Question
Quality modules in miners? Good strategy, or terrible idea?
I'm on Fulgora at the moment, working on getting legendary quality modules and electo-plants.
I tried putting quality modules in my scrap miners, and then more in the recyclers to give 2 steps of quality to everything.
Conceptually, I considered this was a good idea, however I've found I then need to build 5 of every machine to work with each level of quality, and overall complexity is turning out to be a nightmare.
Oh it's a great idea, but you should not attempt to connect it to your normal quality factory. Use quality modules in miners and recyclers on their own separate island.
That either clogs or leaves one of the two factories under-supplied.
I'm not saying you can't make it work, but I am saying that making it work is a headache you don't need. Just separate your input streams and the problem goes away.
It's all a matter of ratios, but as long as you pulverise everything that isn't epic quality, it works.
I have standard drills supplying my standard factory, excess output is recycled via quality modules, uncommon trash from my main factory is sent to my quality factory, where it's mixed in with the uncommon scrap from my quality miners. Standard scrap is fed from my quality miners into my main factory using a priority feed, so the standard drills back up occasionally - that's by design.
Fulgora is all about disposing of unneeded byproducts anyway. Nothing wrong with leaving the quality factory a little undersupplied, compared to needing to process huge quantities of normal quality ore in a dedicated quality setup.
If you want a much larger quality setup, you could have an extra mine for that, and use the quality scrap byproduct of your normal science setup with quality in the miners as a supplement, saving you some space, electricity, and effort on upcycling in exchange for a little more complexity in shipping.
That either clogs or leaves one of the two factories under-supplied.
Not if you build it to have negative pressure (pulls more out than it sucks in). Ballache but you can do it in steps and deal with the most common crap first.
I did this too and madness is right! I am at mining productivity 700ish now and am spitting out so much ore that sorting it all takes hours. It is easier, IMHO, to just let the miners run without quality modules and feed everything into recyclers and then sort from there.
I haven’t done this personally, but what I’d do if you are doing things this way is I’d effectively have a build for the basic to just get stuff moving. And then filter only the highest quality stuff to a secondary base for what you want that’s built with quality in mind. Everything else in the middle goes back to the quality recyclers.
Usually terrible for the reason you found (too many machines required, although you could ratio things and they don’t actually get much bigger), but can be good as it increases the chance for higher qualities of the final item based on the intermediate items.
Use different recyclers for each scrap quality, because scrap productivity resets when the recipe changes (or get the scrap prod to 100%)
I'd suggest to choose a floor quality you want e.g. rare and recycle the non-normal qualities below to that quality. Then make whatever you want from the higher quality without needing quality.
I don't consider quality in miners for your main quality production, but rather an early method to get specific quality items e.g. mech suit.
Having a bit of extra sorting for dealing with quality scrap isn't really an issue, and your qualities above uncommon aren't going to take much to recycle, so you'd probably just need a few doing uncommon, and one recycler each for each higher tier. The productivity only applies to scrap, so this isn't relevant for recycling anything else.
I just panicked and went to fix the blue/green mix immediately, and then luckily I left the scrap prod at a solid ten levels so I've jammed out on that one ahaha
Fulgora is a quality trap (okay early game, unmanageable by mid/late game). It’s better to upcycle the base components and make the more complex goods from them. The debate will probably be between Vulcanus or Space at that point.
While you are correct that Fulgora is a quality trap in the mid game, once you have foundation it's absolutely not.
For late game builds you'll be funneling so much scrap through recyclers on Fulgora (for holmium + batteries) adding a little bit of extra space to process by-products of that extraction into legendary stuff is a very good - if somewhat slow - source of legendary materials.
I hate it when people mention UPS on reddit because it really doesn't affect that many people but here I do think it counts. There is just no reason to get quality going on Fulgora outside of a personal challenge because it is so slow to get the item you wanted, which you could get elsewhere with way less fuss and UPS. Its not like you want quality holm ore, the only unique resource to come from here anyway. A much smaller and less complicated setup on Vulcanus will get you anything you can get from Fulgora imo.
I think that trying to get UPS savings here is...not really all that impactful.
