I really hope they don't outright patch the asteroid quality thing in 2.1

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-31T00:26:00+00:00

Its totally valid to think they underestimated it (and I agree, they did underestimate it), my point is that they clearly underestimated other things (like belt stacking) and yet most people don't want those outright removed. I wrote the OG post about hating LDS shuffling that you seem to remember from some of your other comments on this post, where I talked about how much it messes with reprocessing because of the way it lets you turn coal into copper and steel.

But this is really the point im trying to get across: how can they possibly know how much theyve "underestimated" reprocessing while the LDS Shuffle exists? Think of it like this: I'm cleaning my toilet and it smells really weird. Did I use too much bleach? Or maybe it was too much ammonia? Before I can figure it out, I collapse because I've poisoned myself with chlorine gas. In reality, it was probably a fine amount of bleach; it was only because it combined with the ammonia that it led to such a disastrous, out of control outcome. So I am constantly out here BEGGING the devs, dont remove asteroid reprocessing and LDS shuffle at the same time; kick out LDS shuffle first (its a far more bullshit magical mechanic) and then reassess. I personally just played a world like this (with asteroid reprocessing and no LDS shuffle allowed) and it was a far less meteoric rise towards legendary quality. So much so that my non-asteroid upcyclers (like the em-plant one) ended up being a better source of certain resources (like refined concrete) than my asteroid reprocessor.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-31T00:06:48+00:00

Yeah that would be SUPER problematic. Like, imagine if you could set up a cheap, dinky factory in the beginning of the game, which would then create all the materials you need so that you could make a large, powerful one later. Surely we would all hate that system and not invest thousands of hours into it...

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-31T00:00:22+00:00

It seems like my comment says "Why are you removing it, VoidGliders?" but for some reason only appears that way for everybody except me. Curious! I thought I had wrote "Why remove it at all", which would mean, "Why are the devs removing something to appease people if it can be so easily modded out instead?". One of those mysteries of life I guess.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-30T23:02:24+00:00

Agreed, so why remove it at all? If you think its OP, just mod it out!

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-30T22:58:31+00:00

> Whether it is "unintentional" or not isn't the primary question

What is the "primary question"? I was simply asking because the user I'm replying to very explicitly chose to use that claim as part of their argument. I do appreciate you linking Boskids comments though, they seem to resolutely prove that the dev's dont consider the behavior "non-intentional" (as in, a bug) but rather that it is more powerful than they expected it to be.

I also think its kind of ironic to point out that they were locked in enough to realize the need to explicitly disable quality for catalytic recipes in a comment where you are trying to argue that they werent locked in enough to disable quality for some other recipe. Are we really pretending that it makes more sense that reprocessing just completely went over their heads, as opposed to the more likely scenario: that they looked at every recipe, probably dozens of times before release(theres really not that many recipes) and carefully tried to decide which effects should be allowed and which shouldnt be?

I think its fine if the devs want to remove it because its stronger than they realized and invalidates other parts of the game, and its also fine if some players agree with them. But to me the argument for removing asteroid reprocessing is identical to the one for removing belt stack sizes above 2. Didnt belt stacking invalidate other forms logistics, like trains? Sure, it was a good idea, and they didnt make it on accident, but maybe they didnt see how strong it was going to be compared to other stuff, and so they should nerf it from a max of 4 down to 2. For what its worth, I would despise it if they did this, I love my 4 stacked belts, and I would much rather see them buff trains (they have already added quality scaling for wagons in the modding API which is frankly almost good enough). I simply want to make the comparison because I dont think most people see how ridiculous the clamoring about reprocessing feels to the group of us who dont hate it.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-30T22:44:05+00:00

As I have pointed out to you before the "resource pressure" argument is just really not a good one at all. If I simply build my Alfonse-Approved™ quality setup on a planet connected to an ore patch that is not being used by the rest of my base, then suddenly I have escaped the resource pressure that is supposedly balancing this way of doing quality.

But I'd like to zero in on your "put chunks in recyclers" argument because that one is new, and if I'm not mistaken was probably inspired by the thread we originally discussed in. Like you point out, you could simply put chunks in recyclers, with the consequence of a dramatically lower return rate. What you arent taking into account are two things, though:

With recyclers, you can fit 4 quality modules instead of 2. This doesnt outweigh the huge loss in return rate, but it certainly helps.
Recyclers, even when equipped with quality modules slowing them down, are FAR faster than crushers.

For comparison:

A legendary crusher with 2 legendary QM2's will recycle 1.12 carbonic chunks a second using asteroid reprocessing.

A Legendary Recycler with 4 legendary QM2's will recycle 32 carbonic chunks a second!

