Ability to craft lower quality with higher quality

[Tinyboss]

Hi All

I am pre-recycler at this stage and am trying to craft rare quality modules. I am making progress but obviously end up with a lot of uncommon items that I don't want. It seems like an odd decision to not let me use these up in a non-quality assembler....

Even when I have the recycler it would be better to use tehse to craft non quality items rather than lose 75% of them in the recycler...

Why can't I do this?

Have you considered making more of the other uncommon items needed for the modules, so that you continue to make progress toward the rare ones you want?

[coolkau]

The main issue is the clogging up once your "high quality line" is full, if you use it pre recycler. Building a large storage just to store them, potentially shoot it down and then fill it up again... all of it is so ugly. Also what happens if your storage was too small and then the lights go off while you are off-planet.

It will take forever to fill up a steel chest with quality items pre-space. (And WHY would you shoot the chest instead of just chaining a new one with an inserter? Or just take the modules out so you don't make any more?) Not only is your quality bonus going to be limited, but your production probably isn't super high, either. If you're worried about it, stick a programmable speaker on it to alert you when it gets nearly full.

By the time you can leave the planet, you can research purple chests practically for free, and that problem is now solved for 100x as long, with a chunk of yellow chests in the middle of your base. More than enough time to go grab the recycler even if you do Fulgora last.

This is a fair point.
Yet now I played a bit more:

- I now took out all of the modules .. which is painful enough, as there is no remove all modules shortcut.
- I followed the advise to only use it pre-recycler in "final" product assemblers to get a few higher grade items. Yet as I found out that you cannot have any- quality logistic request. So even then it goes down to an absolute grind to set up any logistics request multiple times for every quality. So I took out the modules also in those
- Boxes always get in the way not matter which perfect place they were initially ... and then they are impossible to move once full
- Small other note: Its just ugly to have a solution which will just dump stuff in boxes in masses... lets just get rid of stuff we dont want (without shooting the box).

So or so, how harshly quality is currently implemented you wont be able to run multiple "qualify lines" in parallel. It is not something you can gradually stick into your lines. You'd probably stick to one additional line with one target quality and which slowly goes up once you have better quality modules... but then dealing with all the other qualities becomes just annoying waste management. (Perhaps lift it into space and dump it from the platform )

I feel there is a lot of grind coming with quality which is not a fun challenge to solve. And limiting things to one quality is eliminating quite a portion of that grind. I will play with the Quality Down-Binning mod and see where that get me.

With recyclers (which I dont have yet) this might change, but I also fear this makes things a bit too boring... but lets see.

[dzikakulka]

+1
It's just super counterintuitive when introducing new players right now, they *want* to try out the quality system, slap some modules onto miners/processing.... and completely deadlock whatever assembly lines they painstakingly created. Then you get to the fun part of explaining that "this is a better quality iron plate and it can't be used to make a normal belt". I haven't met one person that didn't react with a WTF.

Everybody understands that filtering these out for specific use is generally desired, but you shouldn't be forced to sift every line and wagon and inventory item so it doesn't screw you up.

A feature that opens up this early should not require babysitting. At worst, let it be wasted and dealt with later.

[erronius]

I'm sure others have said something similar but the only change I would personally be in favor of here is allowing something like a hand insert override. There have been some times where for example I was trying to craft with rare ingredients, didn't have any available, and would have been fine using epic. But, I don't ever want that happening "behind my back". Also I think that's part of the challenge of quality, that it can get stuck on the wrong quality items. My first trip to Vulcanus, I for some reason got it into my head to do quality research packs because space logistics felt expensive. And you absolutely could design a system that would work, but mine didn't. That's OK though.

[AileTheAlien]

I think that's part of the challenge of quality, that it can get stuck on the wrong quality items. My first trip to Vulcanus, I for some reason got it into my head to do quality research packs because space logistics felt expensive. And you absolutely could design a system that would work, but mine didn't. That's OK though.

The "system that works" is to have 100% of the same quality ingredients, and then zero quality modules in every assembler that uses them. You're duplicating your assembly lines for each quality level. Or you have splitters with quality filters set, and you've got 3, 4 or 5 belts coming out of each line of assemblers. You're multiplying your factory size (or belt spaghetti) by 3, 4 or 5, depending on what levels you've unlocked, for 30% or 60%, 90% or 150% bonus. The juice isn't worth the squeeze.