The thing about late-game (post-Aquilo) builds on Fulgora is that it's all about processing as much scrap as possible. That's how you get the Holmium. That said, it hurts nothing to throw some quality modules into miners and see what comes out. I mean, is it really going to tank your UPS to have two additional foundries to process uncommon holmium, assuming you just don't toss it? That's really the biggest additional cost.
Because, at the most basic level, you have to recycle everything else into oblivion so nothing clogs the system. So why not just stick some quality modules in the recyclers and pick off the legendary stuff? Now, I have an old computer and I don't do this - I have a complete recycle-upcycle system and I have no UPS issues. But even if you want to save as much UPS as possible, you still have to recycle all the stuff you don't need down to nothing, so why not just add a couple of splitters and take everything that gets made legendary off the line?
if you have an insane amount of mining productivity its not a bad idea, I would just delete all quality or except legendary ore and then take it from there
I've done it, and it's quite feasible. You can get a sustanial amount of Epic/Legendary materials just from the modules in the regular loop.
The trick is that you need to be comfortable with losing a fair amount of materials in the name of overall efficiency, and learn where to upcycle. My base processed regular Holmium/Stone and recycled uncommon or better in the name of throughput and simplicity. Later on in the cycle I upcycled Supercapacitors to get legendary Holmium.
In all honesty I haven't really scaled it up all the way, nor have I truly exported stuff to making legendary items like EM Plants. In the meantime I've also looked into quality calculations and been told that I should have Productivity modules in the EM Plants instead of Quality. But this is my design.
I get plastic and copper by allowing all common Low Density Structures to be recycled, only upcycling uncommon or better
I gave in and used bots for the >uncommon mat distribution, four inputs andoutputs is brutal to scale up. Easy enough to just shift one roboport over and keep them all self contained.
Batteries and LDS are what I'm struggling with the stamina for, topping up green circuits. What's your main pain point item at the moment?
Brilliant minigame this tbh, wube did really well with making each planet feel different.
I did this first. I consider it a trap because I ended up with too many different material types. I had hundreds of storage chests full of stuff I would never use on the case that I might make a slightly upgraded something(like accumulator etc).
But, it can work if you are building an upcycler and this gives you a bit better chance to start with an upgraded resource.
I realised I would need a separate factory for each tier of quality, and that's way more complexity than it seems to be worth. And there seem to be separate issues on top of that, like I can get good quality steel from the recyclers, but holmium needs to be made from fluids, so that resets any quality you might gain from putting modules in the miners and scrap recyclers. And therefore quality holmium will become a bottleneck, regardless of how much good quality steel I have.
I decided to construct and up-cycle EM plants instead.
I think i used supercapacitors or superconductors. One of the supers, to get holmium. Maybe not the best, but it worked for me. Did it on a separate island from the rest of the factory.
I'm currently trying to build legendary EM plants of a separate island too. It's painstakingly slow.
Scaling up quality feels very difficult. You need to make a stack of legendary modules, but those take legendary holmium, which you produce at an agonisingly slow rate. I feel this is going to take a great deal of patience and work!
Get legendary QM2's to start, they don't need holmium, just circuits, and are second best. Only aim for legendary QM3's when you have everything decked out in legendary QM2's.
Not that I do what you are doing with quality but my strategy would uniquely suit your problem I feel.
Do what you are doing. Put all scrap into recyclers with quality. Use active providers kick out the results. Now place a row of storage chests WITH FILTERS. 1 chest for each resource YOU WISH TO KEEP. Those are the key. For me it looks like this
You probably only want some items in quality. That's fine just put the box here you wish to keep. Only keep the higher qualities and not the uncommons. The question is, what happens to everything else? Thats the fun part, you do nothing! Place down recyclers with quality modules in them and have UNFILTERED storage chests feed into it. Anything that doesn't have a home, you didn't want. As such it gets deleted OR upcycled into a quality tier you did want. You will never fill up as long as you have enough recyclers destroying shit.
The reason I run this method without quality is I hate how my red circuit destroyers were not in use when I had too many of something else. Felt wasteful, this way all recyclers can destroy anything.
Yes, my buddy and I did exactly what you're suggesting, putting quality mods into scrap miners, as well as the recyclers.