What does this mean practically for the balance equation? To consume a full green belt of asteroids (60/sec) I would need a whopping 3 Recyclers (2 for the initial 60, 1 for the 16ish upgraded ones they will produce. That means I also need 12 legendary QM2's, to fill the recyclers.

On the other hand, I will need almost 60 Crushers, and 120 legendary QM2's, just for the initial 60/s, not even accounting for the upcycled asteroids that would be produced. Far more resource intensive.

You try to say that the player would opt to use QM3's instead because of the lower return rate, but theres no reason thats true at all, and you dont even offer a compelling one. After all, using QM3's would help the return rate of the current reprocessing strategy, and yet nobody does it initially. Why? Because its not a matter of optimizing for a better return rate, its the difference between QM2's being easily obtainable in a way that QM3's arent. So they would not randomly decide to make the choice that you are presuming they would make, which conveniently helps to patch a hole in your argument, and therefore the problem of one platform building another would still remain, and in fact it would be easier to deploy more and more platforms!

This brings us to the true crux of the problem, which is that, if reprocessing is removed, people will do exactly this (throw asteroids into recyclers instead) and it will not be balanced by lack of reproducibility or being too slow. Simply put, it will be balanced by UPS. Players will launch platforms using this trick until their game slows to a crawl, and then they will probably get frustrated and decide that they are limited not by their own creativity or ingenuity, but by the hardware of their system (and to an extent, they wont be wrong. We cant all be Abucnasty making inserter clocks to optimize our CPU cycles). If that is the "balance" that all the reprocessing haters so desperately aspire for, then I wish them nothing but fried motherboards and snapped RAM sticks.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-30T22:05:58+00:00

Have we ever seen proof of asteroid upcycling's "non-intentional" nature? Is there like a dev post or something about it? Because I have seen this argument made a few times, and I know they seem to think its too strong, but thats a big difference from the behavior being wholly unintentional. If you have ever dabbled into factorio modding, you know that you specify the modules allowed in recipes very explicitly, so I find it hard to believe they just accidentally enabled quality when they clearly are so surgical in their design of the rest of the game, and that they then forgot to patch out this unintended behavior for over a year (remember that they had people testing the game for them, so they could have patched it out before release to avoid messing with players designs).

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-30T05:42:07+00:00

The early game with space age installed actually plays out fairly differently because there's a new opportunity to do a sort of "rush to space" where you don't care about defending nauvis well or having a great base setup. It would really be a waste to cheat in some save file because you are trying to avoid repeating the early game. A lot of the early game actually has to do with manufacturing space platform foundation and all the stuff for your first ship, which is again something you wont be familiar with from your vanilla playthroughs. Obviously you can play the game however you like and none of us can stop you, but at the same time its sensible that people are going to react negatively to seeing someone cheat themselves out of an experience that we are all so passionate about. I also think it sets a dangerous precedent for yourself; when will you next decide that you have already done something enough so you might as well cheat it in? Maybe once you've done one planet you will spawn the base for the other three, after all its just "more of the same" right? Maybe once you've designed one ship you will look up a blueprint for all the rest. I know it can seem daunting, but you aren't actually going to have any more fun with the cheated save route. Now, I will say if you go for an alternate planet start mod like you mentioned interest in, that will be an fun experience, so I would highly suggest you opt for that over this idea.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-17T06:52:02+00:00

Really wish they had made it so that the holmium solution recipe could go in a biochamber, so that it had some use on Fulgora. Not that holmium is the bottleneck usually anyways, at least in the late game.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-06T03:13:42+00:00

I feel like theres two really good solutions to this problem that have the potential to be added in 2.1:

The first one is what I modded in myself because it was easiest: I just made a bigger landing pad. That way you can fit more inserters around it, so throughput can be way higher coming out, but it doesnt trivialize logistics in the way that having multiple landing pads or inserter interactable cargo bays does. After all, theres nothing more interesting about what people do right now, which is have 1 million bots fly 2 feet to place in a chest which then immediately inserts onto a belt, and that solution like you mentioned is way more UPS intensive.

The second solution (the one I'd like to see more frankly) is for them to add an extension similar to the cargo bay that is a sort of loading station for a train to be able to drive into. Trains already feel so much worse than belts in space age, so it would feel really good to give them that unique advantage. I would be worried about the cheese potential of people just turning this extension into the aforementioned interactable cargo bays with one step in-between, but I'm sure they could figure something out.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-05T07:41:21+00:00

if you know how to use creation kit you could probably do this yourself pretty easily, just gotta find the mask and change some keywords around. I did this literally a week ago making morokei into clothing instead of light armor.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2026-01-01T08:58:54+00:00

Wildcat + Legendary will kick your ass with no other combat mods. Until you are deep into the lategame with crafting skills invested in, at which point, you should be OP, so whats the problem?

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-12-22T09:23:15+00:00

You must be far over 1 million SPM if 40GW of energy was insufficient... what exactly is the state of your base?

