Ability to craft lower quality with higher quality

[dragon_gawain]

Duplicate of this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=116817&start=40

[Koub]

[Koub] Indeed, threads merged.

[Linsanga]

There is some talk in this thread of having quality downgrading being a thing you do on its own, rather than having it happen in the assembling machine, and I'm +1 ing that idea as a more elegant solution (with some thoughts in this thread viewtopic.php?f=6&t=117524)

I essentially would like a 2x1 tunnel building that a conveyor belt flows through that downgrades items.

[dragon_gawain]

I think I personally am slightly more in favor of it being some sort of 'belt attachment', a 2x1 tunnel building as Linsanga puts it.
I think that would make for more interesting gameplay in the same way that splitters being 2x1 does - you can't squeeze a down binning operation on a turn, nor can you sideload into a down binner. With that sort of solution, you'd need to incorporate the operation of down binning into the production line.
However, the tunnel should either be settable (i.e. I can tell it "make epic things uncommon, make rare things uncommon, leave uncommon as is) or it should only decrease the quality by 1 level (i.e. rare always comes out as uncommon). The settable option of those two would be preferable to me.


The solution of being able to craft with mixed tiers is also one I'm OK with. It would mean we could just throw all the tiers together and there would be no contamination. Quality would just slowly filter its way through, resulting in more higher quality on average for more complex things (assuming quality mods in everything).


The solution that I would not be OK with was if the down binner was a machine, because then you're capping the throughput of down binning to an (or multiple) inserters, as well as the crafting speed. If it's a machine, it also potentially introduces problems with mixed belts (either the sides of the belt have different things, like copper plates and gear wheels for red science share a belt, or sushi). If the machine could only downgrade 1 type of item at a time, then that would be bad. Sure, we could set up some circuit logic to set the recipe depending on backlog/time/other factor and switch between what we need to downgrade, but that's even more throughput limiting/annoying to set up. (and by not OK, I mean that I'd give it a sigh, then crack my knuckles and get designing at it with throughput limitations in mind and my quality builds would just become that much bigger)

[Ranakastrasz]

Such an inline machine might be set to specifically downgrade to its own quality. So if it is uncommon anything drops to uncommon. Would prevent any settings from being required.

[dragon_gawain]

Such an inline machine might be set to specifically downgrade to its own quality. So if it is uncommon anything drops to uncommon. Would prevent any settings from being required.

That would be a very interesting solution!
My only concern with it is that it demands quality to handle quality. So you'd still have the starter stage of dumping all stuff of quality into a chest until you get the downbinners of quality which would let you streamline the process.

I'd be cool with it if it worked that way!

[KillHour]

Came here to give this exact feedback. I spent a long time building a branch of my factory to make higher quality modules and was really proud of it only to find when it backed up, my entire factory came to a screeching halt because either the splitter downstream of the furnaces would clog up or the quality ingredients would "pollute" my lines, breaking my machines. I think it would be totally fine if inserting a rare part into an assembler with an uncommon recipe just "downgraded" that part. It might be annoying if you accidentally inserted a legendary blue circuit into the wrong crafting machine, but it's better than what we have now by a mile.

[Linsanga]

My only concern with it is that it demands quality to handle quality. So you'd still have the starter stage of dumping all stuff of quality into a chest until you get the downbinners of quality which would let you streamline the process.

With their idea, you can have all your surplus greens and blues flow through a normal downbinner, putting all excess quality items back into the normal production chain without needing a quality downbinner. You wouldn't need a quality downbinner unless you really wanted to turn blues into greens, which isn't urgent once you at least have *a* way to get rid of excess quality.

I think it works fine. So would a setting.

[Ranakastrasz]

My only concern with it is that it demands quality to handle quality. So you'd still have the starter stage of dumping all stuff of quality into a chest until you get the downbinners of quality which would let you streamline the process.

With their idea, you can have all your surplus greens and blues flow through a normal downbinner, putting all excess quality items back into the normal production chain without needing a quality downbinner. You wouldn't need a quality downbinner unless you really wanted to turn blues into greens, which isn't urgent once you at least have *a* way to get rid of excess quality.

I think it works fine. So would a setting.

Yea. If you want to downbin to normal, you could just use normal components. if you want to downbin to uncommon, you presumably already have the ability to produce the, presumably cheap, uncommon components required to make an uncommon version.

A setting would still probably be better, but it would be a straightforward option, i think.

[bluegreen1024]

A small issue with the "down-binner caps things to its own quality" idea is that a Legendary down-binner does nothing (or whatever the highest quality ends up being given any mods you are playing with).

And speaking of mods, whether it's this idea, the settings idea or something else, it would be nice if whatever solution is implemented can handle modded qualities without hassle. Otherwise there could be lots of compatibility problems in a modded environment. I think this is another argument for a "native" solution rather than having to rely on a down-binning or mixed-crafting mod, because either that mod has to support all sorts of other mods or a bunch of quality-affecting mods have to support the down-binning/mixing mod(s).