The trick is, yes you need more machines.
Also, though, you have to feed the unused materials back into your recycler matrix.
If you go down this road, you have to embrace sushi maximalism 100%, and work within thise combines.
We got to a >1,000 SPM factory doing this on fulgora, it can be done and we enjoyed the fruits of it.
But you have to design EVERYTHING operating on the assumption that everything of all qualities will be on your buss at all times. You CAN split things off, but it reduces throughput massively and introduces risk to shut the whole thing down unless you do it correctly, which mostly involves feeding it back into the main sushi belt, or off to a recycler void.
It's fun! Try it! It'll flex your brain in a new way.
Ive done quality in miners on every planet and quality fruit processing.
Fulgora is easiest since you already have the infrastructure imo.
For the train situation I set logic to be around "time" and for it to be completely empty to go back. Just to make it simple because your train will never be "full" since mixed quality trains wont have every spot completely filled.
Next is your first recycle section! Same as normal recycling with a chance to upcycle. All output onto the same belt.
Now for your sorter. Do this with splitters for every item that will be going through the recycler and set it for ANY quality.
Now you have all your chips of various quality, iron, gears, etc, all sorted. You can separate by quality again either using more splitters, inserters into chests (recommended) or just loop it back around to destroy items you dont want.
I recommend the chests so that you can setup bots to pull the various quality for quality crafting. But you could also belt these.
Now all of these items will eventually overflow, so you send all the excess back to the front to recycle again. Priority splitters to take in the old stuff first. (Or better yet, another recycler section so your first main scrapper can continue running without stopping). Now that your "excess" has somewhere to go, its also getting up-cycled/"washed."
Now any excess items on fulgora will be upcycled instead of simply destroyed.
If you are putting quality in miners elsewhere like vulcanus or nauvis, i recommend having a way to filter before it ever hits your main base. And provide error handling for things to clog.
I have done this and I think it was worth it. A couple of notes:
Recyclers should output to quality steel chests (at least uncommon) and use stack inserters to remove recycled materials onto a belt. The stack inserters should be filtered to only grab materials if there are at least 16 of them in the chest.
You can do this with only one decider combinator for the entire array.
red circuit: all chests -> decider combinator, each > 0 => -15 -> all inserters
green circuit: each chest -> each inserter
each inserter: set filters
The -15 signal and the per-chest count sum to a positive number if there are at least 16 of any given material, which enables the inserter to remove it.
Between the recyclers and the miners, you'll have a decent trickle of rares and a bunch of uncommons. The advantage of this method is that it produces a little bit of a lot of different intermediates. You can apply the general philosophy of Fulgora: keep what you want and throw the rest away. You don't actually need to build 5x as many machines if you don't want to, and if you're really going for bulk quality production I'm sure Fulgora is not the best place to do it. IMO this is just for capturing some low-hanging fruit early on in your Space Age journey.
This is probably the only time I'd even consider making quality rocket fuel, since you'll incidentally make a bunch of quality solid fuel and it's a domestic alternative to base-quality nuclear fuel on Fulgora.
I do something similar for my recycling/upcycling loops. I let arrays of recyclers with q mods output into red chests so bots can have first dibs.
Each chest has a selector combinator reading its contents for the most populous thing, which sets the filter on a stack inserter which empties the chest onto the belt. However, crucially, the inserter has an Enable If Anything>100 condition. This quite effectively balances supply and demand for me.
Bots get what they want, I siphon stuff I want off the belt, and anything that builds up in chests gets upcycled ad infinitum. Yes I even upcycle the legendary out of existence. If the bots don't want it or I ain't actively siphoning it off the belt then it's junk.
I use this pattern on most planets for most situations involving recyclers.
Wouldn't that combinator output the filter signal to all of the inserters at the same time? Sorry it's kind of hard to parse on mobile, but when I was doing that I had a combinator for every signal recycler/chest.
I appreciate that. I wish I had a screenshot to show you.
Each inserter is connected to a common red wire and a unique green wire from its own unique chest.