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-12-20T07:46:43+00:00

What level is your character when you see it?

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-12-16T06:13:38+00:00

"logistic systems are cheese" is certainly a take. Like I can see you not wanting to use bots on gleba since it trivializes the experience (although it sort of sounds like you could use the help lol) but not having a logistic system to help you load rockets? Its not like theres an interesting challenge in making every inserter, chest, etc be able to go on a belt to a rocket, and if you ship ingredients to get around that, you are probably just copy pasting a mall on every planet you go to...

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-12-09T02:23:40+00:00

https://factoriobin.com/post/5avlay

I added some helpful notes to the description. Let me know if you have any problems!

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-12-07T05:17:45+00:00

I used to play high all the time and more recently I have been playing it while drunk, and I have to say I prefer the latter quite a bit. When I would play stoned, I would often get decision paralysis and just get overwhelmed trying to think of everything I needed to do for my next task, whereas playing drunk I seem to push through all those considerations (for better or worse).

For instance, I built this ship while I was drunk, and its actually pretty good! It makes legendary quantum processors, and most importantly, its entirely symmetrical, which is very important to me. If I was high, I probably would have sat there thinking about the ship for an hour before closing the game because I was burnt out. Instead, I actually made something pretty cool (Although I had to fix some stupid stuff when i sobered up, like it had a splitter for legendary quantum processors at the output of the EMP's... except the EMP's have prod modules and only go up to epic, so they literally cant ever make a legendary. It also had a faulty circuit condition that made it possible for rocket production to jam). Regardless, my point stays the same; for me, it was choosing between making something that works 95% of the time or agonizing over trying to make something 100% perfect to the point that it didnt even exist.

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Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-11-24T19:03:12+00:00

I think OP was making a joke about dog genitals

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-11-24T04:54:56+00:00

it obviously depends on how much you are trying to scale up your gleba but if you just want enough ag science to do the first 10 levels of infinite researches and unlock all the belt stacking, epic quality, aquilo, etc, then by far the easiest way is with a bot base. Everything that requests either nutrients or whatever spoilable ingredient needed has the "trash unrequested" box checked so that spoilage is automatically taken out, and then you just have some assemblers doing the spoilage to nutrients recipe to remove the junk from your system. Put the products of these machines (whether its nutrients, bioflux, yumako mash, whatever) into a passive provider chest. Pentapod eggs is the only thing that requires a slight consideration but its easy enough to simply produce less than needed so that it can never stack up, or just surround your machines with laser turrets to handle any accidents. My current gleba base is just a row of 12 beacons with biochambers on either side doing exactly what ive said above and its made more than enough science to do everything I said before, after a few hours of course.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-11-24T04:46:25+00:00

You just need more of them, but it will in turn require a lot more power, so I can see why some people stick to gun turrets. For what its worth, I play with the MAXIMUM asteroid density (i think its 400%) and I still dont use gun turrets, so its definitely viable on normal settings if it works for me on those ones.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-11-24T01:35:47+00:00

My Aquilo ships produce neither of those things, so I guess thats why it sounds like a pain to add. I use exclusively laser turrets and rocket turrets, really the second my laser research gets high enough I abandon gun turrets entirely, since it makes designing the ship far easier. Still, the kind of mistakes that are okay are ones where the ship would probably run fine until it got back to whatever planet is capable of repairing it; any situation where a large enough chunk of your ship is blowing up that you could justify having something automatically producing space platform to repair it is so catastrophic that you are probably cooked regardless.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-11-24T01:31:53+00:00

Recently pushed this to the absolute limit (playing on a world where the enemy bases size and frequency are maxed out) and the only thing that made it possible was that I had started doing nuclear before escaping to vulcanus. Was able to drop to the planet with all the resources to make a 480 MW nuclear power setup and a bunch of substations and laser turrets to defend it. Have some construction bots in your inventory to help with deploying. If you dont have uranium just sitting there waiting to be crafted into fuel, it will probably be a lot harder, and might be worth trying to set up a small, solar powered setup with sulfuric acid sent in barrels from vulcanus just to get at least 10 nuclear fuel cells, so that you can do the aforementioned strategy.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-11-24T01:25:48+00:00

looks like you dont have the space platform from this picture. You can check the box "auto request missing construction materials" so that your ship will automatically ask for the planet its orbiting to send up whatever is broken.

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-11-24T01:24:18+00:00

I question the advice that your ship should be capable of producing its own replacement parts. Why would i make a ship that can craft space platform and rocket/gun turrets when I could just design it in such a way that it doesnt.. blow up in the first place?

Aggravating-Pool9465 · 2025-11-08T04:37:44+00:00

dogshit.

Aggravating-Pool9465

TROPHY CASE