TL;DR
Create a way to remove quality from an item.What?
Create a "quality sink" that provides a way to make use of unwanted quality items. Here's some possible methods:- Allow mixing of quality levels in assembly-type machines, but the output returns the quality of the lowest-quality component. This doesn't fix rocket fuel though!
- When recycling a quality component with no sub-components, have the recycler output a normal-quality item 100% of the time - the recycler eats the quality as the cost instead of a chance of losing the item as normal.
- Extract quality as a token, with the tokens returned identified by how many components an input item has (one quality token for a piece of iron, five for steel, etc.). You can then use these tokens in other builds to upgrade normal materials, with how many you need again driven by the quality, e.g. two quality tokens on iron ore to get a green level iron plate, double the amount needed for each quality upgrade (so 16 tokens for a single piece of legendary iron plate). Complicated, but it makes for less multi-level upcycling, which gets kind of ridiculous.
- explicitly allow assembly-type machines to specify a lower output quality. Maybe increase the productivity or build speed if using higher-quality items to make lower ones?
Why?
Some quality items are completely useless (space station foundations). Others, while they may have one use, can't be used for part of their functionality (you can burn quality rocket fuel, but you can't fuel a rocket with it).I think the last suggestion (have a setting for the machine to force a specified output quality level regardless of input quality) is the most intuitive, but I think quality tokens would be interesting. Burning an entire box of green gears to make a small number of upgrades is a decision that may be worth it.
