Factorio Forums

I’d like to ask about adding a way to set a quality ‘cap’ on buildings, so that a building will never produce something of a quality higher then what the player sets, and anything above the threshold gets turned into the highest possible quality.

While i do see its uses being limited, it’d be absolutely amazing for mid-game in space age where for when you unlock Epic quality - I dont want to have to go around reworking all my setups to handle a new output, so i’d much rather just be able to tell my machines to only ever make rare items.
(I could also seeing this be even more useful in mods, where more qualities are added and therefore more possibility for buildings needing to be retrofitted)

This is what the Recycler is for - feed it any Products that you don’t want. You can use a “Quality Level” filter on Inserters/splitters to choose what goes in.

Good Luck!

eugenekay wrote: Fri Aug 08, 2025 3:06 pm This is what the Recycler is for - feed it any Products that you don’t want. You can use a “Quality Level” filter on Inserters/splitters to choose what goes in.

Good Luck!

that still requires extra work to set up, instead of just putting a setting on a building

eugenekay wrote: Fri Aug 08, 2025 3:06 pm This is what the Recycler is for - feed it any Products that you don’t want. You can use a “Quality Level” filter on Inserters/splitters to choose what goes in.

Good Luck!

Toss it in a chest and forget about it also works for most of the game.

This is not "I'm not great at the game and can't work around problems" this is "How about this feature that is somewhat useful in SA but can be very useful in modded runs"

wanted to add onto this now that i've been playing more space age - a quality cap would be even more useful for when you want to make just an uncommon, or rare, or epic build. I've just turned my red and green science builds into quality grinds, so that i can get epic science; however it'd be way better for me if i could cap all the buildings to something like rare so that my science can run a lot less sporadically (since im not producing enough epics to satisfy my biolabs )

even if i did make a "rare-only" science build, it would slowly accumulate epics (and eventually legendaries) which would be useless until i made builds that primarily produced them. I could feed them into my science belts, but they'd displace the actual science i want to make and use, and recycle-voiding them is just a waste.

MrSmoothieHuman wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 3:57 pm I could feed them into my science belts, but they'd displace the actual science i want to make and use

I don't understand this particular part, you should feed them into your science belts unless .... they come from Gleba

Several players requested things done on silo so they could use their few "epic" or "legendary" science pack that sporadically happens and are difficult to manage with rockets when you don't have full stacks and those spoils so you can't just wait unlike the others you mentionned ( that's the part i don't understand what's wrong with the other packs ?).

Limiting quality output on Gleba science is what i would do if this is implemented, otherwise it creates some stepped optimum for productions where you can only scale up to a point where you have a full stack of your higher quality available at a quick enough frequency to deliver them in Nauvis, which just dis-incentivized me doing them in quality as they would spoil and it's wasteful !

MrSmoothieHuman wrote: Fri Aug 08, 2025 3:24 pm

eugenekay wrote: Fri Aug 08, 2025 3:06 pm This is what the Recycler is for - feed it any Products that you don’t want. You can use a “Quality Level” filter on Inserters/splitters to choose what goes in.

Good Luck!

that still requires extra work to set up, instead of just putting a setting on a building

That's the point of the quality mod. Take it or leave it.

BraveCaperCat wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 6:18 pm

MrSmoothieHuman wrote: Fri Aug 08, 2025 3:24 pm

eugenekay wrote: Fri Aug 08, 2025 3:06 pm This is what the Recycler is for - feed it any Products that you don’t want. You can use a “Quality Level” filter on Inserters/splitters to choose what goes in.

Good Luck!

that still requires extra work to set up, instead of just putting a setting on a building

That's the point of the quality mod. Take it or leave it.

the point of the quality mod is to add additional tiers of buildings, which have a chance to be produced from quality modules or any sort of positive quality effect
its not like it gives any major advantage against having no cap, im actively choosing to waste extra resources for a more stable factory

Are you saying you want production to work the same way as now, except that items with a lower quality than the cap...just don't get produced?

A gear assembly machine with quality modules would normally it make a lot of normal gears, fewer uncommon gears, fewer rare, even fewer epic...

So with this cap, it would continue churning through ingredients, but in case it made a lower-than-epic-quality gear, it would just eat the ingredients, producing nothing, and then start a new cycle?

Of course part of the quality cycle is recycling lower-quality items in a recycler with quality modules so that potentially you can create a higher quality item directly from those higher quality ingredients.

But I gather you don't care about this part?

Kyralessa wrote: Sun Aug 17, 2025 7:08 am Are you saying you want production to work the same way as now, except that items with a lower quality than the cap...just don't get produced?

OP asked for the other way around. If the cap is set to rare, and an epic part was rolled, it would be reduced to rare instead. They did not specify what would happen to lower quality materials - likely they wanted them produced normally.

Kyralessa wrote: Sun Aug 17, 2025 7:08 am Are you saying you want production to work the same way as now, except that items with a lower quality than the cap...just don't get produced?

A gear assembly machine with quality modules would normally it make a lot of normal gears, fewer uncommon gears, fewer rare, even fewer epic...

So with this cap, it would continue churning through ingredients, but in case it made a lower-than-epic-quality gear, it would just eat the ingredients, producing nothing, and then start a new cycle?

the way i envisioned it is:

if the cap on a building is rare quality, then anything made that is above a rare quality gets turned into a rare, and anything below or equal to a rare stays the same. (if it makes a common part, its still common, if it makes a uncommon part, its still uncommon, etc)

does that clear it up?

Of course part of the quality cycle is recycling lower-quality items in a recycler with quality modules so that potentially you can create a higher quality item directly from those higher quality ingredients.

But I gather you don't care about this part?

i mean, presumably all buildings capable of producing quality parts would be able to be capped? if im building a normal quality build for [highest quality unlocked] then sure, i dont care - but for things like science i'd cap the recyclers to the desired quality just so i can squeeze out extra production of what i want

MrSmoothieHuman wrote: Fri Aug 08, 2025 11:44 am I’d like to ask about adding a way to set a quality ‘cap’ on buildings, so that a building will never produce something of a quality higher then what the player sets, and anything above the threshold gets turned into the highest possible quality.

So you don't mean the highest possible quality (that exists), but the highest possible quality for that building, subject to its quality cap?

Kyralessa wrote: Mon Aug 18, 2025 9:59 am

MrSmoothieHuman wrote: Fri Aug 08, 2025 11:44 am I’d like to ask about adding a way to set a quality ‘cap’ on buildings, so that a building will never produce something of a quality higher then what the player sets, and anything above the threshold gets turned into the highest possible quality.

So you don't mean the highest possible quality (that exists), but the highest possible quality for that building, subject to its quality cap?

yes! i thought that was inferred by the idea of having a settable ‘max’ quality a building can produce, but my apologies if not

This is not exactly what you're looking for, but it might help you get the same results in the end:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/quality-down-binning

oh thank you! that is close enough to what i wanted to be added