Yeah, that’s on me, not you. Putting the rotate hint in tiny dark grey text at the bottom was a bad call, and “filters need to go diagonal” is probably the single most important thing in the whole game, which I never actually say anywhere. Sorry about that. This is still a prototype so the tutorial isn’t anywhere near where it needs to be, but here’s the short version in case you feel like giving it another shot:
The tower is a falling sand box, not a factory grid. Everything your drills dig up pours in from the slot at the top center, ore (bright colored, worth money) mixed with dust (dark grey, worth nothing). The floor at the very bottom is the furnace, and anything that lands on it gets cashed in while dust just gets ignored. So the whole job is getting ore down to the bottom and dust out to the sides.
Filters are a roof, not a wall. Hit R (or scroll) to rotate, there are 4 orientations, and what you want is two diagonal ones under the entrance forming a ∧ shape. Ore and liquid fall straight through the mesh, dust can’t, so it slides off to the left and right. A row of upright filters does the exact opposite: dust gets trapped with nowhere to go and the tower clogs.
Drains only go on the far left or right wall. Put one on each side roughly where the roof slope ends, so the dust sliding down gets pulled out. The two bottom corners also eat dust for free, but they’re slow on their own.
Smelters should be your first purchase. Raw ore landing on the furnace only sells for a quarter of the price. Smelters pull ore in from the top and drip liquid metal out the bottom, and that sells at full price, so put them under the filter roof and let the ore rain onto them. They also burn any dust that lands on them, so they never clog permanently.
The row above the tower tells you if it’s working: load % / slag per second / entrance backlog, plus output +x/s next to the coin counter. Slag above 0 means dust is getting out, and load creeping toward 100% means it’s piling up, so add a drain or fix your roof angle.
Right click picks a piece back up for free, so rebuilding costs nothing. The tower is meant to be torn apart and redone as you go.
Again, sorry it didn’t explain any of this. Making it clearer is at the top of my list.