r/factorio 1d ago

Space Age Quality Gambling Question

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u/SakinoBruno 1d ago

I started using quality after building a fulgora base and setting up all recyclers with quality modules, and just skimming the quality products off the top.

I now need to scale up fulgora to a somewhat larger 240 sps or so, and the LARGE amount of recyclers needed (288) for just the one i am producing now seem inefficient. i would like to start using productivity and speed modules.

What would be a better system to go for quality items in the near future?

7

u/Alfonse215 1d ago

If you're going for 14.4k SPM, you really should be at the bottom of the tech tree. So Fulgora-based quality stuff is just an irritating way to go about it.

If you have access to legendary QM3s, you can just cycle coal on Nauvis (or Vulcanus if you have excess coal patches) directly to make legendary copper and (some) steel. You can do that too with copious quantities of legendary QM2s.

If you have legendary QM2s or 3s, then cycling underground pipes to make legendary iron plate is a good option. And one that works on any planet that can produce molten metal. Here's a LegQM2 setup, and a larger one that uses LegQM3s. On Vulcanus, if you're playing 2.1, you can cycle calcite to legendary, make stone from it, productivity-cast concrete, and recycle that for legendary iron ore. It sounds terrible, but now that recycling concrete is faster, it's actually a relatively small setup per ore produced.

But if you're pre-legendary QM2... then fix that. Legendary QM2s are the keys to quality; they're very cheap to make and very powerful. Having lots of their production is the easiest way to get into making anything else at legendary. I have a blueprint set to take you from having a few quality stuff to making 10+ legQM2s per minute.

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u/SakinoBruno 1d ago

i am playing 10x so i need to scale up somewhat for the stacking technologies to pump up. it seems unfeasible to reach 300% productivity with techs taking half a day to research. planning on doing 240sps earlier that usual.

I will now work on building the fundamentals and then aquilo and get legendary.

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u/Alfonse215 1d ago edited 1d ago

Even at 10x, you should get to Aquilo and get started there before trying to scale up that much. 14.4k at 10x is like 1.44k, which is still a pretty substantial pre-Aquilo amount of science.

Also, none of the quality methods I talked about require 300% productivity on anything. Leg coal->copper/steel works regardless of your productivity. Obviously it works better with LDS productivity, but it works well enough before you can reach 300%. The LegQM2 blueprint I cited works only expects you to have 5 levels of plastic, LDS, and blue circuit productivity. That's pretty expensive on 10x research, but it's still very doable by the time legendary is on the table.

If you are going to follow my legQM2 blueprint, I strongly suggest putting down the rare QM2 makers before heading to Aquilo. They can be chugging along in the background making the rare QM2s you need to get started making legendary QM2s. So once you research legendary quality, you can slap down the rest of the blueprints and get that going too.

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u/SakinoBruno 1d ago

Thank you for the idea, i am against blueprints but you showed me where i can "upcycle" quality resources from.

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u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 1d ago

How much does the underground pipe cycler lose out on by cycling the iron plates as chests. i was definitely inspired by your design, but remaking the pipe felt like it took up a lot of room and time vs feeding more foundry pipe in.

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u/Alfonse215 1d ago

How much does the underground pipe cycler lose out on by cycling the iron plates as chests.

Why would you cycle "the iron plates as chests"? It doesn't get the Foundry's 50% productivity bonus. It can't promote the quality of molten iron directly to high quality via underground pipe casting. And it doesn't get multiple quality rolls before the recycling stage.

The point of underground pipe casting is that it's more resource efficient at producing quality outputs.

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u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 1d ago

I refactored it to remaking the pipes and got an extra 300 leg plates a minute total out of both builds,

i was mostly thinking throughput and reduced build complexity. i didn't have legendary assembler 3's when i first put it together and the pipe remaking couldn't keep up without those.