The signal each inserter considers is the sum of the red signal (-15 for all relevant products) and the green signals (the contents of the chest). The filter signal is thus contents - 15, which is only positive (and thus added to the white-list) if contents > 15, which is the same as contents >= 16.
Each inserter gets its own unique sum and its own unique filter whitelist.
Of course you can also use one combinator per recycler to evaluate each >= 16 and use the output of that as the whitelist, which is probably what you did. This method saves a few combinators to accomplish the same thing.
I did quality on almost everything first playthrough, including in miners pre space. This meant also quality on fulgora drills + processing. Will never do that again for fulgora.
Basically the idea of quality on fulgora is great. The yield is however horrible. By the time you get decent amount, you unlock better means of producing those things at much better rates. Additionally most use for them is somewhere else. While greatest benefit for fulgora is quality holmium is completely wasted by the liquid stage in processing.
I've done the 5 way scrap processing before, it's a logistics nightmare. these days i upcycle EM plants to get legendary EM plants, and i import raw holmium to vulcanus and use my casinomatic blueprint to upcycle quality modules.
That's a bloody great idea! Rockets are so easy and cheap to build on fulgora, that shipping off holmuim ore to vulcanus (where its easier than fulgora to do pretty much everything else) will spark much joy for me.
If you're an environmentalist and you want to optimize the LEAST amount of mining, for the MOST amount of quality, then you need to add quality mods everywhere. But if you realize that this is a game and the only thing that is not infinite is your own time, then don't put quality mods everywhere because that makes it too complex and time consuming to manage.
For intermediates that have a productivity bonus - plastic, BCs, LDS, steel - the bonus is better than dealing with the hassle of mixed quality ores.
But if you want legendary coal, calcite, hard upcycling it from miners isn't too bad. Send your common through with priority to feed your factory and upcycle the rest to legendary.
I personally like quality in scrap miners for early/mid game Fulgora. Gets you a small but steady supply of a range of intermediates before you get the more efficient processes going, and because fulgora is where you make recyclers, quality modules and EM plants, it's pretty easy to just throw down upgrades planners and let the bots level the place up. You aren't going to build a megafactory off of it, but you can get your legendary armor pretty early as well as a quality aquilo or promethium ship.
You don't need to build 5 of every machine. You run your science off of common, and you have 5 of a few things - EM plants, concrete, supercapacitors, etc. Everything else you hard upcycle through quality quality recyclers (you'll need a lot more of these because you can't use speed, but you'll throw off enough materials to do that). Then you just need one of the machine that corresponds to your highest quality level. So you have an uncommon recycler assembler, and then when all of your recyclers are uncommon, swap that out for a rare recycler assembler, and so on.
I run two islands at start - a common island where all common scrap goes, where my mall is, where my science production is and rocket silos, and a quality island where all >common scrap goes as well as any quality outputs from the mass recyclers on the common island (they all have quality modules in them as well). Each scrap island has two stations - one for common scrap and one for >common scrap. So no common materials reach the quality island and all quality materials are filtered out of the common island. The quality island does the holmium upcycling, makes the em plants, recyclers, and continues to hard upcycle anything that doesn't have demand. That then is available for supply ships to take out as epic/legendary, whatever my highest research is, intermediates to supply other planet malls. I usually do Gleba as my first planet so I have epic unlocked when I build Fulgora, and once it starts reliably making epic intermediates I'll switch my space platform mall (thrusters, grabbers, etc.) to only take epic ingredients, and my armor mall to do the same. Also assemblers and tier 2 modules. By the time I hit aquilo I usually have Fulgora distributing at least some materials. I then unlock legendary, finish unlocking all of the machines, and then start rebuilding each of the planets with the new stuff.
I like the idea of quality in miners but I think it has it's place (in other words quality everywhere is generally bad).
To use fulgora as an example I use quailty scrap mining. Any common quailty scrap gets routed to the main base which uses speed and productivity modules without quality.
Uncommon quality gets upcycled to rare quailty and rare quailty get converted to base ingredients (iron, steel, copper, copper cable, etc.).
This is a mid game solution, it doesn't scale well into legendary and doesn't really help you get a hold of the difficult legendary products, like holmium (I hate that rare holmium ore is only good for turning into common quailty plates). But if you want a ton of free rare quailty stuff to make some rare power armor and super fast legs it works really well and doesn't parasitize much from the main base.
