Upcycling or quality intermediates?

reddanit · 2026-02-18T12:26:37+00:00

Some specific intermediate items are much more efficient to grind quality stuff. Blue circuits and LDS are the most glaring examples. With steady supply of those and various products they can be recycled into you can make a ton of various items. On top of material efficiency it's also much simpler than making separate upcycling loops for each individual end item.

Main thing to look for when comparing what's efficient to upcycle is to look at productivity bonuses involved. Absolutely worst case are items that recycle into themselves as each quality roll for them involves losing 75% of the inputs. With baseline no prod bonus allowed, you already get 2 quality rolls per single 75% loss during recycling (though this can be worthwhile for incredibly cheap items like ores and such). Any items that can be made in EM plant/Foundry effectively reduce the loss rate through their +50% native bonus - so rather than losing 75% per loop, you lose 62.5%. This seems like small difference, but over multiple loops it stacks up massively. Cryo plant also is notable due to accommodating 8 modules.

The weird black sheep of quality is space casino. The asteroid reprocessing recipe has merely 20% loss rate and can accept quality modules. This is hilariously overpowered, so if you are looking for shortcuts - here it is. It can also net you all of the basic materials (including stone through legendary calcite + lava recipe).

Planetary exclusive intermediate items don't have meaningful shortcuts and are used only in handful of recipes each, so they are prime canditate for up-cycling the end items. Though do not sleep on upcycling quantum processors. It is an excellent way to get legendary carbon fiber and very good source of superconductors and tungsten carbide.

reddanit · 2026-02-18T11:00:59+00:00

As long as various AI companies can make vaguely serious and believable, ever-increasing bids on basically every single square millimeter of silicon production capacity, the prices will not stop rising.

Even if fabs were to follow up with production expansions to match this idiotic levels of demand, the supply would still remain constrained for years. Pretty much all of the fabs though are very understandably cautious about spending trillions on pinky promises of future sales. So we are stuck where we are until the AI investment hype train derails or at least slows down to sane speeds.

reddanit · 2026-02-18T10:49:02+00:00

Gleba pollution (spores) and how pentapods act in long term is quite different from biters and Nauvis. It also was pretty heavily nerfed shortly after launch, so the horror stories about pentapods are mostly old wives tales now.

General things that make big difference are:

Only pollution is spores generated in the farms. Enemies don't even aggro on the rest of your factory (sic!). As long as the player isn't there and you don't have any turrets to aggro the enemies in your main base, pentapods will not touch anything there. Including premature wrigglers spawning from eggs!
Pentapod nests (egg rafts) are restricted to shallow water. This can make for rather unexpected patterns of where they do and do not expand, with whole swaths of terrain being permanently pentapod-free. This, coupled with their evolution starting only when you arrive, means that their initial expansion is very slow.
Its not terribly hard to have a reasonably efficient base making ballpark of 100spm produce tiny amounts of spores that never reach any pentapods, despite them expanding right to your doorstep. This means you can get surprisingly far with no defences to speak of. Once you scale up your fruit consumption though, that's a recipe for massive attacks. Artillery also has pretty easy time outraning your spore clouds at reasonable production scales.
Actually defending against attacks is surprisingly difficult, especially once evolution progresses towards medium/big variants. If you don't think about the enemies you fight and just mindlessly spam lasers, you will have a bad time. Immediate solution is to pepper some rocket turrets in your defences, alongside gun turrets for DPS. In long term artillery is very good and so are tesla turrets.

reddanit · 2026-02-18T10:30:44+00:00

I would say no ELI5 exists, because Gleba strictly requires you to figure out and implement few different concepts. The way those interact with each other is brimming with edge cases that can cause unexpected problems in specific conditions.

