I’ve seen a lot of guides for Stationeers, but not one that explains how to get started with the furnace in a quick and simple way. Most of the guides use more materials equipment and automation than are, strictly speaking, necessary. This guide is aimed at getting a furnace up and running in the quickest easiest manner, so you can concentrate on other aspects of base building and survival.
You can build a furnace, and feed it with ore nuggets. But for a lot of ores that is not an ideal solution. For advanced furnaces it becomes even less practical. A simple and easy solution is to feed the furnace with gas, specifically bottles. That is the basis of the methods used in this guide.
The first thing you will need is an ice grinder. It will be useful not only for the furnace, but also for getting drinking water. When you build the ice grinder place your pipes running to the right side of the ice grinder, looking at it from the front. The reason it should go to the right is because the volume pump and pressure regulator can be placed running left to right, but not right to left.
First place one elbow, only one elbow. A good rule of thumb when moving gas is to use an equal volume of pipe and pump. The reason for this is because the volume pump moves a maximum of 10 liters per tick. When you pump gas from the ice grinder with the volume pump it will draw out the entire 10 liter volume of the pipe elbow, and then the pressure will equalize between the 10 liter elbow and the internal volume of the ice grinder. The process will then repeat. If you are using a larger pump you should build up to 10 pipe segments because the Turbo pump move 100 liters per tick.
Next build a storage buffer, this can take a number of forms. But because we are keeping this simple, start by building a single pipe tee, running left to right, with the third leg facing down. Place a gas canister connector below that. This will be your storage canister. To the right of the tee place a pressure regulator then another tee with the third legfacing down, and a second canister connector. There are additional improvements, or simplifications you can make to this set-up, but this is a simple, yet functional starting setup.
Your setup should look like this:

The vent in this setup up serves as both a purge, to remove and residual gasses from the pipes, and a method to fill cylinders with gases from the atmosphere. This will come in handy for collecting pressurant, and to re-fill your jet pack bottle.

The next thing to do is to set up the furnace. It will need a canister storage, one piece of pipe, a volume pump, a second piece of pipe and then the furnace. On the outlet side you want one piece of pipe and then a valve or pump. This is the absolute maximum you want, because each piece of pipe you add to the inlet or outlet increases the volume of the pipe, and decrease the amount of gas in the furnace.
Your setup should look like this:

With those two setups you can smelt all the basic ores, and build an advanced furnace. The setup for the advanced furnace is even simpler, because you can omit the pipes and pumps on the inlet and outlet.

From here making alloys is fairly basic. Grind the ice, at a 2:1 ratio, and pump it to storage. Set the regulator and pump the required amount of gas in MOLs into a canister. Load the canister into the furnace and pump the gas into the furnace. There are some things to be aware of. Firstly, when you grind the ice it will but a large amount of either volatiles or oxite into the mixture, and change the ratio of gases. This won’t be a problem, if you remember to shutoff the regulator while grinding. As the gas is pumped from the grinder to the buffer, the gas mixture will normalize. Your gas should be 63.85% Volatiles, 32.54% Oxygen, and 3.61% Nitrogen.
Now for the fun part, making alloys! Fill your tanks to the amount shown in the tables below. When loading the furnace there are two caveats, 1) Ores need less energy to melt, and 2) The order you load the ores in matters. You can make solder with as little as .5 MOLs of fuel, if you use ores and if you load the lead first. If you load the iron first it will take more gas to smelt the solder. One recipe, Invar, requires a pressurant gas to absorb heat from the fuel and increase the pressure. This can be any gas, I used Mars atmosphere. If you are on the Europa or Venus you can use their atmosphere, on the Moon you will need to come up with the gas from another source. The tanks should be filled based off the number of MOLs of gas needed for each alloy. The pressure will change depending on the temperature of the gas, MOLs will remain constant.

As you can see, Steel, Electrum, and Solder can be made with a single gas canister. Constantan can be made with 2 Canisters, or 1 Smart Canister, and Invar needs 4 canisters, or 2 Smart canisters. When you are ready, you can use the same technique to smelt alloys in the Advanced furnace. The Advanced furnace benefits from having built in pumps, so it does not waste 10 liters on the input side and 10 liters on the output side. Having internal pump also makes the plumbing simpler

Most of the recipes for the Advanced Furnace are fairly simple. Stellite needs only one canister, Inconel need 2, and Astroloy need 3. However Hastelloy and Waspaloy will need a lot canisters.



While you can make Hastelloy and Waspaloy using canisters it is not the most practical method. Smart canisters will halve the number of canister required, and Portable Gas Canisters will cut this down to one for Hastelloy and three or 4 for Waspaloy. You can cut this even further by pumping pressurant directly into the furnace. Use an active vent to collect atmosphere, or grind ice and pump that gas directly into the furnace.
Almost any gas can be used as a pressurant, It is however preferable to use an inert gas, and a gas that is abundant on the world you are on. On Mars you can pump atmospheric gas, consisting of mostly CO2 into the Furnace, on Europa you can use Oxygen from the Atmosphere.
Using these techniques you can smelt any alloy in the game with a few basic machines, and some gas canisters. No automation or gas mixing required.

It is also possible to make most alloy using only Volatile Ice and Oxite Ice, but some alloys such as Solder and Electrum require additional manipulation of the mixture to get acceptable temperature or pressure ranges. You can, for example, use ingots instead of ores, which will prevent the solver and gold from producing N20.


Additionally the mixtures will use slightly more gas than if the ices were ground. This is largely due to the fact that ices produce ~25 Mols of gas when ground, so filling the furnace with ices does not allow as fine an amount of control of the mixture. While this approach is less efficient, it may be an expedient solution early in the game.

While this is a guide to basic furnace operation, the setups are not the most barebones setup possible. Some alloys can be made simply by placing ice directly in the furnace. The ice grinder setup can be simplified even further. The pressure pump on the inlet side of the furnace can be omitted for many recipes, but you will need about 10% more fuel to account for the extra volume of the bottle on the inlet side.

It is helpful when grinding ice to pump the grinder completely empty, into your storage system before filling bottles. This is because the grinder does not grind ice in thoroughly mixed batches, but in separate groups, so the mixture coming out of the grinder is not uniform. It is a good idea to let the gases normalize in your storage, where the ratios will return to normal.

There is plenty of room for optimization, for example some ores produce Nitrous Oxide. Blending you fuel to take advantage of this, will decrease the amount of fuel you need to start with.

Ambient temperature, Fuel temperature and Pressurant temperature will effect your results. A furnace outside on Europa, burning -140C fuel will need more fuel to reach the target temperature. I am still testing on Europa, and eventual I will test on Venus. Most recipes that work on Mars will work outside on Europa, with cold fuel and cold pressurant. Of course some recipes, with very tight limits, such as Hastelloy will be different.