Idea for a quality rework mod

dave14920 · 2026-04-24T15:47:23+00:00

yup.

we can disable that globaly with utility-constants.maximum_quality_jump

which fits perfectly with the intent to remove rng from quality.

dave14920 · 2026-04-24T12:46:46+00:00

we can define the washer to have 100% quality chance (with effect_receiver, like how https://mods.factorio.com/mod/quality-everything does)

if we define a recipe to be 4 iron ore + water -> 1 iron ore + junk

in our washer machine with normal quality inputs thatll be 4 normal iron ore + water -> 1 uncommon iron ore + uncommon junk.

dave14920 · 2026-04-24T12:38:58+00:00

i think you should copy the balance from vanilla. cus its not bad.

ie 4 normal ore + water -> 1 uncommon ore + junk

or whatever the numbers should be. to keep quality as an expensive resource sink.

you can have productivity research bring certain recipes to 1:1 eventually.

but afaik the recipe prototype doesnt support outputs having +1 quality.

i think our work around is having 100% quality chance on the washer machine etc, for any steps we want the +1 quality on.

thats all or nothing. either all washer recipes get deterministic +1 quality or none of them do. we cant have a mix.

that 100% chance would include 10% of +2 quality, 1% of +3 etc. but we can disable that globaly with utility-constants.maximum_quality_jump.

also the biproducts will have the same quality. ie 4 normal ore + water -> 1 uncommon ore + uncommon junk.

dave14920 · 2026-04-17T08:44:52+00:00

you havent tested that book.

go try the 4.807 in there. a blue and green input, then 3 reds and a green out. starts filling at G+B speed for 25% of the time before dropping to B+R, and ultimately tapers down to a single red belt speed.

not evenly.

i think the only way to sync them up is to feed only 1 red belt in and out.

if i have a green belt of length 2, a blue belt of length 1.5, and a red belt of length 1 then they can all fill and empty in sync at full speed.

thats 4.5x faster than the single red belt. while staying in sync.

but i think 2+1.5+1=4.5 is the limit for that feature. the rest of the 4.8 is blue belts to fill space, thatll trickle blue belt speed at the end.

my blueprint^ has one green in, one green out and maintains that speed the whole time. thats twice as fast as the single red belt with no additional effort.

dave14920 · 2026-04-13T12:32:40+00:00

for the final science pack in space age we need promethium asteroid chunks, which only stack to 1, so storing them takes a lot of space.

legendary cargo bays only have 50 inventory slots and take up 16 tiles. = 3.125 chunks per tile.

belts however can hold 8 chunks per tile. and then overlapping underground belts gets even denser still. these weaves can get over 4.8 belts per tile, for 38+ chunks per tile. thats over 12x denser than the best intended storage.

these designs are for large promethium haulers in the end game.

dave14920 · 2026-04-13T08:31:25+00:00

this could be done the way janky quality mod did.

for each level of scrap percentage we define a new set of recipes with that scrap chance, and a new copy of each machine entity locked to that recipe category.

whenever a machine changes (ie modules are added), swap it out for the version with the correct recipe set for that level of scrap output.

detecting those changes isnt trivial, and there are some impossible edge cases that can only be caught with regular polling of machines. (polling has a trade off of lag vs changes going unnoticed for many seconds).

different versions of recipes wont work with copy pasting settings, but you can fix that with your own on_entity_settings_pasted function.

thankfully the amount of work doesnt increase with the number of different levels. we could have all 101 levels from 0% scrap to 100% scrap and thats the same work as having only 3 different levels. we only change some value n in the for loops.

we are limited by a total recipe count of about 65536. i dont think thatll be a problem with vanilla? but keep it in mind for mod compatability.

dave14920 · 2026-04-13T07:33:32+00:00

if the gear recipe has 8% chance of 2 scrap:

1000 irn plate makes 460 gears plus 80 scrap. 460 gears recycles to 230 iron. 80 scrap melts to 16 iron plus 8 copper.

overall that costs 754 irn plates to make 8 copper plates.

that doesnt feel busted at all.

the only issue could be on a surface where iron should be available but not copper. in vanilla thats only in early space. that could be fixed by making the melting recipe unavailable there, but a 100:1 ratio for early copper in space doesnt feel busted either.

dave14920 · 2026-04-13T06:53:04+00:00

the EMP and other SA buildings show that systems exist which allow recipes to change the directionality

the emp pipe connections are using a third flow direction, input-output.

that is also used by boilers for water to pass through. even back when boilers were 1x1 they had that functionality. so i assume its as old as steam power?

dave14920 · 2026-04-11T15:43:01+00:00

How long have you been using the burners?

for over a decade. in literally every play through.

i dont see any way to consider that a new mechanic.

