Factorio Forums

What did you do?

Playing space age for the first time. Do not watch any lets plays or spoiler messages, besides some fff.
Setting up production lines as always. There's now a quality button when setting recipes, great!
There's a tooltip for legendary chance when viewing quality modules 2 in Factoriopedia.
Got some recyclers from fulgora, now building mass production:
Trying to get quality on modules up to legendary, recycling everything else.

What happened?

No epic or legendary items in 30 hours playtime. There's a research for epic and legendary I did not know of.

What did you expect to happen instead? It might be obvious to you, but do it anyway!

I assumed, IF I could set the assembler to produce legendary quality 2 modules, and the recycling tooltip tells me some chance, I will get some legendaries. Small chance maybe, but will just take some time.
I assumed, if it's not entirely possible to craft something, the game would tell me. Like not offering recipes for unresearched stuff

Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?

always

I understand that this can be confusing, but there's 2 sides to consider here. Namely, that it's really damn convenient to be able to set up machines for theoretical later rarities already. I've constructed a blueprint that can handle all the rarities, and just needs a single constant combinator to change from producing rares to epics or legendaries. Updating these was trivial compared to the first few I placed which were specifically designed for rare and basically broke as soon as epic was unlocked.

So I think that the recipes should very much be selectable, but some clearer indication that these rarities cannot be attained at this time may indeed be beneficial.

I do agree, it's convenient to be able to do this.

But there should be at least some indication, that it's not available yet. Like a grey-out symbol, a note in the tooltip, something.
The list shows all available recipes, but (yet) impossible combinations too. This is without epic research

This is not a bug.

Also see idea/suggestion Locked advanced qualities confusion.