Early on, your ship doesn't have enough capacity to refine ore either than occasionally, which means ore has to be hauled back to a storage, have it accumulate there until you have enough for it to be refined, then have to scroll through an unsorted list of a jumble of raw ore, rare earth materials, and refined ore to find the raw ore ones that have accumulated 30 (or a multiple thereof) units, transfer it (the exact amount unless you've got room to spare in your cargo hold), refine it, and transfer it back.

The easiest would be to allow the ship cargo interface's refining screen to access a station storage when docked. That may be a bit messy, however. The option to process all could have a check box for including or excluding the ore in Cargo Storage, merging stacks from the cargo hold and the cargo storage to form sufficiently large stacks. The operation would have to deposit the results (including left overs) in the Cargo Storage, as there is no guarantee the results would fit into the cargo hold.

The actual proposal would be to allow the storage filtering to filter on raw ores numerous enough for refining. Select that option, transfer those ores, refine, and move back, without having to scroll through the whole list to manually match type and amount to the requirements.

One minor problem with this is that the minimum amount of raw ore actually required to use the refinery depends not only on your skill, the quality of refinery you have equipped, and the mining perks you have selected, but also on a random factor which changes which each cycle of the refiner. The cutoff for what constitutes "numerous enough for refining" would be changing every round unless you set an arbitrary amount or use the maximum amount the refiner could require (around 30, i think).

However... The crafting table already not only takes into account the ores you have in your current cargo hold, but also the ore you have stored in the station's storage bay. I can't see any reason why that shouldn't be extended to your refinery. You already can move items from station storage to the ship's hold and vice-versa. This would simply remove some of the tedium of having to micro-manage the process. Maybe the developer will consider adding that feature.

And while looking at the refiner code, maybe he'll also consider setting it up so that the ore is subtracted from the bay FIRST and the finished ore is placed back into the hold SECOND, which is logically how the process should work. Unfortunately, it currently goes in the opposite order, which can be annoying if you start your refiner while your cargo bay is actually full - it creates the ingot, realizes there's nowhere to put it, gives you an error, turns off the refiner, and THEN deducts the ore that you actually had to load into the refiner in order to create that ingot in the first place... costing you the ore, but not giving you the ingot (and making you restart the refiner as soon as you finish cussing about it)

As far as I've seen, the refinery requires the maximum amount (30) to start the refining process, and then may use less than that. There's a message when you try to start refining saying it needs a stack of 30 to start the process if you don't have any stack large enough.

That is only true if you have a poor quality refiner and no refining perks. For example, I have a good quality refiner - good enough that there is no wastage, and if my refining perks are turned off, it says it needs a stack of 25 to start. With my refining efficiency perk turned on (mining level 15), it only needs 23 to start. If I had the second refining perk (mining 55) it only needs 21 to start. I've never gotten as far as 95, but I assume it would require only 19 or maybe 17 to start (the last efficiency perk is twice as powerful as the previous two).

We really need more filters and sorting options (alphabetical, value, quantity) for ore, refined ore and rare earths and the ability to move all. At the moment it's a complete chore and thoroughly tedious.

Thank you

I would also like to request that one of the filtering options is "off" so that we have the option of an unfiltered list. While the filters are usually handy, there are some circumstances when they actually get in the way. For example, when adding or removing items from the stash when filtered, it can take an extraordinarily long time when the list is filtered, because any change in the list appears to require a resort. I have a 12 core processor (6 real, 6 virtual) running at 3.4 ghz, and I was stunned at how long it took to add or remove items when the stash was nearly full (several seconds per item when sorted by value, and a bit less when sorted by name when the stash has 170-195 items). I know that 5 seconds doesn't seem like much - but if you're moving 55 crafted items from your inventory into your stash, it adds up quickly.

Having the option to turn off sorting would fix this - it would also allow me to keep items I don't want to accidentally sell "safe" by keeping them at the top of the list by simply adding them to the stash first, and then leaving sorting turned off.

I would also request that you consider allowing the resort button on the player's inventory to work as an "all" button with key combinations - e.g. alt-clicking the sort button would mark ALL items for sale, while ctrl-clicking the sort button would mark them all for salvage. Shift-clicking it would move all items into the stash, subject to space limitations.

Another refinery option to consider, which hopefully won't be TOO difficult to implement... currently, if I craft an item at a station, the table will preferentially use materials from my ship's cargo hold, but it will also allow me to pull materials from the station storage if I have purchased storage space and stored ore at THAT station. It would be great if the ship's refinery was capable of accessing the station storage in the same way. e.g. If I buy raw ore via the trade-net, when I dock at the station where my ore is waiting, I should be able to tell my shipboard refinery to use the ore in the current station as input, and output to my cargo hold (or back to the station cargo space IF I have purchased space there.)