Iron Smelter

Overview
The Iron Smelter helps your Iron Mines and/or Advanced Iron Mines increase their output by +20%, at the cost of 40.

They cause any nearby Houses to experience a drop in tax rate of -5%.

The Iron Smelter should be compared to an Advanced Iron Mine in terms of saving Nanopods. The Advanced Iron Mine costs more, but provides a larger production boost for the cost. This is because an Advance Iron Mine is the equivalent of providing a 100% increase in production over a regular Iron Mine. To achieve the same benefit using Iron Smelters you would need to distribute 5 smelters across 5 different regular Iron Mines. This would cost 5 x 40 = 200 Nanopods versus 160 for the advanced mine.

Once you have an Advanced Iron Mine, however, it becomes more cost effective to add an Iron Smelter to the Advanced Iron Mine before adding a second Advanced Iron Mine. This is because the effect is effectively doubled when applying the Iron Smelter to an Advanced Iron Mine or the equivalent of applying the Iron Smelter to 2 regular Iron Mines.