Factorio Forums

So I was thinking...
currently I can melt iron ore into iron plates, then iron plates into steel
and
I can melt copper ore into copper plates but not copper plates into something else

It feels like it would make sense to have a "higher tier" of copper too. So... here´s a bit from wikipedia:

Copper-clad steel (CCS), also known as copper-covered steel or the trademarked name Copperweld is a bi-metallic product, mainly used in the wire industry that combines the high mechanical resistance of steel with the conductivity and resistance to corrosion of copper.

It is mainly used for grounding purposes, drop wire of telephone cables,[1] and inner conductor of coaxial cables, including thin hookup cables like RG174, and CATV cable.

realistically this would need both iron and copper but maybe it could be made from just copper in the game for more straightforward gameplay purposes. Used for higher tech tier item production maybe?

I think this suggestion is not concrete enough.

New types of resources will come (Uranium? Aluminium?), but if new types of Intermediate products from the long existing current resources will come into vanilla...? Without a plan what to do with them surely not.

You can do this yourself: Create a mod. It's really easy to set up new recipes. If a mod is good enough the devs might think about bringing it into the vanilla game.

Yeah Im not really qualified or skilled enough to make this into a more concrete proposal but the idea revolves around symmetry.

there are 3 tiers of iron "resources" iron ore, iron plate and steel plate but only 2 tiers of copper resources copper ore and copper plate. My melting outposts are asymmetric! This just doesn´t feel right

Bronze is also an alloy involving Copper. Maybe it could be used as Iron substitute in recipes.

To be also realistic, steel is made of iron and a little little bit of coal.

Since there is already coal in the game, this could be added.