People saying quality is gambling don´t understand the concept. It is the same as with the kovarex enrichment. When you increase the throughput the chance does not matter.
True, in gambling you can lose, here you're guaranteed to get a value parity at the very least. Integrating quality modules at every step, and then using normal quality items for items that don't benefit from quality (belts, rockets, foundations) seems like an efficient strategy at the time.
It's normal that not everyone will like the quality modules. It's quite uncommon to find people who love everything - rare, even. But in my opinion, this new aspect of the game is epic. That's exactly what you'd expect from the legendary developer, Wube.
I love that quality is system that encourages you to build more complex setups instead of just bigger factories. I always preferred mods that increase the complexity instead of trying to build a megabase with x science per minute. Can't wait for Monday
@@wigoow1206 Same, it adds a nice mix of both in my opinion! You need to build things differently and perhaps more complex but also bigger too to get it to work well
Yeah, so when you have basically the same recycling concept to make every kind of legendary item, that totally won't be "more of the same". Maybe a challenge to figure out how to make half the items with a single parameterized BP? And then the bar for a megabase just moves, so you still need thousands of assemblers/smelters, they just all have to be legendary now, and we add a zero or two to SPM expectations. Fun for one playthrough I guess.
thats why i´m not sure if i actually want to play the DLC in vanilla or wait for space exploration to catch up. love the complexity and this DLC is still kind of simple compared to SE.
@@SkorjOlafsen Big difference being that these are free to roll. If you had to pay IRL currency for this? Ew. But it's not. In addition, at the scales that Factorio operates at, chance becomes ratios instead.
@@leakingamps2050 Yes, yes, still doesn't feel right though. Mostly because I suspect that the endgame will be more assemblers and BPs doing the quality grind than actual production.
This video made me think about FFF #402 where Rseding talks about how they had to rewrite the crafting logic because the original one was too slow for space age (crafting something couldn't take less than 1/60th of a second, or one tick). I still can't believe how necessary that was and i see nobody talking about it lol
When dealing with the scale of factorio production, it's less gambling and just becomes a matter of the Law of Large Numbers Think of uranium processing from 1.0 vanilla. Obtaining Active uranium is a sub percent chance. But with having only 4 processors, supporting a nuclear reactor becomes a given. It's not shooting the poop. Without training, the human brain is awful at dealing with probability and statistics. Confounding that is also the human deficiencies in imagining large numbers.
I love how it’s what you said AND if you do want to gamble a bit, just slap quality modules in random parts of your system and you can sometimes get a rare item! Best of both worlds!
Quality is one of the most exciting thing for me! It seems nothing like lootboxing, but much more like the startup of uranium processing. Super looking forward to making all kinds of quality producing factories!
my inital thought is that it will be best to focus on getting quality quality modules right from when they're unlocked, so when you get round to building a setup to produce quality items, your compound chances are much increased
Quality is a brilliant concept that gives so many possibilities. It's hard to min-max it, but people need to understand that you don't have to min-max; you wouldn't even want everything in max quality. It's about how do you want to get to quality, what do you want to make out of this, do you just want to set some quality to the side for "special projects", and so on. It's a fantastic concept that can keep you busy for hours on end designing, and even has a pretty nice "reward system".
I know its not gambling cause with enough throughput chance wont matter as someone in the comments already stated. But thats not ganno stop me from getting a dopamine rush when I see a legendary item
Who would call this gambling? on the scale of factorio, a 1% chance means that 1/100 of every item is gonna be a bit more rare, like on such a large scale its not a chance its a constant. Also there are no flashing lights to release dophamine you wont even get addicted to it (ignore the factorio addiction syndrome for a moment)
@@unitazer I've seen quite a few people say they dislike it because they don't like "a gambling mechanic being added to the game". I obviously don't agree lol
@@evangold4748 Imagine if legendary concrete would increase the movespeed bonus. wearing legendary exoskeletons and walking on legendary concrete teleporting you across the whole factory with a single tap of a movement key...
On the FFF that first mentioned these the reception of the quality system was really poor which surprised me but honestly it adds so much depth to the game imo, In a way it's like they added MK2, MK3 versions to everything (aka just upgraded versions of buildings and gear) without even needing to do that and allowing it to be really flexible too.
"Grab your best lube" (rayguard) 😀 No, fluid does not have quality. About the calculation: I wondered the same, but then remembered: you can't mix quality in the ingredients. So fluids count as the same quality as the ingredients you explicitly chose when selection a recipe.
for the quality smelting builds, in addition to using productivity in the legendary-ore smelters, I would suggest using productivity in the epic ore smelters as well. The output of epic and legendary ore is so low that productivity is probably more useful than quality. You'll have plenty of additional chances to roll higher quality products from the epic plate further down the production line, so it's better to use quality in the normal, uncommon and rare ore builds, but use productivity in the epic and legendary builds.
@@camrenw9719 that only applies to assembler-recycler loops for the purpose of outputting only legendary results. What i'm talking about is the value prospect of putting quality modules in furnaces vs productivity modules for the epic ore.
(my argument is, that because plate is a LOW-level item, you'll get plenty of chances to roll for higher quality at later stages, so getting productivity at the smelting stage will yield better results.
@@camrenw9719 Furnaces only get 2 module slots. for epic ore, you effectively have the choice between productivity or quality. If you choose quality, it can only improve a single step (upto legendary, but when it doesn't improve the quality the 87+% of the time, you'll only getting a single epic plate per ore), at the plate level, you'll have multiple chances to IMPROVE that same, single step, but at an assembler step, you can have FOUR module slots. so, in the case of smelting column module decisions...it's better to put 2 productivity modules in the furnaces that are smelting epic ore and put 4 quality modules (or a combination of quality+productivity) in the assemblers that take that epic plate in order to get more quality stuff out of that ore patch.
Minor note there, the quality mod is required mod with Space Age. However you can choose not to research it and then you don't have it in your UI. Some were saying it's because recycler comes from that mod and it's vital machine on Fulgora.
I like the idea. Probably not for the whole factory but for spaceships and personal equipment. It makes the need for mods like "better Spidertron", "Better Armor" etc. obsolet and you still need to put some work/automation to get the better stuff. And you always need to balance your factory how much I want to put in quality (slowing down my factory) against normal production.
Maybe I am missing something, but with SA we could have one chest that has slots reserved for each ingredient in each quality which also gets fed from recycling. Then a circuit selects the highest-quality recipe for which all quality ingredients are present and sets it as the recipe for the assembler. Non-legendary outputs then get recycled into that chest. That way, we don't need to use multiple splitters and multiple assemblers to differentiate quality. If that build itself has high quality, it should also be incredibly fast while only costing few quality-buildings to place.
I did not know that quality worked on ores. Honestly though, I will probably stick to the method he didn't like. Speed/bulk produce like normal, then stamp down a standardized recycling loop at the end product. Start with something you need in very low quantities like oil refineries. Once you get an adequate stockpile, you can then funnel off those higher quality base/intermediate materials into new quality producing setups.
I'll probably do a similar setup just because trying to filter quality from every step looks incredibly tedious although it's certainly an interesting puzzle for sure.
Seeing the explanation of building from the ground up made this click a lot more for me. I had thought of it as just adding the same recycle system at the end of each line which is boring, but tracking quality materials at each step is a lot more interesting to me. I probably will actually keep this feature on now (was on the fence before). I kinda like the idea of throwing quality modules on miners at your outposts, sending all regular ore to the traditional factory, then separating out the quality ores to a second base built entirely around quality materials with the end goal being to get and save up legendary materials to choose to build the few legendaries I do want (like maybe turrets for personal use).
I'm totally fan of quality, simple because every single factory game has the issue where to build big you fps and ups goes to nothing pretty fast. Always been suggesting that those game had a building multiplier, like higher version that require 5x the material, 10x, 100x, so it would still cost the same as building 100, or even more, but it would also make the same as 100 with only 1 building, which would drastically improve fps and ups, and quality kind of does exactly that. One of the reasons that most factory games like factorio or satsfactory always have a mod that make a "super" machine that make 100x of anything
@@cmdreteri7791 I'd say easily 5-10x what it currently is, for actual pack production. However, we may need to start measuring in ESPM (effective science per minute) because with lab prod researched and 50% built in on the Biolab, even if you're *only* making like 50k packs a minute, you could easily be doing like 100k, 150i spm worth of research cause of lab prod.
I like the quality names. It might feel like gambling if you pop in a few modules here and there, but it seems to be deterministic at large scales. Anyway, this is absolutely insane and I can't wait to play around with it.
@@sproins While I'm not a huge fan of the names within the Factorio setting, I totally agree otherwise. It's just probabilities and once you start building big enough, it's not gambling at all, just statistics
Quality is also great for factory components that are used in science. You need yellow inserters in bulk anyway, so you can build a quality hub and send all common ones for red science.
