TL;DR
For ore with 100% active ingredient, the production is 1 plate from 1 ore. For 50%, 1 plate from 2 ore items.What ?
This needs more field in the prototype(data.lua), and more codes to manage the tooltip for an item.And also, tech to unlock the full display of information.
Also, this might scale to all the mid products.
But the real core of this suggestion is that, say I have 10 100% ore and 10 50% ore. If I didn't unlock the technology to see the full information, I got to smelt them all together. This needs the furnace to handle a series of recipes.
{type = "recipe"
name = "100% iron ore smelt"
...}
and
{type = "recipe"
name = "50% iron ore smelt"
...}
Like the fast replace.
For now, if a whole lane of furnaces have worked on a recipe, unless they finish just the full cycles, or they'll get stuck. Like if ores and iron plates are mixed for smelting, the steel recipe stucks some furnaces, even no iron plates come, they won't do anything.
50% ore needs to add 0.5 to the results of recipe progression.
Why ?
If some more mechanism is added, this might provide more places to increase the final production. More variety for vanilla. And this makes ores more interesting. Let's say, a specific combination of environment generates better ore and stronger bitters at the same time.Anyway, more variety for the environment should be the top task after the sugar is enough.