Intermediate Products

Intermediate Products are mostly found in the "components" section of your crafting menu.

=Primary Components= Crafting primary components by machine has an efficiency advantage. They cost twice as much material to produce by hand from ingots. In order to produce a machine from primary components, sufficient components must be available in your inventory. An insufficient number will cause ingots to be used at the full, doubled price. The existing system will not exhaust your component supply and use ingots for remnants. It's all or nothing.

Stone Plate
=Secondary Components= Prefabricating secondary components can save you time, but confers no specific material advantage.

Metal Scaffolding
=Other Intermediaries= As with secondary intermediaries, these items seem to exist only as steps along the path to an alternative product. Unlike components, however, these cannot be handcrafted (exception for unfired clay bricks).