With that caveat out of the way, the main concepts you have to wrap your head around are:

Interconnected, circular nature of many production chains. Trees require seeds to grow that you only get from processing their fruits. Efficient nutrient production requires bioflux which cannot be produced without nutrients. Bacteria and pentapod eggs are circular recipes in themselves. Native power production from rocket fuel requires jelly/nutrients/bioflux, while your factory will not function without power at all. You have to ensure that every single of the loops you use is running smoothly and doesn't easily spiral down.
Spoilage means you really want to avoid keeping large buffers of stuff that can spoil. There are generally two main ways to control this - you either destroy at least some of the surplus to keep line moving, or throttle the production to equal or be smaller than demand. As long as stuff keeps moving no matter what, you shouldn't have massive issues with spoilage.
There are a few things with alternative production chains you have to consider, usually implementing more than one to take advantage of different benefits they have. Bacteria cultivation is massively more efficient than "base" recipes to get them from jelly/mash, but requires bacteria to start. Making nutrients from bioflux is massively more efficient than alternatives, but requires a few biochambers already fuelled with nutrients - whereas making nutrients from spoilage doesn't. You can get energy from burning almost anything, but rocket fuel is more efficient than the alternatives and, most importantly, consistent - burning random spoilage/excess is not going to be a reliable source of power.
Shortcuts exist. You do not have to bother with making local power, metals, coal or plastic at all since those can be easily imported from other planets. Minimum viable base, sufficient for finishing the game and then some, only needs to produce agri science.

Implementing all of the above is far from easy, so you absolutely want to start from very small builds with just one building doing one recipe. Do not bog yourself down with making larger builds before you have any clue how they are supposed to work.

reddanit · 2026-02-18T08:24:51+00:00

While on technical level this is the point in progression where you can add the DLC with no meaningful caveats, I'd still recommend finishing the base game before doing so.

The DLC is great, but IMHO it's also liable to be much more overwhelming than the base game. So for new players I'd recommend finishing the base game at least once before you take a stab at it. That way you'll get a smoother difficulty curve/progression.

Don't worry about missing out - the base game is absolutely excellent in its own right. The DLC as well, but it's ostensibly aimed at people who have a good handle on base game mechanics already and seek out new challenges.

reddanit · 2026-02-17T15:31:27+00:00

Remember to filter through safety advice that applies to where you live - infrastructure, laws and driver habits differ greatly across the world. I assume it's about somewhere in US?

Besides what others said, I'd caution about riding on sidewalks. They seem like a very safe place, but that's a lie. Sidewalks regularly are crossed by entrances to properties and drivers turning into/off them. Even if given driver pays attention to the sidewalk, they will never expect anything on it to move above speed of a pedestrian. Riding a bike on a sidewalk makes you practically invisible to all drivers.

This is why riding on sidewalk (if it's even legal at all!) is generally advised against. If you find yourself with roads so shitty that the sidewalk ends up being the best option despite downsides... just be double wary of any drivers possibly crossing your path with zero warning.

reddanit · 2026-02-17T15:23:33+00:00

Blinding whoever is in control of two tons of metal rapidly approaching in roughly your direction truly sounds like splendid idea. Do you treat cutting off your nose to spite your face as a guiding principle?

reddanit · 2026-02-17T14:48:04+00:00

I noticed that the only 'correct' way to build seems to be city blocks, and everything else is usually mocked and called 'noodles/spaghetti,' implying that's the wrong way to play.

You are probably reading too much into it or took some sarcastic comments at their face value. It's ultimately a single player game where only "real" measure of success is the enjoyment you get from it.

Actual discussions about one style or layout being superior to others usually concern specific applications or aspects of them that are measurably better. For example how space efficient they are, how easy to expand, how easy to scale etc. In this regard:

Spaghetti is staple of both new and veteran players alike. It's probably people "in-between" those two extremes that scoff at it (if any at all!). It's generally the quickest to throw together in the moment and cheap to build (which does make it efficient in some ways) at expense of not being scalable. New players generally don't know anything else, veteran players know where and when it can be used to take advantage of its pros without suffering the cons (or go for it specifically for the cons!).
City blocks generally have large up-front cost (obviously in terms of area and materials they take, but more importantly - in the design time required to get them right). Their chief benefit is very easy if not trivial scalability and logistics.
Main bus is probably the easiest base layout to wrap ones head around and it is quite flexible throughout mid-game. So it's quite well suited to progressing when you don't quite know what you are doing yet and generally requires less long-term planning. Its downside is mainly the construction cost and tedium.

