Mining and Refining Details

Mining raw resources is vital for the continued existence of your settlement. There are four raw resources found on the island:

Bauxite (aluminum oxide) used to make parts and much else.
Galena (lead sulfide) used to make batteries and explosives.
Quartz (silicon dioxide) used to make structural glass and electronics.
Oil shale (tar) used to refine diesel, lubricants and chemicals.

Raw resources are found in naturally occurring mine pits. If you look into or mouse-over a pit, you will see what it contains. Once you build the appropriate refining building for a given resource, your robots will automatically go to a mine pit and fetch loads of ore from the pit to the refiner. The refining buildings for each resource are as follows:

K (eleKtrolyzer) refines bauxite into aluminum
L (Lead smelter) refines galena into lead and sulfur
F (Furnace) refines quartz into glass and silicon wafers
C (Chemical cracker) refines oil shale into chemicals
O (Oils refinery) refines oil shale into diesel and lubricants

It is a very good idea to build your words so that the KLFCO buildings are as close as possible to their supplying mines. Factory production per day is directly dependent on the distance your robots have to fetch the raw resources over. Place your refiners too far from the mines, and you may stall your economy... Check the production and performance reports to see how you are doing in that regard.

Open mine pits are accessible to everyone. You can get exclusive ownership of a mine pit by building an (M) or a (D) over it (D over tar pits, and M over all others). When placed upon a mine these buildings function as extractors that can be unloaded only by your robots. While you can place an M or a D anywhere, M and D are the only two letters you can build on top of mines.

Building your own exclusive mine has the obvious advantage of denying its supply to your opponents. However, it also has the unfortunate effect of capping the mine output of raw materials to a certain maximum value per day. If your settlement is still small, it may be actually fatal to build an exclusive mine because they require quite a lot of power to operate. You will need to think strategically to decide whether, where and when to build over open mines.