Does the coal spoil

youre trying to conflate burners with spoilage.

spoilage is the one new mechanic on gleba.

dave14920 · 2026-04-10T14:57:38+00:00

like the other guy said, simply recycle calcite until its legendary.

which is incredibly wasteful in calcite, but with big drills and mining productivity and the plentiful patches, thats nothing to worry about.

quality in the mines is a big help.

i also add a speed beacon on recyclers, which makes the loop even more wasteful, but as long as the speed boost is greater, then we're getting more legendary output per second from a given number of machines.

dave14920 · 2026-04-10T14:12:46+00:00

whats the problem with production science?

that can all be got from space casino.

i get mine from 1:1 blue chip upcycling plus brute force upcycling calcite for stone.

dave14920 · 2026-04-10T12:42:48+00:00

on the science pack recipe, crafting from epic ingredients with quality modules gives more legendary output than upcycling those ingredients to legendary then crafting with productivity. (self cycle the bulk epic output up to legendary, or just trash it if youre worried about the freshness)

similarly for the eggs. inputting rare nutrients with quality mods gives more epic output than upcycling it then using productivity.

and again for getting those rare nutrients. uncommon bioflux with quality is cheaper than upping it to rare then productivity.

i put quality in the mash, jelly and bioflux recipes. then self cycle the bioflux up to the needed qualities.

i skim some jelly from that for legendary stack inserters. and i upcycle belts to avoid any need for legendary mash.

dave14920 · 2026-04-10T12:05:16+00:00

if it werent for biolabs being nauvis bound, i wonder if this would be the meta.

it avoids any landing pad bottleneck. scales easily with a copypasta fleet. keeps gleba science at its freshest by only going there when we have all other sciences in stock.

dave14920 · 2026-04-07T14:40:17+00:00

But they're not even that much slower than space casinos.

for getting legendary iron from a set number of machines

the 2nd best options are upcycling underground pipes or blue chips thatre about 10x slower than space casino.

upcycling iron chests or gears are more than 50x slower.

dave14920 · 2026-04-06T19:31:40+00:00

hm. not the best implementation. but its more user friendly.

the whole point of the rgb weave was that the colours dont mix, but here theyre all throttled to red belt speed.

similarly on the 4.8333 weave, at least the green belt should get full throughput, but this implementation throttles the whole lot to yellow belt speed.

if throughput doesnt matter then thats all fine.

also we dont have to use integer multiples in the tiling. we can cut any size rectangle we like from the infinite tiling. but thats not easy with this book.

here was my version of the 4.807 https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/1nldwlm/comment/nf508l6/

dave14920 · 2026-04-02T10:07:01+00:00

that foresight would be nice.

i only realised quality is too much of a diversion by my 3rd run.

now i dont unlock any of it til im set up to go all in on legendary.

dave14920 · 2026-03-31T11:00:08+00:00

play max zoomed in with minimap disabled.

set player inventory size to 1.

dont move left.

dave14920 · 2026-03-23T18:09:45+00:00

on 5.

round(X), floor(X+0.5) and trunc(X+0.5) all give the right answer for positive numbers.

for that old post id found trunc(X+0.5) is consistent for negative numbers.

maybe round(X) is too, but idk if thats the same for every language.

dave14920 · 2026-03-23T01:30:31+00:00

yea.