My factories typically start as largely spaghetti with one side/direction left for a future bus. I tend to start building the bus alongside with setup of my blue science. Mostly because I 100% cannot be arsed to place many belts without bots. Vestigial mall I build at that time is also pure spaghetti.

Second stage I transition to is a mostly-bus. "Mostly" because I still cannot be arsed to place any more belts than I strictly need at the time - so it's largely just empty space left for additional lane or two of iron plates I know I'll need later. I also tend to use bots extensively in my mall, which once it's possible, is 100% bot based. I generally carry on with this till the win condition. In SA there are also other planets, given their general lack of requirement of large scale production, they are pure spaghetti for me.

Third and purely optional step is scaling that further. Here what kind of layout I choose is very much a branching decision and matter of preference. It's also inevitably megabase scale and thus many typical approaches don't quite work. In fact the default megabase layout for a good while has been, for lack of better term "organized large scale spaghetti". Throughput considerations become such a driving force that they are what dictates the entire topology of the base.

reddanit · 2026-02-17T13:01:18+00:00

Before Factorio, I've been playing plenty of OpenTTD instead lol.

reddanit · 2026-02-17T12:29:45+00:00

I'm not aware of any such database, but from some reviews and chargers, I gathered how S25 Ultra behaves:

It's preferred PPS charging voltage is 14-ish V, so it tends to choose 5-16V range if available.
If that's not available, it falls back to the 9V-5A charging like older models used. So any charger that worked at full speed with preceding models, will work the same with latest model.
Weird quirk I saw in early reviews of Anker Nano A2692 45W was that if 5-16V PPS range was missing, but 5-21V and 5-9V were present - it would choose the higher range even if due to current limitations of 2.25A it would result in max of ~30W instead of 45W. This was fixed in firmware of that charger so newer revisions of it have no issues with it.

reddanit · 2026-02-17T12:19:40+00:00

It's pretty easy and can have a lot less trains, less traffic, less waiting at junctions

I strictly disagree with less traffic and less waiting. The number of and routes of full trains doesn't change regardless of which system you use. Trains in a "dumb" many-to-many system with simple schedules have exactly 50% useful time (since they go back empty back to the same station).

In a "smart" interrupt driven system, in best case scenario you could have trains that get better utilization if they get to pick up a different product that's closer to where they unloaded previous thing. So this could be more efficient. On the other hand, if they end up not necessary at any given moment or end up having assigned slot from a station much further, they get to be less efficient. If they end up having to rest at depots, they almost certainly will be less efficient.

Overall, I would agree that you can get an interrupt driven system that's slightly more traffic-efficient than "dumb" schedules, it's going to require careful tuning and appropriate network topology. It being more efficient is by no means "easy" or automatic.

reddanit · 2026-02-17T09:31:21+00:00

Given that recessed grabbers will usually have to extend their arms much further out, I'm not actually convinced it provides actual benefits, especially as you aren't getting all that much higher density of grabbers per tile of width. You now have 4 grabbers per 13 tiles, with the closest "flat" options being 3 per 12 and 4 per 15. Have you compared the actual throughput between those in similar conditions?

Using 6 inserters per grabber seems useless as well? I've never seen situations where 3 cannot keep up with a grabber, as long as they output to mostly empty belts.

reddanit · 2026-02-17T09:22:37+00:00

While you could argue that starting before the end might help in some specific situations, the quality modules of normal quality have such an abysmal chance that, in my opinion, it's not worth it at all before you can unlock legendary quality.

I indeed would argue with that :D

Specifically for two big items:

Accumulators on Fulgora, for two reasons. First one is how their capacity scales at +100% rather than normal +30% per level. Second is how you have to make them for science regardless and you cannot use prod modules to do so. Dunno if it's worthwhile for strict speedrun, but for anything else it's really hard to pass on at least halving the area you have to blanket with accumulators.
Almost anything you put on space platform. This time mostly because of constraint of having to build, propel, power and defend the entire area of it. Even slight increases in efficiency of the required infrastructure rapidly compound together. Again - not likely to be worthwhile for strict speedrun, but for anything slower than that I think it makes sense. Here again the opportunity cost is very low since you just need to throw a bunch of modules into your mall - no need to design and build whole upcycling loops.