The quality is the one thing I'm the most excited about in the whole Space Age extension! Ever since reading the FFF I've been dreaming about it! I really love the implementation they chose: we need to design systems specifically for quality and they're very different from what we're used to do! Moreover, one thing that is not often mentioned is that this could even lead us to automate things we don't often automate. For example armor or modules! I don't yet know what it changes for those but I'm sure quality will make them great and it'll be very interesting to automate things like that!
The quality system is a really clever way to make very expensive and powerful equipment without having to clutter the UI with "Assembly Machine Mk 7" and the like. It also makes for a more interesting factory design than simply making very expensive recipes, since you have to feed rejects through recyclers.
@@haxney 100%! Part of why I like it so much, aside from the obvious "machine go brrr" aspect lol. I'm not really a fan of mods that add like machine make x, as you said and this is a far better way to do it Id say.
For how hard legendaries are to get, they seem pretty balanced. A few days before the beacon rework was announced Kovarex posted a screenshot of a full legendary foundry and electro plant in the Factorio discord that showed the new possible numbers. The electro plant had 20m green chips crafted by itself and the screenshot showed 4 fully stacked turbo belts. I'ts gonna be interesting to see how much more science a non space age base can make with the quality mod, we might start seeing 100k spm or something insane
@@deathfistenjoyer Definitely! Although an important note is that to get quality module 3s you have to go to another planet. So for that you have to do space age stuff. But, you could technically just grind out quality with level 2s, just more slowly. Or... Build even bigger to make up for it!
@@Xterminator I've watched a few of the Nilaus videos, from what Ive seen just having a few uncommon or rare items like solar panels or (more importantly) the asteroid collectors makes a huge difference early on. I learned from my SE playthrough that its really better to start small and wait until you get the fun stuff to scale.
I think the quality system is a cool addition. It's like a whole new vertical axis of production (better instead of more.) I only wish the names for quality tiers were less "video gamey" and had better names that fit the engineering of factorio
I like the naming, it is so different from the rest of the game that it's hard to confuse it with anything else, the naming is also intuitive to gamers. Factorio has always been more game than simulator anyway.
One thing I've heard other early testers report is that liquid inputs (e.g. iron/steel/copper products from the foundry) don't have a quality value. Therefore, if you're quality grinding anything you can make in foundries (which is probably the right way to do it due to speed and productivity bonuses), then you pretty much have to do quality "top down", not "bottom up" like you're doing here. Factoring in the productivity bonuses for the EM plant and the 8 module slots on the Cryo Plant, it probably makes sense to use them for "top down" quality grinding too.
True, and while you can't get get quality liquids when turning ore into molten ore, you could still do quality basically from the ground up by just starting from the casting step, of turning the molten metal into things like steel, gears, etc and beginning your quality process there. So basically all that would need to be skipped is the morning step for quality
Personally, I’ve theorized that an ideal early game approach would be to build as normal, but place quality modules in certain high throughput items. For example, in an electronic circuit build, and then filter off the quality while allowing all the normal components to be used as normal. Then there would be no waste via recycling, and some quality items can be used for special use cases without much expense or infrastructure
Definitely a good option! This is what we've been doing up until very late game when we can reasonable make a massive setup do quality from Ore and up.
I love the potential of quality. I'm not a megabase player because I find "the sprawl" and outposting tedious tbh but between quality and the interplanetary logistics I might give it a shot this time around as it's far more complex and more involved than just making bigger builds for SPM goals, honestly, never found that an interesting goal that's why I tend to stick to overhauls with various levels of complexity. From what I've seen of stream footage there are defo certain items early on that you would want to prioritise getting quality on, and it mostly seems like personal equipment and space platform buildings. Asteroid collectors get extra arms which is huge and solar panels and accumulators producing and storing more energy is self-explanatory.
I think the goal is basically to make quality quality, and to add quality prod to the legendary as you said. As I make more quality quality, add this to beacons, you're unstoppable
I think one important thing to let people know in quality tutorials is that speed modules seem to decrease quality. I'm not sure if it can downgrade an item, but at least you can't beacon your quality upcycling. As for what might be optimal, I have a feeling having a build that up-cycles everything from the bottom-up would get you the best results, since recycling destroys so much of it it doesn't seem to be worth it for just rerolling the same item. But for simplcity's sake, you'd probably want to just keep recycling the most basic ingredients and then having one legendary production line afterwards...
Definitely checking out quality as I get more familiar with space age. Fully agree with needing some solution for massive factories. The way I tend to force that to happen is make more enemies and more research costs. The save I have prepared for space age has 4x research cost and 300% biter nests specifically for larger factories. I am all for checking out quality on that save once I have basic setups on at least the main 3 worlds. That foundry steel production was mind blowing. Also, the devs I think mentioned that the gleba squids are driven by the existing enemy nest spawn rate, are demolisher territories driven by that value as well?
I’m looking forward to building a recycling centre to grind up the stuff below the quality I want ;) will be fun to see trainloads of stuff going to the recyclers in a sushi belt.
Quality is less like gambling and more like refining. The quality modules would be significantly worse without the recyclers I am so looking forward to working with them.
I am entirely convinced that sending off "failures" (see: basic items that don't roll +QL) into recyclers is a trap and should be avoided as much as possible. Red Circuits, Electric Furnaces, Processing Units and Speed/Prod 1 Modules I think are especially good candidates for Quality Modules, where the failures can be easily reused for science. +QL Red Circuits are set aside for making +QL Mk2 Modules. +QL Electric Furnaces can be put into your Furnace stacks for extra speed. Failures sent to Production Science +QL Proc Units, like the Red Circuits, set aside for Mk2 Modules, send the failures into Utility Science. +QL Speed/Proc Modules also side aside for Mk2 Modules and failures sent to Prod/Util Science. By the end of it, you've got Uncommon and Rare Mk2 Modules, and you're not destroying nearly 75% of your input in recyclers.
@@Jeff_the_Hobo Yeah, generally I've found that I much prefer to not recycle the failures if at all possible. But tbh, I'm not sure anyone knows the actually best strategy for the whole process until it's used extensively over time.
Vulcanus is easy to get a basic setup on though, and from the looks of it a tank with green friendliness pellets is enough to make at least the small worms friendly so you don't need much extra.
First time i'm heard about it I definitely don't like it, but after digging a little dipper it's seems like even balanced? And thing that it's opening a lot of new setups to play around also seems interesting
I love quality, it's gonna be super fun to setup a separate quality factory for modules/power armour. One downside I have with the system is having to select the specific quality recipe. I wish it worked more like outcome quality = average ingredient quality + quality module So if you're making electronic circuits with 3 cable and 1 plate, if the plate is legendary (which is quality tier 5) and wires are common (tier 0), average quality would be 5/4 or 1.25, so you'd always get uncommon circuits out, with 25% chance of quality bump to rare. This does mean you could only bump 1 tier at a time based on chance, but you could more easily make rare/epic things. And over time as you craft green circuits into red and then into blue, they'd just get higher and higher because you also have +10% or so from modules. And then you take all the uncommon/rare/epic stuff, recycle it down, put it back in the system, and take legendary stuff and make it into modules/power armour. Now it seems like you have to recycle at every step of the process, since if you want legendary blue circuits, it doesn't really make sense to input common/uncommon things into that, better to just recycle back and forth and keep crafting until you get legendary. Although my idea would require quality items to be stackable with their non quality counterparts while still preserving their data, at least when put in any crafting machine, which seems like a pain to implement. Still, can't wait to make a fully legendary base making 10k+ SPM, it's gonna be very fun either way!
@@helleye311 I think your idea is reasonable for the most part and could definitely see a mod being made for it in the future! I think the devs wanted to keep it as simple as possible, so avoided doing mixed quality stuff like you suggest. Monday is almost here, hope you have an absolute blast with it!
Nobody doubted of it's incredible speed, but the question is, Is it worth it? Having to make a "quality production cycle" for each component sounds way more complicated and expensive than just making a factory bigger. The only good reason to use them is if there is limited space, like in a space platform. But beyond that, each world is literally infinite and space is usually never a problem. Correct me if I'm wrong
framerate. Maybe the first 1000 machines run fine, but at 2000 machines you are now running at 56 FPS, then at 3000 machines you are at 45 FPS. Your computer cannot handle an infinite sized factory. So a smaller more powerful factory will produce the same amount as a huge factory and not i pact your frames.
I'm very on the fence about quality. My initial gut reaction was negative, but I've definitely warmed up to it a bit I guess I'll see first hand in like 35 hours
I don't think I'll be using quality modules in most mines due to the fact that liquids can't have quality, so I'll probably be building a foundry smelting setup with prod on the melting and quality on the plating. If I use quality in mines I'd have to route ore to electric furnaces, losing a ton of potential productivity. If my math is mathing, a setup with legendary quality in big mining drills and electric furnaces would give me 23 legendary plates for each 10.000 ores (10.000 total plates), while a foundry setup with legendary productivity on melting foundries and legendary quality on the plate casting would give me 106 legendary plates for 10.000 ores (around 75000 total plates).