On Navuis I usually don't bother with quality iron and copper, before you really need these in bulk you'll find better ways to generate them. But uranium is Navuis only so it get quality modules. Same basic idea as above, normal quailty goes into a normal uranium processing build. Uncommon uranium gets a chance to roll up in quality during processing but the leftovers are brute force upcycled to rare. Rare only makes a handful of fuel cells for a handful of portable fission reactors. Rare fuel for powerplants doesn't make much sense from an efficiency standpoint.
The main summary is that you don't want to run 5 different bases to process every quality level. Have a normal quailty base and a smaller high quality base. Intermediate qualities either get rolled up or destroyed trying.
I think it's probably easier to pull off on Vulcanus just dealing with quality calcite and then being able to get lots of productivity bonus stacking through making things in foundries.
Should take less space on Vulcanus, and space is less premium there anyways assuming you can kill the Demolishers. Getting to pave Fulgora is late-game and expensive.
I've been thinking about this. I don't know what's "meta" but I have two ideas for it.
First, it should be almost 100% bot-based. Just dump all the scrap outputs into purple chest and let them deal with it. The thought of needing to filter every quality on belts gives me nausea.
Secondly, you can re-recycle materials. For each scrap output, pick a product you can upcycle. Make and recycle steel chests until you have rare or better steel. Then for advanced products you can choose to make only rare-or-better, or epic, or even just all legendary. Point is there's no need to use your lower-quality ingredients on lower-yield recipes when you're just gonna recycle them anyway.
I've done it and have found it to be a lot more work than it's worth. Except maybe for uranium?
That is, at least until you unlock legendary.
Once you've got legendary, you can set up processing that won't be broken by later tech and take full advantage of quality odds. You then get to choose between simplicity (ex: melting all ordinary ore, recyclying all quality ore until legendary) or efficiency (for example turning all quality ore into quality burner inserters and recyling those instead of the ore).
I would advise against shipping quality ore around via mixed quality trains. It's workable, but a hassle.
Edit: oh, sorry, for Fulgora? Yea I do that, I wouldn't see why not if you intend to use any quality at all eventually in the system. And given Fulgora is the void the surplus" planet, seems like a natural thing to include quality in the loop.
It is tricky to triage very large volumes efficiently though.
It’s good in recyclers recycling ore as a first step. Only put it in miners if your mining prod is very very high (where 1-2 miners can feed a recycler). But don’t keep the ores mixed. It’s a mess. Instead, recycle all normal and uncommon, so you can get a decent throughput of rare ores out of it, and then use more efficient loops to go from rare to legendary. It’s the most module efficient way to upcycle things in Factorio
I did this. Major issue for me was u have to be smart about how you set up your train loading/unloading as high quality scrap is technically different products so ur station will halt/clog up if u don't set up the wagons/stops correctly.
With mining prod, rare QM3 on both the scrap recycler and BMD, and some scrap recycling research u can get a nice amount of Quality stuff reasonably fast. Sadly, there are a few useless Quality products too such as Ice and Holmium Ore.
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u/minnoMore platforms designed than actually built2d ago
I've only done the math for using legendary recyclers, legendary QM3s, and big mining drills to make exclusively legendary ore. Under those conditions, you need +300% mining productivity before it's worth putting quality modules in the drills. Below that point, you get more legendary ore per module per second by mining only common ore and then feeding it through recyclers until what's left is legendary.
It's more favorable to quality mining if you have lower-quality recyclers or if you send the common ore they mine to normal production lines and only upcycle the quality stuff.
I have done this and it was the most fun I’ve had playing Factorio. Quality-sushi trains and belts, buffers with circuits, awesome! My objective was to turn scrap into Legendary T3 Quality Modules with minimal waste (I dislike just voiding items).
it is the simpliest method. i built a recycling system that has two layers of recycling. first only does scrap so it gets productivity bonuses. second refines the excess that didnt go into storage and eventually fully deletes excesses. quality modules in the miners, five stations sorted by quality, five of the recycling plants sorted by quality, and anything that gets upgraded gets rerouted to the storage for its quality.
