In Firefall, all materials you gain from thumping, surface deposits, chests or as rewards are raw materials, need to be refined in order to be useful.
This can be done at a Molecular Printer of your choice:

1. Open the Printer.
2. In the top left menu, click on “Refining Process”.
3. In the submenu opening up, click on “Raw Resource Refining”.
4. At the bottom of the screen there is now a box showing you what raw material is being refined. You can change the selection by clicking on that box.
5. Click on “Manufacture” in the middle of the screen to start the process.
6. Once the refining is completed, you can get your results by clicking on “Unload” on the appropriate workbench, in the bottom left corner.

When you refine a raw material, the whole stack is always used. The time needed depends on the size of that stack: Each unit takes one second. So, if you refine a stack of 50 Units of Raw Ceramic Insulators, you will have to wait 50 seconds between clicking on “Manufacture” and unloading.
Bug warning: Currently once you have started the manufacturing process the time remaining-display can break. If it shows you the “Unload” button, but clicking on it throws you out of the printer with a SIN connection error, you need to wait the time that was indicated to you before you started.

Want to know how much you will get out of your raw materials?
This is where the 4^th stat of each resource comes in – Purity.
This stat can range from 1 to 1000 and determines the amount of refined materials you get as a percentage of the amount of raw materials you are refining.
With a purity of one you get 50% of the input, and with a purity of 1000 you get 100%. In between that, it’s a linear progression (see graph).

For example, if you refine 600 “Raw Conductive Polymers” with a purity of 400, you will get out 420 “Conductive Polymers” (of the same quality level you have put in), which is 70%.
If you refine 600 “Raw Conductive Polymers” with a purity of 900 though, you will get 570 “Conductive Polymers”, which is 95%.

Each time you refine one of the 15 raw resources, you also get a small amount of crystite.
In addition to that, you have a small chance to get a “crystite hybrid”. This is a rare material which is used as a component in some higher end nanoprints. There are 6 types of crystite hybrids – you can get “Seed Crystite Hybrid” from any resource. The other 5 are sorted by group colours – for example from refining ceramics you can get “Green Crystite Hybrids”, from refining Polymers you can get “Purple Crystite Hybrids”, and so on.
According to the patch notes, the chance to get a Crystite Hybrid is 0.1% per unit of raw material refined. For example, if you refine 500 units of any Polymer, you have a 50% (500x0.1%) chance of getting one Purple Crystite Hybrid, and a 50% chance of getting one Seed Crystite Hybrid.
When you refine more than 1000 units, one Hybrid is guaranteed, and you have a chance for more: Refining 1735 Ceramics yields you one guaranteed Green Crystite Hybrid and a 73.5% chance to get one more.