Yeah when good for 'quality' modules you go for scale. Legendary is .o1 that means you add 100 machines for a greater chance. You just recycle the rest and use a priority input splitter in to get rid of the extra back into the system. And quality chance scales with the quality of both machines. Always quality your modules first > assembly machines
What a cool setup! Thanks for the ground-up insight! Maybe it was just for demonstration, but I dont think filtration and separation of ores and intermediate products is necessary if you also separate the final products. I think it would actually be better for throughput to not have dedicated legendary furnaces with dedicated legendary rail car slots. If legendary lasers are the objective, I think optimal throughput would just be typical steel/battery/green chips with occasional seeding from up-qualitied components, assuming 1 of 3 uncommon components results in a 33% chance for an uncommon final product, a recycling loop for suboptimals would recoup that 66% and you'd be printing legendary lasers after a few minutes. I think the first 4 quality chips made should go right back into the quality chip assembler, starting that loop seems very important. Its not gambling! It's six sigma! Thats why everyone hates these "epic" "legendary" names instead of "superior" "exceptional" "flawless" or actual grading terms.
The optimal strategy can actually change depending on the stage of the game / what equipment is available, and what you're trying to make. There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution that's always optimal. Some solutions however will always be more logistically challenging, and it's up to you how much that will influence your decision making.
People dislike quality because it's random, but have no issues with fulgora scrap recycling or uranium ore processing, which is also random. This confuses me; Quality is optional, but fulgora isn't. I think the real reason people dislike quality is because of its complexity, which is also weird, because factorio itself is complex and that's the fun of it.
the only thing I don't like about quality is the appearance: both in terms of the coloured dots (although I must say it is clear), but also the naming of the quality levels seem a bit out of character (they could have gone with much more in-theme names, like "efficient" or "optimised" or something). The mechanics are very cool though.
@@qliotik4115 nope. I also should have mentioned (dang it) that speed modules and quality modules work against each other. So speed beaconing machines with quality modules in them, takes away the quality % or at least reduced it
Some questions given I can't try this myself yet: 1. Do you actually need separate smelters for each quality? Could you not just merge all the ores and send them through a single quality moduled smelter stack (possibly split out the legendary if you want to run that through a prod moduled smelter) 2. Do recipes that require liquids reset the quality given that liquids can't have quality. Specifically, would legendary green chips and legendary red chips give legendary blue chips, or does the sulphuric acid count as "normal" quality and cause it to output normal blue chips? 3. On the subject of liquids, I'm guessing that means the foundry renders quality ore "useless" as it outputs a non-quality liquid? I'm guessing there's no option to run the foundry as a normal smelter to skip the liquids and get the 50% prod with 4 quality modules?
Good questions. 1. No you definitely don't have to. It was just easier for me to demonstrate everything and visualize it by separating it out. 2. Liquids are basically irrelevant when considering quality, since as you said, they can't have quality. So yes, if you put in legendary red chips and legendary green chips, you'd get legendary blue chips. The fluid is basically just not considered at all for the quality. 3. Correct. So you couldn't put quality into the initial process where foundries turn ore into molten metal, but you could put it in the Casting process where the foundry turns the molten metal into solid products again like gears, steel, etc.
Instead of recycling iron or copper plates, you could make them into something that only requires those items and then recycle it. That would create 2 chances to get higher quality for the same input. It is even better if the item you are recycling is something you would use anyways like copper wire. Plastic would be more difficult unless there is a new recipe that only uses plastic. I am guessing there is no quality fluids and it just requires that fluid to craft higher quality, possibly with more required. I have not seen any higher quality recipes that require fluids yet.
As you can't make worse quality than the ingredients, trying to get the ingredients for your quality module production up first makes a lot of sense. So I guess, making and recycling circuits until you get the ingredients for the next better quality modules than you already have is the way. First, you loop-recycle to Q2 till you got Q2 quality modules in your machines. Then you loop-recycle to Q3 till the machines have Q3 quality modules... and so on up to Q5.
This legendary setup is hilarious lol. I think we will need the belt that load inside de machine from krastorio What do you think to store higher quality items at the beginning just before they go to the main bus?
The idea of gambling is missing just how much you produce in a game and how much is required. Simple point would be we have an achievement for producing 5k Processing units per hour, at 5k per hour, you are already getting to the point where your getting a lot of quality products (4500 common, 450 uncommon, 45 rare, and 5 Epic/Legendary as relatively expected rolls based on the shown probabilities.) and this is already for Blue circuits, if you start from the bottom, you get to a point where you can be pulling Rare+ at a decent rate.
The more & more i hear about quality, the less excited i get, that i think I'll need a mod to come out changing it to enjoy it. Personally, considering everything I've seen, but obviously not played yet: I feel like the rng part isn't the issue I'm going to have with quality as a mechanic, but that it doesn't seem to operate in a teir up system, that no matter how much effort you put into quality, you will always be earning lower than desired quality levels. Considering the mechanic of guaranteeing the minimum quality of what you're crafting based on the quality of ingredients you put in, i feel like that creates a perfect opportunity to have some way of guaranteeing your entire factory works at a specific quality teir. Anyway I'll finish up by saying. Obviously its a optional mechanic so I'm not that fussed, I'll just stick to things like Bob's mods with it's tiered buildings or be on the lookout for a quality mechanic changing mod. Also who knows what type of easy to create optimal builds ppl will discover/create that might make it easy to get & use quality.
The step you need to take for that is simply dealing with the low quality “byproducts”. You can recycle anything below your desired quality and essentially guarantee that you only output what you want. Also, once you get far enough to have legendary T3 modules, this will be extremely fast since 25% of all your products will have a higher tier than before. And with inputs guaranteeing output quality, 25% uncommon green circuits will guarantee 25% uncommon red circuits, etc. If you recycle ALL common green circuits, you will ONLY get uncommon red circuits. I think getting started with quality will be a pain in the butt; however, you can set up your normal mall with quality modules and gather a few uncommon and perhaps even rare assemblers and stuff like that while you are playing normally. Then, once you want to REALLY scale up, you gather everything you have (much like setting up uranium early so that you can start enrichment the moment you unlock it) and you’ll see exponential growth in how fast you produce high quality items. I think most SA-endgame bases will be able to easily produce what is required to switch to legendary quality.
the easy & simple quality setup for you is this: 1) quality all of your miners, load the output onto generic interrupt trains 2) set up 4 stations, each requesting a different tier of ore at a low priority (normal, green, blue, purple) 3) at each of these stations, recycle the ore in a recycler with quality modules. feed the station's quality back into itself as a priority input, and the higher qualities into a generic train 4) set up your 5th station requesting legendary ore. then, process this as you would any other ore. anything you make with legendary inputs will be legendary. for earlier-game setups you can always change this to produce only blue or purple ore very easily by adding a default priority ore request station that then processes that ore.
@@spicybread5668 but if recycling ore works like recycling plates, won't that delete 75% of your inputs? Meaning that combined with a 25% chance for an upgrade, you'll be looking at destroying something like 99.99999% (1-0.25^8) of your ore?
@@DoubLL Thanks for the information & advice, I do appreciate it ☺️. For me the idea of lower quality byproducts just doesn't seem fun in factorios case. It's like how in most (not all) RPGs with rarity loot systems, you end up never wanting lower than legendary, but still get inundated with lower gear, so developers started implementing features like lower rarities being removed from the loot pool & auto selling. In factorios case the down sides will be inundation, guaranteed resource loss from recycling cycles & a massive time sink. Obviously it seems to be a late game, mega base kind of players mechanic, I just feel it could be a more general player reaching mechanic if it was a little different, even if based on my original comment, the requirements to guarantee specific quality levels where locked behind a research requiring something like "have majority of all your stuff be X quality" thus unlocking a permanent quality boost to that quality tier, so all your minors will only pump out X quality mats, but requiring you to go through the quality tiers for each research. You could even make it so you can't get guaranteed Epic or Legendary, so they still require a factory commitment. Anyway I'll stop there I can type a lot 😅.
@@Willow4526 Yeah, good point. I think that should be possible to implement too, since now there apparently are techs which are unlocked be performing actions ingame. So you could gain access to a research after building a certain amount of quality items or maybe even have a percentage of all built items be of a certain quality, as you suggested. Maybe someone cool will make a mood like that! 👍
I can't imagine how many hours it would take to make a mega-base with all legendary production. I would guess the key is to get legendary miners. After that, everything will take care of itself.
