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Is there any reason why these two mods are not conceptually separate? I'm getting "I'm insane but also a genius" vibes in my head so I thought I'd put this out to air. I doubt very much that it'll be implemented.

The Recycler item/entity/recipe/technology and the code that generates all of its recipes from the auto_recycle property would be moved into its own official mod.

space-age would then depend on recycling, with the dependency on quality being optional.

The only DLC feature that Recycling uses is belt-stacking, which could be added from space-age's side. With that removed, the recycling mod could be made available to non-DLC players, or moved into the base mod entirely.

If it were in base, it would probably make sense to make Recycler a hidden recipe/technology like loaders are. The auto-generated recipes would be governed by a new utility-constant, perhaps enable_auto_recycle_recipes and set to false.

This has the advantage of giving all mods access to a standard recycling system if they want it, similar to how barrelling recipes work.

Using quality or space-age would unhide the Recycler and enable the utility-constant.

Shemp wrote: Thu Feb 12, 2026 3:11 pmIs there any reason why these two mods are not conceptually separate?

Because this is how the DLC was designed.

Previously

eugenekay wrote: Thu Feb 12, 2026 4:12 pm Because this is how the DLC was designed.

Previously

Ah thanks for the link, I missed that one. This thread is more focused on Recycling being moved out and possibly becoming available to "base". Only one of those posts alludes to the Recycler being split out, so I'll keep this thread separate.

When I talk about "these two mods being separate", I'm talking about quality and recycling just to be clear. You can have two completely independent mods:

• quality - Adds Quality modules and higher quality levels
• recycling - Adds the Recycler machine and automatically generates recipes to recycle items in it

My main point is that space-age depends only on recycling, it does not depend on quality at all.

I realise it's probably not going to happen because it would make the presentation of the DLC unnecessarily complex to most players.

TBH I would like to have recycler separate from Quality too. I like quality, but some modes implement alternatives to quality and as such recyclers would have sense to be implemented separately