Basically all of the history of science until 200 years ago was figuring out "mine and extract" and the course of civilization is very much linked with the price & quality of metal structures they could produce. But it's gotten so good we take it for granted.
However that is because of gigantic plants situated in specific areas where energy is cheap that do this thing at an amazing scale.
Aluminum is cheap as chips, except that it used to be more expensive than platinum (and at a much higher impurity ratio than the stuff we use for baking or for making cheap cases).
Heck, gold is "a thing" because we could purify and mold it without bringing it to a melting point and it was, for a very long time, the only metal available to us to do anything with, way before the bronze age.
And the problem with the refinement process is that you can't really "be smart" about it, reaching very high temperatures is one of those things you can't really scale down in an efficient way. You'd have to propel 100,000 tons of factory to mars in order to efficiently refine anything remotely close to the metals we had access to 100 years ago.
Which is not to touch on the mining bit, that is in itself very complicated (see how slowly and shallowly rovers are currently able to drill).
Are there workarounds for this? Maybe, I don't think anyone knows them though, they are not the kind of thing that's within easy reach. Maybe if we happen to stumble upon large reserves of bismuth or lead or gallium or mercury close to the surface of Mars, and build a whole branch of engineering around using those to build machinery... ? But my limited knowledge of geophysics and geology tells me that finding those in large amounts is very unlikely.
For reference, if you take an oven, that can reach, say, 450 degrees celsius (home) and up to 700 (industrial). Those aren't enough to refine any "useful" metal (e.g. iron) and building them requires materials that were produced at 1500+ degrees.
IANAChemist/IANAMaterialScientist/IANABlacksmith though, so take with a spoon of salt.
But thinking about it now, I can't envision that we here would be able to come up with something sublime/novel that a huge army of really-smart people haven't already after spending decades thinking about it. Then again, we have a lot of smart people concentrated in this forum, so who knows if a weird/silly conversation triggered by IT-minded people, acts as a catalyst for the engineer-lurkers that see it.
