How this would work:
- It could be a checkbox on each inserter that when clicked allowed it to pickup and downgrade items to some specified level, or just automatically based on the machine it's set to insert into.
- It could just be implicit behavior when an inserter is configured with a filter of higher quality items into a machine of a lower quality.
- Ideally I would prefer if this was just innate behavior of inserters, but with 2.0 out so long adding it as the default behavior would brake a fair few factories.
Some of the issues I think this change would address.
- 1. Quality is punishing to experiment with. The other modules have minimal side effects: efficiency has none, and speed and productivity mainly just affect power draw, which if that becomes an issue can usually be reverted to restore the factory to the pre-module state. Quality however doesn't work that way. If Quality items build up, they can cause a partial or complete shutdown of the factory. If a player decides they no longer want use quality, they need to go through and completely filter out all quality items previously produced. Not only would allowing inserters to downgrade quality make it easier for a player to swap out modules, but it will also prevent the buildup and shutdowns caused by quality.
2. Uncommon and rare qualities aren't generally useful. Quality is usually only situationaly useful, you craft some higher quality solar panels or player gear, but those are low volume, manually consumed items. But for general items like science packs and intermediate goods quality is just an unappealing option. Both a production module and a quality module will effectively produce a free science pack. But A level 1 production module will produce a free pack 4% of the time, while a level 1 quality module will produce a 2x capacity pack 1% of the time. The benefit with quality is that you can go to the upstream assemblies and add quality there too, even if they aren't intermediate items like walls and electric furnaces. But because mixed quality could lead to a factory shutdown, you can't just add modules into an existing factory, you need to completely redesign every downstream assembly line to account for quality and add contingency to destroy excess quality goods which seems counter to an engineers goals of increasing science output. If inserters could downgrade the quality of items to fit the machine they were inserting into, this wouldn't be an issue, an engineer could put their quality machines at the front of assembly line to have first dibs on quality components, with lower quality machines towards the back to just pickup the excess as if it was a lower quality. The way quality is now, uncommon and rare quality are almost too much hassle for what they give and serve as just stepping stones to epic and legendary quality items in recycle loops and space platform casinos. But by solving the issue of quality back-pressure it opens up uncommon and rare qualities to have a place in the factory. It turns quality from a late endgame mechanic into one that can be engaged with at scale during any stage.
- It's not a fundamental change to quality. It doesn't really invalidate the core mechanic of quality, and wouldn't really be a big buff to quality either. Factories would still only be able to benefit from quality up to the lowest common denominator, but instead of shutting down they would simply partially lose some of the benefits of quality. It's a bit funny to think how converting a rare piercing round into an uncommon one because you can't produce rare grenades as quickly as you can piercing rounds is considered a buff, but when the alternative is to recycle loop it into oblivion, Then at least this way you still are able to extract some value out the manufacturing process.
- Interesting alternative factory designs. While addressing back pressure makes it easier to use quality, I still think making assembly lines with quality in mind would make things interesting. For starters you would want to order your assemblers such that the ones set to the highest quality have first pick of incoming ingredients. Additionally it would change the way I design some lines. Production Science requires 30 rails. That's alot, and to avoid the challenges that come with transporting those rails on a bus to the production science assembly machines, I typically just manufacture the rails in assemblers right next to the science assemblers. But with quality it opens a new challenge of manufacturing the rails and then transporting them along the different quality lines. Without the hassle of backups I think these designs would be more worth exploring. This is obviously a benefit with the core of the quality system and not just this request, but I think this change would open up the areas where quality makes sense.
- It doesn't invalidate recycle loops/space casinos or other factory designs. Quality today serves an endgame grind, this change wouldn't invalidate that, you would still make the recycler loops in the same way, filtering higher quality items to be forwarded to higher quality machines in the quest for legendary gear. This change is focused more on the lower end of the quality spectrum, when the goal isn't legendary gear, but just higher quality science. For when you happen to make more rare productivity modules than you do rare rails for productivity science because their quality chain is more robust and you didn't worry about making quality stone.
Why I think some of the other solutions are inadequate
- Mixed Quality: This has issues when you factor in productivity of a assembly machine, as you could just produce a bunch of low quality items, build up productivity progress, and only then insert in high quality inputs to get double the high value output. This wouldn't have that problem, because assemblers would still have a set quality, and the items would be down leveled to that quality, in effect the quality difference would be wasted.
- Assemblers have slots for all quality levels This doesn't actually address the backups that I believe is the biggest barrier to using quality at the lower levels. This just adds additional buffer space, which doesn't help uneven production. If your making more high quality productivity modules than you are rails, adding different buffers isn't going to fix that.
