How do disciple refiners work?

[vrnikolai]

I have 2 granaries and smelters, each can hold up to 8 refiners so in total I would need 32. There is also a bonus that allows the building to staff more, I think up to 11 or 12, but I wont talk about this now.

The question... How do refiners work? While they staff a building, when a villager downloads something in the storehouse, this increases by a certain %? Or do they have to bring first the ore to the smelter, from the mine? Or they get the ore from the storehouse, get it to the smelter, then multiplies it by a certain %?

Also I have the 32 said but most of them sit at the town center, they dont staff the buildings. Why?

 

[FunniestMonkey]

They bring the resource to their respective building to refine it; I'm fairly certain of that because I've set the smelters' bonus of ore refining to a large number and it ended up giving near limitless supplies in the store house. This also works with the other two refineries.

 

[vrnikolai]

But then... If you dont have any ore to gather, the mine is empty, even if you have a large number in %, nobody brings ore to the smelter so its useless, right?

Can this be glitched by getting the ore in the warehouse using the hand and putting it somewhere else out of the warehouse, so people will gather it again?

 

[FunniestMonkey]

To the first question:  Yeah, I believe so.

To the 2nd:  That's an interesting idea! I don't know for a fact as I've never tried that, could be an interesting find. However I don't think it'll yield you more than what you've taken out 

Personally, I never liked the ore mines, and so I made them bottomless for every single map, because I liked building cities then conquering later. It seemed much better than way