@@brianpleshek5593 It takes a VERY long time. Not gonna lie, it's a huge grind. But I'm okay with that because it legitimately gives the base something to do for a very long time in ultra late game
27:08 This setup is kind of bad. Large footprint, few beacons. But more importantly, I don't really see the need to split different quality level items into spaghetti belts all the time. What's stopping anybody from just having a simple line of machines outputting every product every time on a single 'sushi quality' belt, and filtering all of it just *once*. Actually, why not the same for inputs? On that topic, I can't be the only one who is disappointed in Quality requiring different recipes in the same assemblers just for different target qualities of the same product. This should've been done automatically. But (hopefully) you should be able to switch target quality levels with assembler circuit control magic. Route all undesired products into a recycler and priority merge the results back into the ingredients (with obvious exceptions such as raw ores). Only produce high level quality products. Will take a long time, but that's what beacons and speed modules are good for.
@@KackBratze001 Two things. First, this was for demo purposes and much easier to visualize than an all combined setup. While you could technically do it the way you suggest, I think there could still be issues with it. You'd need some way to make sure higher level inputs get prioritized on input belt, otherwise it could get backlogged with basic quality stuff, since that's what you'll have vast majority of. So if your smelting isnt running 100% of the time at full tilt, then your needlessly slowly down the processing of higher qualities if say epic or legendary ore is stuck way back on a belt because it's full of normal iron ore ahead of it and your normal plate is backed up so smelters aren't running. Also as another user said, beaconing it is bad. Speed debuffs the quality
From what I've seen, it seems very complicated to actually set up grinding out quality items, especially because there doesn't seem to be any easy way to get rid of items until you get to Fulgora. And even then it's a very involved and probably slow process. It's really good, but I think it's balanced.
Now that circuits can change recipes could you set something up that cycles one small furnace stack (or even just one fast furnace) between the different qualities? Sorry if this is a silly question, I never really got into circuits.
@@manboy7773 Totally could yeah! I imagine it could be done without too much complexity. Although off the top of my head I don't have a way in mind, as I'm also not great with circuit network lol
@@Xterminator Glad to hear, I imagine it could also be done on a mall, so instead of having five malls for all the qualities you just have one. Although I wouldn't even know where to start with something like that.
@@s1ngularities good point! there are also el cheapo factories that may, once in a year, produce a decent sample, and there are top ones, that mostly ship shiny and reliable and lasting goods.
My biggest concern with Quality is just the setup to get quality products mid-to-end game. I feel like it's going to be a huge headache. Other than that, I am definitely sold on having a single machine spitting a billion steel per minute.
I wonder what would be end up being the most efficient path to producing legendary items out of raw materials. Doesn't it seem reasonable to use productivity modules in stead of quality modules during some intermediate steps as well? You'd have less chances of improved quality in the production chain, but more stuff to try to get improved quality with. I wonder how such a tradeoff will work out. Will be an interesting puzzle for sure!
@@ilovebluestorm Great question, and honestly don't know the exact answer! Generally I'm of the mindset though that resources are infinite so I'd rather be trying to roll on quality in every step possible rather than getting some free stuff to roll more quality on. However, combining the two in a machine is actually quite good! Because quality can also hit on the free crafts from productivity ;)
If you already have legendary tier 3 modules, then from my calculations full prod is most effective. Prior to that? Full quality seems to be most effective. This was for tier 1 modules using foundries and em plants, and I wouldn't be surprised if the optimal strategy changes if any of those variables were changed.
I like the quality mechanic, except for with ore/plate. I'm worried that I'll essentially have 5 separate manufacturing lines/buses, one for each level of quality. I think a better idea would have been to have quality affect the efficiency of mining and smelting so that higher quality resulted in more product. Kind of like how Angels injects various refining/smelting steps to increase the output count. But maybe once I get to play it, my concerns will be put to rest.
the easy & simple quality setup for you is this: 1) quality all of your miners, load the output onto generic interrupt trains 2) set up 4 stations, each requesting a different tier of ore at a low priority (normal, green, blue, purple) 3) at each of these stations, recycle the ore in a recycler with quality modules. feed the station's quality back into itself as a priority input, and the higher qualities into a generic train 4) set up your 5th station requesting legendary ore. then, process this as you would any other ore. anything you make with legendary inputs will be legendary. for earlier-game setups you can always change this to produce only blue or purple ore very easily by adding a default priority ore request station that then processes that ore.
not only is there not a problem with it, but it's not properly characterized as gambling. There's FAR more that is required for something to be gambling other than simply that % chances are involved.
All the analysis at the later part of the video crushes over the fact that you don’t use furnaces to get any reasonable amount of production after Vulcanus, and liquid metals can’t have quality, so… All I’ve seen is people mining directly into Foundries. This saves space and UPS. And this is where I guess you can’t put quality modules in it.
@@LosashExote But the casting in a foundry outputs plate from molten material. So you can still put quality in those to try and get quality plate. So yeah you'd skip the quality step in mining that I showed, but the rest could remain the same.
@@Xterminator I don’t have access to the game but I wonder if it’s gonna be viable to put quality in a drill, which mines directly into the foundry, and then inserters next to that drill which take uncommon+ ore out to process it in somewhere else
One question I have… when the recycler successfully outputs the base materials, will those have a guaranteed minimum quality based on the recycled item’s quality?
It is not gambling. We have to kill this talking point. It was started as a meme talking point and honestly it is funny to say that to friends to sell them on the idea. You put in 1 iron ore and you will always get 1 iron plate out. Some of the time you will get something better. This only benefits you. Gambling is bad because you will lose over a long enough time scale.
I think this would feel better if you could purposefully slow down your machines to guarantee better quality. I'm probably not messing with this at all but I guess its fun for those that want it
Is that not what using quality modules is? Quality modules themselves have a speed penalty, so they really are just showing down your machines to get higher quality. The "guarantee" part just comes with processing enough quantity.
@@angeldude101 To me that just adds unnecessary bloat to the mixture. It's already bad enough that every item can have multiple tiers The Quality Modules themselves having it is insane. I would rather just be able to slow my machine WAY down as a toggle to get better quality.
People saying quality is gambling don´t understand the concept. It is the same as with the kovarex enrichment. When you increase the throughput the chance does not matter.
Its also a hard ratio that you can see, and the numbers you produce of goods means you are guaranteed to get what you want eventually
True, in gambling you can lose, here you're guaranteed to get a value parity at the very least. Integrating quality modules at every step, and then using normal quality items for items that don't benefit from quality (belts, rockets, foundations) seems like an efficient strategy at the time.
I know, some people are just..... too stupid.
I also understand its not gambling but seeing that orange tag is ganno give me a dopamine rush everytime
exactly, gambling, my ass. rng, yes, some despise it passionately, but gambling is entirely another damn thing.
It's normal that not everyone will like the quality modules. It's quite uncommon to find people who love everything - rare, even. But in my opinion, this new aspect of the game is epic. That's exactly what you'd expect from the legendary developer, Wube.
Nice!
@@disskuss4268 this comment is just as nice as the 69 hundred iron gears per minute
I see what you did there
under-rated comment. IMHO, deserves a pin.
@@disskuss4268 The puns are overwhelming, but quality nonetheless!
I love that quality is system that encourages you to build more complex setups instead of just bigger factories. I always preferred mods that increase the complexity instead of trying to build a megabase with x science per minute. Can't wait for Monday
Omg same the answer isn’t just “make more of the same” anymore and I love that so much
@@wigoow1206 Same, it adds a nice mix of both in my opinion! You need to build things differently and perhaps more complex but also bigger too to get it to work well
Yeah, so when you have basically the same recycling concept to make every kind of legendary item, that totally won't be "more of the same". Maybe a challenge to figure out how to make half the items with a single parameterized BP? And then the bar for a megabase just moves, so you still need thousands of assemblers/smelters, they just all have to be legendary now, and we add a zero or two to SPM expectations. Fun for one playthrough I guess.
thats why i´m not sure if i actually want to play the DLC in vanilla or wait for space exploration to catch up. love the complexity and this DLC is still kind of simple compared to SE.
99% of engineer quit right before getting a legendary item
Lets go *-GAMBLING!-* stacking all variables in our odds through clever preparation.
Aw dangit
100-pull gachas! Cobine 5 rare waifus to make a legendary waifu! Yeah, pardon me for my lack of enthusiasm.
@@SkorjOlafsen Big difference being that these are free to roll. If you had to pay IRL currency for this? Ew. But it's not. In addition, at the scales that Factorio operates at, chance becomes ratios instead.
@@leakingamps2050 Yes, yes, still doesn't feel right though. Mostly because I suspect that the endgame will be more assemblers and BPs doing the quality grind than actual production.
This video made me think about FFF #402 where Rseding talks about how they had to rewrite the crafting logic because the original one was too slow for space age (crafting something couldn't take less than 1/60th of a second, or one tick).
