
You find an abandoned structure that can make a non-game-breaking intermediate product (never quantum computers, for example).
Taking inspiration from Satisfactory, it has an alternative recipe that is a bit more complex, but ultimately much more resource and power efficient. It might not even be a product you have researched yet!
However, you cannot move the station, so you must ship in materials and ship out the output, getting a big reward for exploring and for putting in a little extra effort and logistical finagling to make use of the ancient structure.
Maybe if you study it long enough you can eventually learn how to make it - but it’s not unlikely that you will need very high tech equipment to make it.
Basically, you find a singular Ancient Assembler that does a thing faster and more efficiently than the player can on their own with standard recipes, but that recipe can only be used in the immovable (maybe fragile) ancient assembler. If you find more Ancient Assemblers you might be able to switch the recipes between them.