaper metals to produce bars of other precious metals (like needing tin for gold, gold for neodymium, neodymium for lanthanum, etc. Oddly, all of these are elements so by definition not compounds, and thus adding anything means it's no longer a pure bar of that metal (in fact it's mostly composed of the cheaper ore, so a bar of gold is actually a bar of tin with a bit gold plating perhaps, lol, but sells for much higher - what an evil game!). Oops, logic again. #end

Ever heard of redox reactions? There, one ingredient gets oxidized to reduce (purify) another ingredient. Assuming that all the ores are sorted by their affinity to oxygen (which they aren't, I think?), then using a cheaper ore to refine a pricier one makes total sense.

I couldn't find an example with two metals, but this is a (short) explanation I found so far:

Extraction of Metals: The redox reactions find a great deal of application in the extraction industry to extract metals or minerals from the natural ores. Metals usually exist in an oxidized state in nature (due to their long term exposure to the oxygen present in the air surrounding them). Hence, they need to be reduced in order to extract the required metal out of them. This is done in the industry on a large scale with the help of a suitable reducing agent, depending on the metal or ore which is to be refined. For example, iron is extracted from the oxidized ore of ferric oxide in a large blast furnace in the iron extracting and refining industries using coke as a reducing agent.

Source: https://www.vedantu.com/chemistry/applications-of-redox-reactions

Edited 6/28/2021 17:12:46

LOL, reaching pretty hard.

That shows that what you find is a mix of 2 metals and you separate them to get pure metals. This is the opposite, where you're taking 2 pure ores and mixing them in quantities of 90% cheap metal ore & 10% expensive metal ore to somehow get a pure alloy bar of the expensive metal.

So you assume ores are pure elements from the get go?

Source Wikipedia:

Ore is extracted from the earth through mining and treated or refined, often via smelting, to extract the valuable metals or minerals. [...] Minerals of interest are generally oxides, sulfides, silicates, or native metals such as copper or gold.

Yes, some are more pure than others, but pure ores are, I'd assume, the minority.

To elaborate on what I said before, if you have an oxide of a valuable metal and want to purify it, it wouldn't be impossible to do so with help from a pure(r) and "cheaper" other metal as the reducing agent. You then let the oxygen that was bound to the valuable ore transfer to the cheaper ore because the cheaper ore has a stronger affinity to oxygen. The end products would be an oxide of the cheaper material (that, for our purposes, would just be waste) and a pure(r) and more valuable metal.

So let's take Silver, because most players will know it by now. In each level that I played so far, Silver is smelted by "mixing in" Copper. Despite the fact that some of the ores in idle would never be found as oxides in the real world, let's imagine, mines would produce silver-oxide and the copper you use for the smelting/refining is pure copper (that raises the question, why you don't use copper bars here, but that's not the point I'm making here). Then the smelting would produce pure silver bars and copper-oxide. Given that we are only interested in pure metals, the output of the smelting is just the silver bars.

You are right, that some recipes rather look like they produce alloys instead of pure metals, but given that for each smelting recipe there is an ore of identical name, none of the smelting recipes actually can be alloys (chemically speaking), but have to be somewhat pure metal bars. And if they are alloys, then this wouldn't be totally wrong either given real world examples: Most jewelry isn't made from pure gold but from a gold alloy to achieve different properties (like stability) that pure gold wouldn't meet. They shouldn't be called simply "Gold" then, but hey, it's just a game, so over-simplification isn't a big no-no in general. Besides, some of the metal names are completely made up, so real world chemistry might not apply here at all. Just saying, the smelting isn't what I would classify as unrealistic in WZI.

I have a decent basis in chemistry (if you want to translate it into your educational system, I took a "Leistungskurs" chemistry in my "Abitur", perhaps something like a major in high school??), so I'm not "reaching hard", but applying knowledge that I learnt. Thanks, krinid, that after all those years I again had a reason to apply my chemistry knowledge somewhere. So much of everyone's school knowledge is completely useless. ;)

HAHA, glad to be of help in finding a niche to apply your knowledge.

Well when I say "reaching hard", I think you're actually agreeing with me that this isn't realistic. The fact that you yourself said "some of the ores in idle would never be found as oxides in the real world" & "that raises the question, why you don't use copper bars here, but that's not the point I'm making here" indicates that you already feel this isn't a strong fit from real world to Idle world, but do see a loose thread that can connect to real world if we ignore some of the details and cut it some wide slack. In short: we agree on this, your reasoning lends credence to it, but it's still materially incorrect.

One question though ... for this type of smelting in real life, would there ever be a case where you would need a 5x or higher ratio of the inexpensive metal to the raw ore of the expensive metal? Some of the recipes ask for ~300K of an expensive ore & 2M of an inexpensive ore.

I know about das Abitur ... I lived in Stuttgart for a year, and I recall hearing the students going through a rough time preparing for them. Closest we have here in Canada is final exams for each class in final year, but the Abi is amped up massively and more impactful, since here going to university is just a matter of which school you can target with your grades & how much money you can/will pay, but if you're willing to pay and lower your aim to less prestigious schools, you'll be able to go to some university somewhere. Whereas in Germany (and many European countries) university itself is free, so you're more actively competing for those free and limited spots. I recall 1 car in particular that was covered in celebratory decorations, driving down the road, and while I forget the exact wording, the back window read something like "das Abi" ... so someone was very happy to have them over with, and presumably did well on them.

All bars in WZI are alloys, which are not pure metals. There could be some weird ratios of materials in alloys.

Talking about names, a gold coin is called a gold coin even if there is only 1% gold in it.

Edited 7/2/2021 14:08:20

the other day it will come to you if you're in your position as to how the person feels about yourself per. it has a few years in a month for her so he is going for more money on his relationship if you need something more comfortable and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and less more!

