chris because youre supposed to lose all upgrades bought with white resources, you have to get special resources from special resource income, special enemies and bosses then exchange it for blueprint points and spend them in workshop for perm upgrades
in order to use dust forge and dust oven do the following: drop anything in the upper tube on dust forge, this will make molten dust which you can freeze to make crystals which you can throw on a wall to make dust piles. after doing that, put the dust piles in the purple area in the oven and BOOM, you have a trading card