I still can't believe how necessary that was and i see nobody talking about it lol
Omg that’s amazing
Shoutouts to Simpleflips
When dealing with the scale of factorio production, it's less gambling and just becomes a matter of the Law of Large Numbers
Think of uranium processing from 1.0 vanilla. Obtaining Active uranium is a sub percent chance. But with having only 4 processors, supporting a nuclear reactor becomes a given. It's not shooting the poop.
Without training, the human brain is awful at dealing with probability and statistics. Confounding that is also the human deficiencies in imagining large numbers.
I love how it’s what you said AND if you do want to gamble a bit, just slap quality modules in random parts of your system and you can sometimes get a rare item! Best of both worlds!
Quality is one of the most exciting thing for me! It seems nothing like lootboxing, but much more like the startup of uranium processing. Super looking forward to making all kinds of quality producing factories!
Exactly! but it also CAN be like gambling if you only put one or two quality modules in a system! A little bit of excitement and chance!
This is exactly how I feel! Setting up kovarex is one of the most satisfying things for me (cannot explain why 😅) so I am super excited for quality!
Gambling at scale is just statistics.
@@JoeTaber Exactly!
I'm already planning in my head how to craft legendary weapons and assemblers and so on.
The factory must grow and be faster!
@@Yorashy Ludicrous Speed!
The easiest way to switch assemblers on and off for demonstration purposes is the often forgotten power switch.
my inital thought is that it will be best to focus on getting quality quality modules right from when they're unlocked, so when you get round to building a setup to produce quality items, your compound chances are much increased
Yessss
@@hengrv Yup definitely a good thing to be grinding away asap!
8:35 "You can check in-game for yourself"
*Are you sure about that?*
lol
Quality is a brilliant concept that gives so many possibilities. It's hard to min-max it, but people need to understand that you don't have to min-max; you wouldn't even want everything in max quality. It's about how do you want to get to quality, what do you want to make out of this, do you just want to set some quality to the side for "special projects", and so on. It's a fantastic concept that can keep you busy for hours on end designing, and even has a pretty nice "reward system".
I know its not gambling cause with enough throughput chance wont matter as someone in the comments already stated.
But thats not ganno stop me from getting a dopamine rush when I see a legendary item
I 100% feel the same way. I got the same with early game uranium processing, just such a nice feeling to see those glowy greens pop up!
Law of big numbers
I wouldn't put you in a recycler, you're as legendary as it gets.
Who would call this gambling? on the scale of factorio, a 1% chance means that 1/100 of every item is gonna be a bit more rare, like on such a large scale its not a chance its a constant. Also there are no flashing lights to release dophamine you wont even get addicted to it (ignore the factorio addiction syndrome for a moment)
@@unitazer I've seen quite a few people say they dislike it because they don't like "a gambling mechanic being added to the game". I obviously don't agree lol
Are you saying that the 5 orange dots in the corner of the item icon aren't enough of a flashing light to release dopamine?
If your factory isn't all Legendaries, is it even a factory?
If your factory above 60UPS its a starter base
and i don't wanna see even a single belt that's only epic!
Is it really a mega base if the floor isn’t made out of legendary reinforced concrete?
@@evangold4748 i hope there is no such thing as legendary concrete, but it would be hilarious.
@@evangold4748 Imagine if legendary concrete would increase the movespeed bonus. wearing legendary exoskeletons and walking on legendary concrete teleporting you across the whole factory with a single tap of a movement key...
On the FFF that first mentioned these the reception of the quality system was really poor which surprised me but honestly it adds so much depth to the game imo, In a way it's like they added MK2, MK3 versions to everything (aka just upgraded versions of buildings and gear) without even needing to do that and allowing it to be really flexible too.
Do fluids have quality? Do they count as normal when figuring out the minimum quality of a product?
"Grab your best lube" (rayguard) 😀
No, fluid does not have quality.
About the calculation: I wondered the same, but then remembered:
you can't mix quality in the ingredients. So fluids count as the same quality as the ingredients you explicitly chose when selection a recipe.
I already know quality was powerful but the gear demonstration blew my mind
for the quality smelting builds, in addition to using productivity in the legendary-ore smelters, I would suggest using productivity in the epic ore smelters as well. The output of epic and legendary ore is so low that productivity is probably more useful than quality. You'll have plenty of additional chances to roll higher quality products from the epic plate further down the production line, so it's better to use quality in the normal, uncommon and rare ore builds, but use productivity in the epic and legendary builds.
There's a section on the quality page of the wiki that talks about that. "if quality strength >x - use quality,
@@camrenw9719 that only applies to assembler-recycler loops for the purpose of outputting only legendary results.
What i'm talking about is the value prospect of putting quality modules in furnaces vs productivity modules for the epic ore.
(my argument is, that because plate is a LOW-level item, you'll get plenty of chances to roll for higher quality at later stages, so getting productivity at the smelting stage will yield better results.
@@camrenw9719 Furnaces only get 2 module slots. for epic ore, you effectively have the choice between productivity or quality. If you choose quality, it can only improve a single step (upto legendary, but when it doesn't improve the quality the 87+% of the time, you'll only getting a single epic plate per ore), at the plate level, you'll have multiple chances to IMPROVE that same, single step, but at an assembler step, you can have FOUR module slots. so, in the case of smelting column module decisions...it's better to put 2 productivity modules in the furnaces that are smelting epic ore and put 4 quality modules (or a combination of quality+productivity) in the assemblers that take that epic plate in order to get more quality stuff out of that ore patch.
@@camrenw9719 for normal, uncommon, and rare, put quality modules when processing those ores. But for epic and legendary, use prod modules.
Minor note there, the quality mod is required mod with Space Age. However you can choose not to research it and then you don't have it in your UI. Some were saying it's because recycler comes from that mod and it's vital machine on Fulgora.
@@seonteeaika Hmm I'm 99% sure that is not the case. But I will double check now that you mention it
I like the idea. Probably not for the whole factory but for spaceships and personal equipment. It makes the need for mods like "better Spidertron", "Better Armor" etc. obsolet and you still need to put some work/automation to get the better stuff. And you always need to balance your factory how much I want to put in quality (slowing down my factory) against normal production.
Maybe I am missing something, but with SA we could have one chest that has slots reserved for each ingredient in each quality which also gets fed from recycling. Then a circuit selects the highest-quality recipe for which all quality ingredients are present and sets it as the recipe for the assembler. Non-legendary outputs then get recycled into that chest. That way, we don't need to use multiple splitters and multiple assemblers to differentiate quality. If that build itself has high quality, it should also be incredibly fast while only costing few quality-buildings to place.
I did not know that quality worked on ores. Honestly though, I will probably stick to the method he didn't like. Speed/bulk produce like normal, then stamp down a standardized recycling loop at the end product. Start with something you need in very low quantities like oil refineries. Once you get an adequate stockpile, you can then funnel off those higher quality base/intermediate materials into new quality producing setups.
@@Erik_Ice_Fang Totally fair and viable! I'm honestly not sure what method is better at this point, or if one even is strictly better than another tbh
I'll probably do a similar setup just because trying to filter quality from every step looks incredibly tedious although it's certainly an interesting puzzle for sure.
@@Xterminator now that I think about it though, your method would be the best if a player decides to wait a significant period before going to Fulgora
Seeing the explanation of building from the ground up made this click a lot more for me. I had thought of it as just adding the same recycle system at the end of each line which is boring, but tracking quality materials at each step is a lot more interesting to me. I probably will actually keep this feature on now (was on the fence before). I kinda like the idea of throwing quality modules on miners at your outposts, sending all regular ore to the traditional factory, then separating out the quality ores to a second base built entirely around quality materials with the end goal being to get and save up legendary materials to choose to build the few legendaries I do want (like maybe turrets for personal use).
I'm totally fan of quality, simple because every single factory game has the issue where to build big you fps and ups goes to nothing pretty fast.
Always been suggesting that those game had a building multiplier, like higher version that require 5x the material, 10x, 100x, so it would still cost the same as building 100, or even more, but it would also make the same as 100 with only 1 building, which would drastically improve fps and ups, and quality kind of does exactly that.
One of the reasons that most factory games like factorio or satsfactory always have a mod that make a "super" machine that make 100x of anything
That production is truly mind blowing. I wonder just how high the limits of megabase SPM will go?
i think the devs at some point said that they wanted a MILLION spm to be possible
@@cmdreteri7791 I'd say easily 5-10x what it currently is, for actual pack production. However, we may need to start measuring in ESPM (effective science per minute) because with lab prod researched and 50% built in on the Biolab, even if you're *only* making like 50k packs a minute, you could easily be doing like 100k, 150i spm worth of research cause of lab prod.
I will start watching any Factorio related videos after Monday, when everyone else can also play
I like the quality names. It might feel like gambling if you pop in a few modules here and there, but it seems to be deterministic at large scales.