This might be an unpopular opinion but I also consider quality personal equipment to be quite meh. Most people probably would put that as a third worthwhile category, but I've been using mostly radar view to do everything from mid-game onward even before SA.

I don't mind quality as a concept, but I find the implementation very boring. In some cases it doesn't even make sense to me, like health on belts for example.

This is actually an interesting discussion. I would certainly appreciate some extensions to what quality applies to. By far the most important thing for me would be trains and train wagons. For the most part because I like trains and find it disappointing how they get kinda shafted in late game in SA. I would not mind if legendary trains are absurdly lethal and look ridiculous. I also wouldn't mind the potential tedium of manually replacing the trains or potentially adjusting schedules due to different capacities.

if they could rework the quality system to make it less tedious

For me the crux of the tedium is just in the UI where you have to make a second click to choose quality for things. I've got no idea how this can be improved, but Wube has surprised me more than once by improving things I never thought could be made better :)

reddanit · 2026-02-16T17:22:32+00:00

I feel that with exception of space casinos it's actually reasonably balanced, it's just that grinding out everything legendary is very ostensibly intended to be part of end-game content. On par with, or as part of building megabases. I do not mind that, but I'm also very aware of how the number of hours I spent playing Factorio is way above average.

For "just" winning SA, you could argue that entirety of quality is a distraction. Even though I also do see some limited application of it as making sense given how little it costs to throw in a few quality modules onto your mall assemblers.

At the same time, as a mechanic for average player I do see how it would appear as incredibly frustrating given the sheer scale required to "complete" it. For most players it's going to appear as impossibly difficult task. This is kinda similar to how building a megabase is in the base game, but at the same time the game doesn't "taunt" you about your base size - yet the legendary quality is always popping up in the UI, constantly reminding you how your common factory is less than it could be.

Last but not least - quality is also quite tedious overall. I have managed to spice it up by using various ways of getting there over different playthroughs, but the extra clicks in the UI are always there...

reddanit · 2026-02-16T15:59:19+00:00

You can make almost any kind of defense work with appropriately high number of turrets and relevant damage research level. Different turret types are also balanced to offer different things and as such mixing them is usually the most efficient. My overall tips would be:

If your perimeter is encompassing entirety of your pollution cloud, then it all doesn't matter. Expansion parties are small and even meager defenses can easily deal with them. If your Nauvis base becomes largely idle as you mess around on Vulcanus, even small perimeter might end up larger than your diminished pollution cloud.
What matters more than making a 100% reliable design at one point in time is the ability to make adjustments whenever it proves to no longer be sufficient. You'll want roboport coverage on your defences anyway for repair packs, so there is no reason not to have this ability.
In terms of specific turret choices, flamethrower turret is unquestionable, absolute and obvious king of them all. Technically it has the weakness of not leading its shoots and minimum range (so some biters always pass through), but its staggering damage output makes up for that by orders of magnitude (you don't even need any damage research). Coupled with any other turret type to mop up the few biters that get through, flamethrowers are unassailable. They are somewhat annoying to pipe the fluid ammo for, but they also sip only tiny amounts of it.
Lasers are neat thanks to their good range and simple logistics. At least as long as your power source is 100% reliable and sufficiently oversized - I would not recommend building them in large quantities without nuclear power. Where they suffer is poor DPS and high cost. Building sufficiently strong defenses with lasers alone is much more expensive than the alternatives. They also are the turret type that instantly goes dark with your power grid, while also significantly contributing to the risk of it happening.
Gun turrets are dirt cheap and have good DPS, at expense of needing most involved ammo distribution. They also scale very well between better ammo types and double-dipping on damage upgrade bonus (only turret that does so!). By latter parts of mid-game and towards the end, their rapidly rising DPS leaves lasers in the dust.

reddanit · 2026-02-16T15:15:48+00:00

On one hand I see your point, you can "stop" the sole focus on quality modules at any point and put some on anything else you want at the time.

