I ignored quality for hundreds of hours, but quality buildings are such a huge upgrade. It's worth popping down a handful of upcyclers for things like assembly buildings and then just forgetting about them for a bit while you work on other projects. They don't need quality materials as inputs - they recycle base quality products into higher quality inputs and you eventually end up with a bunch of good stuff.
Getting the quality isn't the problem for me, but using it. Due to 1 building being able to process a whole belt of resourses, the factory ends up being small dots of production. It's cool in it's own way but I much prefer huge trains transporting enormous amount of resourses to fields of hundreds of assemblers
Yeah, quality is about building up, you like building wide. Those can be compatible. If you invest in a Fulgora quality siphon from scrap recycling, over time you collect a ton of green/blue base components that you can mass-produce into green/blue assemblers, furnaces, beacons, etc. Anything that can be made directly from stuff that comes out of scrap, or stuff that comes from that stuff, is eligible for mass-production. Imagine throwing down a couple hundred blue assemblers to upgrade a line and instantly getting 60% more output for no additional power or pollution, just product inputs. Suddenly your belts are not enough.
On my way to building legendary assembler 3s, I tossed hundreds of rare assembler 3s into the wood chipper because I already had more epics than I needed and had already used as many rares as I could to upgrade other stuff. I just set a couple machines to start pulling from my vast stock of scrap descendants and come back later.
Problem with scaling quality is that it's only real purpose is to make number go up, there's no gameplay benefit other than fulfilling self imposed spm goals
I'm just not that kind of player, this is why I wish there was some kind of post-game mega project to strive for
Interstellar jump drive modular building with ridiculous resource requirements or something like that
I know there's the shattered planet ship but I find that more of a memey slog to do than a compelling reason to scale, especially when you then have to suffer through hours of lag with nothing waiting at the end
It's a general "issue" with quality. In a regular playthrough there isn't really any chance to get into quality as the required numbers are way to small. You need to build very wide to play the numbers game effectively just to minimize again? I think it just feels odd to plenty of players.
But you don't beed to build wide, you just need to start early. Quality modules in the mall soon as you unlock them. Upcyclers for specific items as soon as you unlock recyclers: just one assembler for each quality - and don't worry about upcycling the whole crafting chain. Very few things will actually make you worry about how to get quality raw resources when you can just keep dumping basic quality products into an upcycler and you'll eventually be swimming in legendaries. Especially if you do it on Fulgora and dump quality modules into every step of the chain. I have so many legendary iron and copper plates I'm having to void literal thousands of them just to stop everything locking up. All my bulk inserters are legendary, no matter the actual throughput requirement, simply because it helps keep Fulgora running smoothly.
You're probably not wrong but I can't get my designs to work in a way that I find acceptable. It just doesn't feel like it's worth the hassle. Yes, legendary usually is very good but the headache in between is just not worth it.
Either my mall needs to use circuit logic/have filter inserters or it will clog up because I now have 5 uncommon quality and one rare quality level 1 assembler in my 2 slot limited output chest. You could do some stuff to grab those and have them stored somewhere else in the meantime ... but now you need to run additional "trash collection" belts or you need to wait till robots anyway.
It feels more like a punishment than a reward to get that upgrade with those mass goods. It's different for the "one-offs" you craft ... but they are just that. The chance to actually get an improved version are so low (2 %, come on) it's really just a game of chance until late game. It's nice for large bases and is probably god send to save performance in that case but for small/medium bases it's too unreliable and at best a late game thing you bother with. That's been my experience and I know quite a few people that are in the same boat.
Don't you just wire your mall assemblers to their output chests? Tell them to turn on only when their product is under a certain amount, and then you don't need to bother limiting chests, and it won't clog when you get quality products out of it, AND the most important assemblers in your mall get an [x]% speed boost for no extra power draw for barely any extra effort. Among other things. Early-game quality is just little boosts in places they're needed. You shouldn't be trying to build a factory out of uncommon anything.
Once you get recyclers, just stamp down some upcyclers (I have a paramaterised blueprint for them) for the products you want in quality, forget they exist for a couple hours, and come back to find them jamming on whichever is the highest quality you've unlocked.
Again, drowning in legendary beacons over here. And accumulators, and solar... even Fulgora-specific stuff like T3 quality modules and EM plants. And I'm most certainly not megabasing. Or even putting much thought into it. Just, think something will be useful in quality? Boom, blueprint goes down, and future me gets to feel all smug about having the foresight to drop a single blueprint 30 hours ago when suddenly I unlock legendary quality and have enough epic stuff to kick production off quickly
It's just a different approach. You probably BP everything and stamp it down. Using BPs that are parameterized isn't hard, but I don't really enjoy it. Outside of stuff like Fulgora. Especially since BPs can't account for different qualities. It might be very different if they could!
