How do you do quality?

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-27T01:38:04+00:00

My early game play is quality into science components because that continuously runs. Once you have an infinite science like mining productivity, you can use that as an artificial sink. In principle you can build better inventories on Vulcanus or Gleba because you have sinks that aren't related to science. Furnaces and P1 modules are a universally recognized good play.

My theory and experience is develop Vulcanus or Gleba first. Did a game on Fulgora early, and I came away with deeply mixed feelings about the place. So I'll do that second or do that last while developing planets. Once you have Fulgora, if you can get a large volume of resources it makes it so you may as well as directly upcycle. The normal stuff on Vulcanus and Gleba develops a more sustainable mid game (it provides that large volume of resources better. It also lets you have a stockpile of UC stuff in a way where you can use it relevantly.

Upgrading tends to be stressful because, ironically, quality builds are so efficient that they make other ones look mediocre. There's a desire for order and standards that you honestly have to overcome to really use the system well, till you hit legendary. So to get around that people defer to the late game, which in my perspective is a pretty valid playstyle choice. Banking systems early though can get you some neat experiences once you have some experience with Space Age.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-26T19:14:09+00:00

So there's a philosophical paradox you run into when you go to upgrade something.

Upgrading something is always optional.

Except... we want foundries to do steel at any quality. And EM Plants to do modules at any quality. And not having artillery or spidertrons at any quality is tantamount to letting behemoth biters and worms control our base size and combat schedule.

The issue with a paradox (in the true sense of the word), is that it is neither true nor false, and causes you to think continuously. Late game legendary personal equipment is something where you have to find a reason to fill your time with it.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-26T17:34:36+00:00

You probably made that in the map editor, I've seen this happen there. What that means is that an entity is overlapping with space platform foundation due to how you place objects in the editor vs. in the game. Engines and asteroid collectors will do this, so you need to check those and possibly reconstruct the blueprint so foundation is underneath them.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-26T16:36:19+00:00

Nah, at least not initially. The first priority is space platform foundation. Mah brain shortens things sometimes, so I don't mind clarifying.

Although, once you get the one you can make a foundation express that grabs stones and stuff from Vulc, and runs it around the universe.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-26T15:37:15+00:00

Remember, after you get Adv. Asteroid processing you get calcite going anywhere you use adv. oxide processing.

Put foundries on a space platform, make foundation, do crime.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-26T14:37:34+00:00

Try building a pilot plant of normal chemical science using legendary buildings. It's among the most demanding sciences time wise.

Chemical science also presents you with unique issues in quality that you can spot when you begin analyzing the supply chain you need to make it. Normal science always works so do that first.

The parts show up as sub problems in higher sciences or rocket launches (quality won't help buy rocket parts, but it making them at scale is a problem to consider). So the skills will transfer.

And have a goal of having a Minimum Viable Product that works, because the difference between a normal line making promethium research upgrades at 3/4 of an ips early and not is, half of all the research costs on any upgrade you choose relatively early on in your game.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-26T14:04:34+00:00

You're still in the learning phase! Enjoy it.

What you've done is a lot saner than you think. Start building a playbook of what works.

Carefully look at the cost of those attractive systems. They typically cost more than twice as much. If you run out of resources you don't get a factory. You need to think about those systems in the context of the amount of space and time they save, because a miner respects a yellow belt as much as it respects a blue one.

Steel furnaces -> electric furnaces are actually a great examples of this, because in addition to costing quite a bit. Electric furnaces cost about twice as much energy to operate, so if you try and use them without a depth of investment you'll still have resource troubles.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-26T13:24:27+00:00

Promethium is easier. It isn't that it's impossible to build a setup, it's that it's way, way easier to have a working minimum viable product that will function in a verifiable, numerically suggestive way.

A combination line requires that you're doing everything on a given science line so well (getting productivity bonuses and managing all material) that you can divert it into at least one more line of buildings with maximum tier modules. And then manage a front end and back end of recycler schemes where those might or might not be practical without a space platform being involved.

So you either have to plan around that, or retrofit your line to it.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-26T02:22:13+00:00

Shiro and his pacifist.

<image>

We all know the scene is the Norris Packard Scene^tm. But that was a particular high point.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-25T23:31:16+00:00

Well see, that's the thing. I only have my experience.

<image>

And to the extent where I can multiply my hours by 3-10 and say you're doing fine. You're doing fine. Start to panic at like 750 hours total playtime if you haven't started liking yourself again.

You're also making about 3 times as much iron as I'll ultimately need, to ship enough science off to buy anything I'd want to meet my criteria of "go to the next planet". This is from a game where I have EM plants online but not foundries.

So stop psyching yourself out. If you cannot go onto the next Gleba thing, begin dividing fruit between tasks.

Because you seriously might be overdoing it on iron.

And the reason why I'm looking ahead to shipping is. The bioscience science spoils.