Anyway, this is absolutely insane and I can't wait to play around with it.
@@sproins While I'm not a huge fan of the names within the Factorio setting, I totally agree otherwise. It's just probabilities and once you start building big enough, it's not gambling at all, just statistics
Quality is also great for factory components that are used in science. You need yellow inserters in bulk anyway, so you can build a quality hub and send all common ones for red science.
The new quality thing is epic, and it is so easy to ignore completely; well done.
Love this. It's nice to have a new challenge to build for.
The quality is the one thing I'm the most excited about in the whole Space Age extension! Ever since reading the FFF I've been dreaming about it! I really love the implementation they chose: we need to design systems specifically for quality and they're very different from what we're used to do!
Moreover, one thing that is not often mentioned is that this could even lead us to automate things we don't often automate. For example armor or modules! I don't yet know what it changes for those but I'm sure quality will make them great and it'll be very interesting to automate things like that!
The quality system is a really clever way to make very expensive and powerful equipment without having to clutter the UI with "Assembly Machine Mk 7" and the like. It also makes for a more interesting factory design than simply making very expensive recipes, since you have to feed rejects through recyclers.
@@haxney 100%! Part of why I like it so much, aside from the obvious "machine go brrr" aspect lol. I'm not really a fan of mods that add like machine make x, as you said and this is a far better way to do it Id say.
I think Quality will be awesome for UPS the fact that you can cut down on the number of entities and still have high production is awesome.
For how hard legendaries are to get, they seem pretty balanced. A few days before the beacon rework was announced Kovarex posted a screenshot of a full legendary foundry and electro plant in the Factorio discord that showed the new possible numbers. The electro plant had 20m green chips crafted by itself and the screenshot showed 4 fully stacked turbo belts. I'ts gonna be interesting to see how much more science a non space age base can make with the quality mod, we might start seeing 100k spm or something insane
@@deathfistenjoyer Definitely! Although an important note is that to get quality module 3s you have to go to another planet. So for that you have to do space age stuff. But, you could technically just grind out quality with level 2s, just more slowly. Or... Build even bigger to make up for it!
@@Xterminator I've watched a few of the Nilaus videos, from what Ive seen just having a few uncommon or rare items like solar panels or (more importantly) the asteroid collectors makes a huge difference early on. I learned from my SE playthrough that its really better to start small and wait until you get the fun stuff to scale.
I think the quality system is a cool addition. It's like a whole new vertical axis of production (better instead of more.) I only wish the names for quality tiers were less "video gamey" and had better names that fit the engineering of factorio
I like the naming, it is so different from the rest of the game that it's hard to confuse it with anything else, the naming is also intuitive to gamers. Factorio has always been more game than simulator anyway.
One thing I've heard other early testers report is that liquid inputs (e.g. iron/steel/copper products from the foundry) don't have a quality value. Therefore, if you're quality grinding anything you can make in foundries (which is probably the right way to do it due to speed and productivity bonuses), then you pretty much have to do quality "top down", not "bottom up" like you're doing here.
Factoring in the productivity bonuses for the EM plant and the 8 module slots on the Cryo Plant, it probably makes sense to use them for "top down" quality grinding too.
True, and while you can't get get quality liquids when turning ore into molten ore, you could still do quality basically from the ground up by just starting from the casting step, of turning the molten metal into things like steel, gears, etc and beginning your quality process there.
So basically all that would need to be skipped is the morning step for quality
Personally, I’ve theorized that an ideal early game approach would be to build as normal, but place quality modules in certain high throughput items. For example, in an electronic circuit build, and then filter off the quality while allowing all the normal components to be used as normal. Then there would be no waste via recycling, and some quality items can be used for special use cases without much expense or infrastructure
Definitely a good option! This is what we've been doing up until very late game when we can reasonable make a massive setup do quality from Ore and up.
I love the potential of quality. I'm not a megabase player because I find "the sprawl" and outposting tedious tbh but between quality and the interplanetary logistics I might give it a shot this time around as it's far more complex and more involved than just making bigger builds for SPM goals, honestly, never found that an interesting goal that's why I tend to stick to overhauls with various levels of complexity.
From what I've seen of stream footage there are defo certain items early on that you would want to prioritise getting quality on, and it mostly seems like personal equipment and space platform buildings. Asteroid collectors get extra arms which is huge and solar panels and accumulators producing and storing more energy is self-explanatory.
This whole thing is legendary
I think the goal is basically to make quality quality, and to add quality prod to the legendary as you said. As I make more quality quality, add this to beacons, you're unstoppable
This will be fantastic for all the Direct insert blueprints where the ratios just don't match.
Mega base just got more UPS friendly.
I'm so excited for quality.
Quality is thing that i was missing in that game, it adds depth to the whole game, and i cant wait to get elevated rails :)
yeah i totally agree, it's basically a regression to the mean
Factory must grow. Not only horizontally but vertically also
I think one important thing to let people know in quality tutorials is that speed modules seem to decrease quality. I'm not sure if it can downgrade an item, but at least you can't beacon your quality upcycling.
As for what might be optimal, I have a feeling having a build that up-cycles everything from the bottom-up would get you the best results, since recycling destroys so much of it it doesn't seem to be worth it for just rerolling the same item. But for simplcity's sake, you'd probably want to just keep recycling the most basic ingredients and then having one legendary production line afterwards...
8:37 no, we can not, SA became available only at Monday %)
Thanks, this is exactly what I need while waiting for the release.
For anyone focusing on Quality when Space Age comes out, the binomial distribution will be your friend.
Definitely checking out quality as I get more familiar with space age. Fully agree with needing some solution for massive factories. The way I tend to force that to happen is make more enemies and more research costs. The save I have prepared for space age has 4x research cost and 300% biter nests specifically for larger factories. I am all for checking out quality on that save once I have basic setups on at least the main 3 worlds. That foundry steel production was mind blowing.
Also, the devs I think mentioned that the gleba squids are driven by the existing enemy nest spawn rate, are demolisher territories driven by that value as well?
I’m looking forward to building a recycling centre to grind up the stuff below the quality I want ;) will be fun to see trainloads of stuff going to the recyclers in a sushi belt.
Quality is less like gambling and more like refining.
The quality modules would be significantly worse without the recyclers
I am so looking forward to working with them.
I am entirely convinced that sending off "failures" (see: basic items that don't roll +QL) into recyclers is a trap and should be avoided as much as possible.
Red Circuits, Electric Furnaces, Processing Units and Speed/Prod 1 Modules I think are especially good candidates for Quality Modules, where the failures can be easily reused for science.
+QL Red Circuits are set aside for making +QL Mk2 Modules.
+QL Electric Furnaces can be put into your Furnace stacks for extra speed. Failures sent to Production Science
+QL Proc Units, like the Red Circuits, set aside for Mk2 Modules, send the failures into Utility Science.
+QL Speed/Proc Modules also side aside for Mk2 Modules and failures sent to Prod/Util Science.
By the end of it, you've got Uncommon and Rare Mk2 Modules, and you're not destroying nearly 75% of your input in recyclers.
@@Jeff_the_Hobo Yeah, generally I've found that I much prefer to not recycle the failures if at all possible. But tbh, I'm not sure anyone knows the actually best strategy for the whole process until it's used extensively over time.
Quality is why I I chose Fulgora to be my 1st planet. The plan is to set up some rare production that will carry me all the way to Aquilo.
Vulcanus is easy to get a basic setup on though, and from the looks of it a tank with green friendliness pellets is enough to make at least the small worms friendly so you don't need much extra.
First time i'm heard about it I definitely don't like it, but after digging a little dipper it's seems like even balanced? And thing that it's opening a lot of new setups to play around also seems interesting
I love quality, it's gonna be super fun to setup a separate quality factory for modules/power armour.
One downside I have with the system is having to select the specific quality recipe. I wish it worked more like
outcome quality = average ingredient quality + quality module
So if you're making electronic circuits with 3 cable and 1 plate, if the plate is legendary (which is quality tier 5) and wires are common (tier 0), average quality would be 5/4 or 1.25, so you'd always get uncommon circuits out, with 25% chance of quality bump to rare. This does mean you could only bump 1 tier at a time based on chance, but you could more easily make rare/epic things. And over time as you craft green circuits into red and then into blue, they'd just get higher and higher because you also have +10% or so from modules. And then you take all the uncommon/rare/epic stuff, recycle it down, put it back in the system, and take legendary stuff and make it into modules/power armour. Now it seems like you have to recycle at every step of the process, since if you want legendary blue circuits, it doesn't really make sense to input common/uncommon things into that, better to just recycle back and forth and keep crafting until you get legendary.
Although my idea would require quality items to be stackable with their non quality counterparts while still preserving their data, at least when put in any crafting machine, which seems like a pain to implement.
Still, can't wait to make a fully legendary base making 10k+ SPM, it's gonna be very fun either way!
