Energy Converters use excess energy to produce a trickle of metal. They're especially useful when you've reached the limits of expansion with Metal Extractors, but are wildly inefficient at producing metal compared to Extractors.

Converters explode violently when destroyed; consider spacing them out.

Converters activate when Energy reaches the "excess threshold", which can be adjusted via a slider on your Energy economy bar.

T2 converters fit in a smaller footprint, and offer a sizable efficiency bonus over their T1 variant, producing more metal for less energy; however, they do require an upfront cost in metal to build.