For those of you who are not familiar with Angel's mods, it completely reworks how ores work. Instead of mining something up and tossing it directly into a smelter, you must first crush the ores, and then toss them into a smelter to get your plates (at a loss of ore), and deal with the crushed stone you get as a byproduct. However, as you advance, you can further process your raw ores to cut down on waste...but this also requires you to deal with ever more byproducts.
In this case, I'm crushing the ores and simply storing the crushed stone; then I'm sending the crushed ore into a floatation cell, storing the geodes I get as a byproduct, and recycling the waste water I get for clean water (this isn't strictly necessary, but since pipes only accept so much fluid flow per tick, it cuts down on how wide I need to make my fluid bus).
Finally, I'm sending the chunks of ore into the sorting machines, which give vanilla and bob's ores (copper, iron, tin, tungsten, quartz) along with a bit of slag, which can (for the most part) be tossed directly into a furnace for plates. The slag I am processing further down into a mineral slurry which I can crystallize into (almost) whatever ores I'm short on. I can also get more slag via dirt-water electrolysis, which is only OP'd insofar as it lets me hang out in the starting area for a lot longer but not indefinitely, since I will still eventually run short on coal (which is needed in most things thanks to bob's mods and cannot be extracted from slag).
Oh, the steam engines scattered everywhere? I'm using them as universal void pipes. The big gaps between the floatation cells and the sorting machines? that's to give myself space to add further refinement steps in the future.