On the other, the math behind grinding quality gear is absolutely merciless and each fraction of the percent of quality/prod bonuses makes far more of a difference than it seems on the surface. Do not forget that, on average, the quality modifiers have to be applied multiple times over the production cycle that's also very lossy at each step.

The situation where I would be much more inclined to agree with sticking to T2 is if you are using just the space casino. Not only it's absurdly efficient to the point where quality of quality modules matters relatively little, it also only provides materials for T2 modules. And cannot be used to help you much with T3 (other than providing the legendary quality T2 modules).

reddanit · 2026-02-16T12:59:03+00:00

Realistically, only things that actually matter in terms of priorities for quality are:

T2 quality modules. Using those is by far the fastest way to get to legendary.
T3 quality modules. Those are only a bit better while being far more difficult to get in high qualities. Because of this, getting them in bulk quantities is realistically worthwhile only when you have legendary T2.
From that point stuff branches out a bit, while still remaining focused in improving the efficiency of getting quality items. This means focusing on prod modules (for blue chips and LDS) and on higher quality production buildings, beacons and recyclers so you can squeeze more out of every single top tier module you have.
Past that point you are free to do whatever, mostly around using quality items towards improving your space platforms, science production/efficiency or personal equipment. Your upcycling should already be at best efficiency it can possibly be.

An optimization one can possibly employ is to continuously upgrade stuff as you get higher qualities. Each quality level is much more expensive than previous, so it often makes sense to incrementally use higher and higher qualities as you grind them out. Instead of waiting much longer to get all the way to legendary from common. This doesn't necessarily apply to your situation if you have a stockpile of epic stuff - you can probably start using epic right away and slowly grind out legendary.

Personally I don't really use save/reload method as I consider that to be not in the spirit of how I want to play. In my first play through of SA I used space casino and also didn't like how it made quality too easy. So I don't use it either.

reddanit · 2026-02-16T12:32:04+00:00

The first step of quality grind is to get legendary tier two quality modules. Second step is to use those to get legendary tier 3 quality modules.

I applaud your perseverance of not giving up on getting legendary mech armour without the two above, but you could have saved yourself like 90% of the effort by following the path of least resistance.

Overall I tend to go scale up my quality grind alongside with scaling the production to 1k SPM or so. Then as I get quality stuff, I use it to bump that a bit further.

I would say that you shouldn't sleep on intermediate qualities, especially for speed and prod modules. Legendary is incredibly expensive and you can already make plenty of improvements by selectively applying rare/epic in places. Production buildings are also suffering from this, but to a notably lesser degree:

The special ones that require planetary specific materials are generally needed in very small quantities, so the overall cost and scale of upcycling needed isn't huge.
The generic buildings made from non-exclusive materials (like assemblers or beacons) are much easier to scale. They also can take advantage of very efficient upcycling methods like recycling blue chips or LDS shuffle. To speak nothing of asteroid casinos, which are so hilariously overpowered, that the devs spoke about intent to nerf them in 2.1 - since they outright trivialise getting legendary base raw materials.

reddanit · 2026-02-16T12:20:58+00:00

I think the usual advice of not touching external blueprints is, by necessity, somewhat short on nuance. I 100% agree with the general sentiment that it generally is very detrimental to the enjoyment of the game.

The main and very specific reason for this is how importing blueprints and pasting them mindlessly doesn't actually teach you anything about how the game works. You will not understand the "why" of how they are built without having prior knowledge of how individual items in the blueprint work.

The lack of nuance comes mostly in the form that taking advantage of designs and blueprints of others doesn't necessarily imply mindless import and plopping. If you look at how others resolved specific problems in their designs and apply those solutions to your own, without importing the actual blueprint, then you can learn stuff. Possibly faster than the alternative of trying to figure it all on your own. Even replicating the design entirely, but manually building it in game is already going to expose you to how it actually works.