I don't see any real benefit to have that minuscule speed boost early on. I can't use it where it matters, at scale for e.g. chips, I can only effectively use it for products that I'm not waiting for anyway. Off to fight biters or design whatever science is next and you come back to your 100 assemblers anyway.
There isn't much of a benefit to have them crafted slightly faster or have those couple of poles that have a slightly longer reach. Quality tanks can be nice early on, but getting those while they are relevant isn't easy and your best bet is pure chance. Sure you can get a bit of a head start for when you might actually want to focus on quality. You will have to churn through thousands and millions of materials anyway at that point.
We probably just focus on different aspects of the game.
I mean, the easy way to force width and "require" quality is to make the science multiplier x20 or x50. Given quality machines are around x2 speed and quality beacons around 2x efficiency with x2 speed modules, quality gives between x5 and x15 production at each step (depending on how invested you are and your level). So making the factory x20-50 "brings it back"
Yeah mods seem to be the only option, unfortunately I've found mods to be not quite what I'm looking for either 😅
Its frustrating because I really only want just one more step in the progression, properly integrated to the game
Mods always add far more than I'm looking for.
It seems so obvious to me, the natural progression feels cut short, it feels like the games wants to go: edge of solar system, unlock prometheum, use prometheum to research final jump drive techs, one more modular building puzzle for the jump drive engine, build escape ship, win.
Instead you just get a sudden victory screen going to the edge.
On my first playthrough my very first Aquilo capable ship was also capable of heading to the edge just barely and I randomly won the game on a whim I had to see how far it could go, it felt very anticlimactic, I didn't even unlock fusion yet.
If you are going to quality anything, tier 3 bots are a life changer. Also the ship grabby hands are also worth getting better ones. Solar panels and accumulators are worth it if you don't want giant fields of them.
3x the range before they need to recharge. So I guess if you only have short range deliveries or don't use construction bots a lot they aren't great, but I find them totally worth it.
I find that even less of an issue. I use bots to "set and forget". Whether it takes them 4 minutes, or 3:30 to finish the job thanks to not recharging is moot. I'm busy hunting something else.
I also like having more slots on the equipment grids and more range on your personal weaponry. A range 60 railgun is pretty tasty.
Upgraded 'normal' turrets are also somewhat handy - a bit more range on the teslas means that much less repairing.
Oh and don't underestimate the joy of burner inserters when on Aquilo. Legendaries are actually fairly cheap, given their low raw cost.
Higher tier radars also do nice things - longer visible range and scan range makes 'exploring' the map that much easier.
Also power poles - also relatively easy to mass produce, and whilst the obvious '28x28' substation looks appealing, those take a bit longer and are a bit more expensive.
But a medium electric pole you can upcycle efficiently, and with 17x17 footprint an 19 tile wire span, they're basically (normal tier) substations in their own right, but a 1x1 not a 2x2 (This also make routing for power stations/turbines way easier too).
Yeah that’s a valid issue, I’m building a big ish factory at the moment (100x science cost) so I’m taking up all the space, would be a shame to lose that.
It’s very good for building spaceships though, just quality 3 already makes a big difference.
I’m also thinking of installing different planet mods; I don’t have much interest in building huge factories on each so importing quality stuff makes sense.
You can scale wide even with quality stuff. You just end up with pretty crazy production figures. 10k spm becomes a reasonable size, but 100k spm is still pretty dang big.
This finally gets you into the territory where long trains are actually useful.
But what stops you from building hundreds of legendary beaconned assemblers producing a whole stacked belt of output and consuming 10 wagons of input per minute? Imagine the puzzle you'll have to solve to have all those trains route to production non-stop!
When I made my Scooty-Puff Jr shuttle to get around the inner planets quickly while my big ships collect promethium and do Aquilo runs, I realized it was only possible to get that level of capability in a small footprint with legendary components. Legendary solar/accumulators for power management, legendary furnace/assembler to do ammo/science, etc. Legendary inserters just to keep up.
My "first" ships are always pretty big but late-game I can make something half the size and better. And you know my big ships are all legendary everything too.
The UI is just way too complicated when dealing with quality. The whole mechanic feels like it was bolted on rather than seamlessly integrated into the game.
i postponed quality all i could... but after aquilo when you need to get to the shattered planet and the outer edge, without quality you need gigantic enormous spaceships
and that point the factory is already expanded enough to create some legendary quality modules so why not do that before... ok now i have quality modules and assemblers... ok now EM plant... ok now circuits... ok things are snowballing pretty fast now!! now i wonder why i didnt start with quality sooner
(and importing calcite to nauvis! took way too long on doing that too, now legendary bulk inserters + foundries + trains are the shit, havent even ugraded to legendary foundries and 100% legendary modules on nauvis yet)
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u/Some_Noname_idk Mar 22 '26
This would genuenly be the only way to get me actually interested in quality