The first thing to do is extract the actual ore itself. Usually, the rock is crushed and the not-iron is removed. I've illustrated this product as "iron ore," which could be a combination of any of the four ores.
Next, we need a heat source. Most often throughout history, charcoal has been used, but coal is also an acceptable source (I've not included coal on the chart). It's used at every step of the process.
The simplest refined iron is sponge iron, which is created in bloomeries - charcoal furnaces that cause the iron to "bloom." If you have a bit better technology, you can make pig iron instead.
Pig iron can be turned into cast iron. Manganese and nickel are usually added to improve strength.
Both pig and sponge iron are used to create wrought iron. This is what we want for weapons, at the very least.
Wrought iron is finally turned into steel, with the addition of some extra charcoal, manganese, and nickel.
The chart is organized according to tech level (or development) and "stage." To correctly loop through every available resource, I've separated the products into these stages. Raw materials are always Stage 0. Higher stages usually mean higher complexity, but not necessarily higher tech level. For example, steel needs to know how much wrought iron is available, so all the wrought iron references need to be calculated before steel can be determined.
Whenever there are multiple paths for a recipe to take (e.g., charcoal/coal, goethite/hematite), I either take the cheapest one or the average.
One thing I'd like to add to the chart is the unit of each source required to move to the next step. I haven't talked much about my recipe system, but each complex commodity has instructions that determine how much material and labor cost is necessary. For example, limonite is about 55% iron, so you need ${1\over0.55}\approx1.8$ pounds of limonite to get 1 pound of ore.
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