Ok, it's a game, and weird stuff happens in fictional worlds.

Curious though, do you also stand behind the recipes for crafts? Such as needing gold for boiling flasks, silver for glass, nickel for rivets, zinc for bolts, platinum for explosive bolts, screws (on only some maps) to build barbed wire, etc?

I'd love to hear a chemistry based explanation for these. (:

You edited your post ... and added this:

Talking about names, a gold coin is called a gold coin even if there is only 1% gold in it.

When is this the case? If we're talking about actual currency coins, that's an exception b/c of the history of people melting the coins for resale value. The point of a coin is that it's supposed to be worthless, and only representative of the value it holds as currency so people continue using it as currency and not as an actual physical asset.

Anyhow, we're not making gold coins here, we're making gold bars, right? And those to my knowledge are supposed to be 99.5% pure.

Edited 7/2/2021 14:40:32

Silver Glass: https://www.ebay.com/itm/182566059265
Gold Boiling Flask: https://www.ebay.com/itm/254143107257
Nickel Rivet: https://www.ebay.com/itm/264730022408
Zinc Bolt: https://www.ebay.com/itm/191348313533

Silver Glass: https://www.ebay.com/itm/182566059265
Not what I envisioned with "glass"; I was thinking glass window not glass beverage holder.

Gold Boiling Flask: https://www.ebay.com/itm/254143107257
This has gold bands on it, hardly a gold boiling flask. If you go by these rules, then not sure what the point of discussing is, b/c you could put a gold fleck on top of a car and say "gold car", without ever having to justify why multiple bars of gold are required to create it.

Nickel Rivet: https://www.ebay.com/itm/264730022408
I see rivets, but don't see nickel, but sure, okay, this is plausible.

Zinc Bolt: https://www.ebay.com/itm/191348313533
Zinc plated ... okay, stretching but at least an integral part of the product, so better than the gold bands on the flask.

You missed some though ... what about platinum for explosive bolts, screws to build barbed wire?

And if you're going to provide links for each of these, then I shall offer the following challenges:
silicon / twine
lead / struct
zinc & nickel / ceramics
iron, zinc, screws / metal pipe
neodymium / magnet

I'll note that needing aluminum for welding rods actually seems totally legit.

But I'll stop there b/c most of the items after that just get ridiculous:
chromium, uranium, welding rods, twine / speaker
gold, nickel, rivets, structs / transistor
lanthanum, terbium, welding rods, twine / resistor
titanium, welding rods, twine, structs / capacitor
lanthanum, erbium, dysprosium, welding rods / CRT screen

Besides, some of the metal names are completely made up, so real world chemistry might not apply here at all.

Which ones are made up? They all seemed legit to me. Or you mean they exist, they are elements, just not metals?

Curious though, do you also stand behind the recipes for crafts?

Short answer, no! Especially because these recipes change too often. There is definitely something fishy going on with the crafting, way more so than with smelting.

would there ever be a case where you would need a 5x or higher ratio of the inexpensive metal to the raw ore of the expensive metal?

Yes and no, but probably more no. If the more valuable ingredient binds a lot of oxygen but the reducing agent can only bind very little oxygen, then you would need more amount of the reducing agent to completely purify the valuable metal/element. But as I said, this assumes that the affinity to oxygen (or to sulfur in case of sulfides) decreases with the value of the material. So, copper must have a higher affinity than silver. Given this assumption, how likely is it that silver-oxides contain more than one atom of oxygen per molecule? Very unlikely, even if this was possible chemically speaking, the oxygen in the air would have reacted with other materials first before oxidizing some silver-oxide a second time.

I just remembered one application where you use two metals in a redox reaction. Not to purify one of them, sadly, but for welding rail tracks together. That is Thermite.

So, yeah, the recipes we have to deal with here are definitely a stretch and are mainly there to torture us. If you want a realistic game, rather play something like factorio (I'm not associated with this game at all, and haven't even played it, but I know that they are quite realistic there). ;)

EDIT: Okay, only one made up one. I just checked and all the others are real, but Unobtanium??? seriously? You couldn't have thought that this one is real, right? And the order of the ores in this game seems off to me.

Edit 2:

Talking about names, a gold coin is called a gold coin even if there is only 1% gold in it.

Let's differentiate this. There was a time, where coins were actually worth something. Back then, the actual material value of the coin was the only guarantee you had that you were holding something that others would accept for a trade. The governing entities were only responsible for small areas and outside of their territory, the name of the duke or count wasn't worth anything. So, coins were made of valuable metals because everyone could at least agree on the fact that gold is rare and therefore valuable. At this time, gold coins were made of almost pure gold. That's why you see pirates in movies testing coins with their teeth. Pure gold deforms, fake coins would be more rigid and wouldn't deform at all. If you can deform the coin with your teeth, it's a real (and therefore accepted) coin. Later on, things like Fort Knox came along. The actual coins were worth very little, but everyone knew that there is some amount of gold stored in a safe place as a guarantee that the coins you handle day in, day out will be accepted. Nowadays, no such guarantees exist anymore, but countries and federations (like the EU) got powerful enough that we just believe in the value of our currencies.

Edited 7/3/2021 10:50:58

LOL, forgot about unobtanium. Ok, that's definitely made up. Right out of the Avatar book of nonsense. If more stuff was made up, it might actually be better, lol. But ignoring Unobtanium, b/c it uses real chemical elements to create other things, it gives the appearance of being authentic, and even makes a meagre attempt by using cooper for copper wire, iron for screws, etc, but then just gives up and makes stuff up.

Anyhow, overall we agree, the recipes are just made up for game mechanics and make little (some) to no sense (most).