Yeah, some more varied stations would be nice.
Silver, you find the best place down at the Jawbone in the far southwest. In my solo game I planned a little camp there. To refine the silver into coins and bars.
The best way to get crystal is Hanuman’s Grotto, southern most part of the map in roughly the center. My starter camp in solo was up near the river just north of that. It’s got GOBS of crystals. You can get stacks and stacks of them with no trouble at all.
And it’s not, not really. It’s just the way the game was designed.
I can get rock salt crystals being ground down into salt. But the same crystals becoming glass? They should have given us sand nodes to harvest, and stick sand into the smelter to make glass, the way it’s properly made.
The nodes could be purer sand that makes better glass, leaving the normal desert sand as too poor in quality.
Edit: Ah man…this just makes me cringe. From the Wikipedia page on Glass.
Glass is a non-crystalline
And we get glass from crystals in the game. >.> Oops.
Second Edit: This is the way the most common glass is made today.
The manufacturing process for soda–lime glass consists in melting the raw materials, which are the silica, soda, lime (in the form of (Ca(OH)2), dolomite (CaMg(CO3)2, which provides the magnesium oxide), and aluminium oxide; along with small quantities of fining agents (e.g., sodium sulfate (Na2SO4), sodium chloride (NaCl), etc.) in a glass furnace at temperatures locally up to 1675 °C.[6] The temperature is only limited by the quality of the furnace structure material and by the glass composition. Relatively inexpensive minerals such as trona, sand, and feldspar are usually used instead of pure chemicals. Green and brown bottles are obtained from raw materials containing iron oxide. The mix of raw materials is termed batch.