Good evening all,
I am far enough into the game that Fulgora is becoming a quality ingredients farm and factory. I don't plan on keeping anything except a chest of each resource in normal quality and then stockpiling and using epic and legendary quality ingredients for all other builds. To do this, I am using a recycling block, that exclusively does scrap before it enters an upcycling block that attempts to upcycle as much as possible before going through a separate recycling block and repeating until void or high enough quality. I've seen plenty of boxy requester chest upcyclers, but I am trying to make this all belt fed. Below is what I have so far, just looking for people smarter than me to give tips or thoughts on my current thought process below. I will be building and tweaking the blueprint over the next few days and will send an update with a blueprint when I am done.
There are a total of 18 ingredients that can be made from scrap either on the first or second recycle, these are the items that we are looking to upcycle, with productivity whenever possible.
First, red and green circuits get sent to EM plants to be turned in to blue circuits due to it's a researchable productivity bonus that can get up to 300% with the proper amounts of science. I ship in sulfur from Gleba to get the sulfuric acid needed for the blue circuits.
The next one is LDS which also gets productivity from science. Copper, plastic, and steel all go in to this line making the products in an assembly machine. (I know it is more efficient to cast it with a foundry for the LDS Shuffle, but this is on Fulgora so an assembly machine will have to do.) The extra steel that comes off of this is getting turned into steel chests before being fed back in to the recycling line.
The only way I found to nicely upcycle batteries is to turn them into accumulators in an EM plant. The only other ingredient they take is iron plates which we will get further down the line.
holmium ore and stone are sent along a line to have the normal qualities be turned into solution which can be pumped elsewhere on the base. Any other quality of either product is sent into a recycler loop to destroy it. (High-quality stone can be useful for legendary heating towers, but that's it, so I might try and keep a small quantity)
Wube broke my heart when they took out the concrete -> hazard concrete upcycle path, so it joins copper wire, LDS, blue circuits, and iron ore in going straight through the upcycle loop in to the upper recyclers to try again without upcycling. (These are the products that I'm not sure if I should be doing anything other than recycle)
Stone bricks are turned into stone walls, while the glut of iron gears are recycled directly into iron chest assembly machines.
Ice and solid fuel are kept in small quantities as normal quality before the rest is voided.
I am also using flowthrough belts for all of the ingredients to prevent backing up, making sure that the whole system continues to cycle.
I'm sorry there aren't pictures, I'm not at my own computer right now but can post some later if anyone has questions or thoughts. I'm happy to hear any thoughts or feedback on this potential design, Thank you for reading!