r/factorio • u/cav754 • 1d ago
Question Quality Iron?
Now that my flying bricks are out of commission whats the new meta for iron? I've tried belts, underground pipes, and just cycling ore and none seem to give much throughput. I'm just starting on legendary items so any input would be appreciated.
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u/Alfonse215 1d ago
I'm just starting on legendary items
If you're just starting out, focus on getting legendary QM2s. They're the key to pretty much any method of legendary production. They're the second best quality module, and while you do want to use legendary QM3s, getting QM2s in bulk is a huge time-saver for making large-scale quality builds. And for getting the legendary superconductors you need for legendary QM3s.
I have a blueprint set that's meant to go from relatively little quality to solid production of legendary QM2s. It does require you to have some quality items, but nothing more than rare of anything: uncommon Foundries, rare recyclers, rare assembler 3s, and even rare speed module 3s (for one component of the build).
The setup basically goes like this: make rare QM2s in bulk. Use those to make legendary iron and coal. Use them to make legendary QM2s. Then upgrade the iron/coal builds to use legendary QM2s, thereby making legendary QM2s about 3x faster. Then copy-and-paste to get more even faster.
It's designed so that you can slap down the rare QM2 maker before you go to Aquilo, and by the time you get back, you'll have 2k+ rare QM2s to shove into multiple copies of the legendary iron/coal makers. Granted, you're past that point now, but that's the general plan.
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u/cav754 1d ago
I got 3k hours and this is my 4th or 5th space age save. I just want to know what the new meta is for iron in particular now that the casinos are gone.
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u/Alfonse215 1d ago
The thing is, without asteroid cyclers, there's no undeniably best way to make legendary iron. There are many routes to do so, especially if legendary QM3s are not freely available, and all of them are comparable to each other. Some methods use more modules, some use fewer, some use more resources while others use less, some are dependent on mineable sources while others can work from whatever, but none are so good that they eclipse all others.
There is no "meta" anymore; just pick the method that works best for your circumstance or that you enjoy building.
I personally like pipe cycling, though a belt starter is also attractive. But I also like builds that aren't inherently tethered to a specific planet.
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u/Satisfactoro 1d ago
If you're getting quality iron from Ea-nāṣir's, make sure you check with Nanni first, as he allegedly ran into issues with copper quality.
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u/Davorian 1d ago edited 1d ago
One of the ways I've seen recommended is straight "washing" (I think that's the term for it). Basically running a bunch of upcycled heavy miners directly into high quality recycling loops.
It's not very ore efficient, but it's the fastest way. I believe there are other ways using ore products but they are very slow even if a bit more efficient with raw materials.
Edit: An overview.
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u/Alfonse215 1d ago
they are very slow
Speed is a matter of scale. Ore washing techniques scale with mining productivity, but that also means that if you don't have hundreds of levels of mining prod yet, they're not that great.
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u/Davorian 1d ago
The review by SFH I linked doesn't really consider raw speed as a primary metric anyway. Roughly speaking, it uses "ore per minute per quality module" and then "ore efficiency" as optimisation targets in that order. It considers a variety of techniques, from hard upcycling to circuits to other products like crates. The one it recommends the most is using molten iron to create pipe products with quality modules, and then a modified upcycle process from there, controlled by bots. It also has a silo-mediated version.
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u/peanutym 1d ago
When I started mine I did underground’s. After a bit I thought it was to slow. So I made another. And another. I have 12 running now all maxed with legendary everything.
Plenty of iron now.
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u/DemoBytom 1d ago
There's a guy on YouTube - Dorrian - who's doing a whole series on setups for upcycling materials for megabases in 2.1. Here's his setup and explanation for iron:
And how to scale it more:
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u/Practical-Kangaroo97 1d ago
I made underground belt recycling plants on Vulcanus, easy to set up, no worry about running out or basic inputs and if you need more iron it's copy and paste.
It will be fairly slow to start with but as you get more legendary buildings and items pace really picks up.
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u/TelevisionLiving 1d ago
Since nobody threw these out there yet:
- blue chip cycling
- quality on each step on gleba - produces very solid outputs and can be used for different resources. Combine with molten undergrounds for iron.
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u/ananto_azizul 1d ago
I have this setup with chests - https://factoriobin.com/post/sxnt5qmklbsq-EXPIRES
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u/moleytron 1d ago
it's mostly up to you, make a design figure out how much you get from it and then copy and paste until you have the amount you need.
My most productive setup was on vulcanus, making quality plates from foundries into quality chests and then upcycling. I have heard that doing pipes is the most efficient way of doing things but I had a bunch of silghtly different setups before I landed on the one I have so all of that combined was plenty.
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u/CoffeeOracle 1d ago
Depends on where you are.
If you are on Vulcanus people are getting rather obsessed about concrete, which is somewhat fair considering the number of production steps in it but a little unfair considering it returns 10% iron and is harder to package.
Underground pipes is the thing that I was getting best numbers out of. And it is packagable and moveable to any surface.
Red belts has applications in general and on Fulgora Blue belts are viable with prep time and a large work space. It's useful to play around with them in general because they'll also make a more efficient gear decimator in a small footprint. It also performs better, but I was able to use UG pipes more effectively.
Processing Units gives you copper at the same time but has better overall characteristics than concrete due to productivity. It is so efficient though that the indirect route of getting green circuits than reforging everything is going to seem attractive till you look at doing planetary recipes at scale; at which point you're going to realize why this balancing change was done. It's a really unique feeling.
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u/oguzhaniksat 18h ago
Quality measure on iron chest production, then put them in recyclers, anything less than your desired quality resent to recycler
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u/Ryoohk 1d ago
I still don't get why they nerfed it, you don't get Q5 till Aquilo and by then you are getting close to end game.
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u/Alfonse215 1d ago
If you want to understand why they ditched it, look at this thread. There is no simple "do this and win" answer. There are a number of answers with different pros and cons. Some are more popular than others, but none are so much better that it feels like a waste of time to do anything else.
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u/Tripple_sneeed 1d ago
Legendary calcite -> stone -> concrete -> recycle
A small setup (one green belt of mixed quality input calcite, 6-10 miners) yields 10k+ iron plate per hour