@@helleye311 I think your idea is reasonable for the most part and could definitely see a mod being made for it in the future! I think the devs wanted to keep it as simple as possible, so avoided doing mixed quality stuff like you suggest.
Monday is almost here, hope you have an absolute blast with it!
Nobody doubted of it's incredible speed, but the question is, Is it worth it? Having to make a "quality production cycle" for each component sounds way more complicated and expensive than just making a factory bigger. The only good reason to use them is if there is limited space, like in a space platform. But beyond that, each world is literally infinite and space is usually never a problem. Correct me if I'm wrong
framerate. Maybe the first 1000 machines run fine, but at 2000 machines you are now running at 56 FPS, then at 3000 machines you are at 45 FPS. Your computer cannot handle an infinite sized factory. So a smaller more powerful factory will produce the same amount as a huge factory and not i pact your frames.
I'm very on the fence about quality.
My initial gut reaction was negative, but I've definitely warmed up to it a bit
I guess I'll see first hand in like 35 hours
I don't think I'll be using quality modules in most mines due to the fact that liquids can't have quality, so I'll probably be building a foundry smelting setup with prod on the melting and quality on the plating. If I use quality in mines I'd have to route ore to electric furnaces, losing a ton of potential productivity.
If my math is mathing, a setup with legendary quality in big mining drills and electric furnaces would give me 23 legendary plates for each 10.000 ores (10.000 total plates), while a foundry setup with legendary productivity on melting foundries and legendary quality on the plate casting would give me 106 legendary plates for 10.000 ores (around 75000 total plates).
Yeah when good for 'quality' modules you go for scale. Legendary is .o1 that means you add 100 machines for a greater chance. You just recycle the rest and use a priority input splitter in to get rid of the extra back into the system. And quality chance scales with the quality of both machines. Always quality your modules first > assembly machines
What a cool setup! Thanks for the ground-up insight! Maybe it was just for demonstration, but I dont think filtration and separation of ores and intermediate products is necessary if you also separate the final products. I think it would actually be better for throughput to not have dedicated legendary furnaces with dedicated legendary rail car slots. If legendary lasers are the objective, I think optimal throughput would just be typical steel/battery/green chips with occasional seeding from up-qualitied components, assuming 1 of 3 uncommon components results in a 33% chance for an uncommon final product, a recycling loop for suboptimals would recoup that 66% and you'd be printing legendary lasers after a few minutes. I think the first 4 quality chips made should go right back into the quality chip assembler, starting that loop seems very important.
Its not gambling! It's six sigma! Thats why everyone hates these "epic" "legendary" names instead of "superior" "exceptional" "flawless" or actual grading terms.
The optimal strategy can actually change depending on the stage of the game / what equipment is available, and what you're trying to make. There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution that's always optimal. Some solutions however will always be more logistically challenging, and it's up to you how much that will influence your decision making.
People dislike quality because it's random, but have no issues with fulgora scrap recycling or uranium ore processing, which is also random. This confuses me; Quality is optional, but fulgora isn't. I think the real reason people dislike quality is because of its complexity, which is also weird, because factorio itself is complex and that's the fun of it.
And now you''ll be able to make 1 million spm bases without ups loss. Kinda exited to get there.
Does power consumption scale with quality? If so, by how much?
Depends. Look at the tooltip.
the only thing I don't like about quality is the appearance: both in terms of the coloured dots (although I must say it is clear), but also the naming of the quality levels seem a bit out of character (they could have gone with much more in-theme names, like "efficient" or "optimised" or something). The mechanics are very cool though.
ah you mentioned the names yourself already
can you put quality modules in beacons?
You can't, just like productivity
@@michavandenenk5167 okqy thank you very much!👍
@@qliotik4115 nope. I also should have mentioned (dang it) that speed modules and quality modules work against each other. So speed beaconing machines with quality modules in them, takes away the quality % or at least reduced it
@@Xterminator okay good to know. thank you very much!👍
If I go to fulgora I can recycle the low tier items right?
@@bladehunter8175 yup!
Some questions given I can't try this myself yet:
1. Do you actually need separate smelters for each quality? Could you not just merge all the ores and send them through a single quality moduled smelter stack (possibly split out the legendary if you want to run that through a prod moduled smelter)
2. Do recipes that require liquids reset the quality given that liquids can't have quality. Specifically, would legendary green chips and legendary red chips give legendary blue chips, or does the sulphuric acid count as "normal" quality and cause it to output normal blue chips?
3. On the subject of liquids, I'm guessing that means the foundry renders quality ore "useless" as it outputs a non-quality liquid? I'm guessing there's no option to run the foundry as a normal smelter to skip the liquids and get the 50% prod with 4 quality modules?
Good questions.
1. No you definitely don't have to. It was just easier for me to demonstrate everything and visualize it by separating it out.
2. Liquids are basically irrelevant when considering quality, since as you said, they can't have quality. So yes, if you put in legendary red chips and legendary green chips, you'd get legendary blue chips. The fluid is basically just not considered at all for the quality.
3. Correct. So you couldn't put quality into the initial process where foundries turn ore into molten metal, but you could put it in the Casting process where the foundry turns the molten metal into solid products again like gears, steel, etc.
Instead of recycling iron or copper plates, you could make them into something that only requires those items and then recycle it. That would create 2 chances to get higher quality for the same input. It is even better if the item you are recycling is something you would use anyways like copper wire. Plastic would be more difficult unless there is a new recipe that only uses plastic. I am guessing there is no quality fluids and it just requires that fluid to craft higher quality, possibly with more required. I have not seen any higher quality recipes that require fluids yet.
As you can't make worse quality than the ingredients, trying to get the ingredients for your quality module production up first makes a lot of sense. So I guess, making and recycling circuits until you get the ingredients for the next better quality modules than you already have is the way. First, you loop-recycle to Q2 till you got Q2 quality modules in your machines. Then you loop-recycle to Q3 till the machines have Q3 quality modules... and so on up to Q5.
exactly the video I wanted!
I always felt better names would have been normal, improved, exquisite, epic and legendary.
i can't wait for someone to mod 20 more rarity and giving crasier multiplier
@@xjoke6981 Already done. Seen several mods for 2.0 already that add more tiers or even infinite tiers lol
@@Xterminator defintely the first mod that i will add adter compleating the fist playthrough
This legendary setup is hilarious lol.
I think we will need the belt that load inside de machine from krastorio
What do you think to store higher quality items at the beginning just before they go to the main bus?
The idea of gambling is missing just how much you produce in a game and how much is required.
Simple point would be we have an achievement for producing 5k Processing units per hour, at 5k per hour, you are already getting to the point where your getting a lot of quality products (4500 common, 450 uncommon, 45 rare, and 5 Epic/Legendary as relatively expected rolls based on the shown probabilities.) and this is already for Blue circuits, if you start from the bottom, you get to a point where you can be pulling Rare+ at a decent rate.
Thinking I'll use quality on my 2nd playthrough of space age
The more & more i hear about quality, the less excited i get, that i think I'll need a mod to come out changing it to enjoy it.
Personally, considering everything I've seen, but obviously not played yet: I feel like the rng part isn't the issue I'm going to have with quality as a mechanic, but that it doesn't seem to operate in a teir up system, that no matter how much effort you put into quality, you will always be earning lower than desired quality levels. Considering the mechanic of guaranteeing the minimum quality of what you're crafting based on the quality of ingredients you put in, i feel like that creates a perfect opportunity to have some way of guaranteeing your entire factory works at a specific quality teir.
Anyway I'll finish up by saying. Obviously its a optional mechanic so I'm not that fussed, I'll just stick to things like Bob's mods with it's tiered buildings or be on the lookout for a quality mechanic changing mod. Also who knows what type of easy to create optimal builds ppl will discover/create that might make it easy to get & use quality.
The step you need to take for that is simply dealing with the low quality “byproducts”. You can recycle anything below your desired quality and essentially guarantee that you only output what you want.
Also, once you get far enough to have legendary T3 modules, this will be extremely fast since 25% of all your products will have a higher tier than before. And with inputs guaranteeing output quality, 25% uncommon green circuits will guarantee 25% uncommon red circuits, etc. If you recycle ALL common green circuits, you will ONLY get uncommon red circuits. I think getting started with quality will be a pain in the butt; however, you can set up your normal mall with quality modules and gather a few uncommon and perhaps even rare assemblers and stuff like that while you are playing normally. Then, once you want to REALLY scale up, you gather everything you have (much like setting up uranium early so that you can start enrichment the moment you unlock it) and you’ll see exponential growth in how fast you produce high quality items.