[Panzerknacker]

Yeah let's talk more about the idea of assembling machines just taking in equal or higher quality, essentially wasting higher quality components but not clogging up belts. We can split off the higher quality manually but if the splitter clogs up then the lane will still keep running.

[newllama]

You can't request multiple quality levels with the same requester chest. It says that the item conflicts with another in the slot. I'd even go so far as to say that this is definitely a bug since different quality items are functionally different things. Edit: Actually you can by creating 5 different request groups within the same chest. Very clunky though.

Anyway my ideal solution to this issue is that assemblers have 5 rows for input qualities. You wouldn't even select a quality in the recipe, it would just craft at whatever quality you throw in. An item won't craft unless all materials match, and then that quality will be crafted. This makes the "recycler loop" pattern simpler to build which could be seen as a disadvantage by the developers, though you would still need to use priority splitters to avoid deadlocking. On the other hand we can already do this with circuit conditions, buffer chests, and priority splitters-- so I don't really see it as a big nerf to creativity. It reminds me of the kind of nonsense we had to do pre-1.0 which was cool I guess, but this just feels clunky.

There is also the "item wildcard" train interrupt parameter problem. If I use a train interrupt to route cargo, the train will fail to path to station (for example) "[item=iron-ore,quality=uncommon]" because that happened to be the first item in the wagon. I would like a "remove quality" option on the wildcard interrupt parameters, and I'd also expect it to be the default option.

The "rocket parts" recipe is emblematic of the problem raised in this thread. With the way the system is currently designed you are punished for doing "bottom up" quality on Fulgora. I have quality modules in my miners and first-stage recyclers. This is nice because I get a bunch of high tier intermediates. But then I have all this "rare solid fuel" that has no use except for train fuel.

It really seems like the way kovarex intended this mechanic to be used is with isolated recycler loops. You dump in a bunch of tier-0 items and eventually you roll whatever you're looking for and you recycle the rest. Even going back to the FFF where this was announced he explicitly posted a video of such a recycler loop. I think that's cool and a fine way to do it but I was excited about having trickle-up quality from my raw materials production. The game will fight you every step of the way if you try to tackle the problem this way though.

Nothing to see here this is a totally normal thing on Fulgora:

Screenshot 2024-11-07 at 9.32.40 PM.png (1.69 MiB) Viewed 509 times

[AileTheAlien]

Also what would it mean that quality is 60% normal 40% uncommon?

I'd imagine it to mean that there is a 60% chance to output normal, and a 40% chance to output uncommon quality.

This is what I assume it would do, and would allow for a gradual upgrade to your base, similar to upgrading your assemblers, adding modules, or changing from T1 modules to T2 or T3 modules. As pointed out earlier, quality is very binary right now. I'm very much in favor of a weighted quality chance, based on the input qualities. Bonus: I'd have one fewer mouse click on every machine, if my recipes were all set to "allow any quality" by default. (IMO, this shouldn't even be a setting you control; If you want to reserve high quality ingredients, you can filter them to a different belt, chest, etc. But that might be an unpopular suggestion, to remove that choice from the game entirely. )

productivity-quality exploit

If the prod bonus also kept track of the ingredients used to "boost" it, that could be fixed.

I think this would be very do-able, without a large impact on performance? I assume that productivity bars are a single byte, limited to 0-99 values, and it just ticks up after each craft? The total information you'd have to keep of for a recipe, is 100 times the number of ingredients. (Because with 1% productivity boost, you could craft 100 times at most, and I assume the game allows mods to customize productivity boosts.) For example, blue circuits take 20 green, 2 red, and fluids don't have quality. I think that's five tiers, that need to have a denominator of 22. So a maximum of 2200 if you used all the same tier of ingredients, but that's 2 bytes times 5 qualities. (I assume no recipe uses more than 655 items. ) I think this would be fast and efficient with integer math and modulo operations? (Sorry if I'm unclear, or misunderstanding this. I'm running on coffee instead of sleeping, because I don't work tomorrow and I want to get my first spaceship to another planet, instead of a crummy platform only making space science inefficiently. )

my ideal solution to this issue is that assemblers have 5 rows for input qualities. You wouldn't even select a quality in the recipe, it would just craft at whatever quality you throw in. An item won't craft unless all materials match, and then that quality will be crafted.

This seems like it would hide quality problems from the player. Like, if you're missing quality on red circuits but you have lots of quality greens, then your long line of assemblers making blue circuits would need to all be moused over, since they're holding all these extra ingredients. (But this is just theorizing; I haven't built a factory that uses quality for intermediate items. )

EDIT:
I forgot, that we need separate inputs for different qualities, since they can't stack. (And if they could, you'd have to "open" the stack like someone else pointed out.) But five different input boxes for different item qualities would be compatible with using different qualities on a single craft, which I still prefer.

[Redmoikle]

Quality is essentially unusable at the point it is unlocked IMO.