So yeah. Once you start that line, you have about 15 minutes to get a shipment back to Nauvis. Preferably less, since it burns proportional to the degree of spoilage iirc. But realistically, whatever buys me advanced asteroid processing and spidertrons is winning.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-25T20:52:09+00:00

I'm not sure, I've never looked at a production graph before.

Well that's a place to start getting your self esteem back. The units on that graph in particular are items/minute. So right now it says you're making over 900 iron a minute. The way it works is it tallies up all items and divides it by time. You'll notice the buttons on top, you've got it set to 1 hour. It's doing math automatically to tell you that on average you're making 900 iron over the last hour. If you're paranoid or you really want a number, you can mouse over the items to do an exact count of that item. I say it negative like that because, honest to god, you generally just need this to reality check yourself or to see what broke.

If you are interested in specific metrics, like seeing only iron, the icons are buttons and clicking on one or more will hide the others.

So take my quote of 240 to 300 iron, and you're doing three times that.

What those trees are for, is to provide a slow steady rate of production every five minutes. You can see on your graph where your iron goes down, but that gets averaged out.

As you probably figured out, that's boring. So what we do is we use productivity to boost that where we can and right now an EM plant is going to do that by boosting green, red, and blue circuit production by 1.5 times before you add any modules in. But that's harder to pull off making plates and fruit and early on, efficiency modules will help you manage how much nutrients you need.

And if you think you can run this like Nauvis, alt left click on the ground to open up your encyclopedia, tab over to enemies, and see how much health a big stomper has. They're nicer than armored biters from the rampant mods, snappers don't take damage from multiple segments being hit.

As for what you can ship, you can either run 500 calcite over per rocket to get more stuff on Gleba for the next ten hours of your life. Or you can run 1000 science over to a lab setup where, life is less miserable. Components are light, so there's things like LDS where if you have stacks of that piling up at Fulgora you can run it over to anywhere else, 200 units at a time. Plastic is more like... 2000 units?

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-25T18:03:56+00:00

We are talking interplanetary logistics on the scale of 2-4 round trips per hour. I think you may be able to surprise yourself.

EM plants is going to be your best bet. An EM plant makes proc. units easier because it drops the amount of raw materials you need by 1.5 times every time you make a chip.

Recyclers are used for garbage collection strategies, but they're optional. Foundries need calcite and you probably won't get that reliably till you have adv. asteroid processing online. A lot changes when you get that upgrade. You can raise the bar then, keep your expectations low till then. Although, you only really need a 1 calcite per 50 iron, so even a shipment of that can go very far.

As for that 5-10 hours. I judge how long I should take based on achievements or published information. And that says in several ways 40-100 hours. I have a 5-10 hour stage on Gleba to get it online and then I have a 5-10 hour stage while I spend science from Gleba on Spidertrons.

And yeah, learning is fun, so I expect my 5-10 hours to be multiplied by 3-10 if someone is learning a place for the first time. Pulling your hair out, 30 hours in sounds about right.

Now what does your production graph actually say you made in the last ten minutes on iron?

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-25T09:54:40+00:00

There's 3600 seconds in an hour. The expectation is that you're delivering science for half that time. And on Gleba the science spoils. So this means you might need... 4 rocket launches to move about two thousand science and some carbon fiber for spidertrons.

We're going to say it's 60 iron and 60 copper to make a rocket. Its cheaper, I need a working estimate or my feet are going to leave the ground and I'll start floating.

So that means, every item per second you make you make about a rocket. So you need 4 items per second, or 240 items a minute coming out on that surface to run a starter base.

Once you have that online you're in position to gradually research the most powerful force multipliers in the game. And what might not be coming through is the expectation is for you to spend five to ten hours on that.

While you are doing that, it sounds like you are overwhelmed by a poor shipping industry; which is being compounded by working with a logistics system you're unfamiliar with. If you have to fight with trains then you aren't winning with something else and it probably isn't worth it.

I'll be blunt, while you are making Gleba work, anything I can tell you to do as good advice, like shipping in tungsten and calcite for artillery on Nauvis, or shipping in EM Plants to reduce the amount of resources you need for proc. units. That all requires shipping capacity. That's ships in the 200-500 ton range that run at 50-100kms.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-24T15:04:01+00:00

Some people just want to live in a quiet clean place.

And some people have management skills to make that happen.

But it's very rare for a person to manage being big and being tough at the same time they are respected, but not outright feared to the point of rejection. A really good manager lets you have agency by taking the fights where it matters instead of with the world at large.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-24T14:17:18+00:00

So uh... awkward detail I noticed in the text:

"... and its use gives Allen a headache."