I think most SA-endgame bases will be able to easily produce what is required to switch to legendary quality.
the easy & simple quality setup for you is this:
1) quality all of your miners, load the output onto generic interrupt trains
2) set up 4 stations, each requesting a different tier of ore at a low priority (normal, green, blue, purple)
3) at each of these stations, recycle the ore in a recycler with quality modules. feed the station's quality back into itself as a priority input, and the higher qualities into a generic train
4) set up your 5th station requesting legendary ore. then, process this as you would any other ore. anything you make with legendary inputs will be legendary.
for earlier-game setups you can always change this to produce only blue or purple ore very easily by adding a default priority ore request station that then processes that ore.
@@spicybread5668 but if recycling ore works like recycling plates, won't that delete 75% of your inputs? Meaning that combined with a 25% chance for an upgrade, you'll be looking at destroying something like 99.99999% (1-0.25^8) of your ore?
@@DoubLL Thanks for the information & advice, I do appreciate it ☺️.
For me the idea of lower quality byproducts just doesn't seem fun in factorios case. It's like how in most (not all) RPGs with rarity loot systems, you end up never wanting lower than legendary, but still get inundated with lower gear, so developers started implementing features like lower rarities being removed from the loot pool & auto selling.
In factorios case the down sides will be inundation, guaranteed resource loss from recycling cycles & a massive time sink.
Obviously it seems to be a late game, mega base kind of players mechanic, I just feel it could be a more general player reaching mechanic if it was a little different, even if based on my original comment, the requirements to guarantee specific quality levels where locked behind a research requiring something like "have majority of all your stuff be X quality" thus unlocking a permanent quality boost to that quality tier, so all your minors will only pump out X quality mats, but requiring you to go through the quality tiers for each research. You could even make it so you can't get guaranteed Epic or Legendary, so they still require a factory commitment.
Anyway I'll stop there I can type a lot 😅.
@@Willow4526 Yeah, good point. I think that should be possible to implement too, since now there apparently are techs which are unlocked be performing actions ingame. So you could gain access to a research after building a certain amount of quality items or maybe even have a percentage of all built items be of a certain quality, as you suggested. Maybe someone cool will make a mood like that! 👍
Honestly, best is probably both as long as you have space for it. The trash from method 1 is used in method 2.
I can't imagine how many hours it would take to make a mega-base with all legendary production. I would guess the key is to get legendary miners. After that, everything will take care of itself.
@@brianpleshek5593 It takes a VERY long time. Not gonna lie, it's a huge grind. But I'm okay with that because it legitimately gives the base something to do for a very long time in ultra late game
27:08 This setup is kind of bad. Large footprint, few beacons. But more importantly, I don't really see the need to split different quality level items into spaghetti belts all the time.
What's stopping anybody from just having a simple line of machines outputting every product every time on a single 'sushi quality' belt, and filtering all of it just *once*. Actually, why not the same for inputs?
On that topic, I can't be the only one who is disappointed in Quality requiring different recipes in the same assemblers just for different target qualities of the same product. This should've been done automatically. But (hopefully) you should be able to switch target quality levels with assembler circuit control magic.
Route all undesired products into a recycler and priority merge the results back into the ingredients (with obvious exceptions such as raw ores). Only produce high level quality products. Will take a long time, but that's what beacons and speed modules are good for.
I just want to point out that with quality you really don't want to use speed beacons because speed decreases the chance to get quality.
@@KackBratze001 Two things. First, this was for demo purposes and much easier to visualize than an all combined setup. While you could technically do it the way you suggest, I think there could still be issues with it. You'd need some way to make sure higher level inputs get prioritized on input belt, otherwise it could get backlogged with basic quality stuff, since that's what you'll have vast majority of. So if your smelting isnt running 100% of the time at full tilt, then your needlessly slowly down the processing of higher qualities if say epic or legendary ore is stuck way back on a belt because it's full of normal iron ore ahead of it and your normal plate is backed up so smelters aren't running.
Also as another user said, beaconing it is bad. Speed debuffs the quality
From what I've seen, it seems very complicated to actually set up grinding out quality items, especially because there doesn't seem to be any easy way to get rid of items until you get to Fulgora. And even then it's a very involved and probably slow process. It's really good, but I think it's balanced.
Now that circuits can change recipes could you set something up that cycles one small furnace stack (or even just one fast furnace) between the different qualities? Sorry if this is a silly question, I never really got into circuits.
@@manboy7773 Totally could yeah! I imagine it could be done without too much complexity. Although off the top of my head I don't have a way in mind, as I'm also not great with circuit network lol
@@Xterminator Glad to hear, I imagine it could also be done on a mall, so instead of having five malls for all the qualities you just have one. Although I wouldn't even know where to start with something like that.
irl factories has quality check, it iknda makes sense tho(?)
@@s1ngularities good point!
there are also el cheapo factories that may, once in a year, produce a decent sample, and there are top ones, that mostly ship shiny and reliable and lasting goods.
My biggest concern with Quality is just the setup to get quality products mid-to-end game. I feel like it's going to be a huge headache. Other than that, I am definitely sold on having a single machine spitting a billion steel per minute.
I wish you went into more depth with legendary recyclers and how they would work. Is it ALWAYS only a 25% material back across all tiers?
@@FernandoSanchez-gp9qf That is my understanding yeah
I wonder what would be end up being the most efficient path to producing legendary items out of raw materials. Doesn't it seem reasonable to use productivity modules in stead of quality modules during some intermediate steps as well? You'd have less chances of improved quality in the production chain, but more stuff to try to get improved quality with. I wonder how such a tradeoff will work out. Will be an interesting puzzle for sure!
@@ilovebluestorm Great question, and honestly don't know the exact answer! Generally I'm of the mindset though that resources are infinite so I'd rather be trying to roll on quality in every step possible rather than getting some free stuff to roll more quality on.
However, combining the two in a machine is actually quite good! Because quality can also hit on the free crafts from productivity ;)
If you already have legendary tier 3 modules, then from my calculations full prod is most effective. Prior to that? Full quality seems to be most effective. This was for tier 1 modules using foundries and em plants, and I wouldn't be surprised if the optimal strategy changes if any of those variables were changed.
Do legendary miners always produce legendary ores?
Pyanodons modders be like : how can we use this to make our mod even more difficult...
I like the quality mechanic, except for with ore/plate. I'm worried that I'll essentially have 5 separate manufacturing lines/buses, one for each level of quality. I think a better idea would have been to have quality affect the efficiency of mining and smelting so that higher quality resulted in more product. Kind of like how Angels injects various refining/smelting steps to increase the output count. But maybe once I get to play it, my concerns will be put to rest.
the easy & simple quality setup for you is this:
1) quality all of your miners, load the output onto generic interrupt trains
2) set up 4 stations, each requesting a different tier of ore at a low priority (normal, green, blue, purple)
3) at each of these stations, recycle the ore in a recycler with quality modules. feed the station's quality back into itself as a priority input, and the higher qualities into a generic train
4) set up your 5th station requesting legendary ore. then, process this as you would any other ore. anything you make with legendary inputs will be legendary.
for earlier-game setups you can always change this to produce only blue or purple ore very easily by adding a default priority ore request station that then processes that ore.
not only is there not a problem with it, but it's not properly characterized as gambling. There's FAR more that is required for something to be gambling other than simply that % chances are involved.
All the analysis at the later part of the video crushes over the fact that you don’t use furnaces to get any reasonable amount of production after Vulcanus, and liquid metals can’t have quality, so… All I’ve seen is people mining directly into Foundries. This saves space and UPS. And this is where I guess you can’t put quality modules in it.
@@LosashExote But the casting in a foundry outputs plate from molten material. So you can still put quality in those to try and get quality plate. So yeah you'd skip the quality step in mining that I showed, but the rest could remain the same.
@@Xterminator I don’t have access to the game but I wonder if it’s gonna be viable to put quality in a drill, which mines directly into the foundry, and then inserters next to that drill which take uncommon+ ore out to process it in somewhere else
One question I have… when the recycler successfully outputs the base materials, will those have a guaranteed minimum quality based on the recycled item’s quality?
It is not gambling. We have to kill this talking point. It was started as a meme talking point and honestly it is funny to say that to friends to sell them on the idea. You put in 1 iron ore and you will always get 1 iron plate out. Some of the time you will get something better. This only benefits you. Gambling is bad because you will lose over a long enough time scale.
I think this would feel better if you could purposefully slow down your machines to guarantee better quality. I'm probably not messing with this at all but I guess its fun for those that want it
Is that not what using quality modules is? Quality modules themselves have a speed penalty, so they really are just showing down your machines to get higher quality. The "guarantee" part just comes with processing enough quantity.
@@angeldude101 To me that just adds unnecessary bloat to the mixture. It's already bad enough that every item can have multiple tiers The Quality Modules themselves having it is insane.
I would rather just be able to slow my machine WAY down as a toggle to get better quality.
I read quality as quantum so for a second I thought there was some major exploits to be found.
In short, the difference between gambling and productivity is aggregation.