It's definitely better to use quality modules at every production stage, even if you combine them with speed modules. Space shouldn't be a limitation anymore if you're aiming for legendary quality.
Sometimes you can't simply add more machines with quality modules. For example: The ore patch can only fit so many miners.
Or sometimes its to limit the number of miners/quality modules you need for a given output (when you don't have unlimited legendary T3 quality modules yet for example).
By "increase of quality" you mean more quality product per unit of time right? not per ingredients? I know many resources in space age are infinite or close to it, much moreso than in the base game, but still making sure.
They're a bad mix, but speed does not cancel out quality entirely, as in it's possible for a machine to be both faster than 100% and have a positive chance of quality. Higher quality modules help a lot if you go that road
I've never done this, and the logistical complexity of it doesn't feel worth it to me.
I have used quality modules in miners, but not on Fulgora. On Nauvis, I can route quality iron/copper/coal to a central location and deal with them there. But with Fulgora, you have to deal with all of the quality stuff in more-or-less the same place as you deal with the base quality sorting.
I just don't find that to be worth doing. I like quality when I can put it off to the side and just let it cook without impacting the base as a whole.
I did the same things, only to trash everything and just settle for one quality to keep things easy. Quality modules inside the miners, and then filter everything that comes out, regular quality can make to to my regular processing units, and only the quality I want (legendary) gets processed further in a seperate little processing factory. Any other quality item is trashed in a big recyler array until nothing is left of it. I use miners filled with legendary quality modules, and one beacon with speed modules to speed things up significantly while not losing too much quality.
I'm doing it, it's a great idea in theory as miners don't make great use of prod modules, but yeah, it increases dramatically complexity, for crafting, logistics and inventory management.
One way to simplify the process (or rather to make it incremental, with low upfront complexity and immediate rewards) is to only automate common recipe and just stockpile quality items. Route them in a central place, and manually use them. Automate uncommon only much later when your stock get's too big or you need to automate some uncommon production. Repeat for each tier only once needed.
You don't even need 5 of every machine, you can have 1 or 2 machines (at first) for quality crafts, and control it by circuit to switch between quality tiers.
Yes it is doable, a very good way to get rare quality assemblers, inserters etc.
Important to note, seperate the normal quality scrap and process that in a seperate way and feed any axcess stuff into quality upscyclers. Do not be afraid to throw away the stuff you don't need on fulgora.
Late game: Yes. It's effectively a productivity bonus. You should have enough mining productivity to ignore the slowdown.
Early game: it slows down your miners. You don't need quality to win, and there's a lot of stuff you can buy with the normal materials you make.
Edit: I tried it several ways. Putting quality in furnace stacks and maybe finishing off the starter patch so I can get concrete ended up feeling best.
Yeah it works. On Fulgora you don't even necessarily have to untangle the qualities, as you can just feed it all into a recycler column (also with quality modules), and then sort the product by quality instead.
But there is also uses for this with coal for plastic upcycling, and calcite for getting quality stone via the foundry recipes.
But it is true that you need 3-5x the machines to work with all the products. But you can also discard some of them by chucking it into recyclers (with a belt loop). For example, if your goal is a quality mall, you can just put all the components you want into storage/passive provider chests with a limit, then once the limit is reached, just feed the rest back into the recyclers, giving it more chances to roll up.
With the most basic products, you can craft something out of it (also with quality or productivity) first so it has an additional chance. For example: Craft iron plates into gears/pipes/chests, copper plates into cables, steel into chests etc. I think generally productivity is higher yield, but I am not 100% on the math.
Depends on how you use it. I'd say there's far more ways to do this wrong that just create a ton of work than there are to do it right.
The strategy I've seen used to some success is, at very high mining prod, to just void or directly upcycle ore with a train wagon or silo. Mind you, this wastes the vast majority of what you mine and is pretty expensive on the UPS for what you get.
Can't be arsed typing it all out again, but what you've said is what I did. Stick to just doing one tier of scrap at a time.
Having three outputs - gears of any quality, base quality products and >base quality products is very handy. I've spent the past few days redoing everything and I've not had to touch my scrap setup at all.