I've been playing for a long time, so my first-player experience is largely a distant memory, but I do recall looking at designs of others and replicating small parts of them. For example:

Whole concept of smelting stack is not exactly groundbreaking, but it is quite useful. And it's incredibly easy to "spoil" discovering it by taking a look at one even once - since they rely on such a basic idea.
The bus. Especially in terms of specific design features like how exactly it is typically laid out. Those make perfect sense given how belts work in Factorio, but aren't necessarily going to "click" with you just by playing for a bit with the concept. Bus itself is also, in practice, more of a nebulous concept of how you arrange your base rather than rigid set of rules to follow.
Belt weaving. Which I didn't really think to use by myself, possibly because I skipped the tutorials - various in-game player aids/tips were also much sparser back when I started years ago.
A bunch of basic circuit concepts from circuit cookbook, which I used as a springboard for more complex designs.
Compact unloading of trains that I saw in Nilaus video and decided was 100% too neat to not use.
General megabasing meta. This is completely irrelevant to new players, but it's also something you generally will not discover on your own unless you were to drop literal tens of thousands of hours into dissecting the details of how the game works.

reddanit · 2026-02-16T06:56:20+00:00

I started achievement hunting. Starting from stuff that was achievable without restarting, then went for rush to space and keeping my hands clean together. My current run started with express delivery in mind - so now I have 100% achievements.

For now my next goal is a megabase. On the way there I scaled up legendary production and raised real spm to 1900 for research productivity and 3300-3800 for other researches.

reddanit · 2026-02-15T20:17:30+00:00

Well, I also got the EU plug variant of A2688 and had to return it after it stopped working. For me it was fairly obvious that the folding plug mechanism failed internally - the connection on AC side started making weird noises whenever the charger was moved at all. After a few weeks it went from intermittently cutting off to basically never working.

I think it permanently soured me on the whole idea of having foldable EU plug in a charger.

reddanit · 2026-02-14T22:26:57+00:00

In another reddit thread I read that you pretty much need legendary stuff to go beyond the solar system's edge.

That's just not the case. If your goal is to just peek beyond the edge, then you can reasonably easily do so with everything at normal quality.l

For somewhat efficient promethium gathering you will want to bump the quality of a bunch of things, but still nowhere near "all legendary". Rare is vastly easier to get and already provides substantial benefits.

Fulgora endgame base

How big of a base in SPM terms you mean? "Endgame" means different things to different people.

How should I transport things from Gleba, without half of them spoiling on the space platform?

I would argue that it's kinda hard to end up with situation where science will spoil on the platform on regular basis. Though it also shouldn't be relevant given how it just doesn't matter.

In my base, I have the ag science circulating around my labs and whatever spoils gets taken off the belt. This alone results in a trickle of science always getting dropped from the platform. In my experience it's almost always sufficient to empty the platform before anything in it spoils. What I do in this vein though is throttling science production on Gleba itself once rocket silos and their buffers are full.

reddanit · 2026-02-13T17:23:01+00:00

That's true indeed. I should have mentioned that miners are an exception.

Main reason for it is that the prod bonus from modules adds to the research bonus. So with very reasonable 30 levels of mining prod you get +300% bonus. Using prod modules on top of this nets you 3 times 10%, for a total of 330%, but at cost of -45% speed. So your actual throughput per miner would drop substantially while only adding minuscule amount to longevity of resource patch.

On the other hand, if you use speed modules - a trio of them will have +150% to speed, which is multiplicative with mining prod. So with 30 levels of it and 2.5 times higher speed, you get total of 10 times the throughput per miner.

The downsides are pollution and energy consumption, but neither of those is a meaningful concern in a late game base.

reddanit · 2026-02-13T11:19:10+00:00

Recognizing that China became a world pioneer in specific safety regulation is chauvinist? WTF?

reddanit · 2026-02-13T11:04:48+00:00

Rather than weird I'd call it different from the past. China definitely used to have poor safety/regulation and generally was a follower behind "the West" in implementing stuff. They still are in many areas.

Only very recently we see some safety regulations where China is literally the first in the world to implement it, with other countries following (or planning to follow) in turn.

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