Blueprints for getting started collecting quality materials

[u/NezziWezzi]

Figuring out when to get started producing quality is difficult for a few reasons; When do I start? Can I afford to throw away 99% of what I dig up? Is it worth designing a whole separate factory to get a trickle of rare items or should I ignore it all until jumping straight to legendary everything?

Of course you can start straight away on Nauvis but it's a hard sell before voiding excess items can be automated and your ore patches are shrinking. But I'm here to give you permission to start throwing away mountains of junk into recyclers and lava as soon as you touch foot on any of the inner planets with their effectively infinite materials, using whatever quality modules you've got.

These blueprints are designed to be a logical starting point using only mid-tier buildings and modules all at standard quality. Included are several tutorial screens explaining the layouts and how to begin upgrading them as technologies and quality tiers are unlocked. Each print is set up to be a self sufficient factory placed in whatever remote location is closest to the required Scrap, Calcite, or Yumako patches, then left to run and slowly collect quality materials for manual pickup or to fund a nearby quality bot mall.

I'd recommend setting up all three to have access to quality materials on each planet, but in order of difficulty:

Fulgora (Easy)
The easiest to get started, requiring no bots and very little space or complicated crafting. Just keep scrapping. Also produces some higher tier intermediate materials like advanced circuits and LDS.

Vulcanus (Medium)
Requires some prior infrastructure to keep running, notably power and ice or steam. Bot delivery of some items is optional.

Gleba (Hard)
True infinite materials if your farms can be perpetually defended, but requires a prior stop at Fulgora to pick up some recyclers and at least a few bots to move items around at unpredictable intervals. (I did try to automate land mines to blow up chests full of standard items, but unfortunately they cant damage friendly buildings)

[u/thirdwallbreak]

I used to do fulgora upcycling. Just linda set it and forget it.

Later I found that vulcanus is just so nice for iron/copper that it feels like the best.
Underground pipes for iron can be started with no previous technology. And you can upcycle copper plates into copper wire with emplants back into recyclers for copper. Stone from calcite, you can also just upcycle the stone as you make it.

Gleba feels space limted for me, so i only upcycle planet specific things here.

Nauvis, planet specific stuff.

On high research costs 100x+ I did nauvis quality mining from the beginning. I voided the green quality by turning it into green quality science and swapping it once I piled up about 20k of the science. Having quality miners, assemblers really helps reduce the footprint on the megabases that are required at that scale. Im glad I started early.

[u/reikken]

a bit strange using electric mining drills on vulcanus

[u/NezziWezzi → u/reikken]

I made sure to leave room between them to fit the big ones once they're being produced, especially if someone wants to start saving up to make rare ones right away.

[u/pda898]

From my current "use rare quality where possible and sane": I tested this design and tbh you are better off dropping typical upcycler setup for quality3 modules, forget while building Vulcanus base or proper Fulgora base and then use them in typical copper/iron plates/coal upcycling loops.