If you think that is expensive, just wait until you get to legendary... But resources are infinite, so it doesn't really matter, it's just a question of the scale of your factory
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2025
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Oh yeah since it's multiplicative, that means it's exponential. Ugh. .
From FFF-375 kovarex says:
With this straightforward approach, if you want to produce items of legendary quality, and you already have enough legendary quality 3 modules (which is not an easy thing to get in the first place), the legendary items are 56 times more expensive than normal items
So yeah, quality is quite expensive, and it's definitely a trap trying to go for epic/legendary for many items.
Honestly, the most important thing to actually make legendary is quality/prod modules. So you can make space ships that harvest astroids, and reprocessing them into legendary astroid.
And that way you have pretty much trivialized getting legendary ores!
It's a long game thing until you get asteroid reprocessing.
Then you can brute force higher quality ores from asteroids and upcycle them faster then using mining drills.
The astroid mining platform is a real game changer. Infinity resources
I've seen asteroid reprocessors and it seems soooo simple compared to what I'm doing. It almost feels like cheating.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Quality
Easier to show you the wiki page as the quality mechanics are lot more complex then what you said and I thought it would be.
I appreciate the link, but that doesn't offer much understanding. I read that page and used it to come up with my scenario. I have to do an example to understand things.
Yeah, no kidding.
I had a nice factory line on Nauvis set up that would build N-number of almost anything; it was the first time I'd done anything this tidy, and the first time I dabbled in signals.
Then I got this crazy idea to replicate it, only for quality-1 items (only taking in quality-1 ingredients, set to manufacture quality-1 products).
Holy. Fork. Just getting the right raw ingredients is absurdly difficult, and it's slow as hell to produce almost anything. So then I thought I'd produce what quality raw ingredients I could in space and ship them down; I tried that, I tried producing stuff on Vulcanis... it's all just too expensive.
I now have an idea that I might meet the quality steel plate by running a factory ship constantly back and fourth between Nauvis and Vulcanis - it's the only way to get enough quality steel to actually generate quality plate in any volume with any efficiency. I may try that next. I think I could get decent quality quality steel ingredients on Vulcanis, but getting them back to Nauvis in any volume would be prohibitively expensive, so space runs is going to be my next attempt.
I got so stuck in this quality rabbit hole, I haven't even gotten to any of the other planets yet. If the factory-ferry idea doesn't pan out, I think I'll give up on quality for a while, because it's becoming a slog.
Bit late but also go for quality carbonic asteroids while you're running a ship back and forth.
Quality sulfur and quality carbon from them become quality coal which becomes quality plastic which goes into a foundry to become quality low density structures.
Sure theres a thing that most people I'd think would consider an exploit, recycling those LDS, but whether you exploit or not, quality LDS for just the cost of quality plastic is a good value.
Quality oxi asteroids can get you quality calcite, too, and that's good for making quality stone if you need some. With the lava to copper recipe, each calcite is worth 15 quality stone for bricks, which can be foundry'd right into quality concrete, saving you whatever quality iron ore you might've spent.
Thanks! I've mostly given up on the quality journey, for now. Maybe post end-game, but at the moment it's just tedious, slow, and frustrating. I do have a stationary platform that's only mining quality asteroids, mainly for ore->plate, but it's still annoying. If I come back to it, my plan is to build a mobile factory to run between Vulcanus and Nauvis and produce quality raw product (well, I'll probably do at least the plate in space).
But I'm still fighting with trying to figure out Gleba, and haven't even been to Fulgara yet, so struggling with quality is going to take a back seat for now.
Fulgora is a good place for quality. I dunno if you're avoiding spoilers so I won't go into why unless you ask, but it's a great fit.
I just got to aquilo, myself, and my current quality strategy is to stick quality modules in miners and early production, hoard quality things in many many chests, then if I want to actually make something quality, I see what I have.
Good strategy; I'm doing the hoarding, but only because I don't know what else to do with it.
I mostly use it for higher end ship stuff. Cargo bays, asteroid collectors, etc.
Or, as epic and legendary get unlocked, recycle more and more of it to get those tiers.
Like, right now i'm sitting on about 16 chests of quality iron, which is the limit I built into my production system, so pretty soon I gotta get some circuitry together to recycle the uncommon stuff automatically. It'll flow through recyclers until it all becomes epic tier, where it'll sit more compactly in a chest waiting for legendary.
But honestly, it's best use for me has been taking old parts of my base and bringing them up to speed.
Just like how eventually, you might upgrade from t1 crafters to t2, to t3, to t3 w/ speed modules, quality crafting machines always raises speed. Anywhere you find yourself wishing for more module slots for speed, or for more efficiency modules to go with speed, that's a good spot for quality machines. A Rare T2 assembler is basically the same speed as a T3, after all.
For me, that was red circuit production. I built them with t2, upgraded to t3, upgraded again to t3 with speed modules because I didn't have the room, then removed speed for prod modules and made them quality to compensate for the speed loss.
Good tips, thanks!
Yes, sounds about right. The most important thing with quality is making better quality modules.
Fulgora is great, quality recyclers, pull out high quality outputs and reserve for the future.
Thinking about it, yes, Fulgora is great for this. I was trying to do quality on Nauvis and it was so resource intense.
This is a game of scale. You just need to build a shitton of everything, until you have legendary tier stuff in abundance. Then you can downsize ( but you should not, of course. The factory must grow!). The god of Factorio, Nilaus, has a lot to share. Do check him on YT if you need inspiration.