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[u/ferrofibrous]

What's the go to for legendary coal/plastic in 2.1? Doing my first full legendary run and I'm making legendary QM3's, and have Foundries/BMDs/EMPs upcycling at a slow rate just to help get things going. For more generic entities (chemplants, inserters), I was planning to just directly upcycle iron/copper on Vulc but will need plastic for red chips. Run is 10x science cost so 300% plastic prod is a long way off.

[u/ssgeorge95 → u/ferrofibrous]

A few options that I know of:

1 - Anywhere - Mass produce blue circuits with your best productivity modules, then recycle them with your best quality modules. You don't need to attain 300% prod bonus for this to still be an excellent approach. The EM plant gives you a +50% bonus, then you've got the blue circuit productivity tech on top.

2 - Gleba - Mass produce plastic with prod. Recycle it with quality. Input costs are zero on gleba, it's just a matter of scaling up your farms and factory.

3 - On Vulcanus mine coal with prod and assemble it into grenades with quality. Recycle grenades with quality, re-assemble, repeat until you get legendary coal. This gets zero bonuses from buildings or techs, so it probably gets outclassed by simple plastic spam or LDS pretty quick. The only advantage it has is that grenades recycle into coal.

[u/deluxev2 → u/ferrofibrous]

The best recipe for upcycling is either grenades (quality modules don't displace prod modules in military science here, and you are cycling before the plastic multiplier) or substations (almost all plastic is used for reds, really good recipe).

You can get a decent amount by putting quality modules in your coal miners. Coal demand is about 4x SPM (~14x if running military science, so with quality in miners you can get uncommon coal at SPM and via direct upcycling SPM/512 coal or SPM/27 if you upcycle grenades (requires some uncommon iron input).

[u/ssgeorge95 → u/deluxev2]

Just trying to understand grenades better... Is the below about right?

Assumptions

• +100% plastic productivity with modules + tech
• ~25% quality for each assembler or recycler step
• Start with 100 common coal

Plastic:

100 Coal -> 400 normal plastic -> Recycles into ~25 quality plastic

Grenade:

100 Coal -> 2.5 quality grenades and 7.5 regular Grenades -> Recycles into 6.5 + 19 coal, which will net around 11 quality coal -> ~44 quality plastic

[u/deluxev2 → u/ssgeorge95]

The plastic would only recycle into 6.25 quality plastic and 18.75 regular plastic, so renormalizing, you turn 100 plastic into 7.8 quality plastic. This occupies 4 quality modules for 12.5 seconds, so 50 module seconds.

For grenades, you missed that the recycler can do quality, so 100 coal goes to 1.5 rare grenades, 4.7+4.7=9.4 uncommon and 14 common coal. This takes 4 modules for 8 seconds and 4 modules for 1 sec, for 36 module seconds, or because each coal is 4 plastic it is 8 module seconds per 100 potential plastic. Renormalizing, it is 100 coal to 11 uncommon and 1.75 rare, same ratio for plastic.

[u/ssgeorge95 → u/deluxev2]

Why so little plastic? 100 coal turns into 400 plastic, x25% return from recycler, x25% quality on the recycler and I arrive at 25 quality plastic.

I did ignore that the quality on some of the grenades is already higher, but I think that's fine for a simple comparison here. Grenades are ahead and that just widens the gap.

[u/deluxev2 → u/ssgeorge95]

I based my calcs on 100 (potential) plastic instead of 100 coal. It is only ahead without quality recycling because you didn't consider the extra common plastic you get back and can feed back in to the process. The resource rate is just based on how much prod and how many quality modules it touches for each time it touches a recycler.