In order to use it in any meaningful way, you need a way to collect increased quality plates as well as the intermediate products. Almost every single recipe requires plates of some kind, and it isn't possible to get them until you have at least electric furnaces.

The ability to downgrade quality, or use higher quality ingredients in lower quality recipes would be a nice "common sense" feature. My initial approach was to create a quality filter on my green circuits, take anything above standard and put it in a chest that runs alongside a parallel belt, but to rejoin the quality belt to the main belt with input priority, so that if this chest filled up, it wouldn't end up clogging the standard circuits if we made enough to back up the belt to the point we split them off.

This however resulted in high quality circuits eventually overflowing into my main bus, which at this point is essentially the same thing as getting iron plates mixed up in your copper line... a few of my important machines shut down because they refused to pick up these spare high quality parts, and when I tried to fix this by just stopping the quality belt from rejoining the line (while grumbling under my breath about how it didn't make sense) it ended up backing up to the filter and making it so absolutely zero circuits could be created!

Ultimately, in its current form, quality either needs to be backwards compatible, or unlocked much later on, at fulgora.

[nethus]

Quality is essentially unusable at the point it is unlocked IMO.

In order to use it in any meaningful way, you need a way to collect increased quality plates as well as the intermediate products. Almost every single recipe requires plates of some kind, and it isn't possible to get them until you have at least electric furnaces.
...

But mining drills can have modules, don't they accept quality modules? Then you can melt quality ore into quality plates.
Not sure though. I've put quality on hold to figure out later. I'm right now struggling on a small Fulgora island to get my first 1000 science packs back before I research yellow and purple (rush to space award), and elevated rails.

[Tinyboss]

Quality is essentially unusable at the point it is unlocked IMO.

In order to use it in any meaningful way, you need a way to collect increased quality plates as well as the intermediate products. Almost every single recipe requires plates of some kind, and it isn't possible to get them until you have at least electric furnaces.
...

But mining drills can have modules, don't they accept quality modules? Then you can melt quality ore into quality plates.

Yes, you're exactly right. Q modules in your drills, and splitters to filter out the quality plates. Done. And very effective--for example, the green rocket launcher outranges big worms.

[coolkau]

The main issue is the clogging up once your "high quality line" is full, if you use it pre recycler. Building a large storage just to store them, potentially shoot it down and then fill it up again... all of it is so ugly. Also what happens if your storage was too small and then the lights go off while you are off-planet. Lastly, it makes just playing with the tech, building the quality line slowly up impossible. As mentioned before it is just all or nothing.

Simplest solution would be a trasher. Say implemented like a "Basic oil processing"-like of the Recycler. Just get rid of the excess. Minimal change of the game play and very costly, so bad to use excessively. You might still want to use storage. Yet it allows you to build up your quality lines slowly while avoiding a catastrophic clogging of your main line while you are gone. (Later you'd get the "recycling" recipe.)

Beyond that I am a big fan of the https://mods.factorio.com/mod/quality-down-binning mod, mentioned earlier. That would be another great option, yet making the quality game play a bit less challenging. Yet in the absence of option I am going to use the mod.

Quality mixing in receipts seems to be the biggest change and simplification of the game play. I did not play enough with quality to really judge it, but overall quality can be a fun add as it is. So I might prefer the minimum change... just adding a save guard so I can have fun with it without risking to shutdown the entire production line.

As a final note: Of course I could use quality modules only on final products, to avoid any issues. It could be intentional, to make quality modules hard to use on miners and the likes.. Yet, it is a bit ugly that it is easy to build if only you carefully calculate and build that gargantuan storage, which will eventually fill up. Would be there another way to make this costly or hard to use rather than that?

[Tinyboss]

The main issue is the clogging up once your "high quality line" is full, if you use it pre recycler. Building a large storage just to store them, potentially shoot it down and then fill it up again... all of it is so ugly. Also what happens if your storage was too small and then the lights go off while you are off-planet.

It will take forever to fill up a steel chest with quality items pre-space. (And WHY would you shoot the chest instead of just chaining a new one with an inserter? Or just take the modules out so you don't make any more?) Not only is your quality bonus going to be limited, but your production probably isn't super high, either. If you're worried about it, stick a programmable speaker on it to alert you when it gets nearly full.

By the time you can leave the planet, you can research purple chests practically for free, and that problem is now solved for 100x as long, with a chunk of yellow chests in the middle of your base. More than enough time to go grab the recycler even if you do Fulgora last.

[Roaders]

Hi All

I am pre-recycler at this stage and am trying to craft rare quality modules. I am making progress but obviously end up with a lot of uncommon items that I don't want. It seems like an odd decision to not let me use these up in a non-quality assembler....

Even when I have the recycler it would be better to use tehse to craft non quality items rather than lose 75% of them in the recycler...

Why can't I do this?

[Koub]

[Koub] Merging the question into the suggestion to add this exact capability.