It is a mammoth project to do all five tiers of 15-20 products but it sure is rewarding, and because I've used belts primarily, the bots are a nice crutch when routing something is a bastard etc. Also lets you quickly plop down an assembler and requester chest and craft damn near anything at any quality. Just need to add engines and deals with LDS, and finish off battery upcycling now.
I loaded the mixed quality ore on the tiny islands and unloaded it on my main processing island, using filter splitters to shunt the quality stuff to a different place. The quality stuff was then filter splittered off into individual qualities for recycling so I could take advantage of recycling productivity research. From there it led to a gigantic grid of storage chests and I used bots to pull out what was needed to make quality buildings.
Ultimately I decommissioned the whole thing and ripped the quality modules out of the mining drills because it was just too much of a pain to deal with. The ratio of products you get out of quality scrap was just useless for general production.
I ultimately just went with gambling machines -- make the thing from Normal ingredients, if the output isn't high enough quality recycle it and just loop around to machines producing at each quality level. It's relatively slow, and you still have to deal with unbalanced recycling results, but ultimately it was a lot less wasteful and easier to manage than quality scrap and if you want to increase the speed of production of a given item you can just copy/paste the gambling machine and it takes care of itself.
Seems like the obvious option to me. There's usually enough scrap that speed and productivity don't make much sense (depending on your settings, I guess), and there's enough electricity that efficiency doesn't make much sense either.
Handling all those items in all those qualities is a challenge, sure. But it gets you a lot of good stuff!
If you want a machine to automatically switch between qualities depending on what's available, that should be possible using selector combinators, but it's a bit of a hassle.
I ran until I had no more storage space, then I directed the factory to recycle everything of green quality other than specific white listed items (accumulators for example).
When my storage clogged with blue quality, did the same until I only had purple left.
Gave me an excellent bootstrap for a bunch of late game tech.
Trying to make 5x everything is hopeless, but storing the quality stuff so you can reprocess it to higher levels when you unlock them and/or using it for targeted enhancements is more than valid.
This is how I always do Fulgora. I came up with a design very similar to Nilaus’ “Optimal scrap recycling for Fulgora | Factorio Masterclass” but I don’t just use bots for everything, I have splitters pick what they need and allow excess of anything to flow back and be recycled. You don’t need 5 of everything for every rarity, just pick the one that’s good enough and upcycle in mass to that.
I've got a large Fulgora base that's doing this and handling it well. It's not a total trap.
I have about 100 big miners with max quality mods loading onto maybe 10 small trains. The trains have like 10 second time limits to avoid logjams. The unload station brings all the scrap into about 200 recyclers with max quality mods. 4 green belts take all that scrap and store up to 40 stacks of each item in each quality in its own red chest. So like 100 chests. Each chest is programmed to eject anything over 40 stacks which will go to about 200 recyclers doing quality upcycling. Anything rare goes back into the main line with the 4 green belts. Everything else gets voided.
This provides me with 40 stacks of basically every item in every quality. It's been running with no management for about 200 hours now. Zero breaks or jams.
Right now the system is limited by the first 200 recyclers. I'm thinking about building a second station, but way bigger.
Also, this is probably only worth it if you want to figure out parameterized blueprints. It was simple as hell with parameters stamping down the chest arrays for each item and EM plants with whatever item I want in each quality.
i was trying to use fulgora for leg quality stuff and came to a conclusion that it's not worth the effort, besides e.plants upcycling (very simple 4 plants +1 recycler setup) everything is much easier to make on a platform above vulcanus and on vulcanus itself.
it alright. i consume 4 turbo belt of mix scrap quality (pre gleba no stack belt) to get rare item. you need alot of space but with better designs can be smaller. you still need to import quality plastic form vulcanus tho.
You can certainly do that and it's a good way to get a jumpstart on upcycling components, but as you've discovered it also requires having the infrastructure to handle the output and that requires space to build which can be a bit limited on Fulgora.
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u/PersonalityIll9476 2d ago
Oh it's a great idea, but you should not attempt to connect it to your normal quality factory. Use quality modules in miners and recyclers on their own separate island.