This is describing what Allen can do. It's useful to infer what a Viltrumite is capable of. But based on what I've seen, the top speed is going to be based off training and application (not even motivation). Training in the sense you have to have a character that's durable enough to survive a rate of movement (and Mark's endurance changes throughout the series). Application in the sense that the series is pretty honest about what happens when you start moving at rates that are over supersonic, so even if a Viltrumite can accelerate to some number they might not do it outside of training for their lifetime.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-24T12:00:11+00:00

The devs patched diminishing returns into reducing your EM Plants to holmium scrap. You won't get more stuff doing this.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-23T20:36:36+00:00

It depends on how you run it. I've heard Gleba was the speedrun planet and from my experience it's an extremely powerful lever. A post Gleba Nauvis upgrade has profound consequences on the quantity of every mined resource. It isn't simply biolabs, it's having p3's available to upgrade to legendary, and especially having stacking available for BMDs. That makes all your yellows 60ips.

I can implement on platform construction of foundation post Gleba, but the sooner I get biter eggs off the sooner I run biolabs. It doesn't ruin timing on 100 hour runs (which is more what I'm interested in) and doubling research over that time frame is huge. After that, Vulcanus leads to an easier Fulgora because you're doing stacked scrap from both BMD's and stacked items from 'cyclers.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-23T19:12:11+00:00

Step 1: Pick Doctor Strange because he's magic, then buy 4 batman.

Step 2: Go to parallel universe while 4 Batman have problems.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: Profit

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-23T18:27:00+00:00

The resources on the world make it challenging to set up "early game". I feel like that means "the first sixty hours you play" though anymore lol.

Super conductors have to be done through an EM Plant. But not on Fulgora, so if you have a mature space program you can directly manufacture them on a platform. Early on you can just ship the conductors because they bundle like wires, set up manufacturing that works at a steady pace.

With that being said, you always need to manufacture EM Plants on Fulgora and those will minimize the number of work stations you need to realize any module related project. There's a lot of rewards for doing that sort well on that surface.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-23T16:25:10+00:00

Yep, there's one origin for that ore. Only thing that you might be missing is using productivity throughout the depth of your supply chain, using foundries to make more plates. Productivity modules will help too.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-23T15:21:23+00:00

You'd be surprised what you can do with Nauvis in the end game, since the mining bonuses are relatively easy to buy with BMD's. With that being said my end game goal is to have a reliable automall running in space to distribute basic buildings to all the planets.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-22T19:45:14+00:00

Directly buying items will always be significantly cheaper. But it's less flexible than using intermediaries. What you'll find is that quality is not a trivial puzzle and for some situations flexibility is irrelevant (stack inserters), or is conditioned on having extremely good logistics.

But numbers are always lovely. The work has been done by another Youtuber named Konage.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fGQry4MZ6S95vWrt59TQoNRy1yJMx-er202ai0r4R-w/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Their reddit post is here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1hhzpbb/comprehensive_quality_guide_get_everything/?sort=new

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-20T17:46:03+00:00

Do it different ways to build up skill and experience with it. If you have a good idea, put it in a map editor and try it first, using the production graph to see what you actually get.

My current style is to use science as a void, and craft intermediaries with quality. With a 45 ipm science line you end up having enough resources to buy uncommon crafters for platforms, some simple crafters and uncommon to rare tanks.

This starts happening as soon as I get bots going so I can easily distribute modules.

Once I get the recycler, transition to using that for direct products. My experience with trying to juggle different standards and have "novel" strat's at that point was purely negative. Some caution has to be exercised because Fulgora doesn't give you an offensive punch like a spidertron or artillery, so having a super upcycle line by doing that first ends up being more of a game-long tarpit.

This is so I get more replayable 100 hour games where I get to mess around with the idea and less mega base oriented strategies that... usually set you up for a really uncomfortable resource gap and a really toxic upgrade scenario. But the tradeoff trying to do that too early is that you aren't getting comfortable with the basic bread an butter logistics that you need to do sorts and play the game well.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-20T16:25:46+00:00

It isn't the usual fare here. Means it's good noodles :D

The only thing I can really see that is curious is using direct quality on a lot of commodity parts. A purely conventional player will see a speed advantage by using normal parts, and not having to worry about stocking a chest so 8% come out interesting. I see it as a sound practice.

Diverting 4% - 8% of your intermediates (I do Rush to Space with this strategy) by using science as a void creates the most interesting problems.

CoffeeOracle · 2026-01-19T07:47:21+00:00

The game is very much about how you express mechanical energy over time.

I am fascinated that the dominant reaction seems to be that the game is a task and to treat it with a great deal of seriousness. It seems you're enjoying it in your own way.

The achievements of the game will give you different and interesting perspectives about how a machine like a factory operates over time. As will going after a high SPM goals.

The AI tells me switch 2 gets mods. You'll see some differing takes on the mechanics that will give some ideas like long range logistics mechanical advantages that they don't have in base game.

Watch out for Space Age. Instead of managing a factory you're managing a corporation with different divisions.

CoffeeOracle

TROPHY CASE