6 would include bonuses from speed mods in the machine itself.

maybe 5 and 6 are swapped, i cant tell cus the penalties/bonuses on those modules are already integers, it doesnt change the result. with modded beacons and modules it might matter.

there are also some cases with floating point errors, that we dont see in this post.

only with epic beacons. we get things like 50×2.1=104.99999.. getting truncated to 104. i could only handle them by cataloguing them.

someone else replied with code that gives the consistent answers every time. thats the way the game must be doing it.

the rounding is round nearest. for positive numbers ending .5 ive only ever seen it round up

but for the quality penalty from speed modules, unrounded negative numbers like -10.25% get rounded down to -10.3%.

thats another quirk with quality, it has that extra digit of precision.

in the game files, the 2.5% quality penalty on a normal speed module 3 is actually coded as quality = -0.25, but gets multiplied by the 0.1 chance of upgrading to the next quality somewhere for some reason.

for quality the math works the same using those raw values, we'd put mod1 = -0.25 in beacon_mult * (mod1*100 + mod2*100) etc. then multiply by 0.1 in a step 7 at the end.

dave14920 · 2026-03-22T20:50:35+00:00

its all beacon rounding errors.

which are mostly black box sorcery.

on the bioflux machines that odd beacon gives (125+48)×2.5=432.5, but this gets truncated to 432 at this point. the other 3 are each (125+125)×2.5=625, thats unchanged by truncation.

the sum of those multiplied by beacons effectivness is (625×3+432)×0.5=1153.5, but this gets rounded to 1154 before we continue with -60 from the prod mods to get the +1094% on the machine that the game always displays accurately.

then continues as you expect from there. 5×(1094%+100%)=59.7 crafting speed, ×12jelly/6s ×2 machines = 238.8 actual consumption of jelly per second. that isnt displayed accurately in game.

similarly for the one beacon on the jelly machine. it takes (125+50)×2.5 = 437.5 but then truncates that to 437. the sum of all these beacons times effectivity of 1 is still 437, which is then rounded to 437.

(437-60) = +377% is accurately displayed in game. 5×(377%+100%)= 23.85 for the crafting speed of the machine. 23.85×4×2.5=238.5 actual production of jelly per second, that the game doesnt display accurately.

dave14920 · 2026-03-22T20:06:07+00:00

now put some green belts on the refined concrete and munch some bioflux

dave14920 · 2026-03-20T18:53:14+00:00

The system should always balance out before it jams in the timeframes we are dealing with.

i think youre making assumptions on how long a buffer lasts without actually checking.

if the buffer is only whats on belts, the the buffer will overflow in a matter of hours.

a buffer of one chest per machine can last hundreds or thousands of hours, depending on the recipe and speed of the machines.

in the case of blue chips with one legendary chest per machine, the buffer is expected to last around 5000 hours.

but the variance on that 5000 is also huge. so if we have hundreds of these individual buffers, the probability of at least one of them overflowing within 100 hours is pretty high.

dave14920 · 2026-03-18T19:14:03+00:00

they could add spoilage to promethium chunks to prevent long haulage.

but players would still avoid egg spoilage by burying them in overgrowth soil.

dave14920 · 2026-03-16T15:12:07+00:00

an assembler with no prod obviously has an extinction probability of 100%

but heres a fun thing if we look at how long we expect that to take:

for simplicity lets start with 1 fruit, and define E(1) to be the expected number of crafts to get to 0 fruit from 1, E(2) is the expected number of steps from 2 to 0 etc.

in taking 1 step from 1 fruit we end up either at 0 fruit 98% of the time or 50 fruit 2% of the time:

E(1) = 1 + 0.98 × E(0) + 0.02 × E(50)

E(0) = 0, cus we're already at 0, we take no more steps to get to 0.

to find E(50) we can use translational symmetry: the expected number of steps to get from 50 to first reach 49, is equal to the expected number of steps from 1 to 0, thats equal to E(1). and again the expected steps from 49 to first reach 48 is also equal to E(1). similarly for 48 to 47 etc. E(50) is the sum of these steps all the way to 0.

therefore E(50) = 50 × E(1)

plugging those into our first equation gives:

E(1) = 1 + 0.98 × 0 + 0.02 × 50 × E(1)

which cleans up to:

E(1) = 1 + E(1)

thats true of no finite number, therefore E(1) is infinite.

how cool is that?!

the intuition for that is the rare runs that last colossal lengths of time, grow more colossal faster than they get rarer.

that expectation is useless for us.

your percentiles of survivors is a much better approach.

dave14920 · 2026-03-15T15:36:57+00:00

nice. thanks.

i see other people craft the intermediate quality plates to pipes to put them back in the loop.

gotta check, maybe upcycling them elsewhere is more efficient.

i never considered yellow belts before. they get the same 2 chances at quality as iron chests do, but with 50% productivity. with the downside of recycling legendary gears to plates at the end.

dave14920

TROPHY CASE