EDIT:
Actually, a quippier way of thinking of this, is that for a boost that's vertical scaling (better factories), you've got a lot of horizontal scaling to do (more factories, more trains or belts). So...why not just scale horizontally in the first place? IMO quality's only good for a few things, like turret range or power armor grid size.

[Tinyboss]

Everybody understands that filtering these out for specific use is generally desired, but you shouldn't be forced to sift every line and wagon and inventory item so it doesn't screw you up.

I think frustration is leading people to severely exaggerate how difficult this is to deal with. I'm quoting you because you're the most recent but you are not the only one.

There is ZERO need to sift every line and wagon and inventory. Only the ones coming out of assembler lines where you have used quality modules. If you add quality modules to a line, you add ONE splitter to filter quality items out of that ONE line, and you're done.

I get that people won't know right away to do this. I didn't, and I got a lockup. But it really doesn't take long for that to happen if you don't filter. It's not like you have a megabase to fix when your first lockup happens.

You scratch your head and find the inserter that isn't pulling iron plates even though there's a full belt. Then you notice that every one it can reach is uncommon or rare, and you figure it out. You filter that line, suck the items off the belt, problem solved.

You might have it happen elsewhere a few more times, but now you know what's up and it takes 30 seconds to fix it so it never happens again to that line.

If you just add quality to iron ore, copper ore, and plastic, you'll be able to make a huge variety of quality items on a one-off basis, like weapons, armor, and equipment. That's a very, very simple thing to do and very effective.

[Stargateur]

basically late game there is two quality, normal and legendary, you filter every items that have a bit of quality to a second factory that will refine everything to legendary. I like quality for what it's offer, I don't like how we must do it for now. Specially a recycler shouldn't be the way to get better quality item.

[Linsanga]

A recycler is the way to get higher quality items, and that's by design and working perfectly IMO. The problem is not how to get quality, but how to get rid of quality. E.g. 1/5 of your ore belt is quality ore that you've been filtering off, but you don't need any more quality ore for now. What do you do? You could remove all the quality modules from your miners, but that's annoying to manually undo and redo every time you do or don't need quality. You could set up a large recycler line to delete 1/5 of your ore, but that feels unsatisfying. Quality is supposed to be better, why does it feel like it's trash that's harder to get rid of?

If you add quality modules to a line, you add ONE splitter to filter quality items out of that ONE line, and you're done.

The point of this thread is that you're not done once you do that. Your splitter that filters the quality out, where does it go? Is it storing the quality items in a chest so you can craft equipment with it later? Is it leading to an assembler with more quality modules, to craft epic labs, and then putting those into a chest? Eventually wherever it is leading fills up, and then your normal production pathway grinds to a halt, because the splitter is clogged with quality items and isn't letting normal items through anymore.

Currently, the only real solution to this is to use the recycler, not to loop items into higher quality, but to delete the quality items. Which, as I said above, feels bad to have the new quality items be worse than normal items and a chore to get rid of. Putting work into getting quality items feels like a challenge that you're rewarded for. Putting work into deleting quality items feels like you're being punished for using the new quality mechanic.

And just pitching my preferred solution again: I believe an inline belt quality-removing building is a better and simpler solution to this problem than having assemblers accept mixed quality.

[Linsanga]

A significant amount of my time spent interacting with quality on my first playthrough is figuring out how to get rid of it, which I don't think is the intended experience. I am learning that I need to have a plan for deleting quality everywhere I make quality, so my next playthrough should be smoother, but some of the lessons I'll be taking into the next playthrough are probably not good ones from a game design standpoint. E.g. don't interact with quality early, dealing with quality before recyclers is not worth it. Don't organically put quality modules on normal production lines to filter off some fun early quality items, wait until I can set up dedicated quality producers that are isolated from normal production.

In my first playthrough I put quality modules on various early-game production lines and on miners, but I don't think I'll be doing that again unless we get a way to reincorporate excess quality items into the main production lines.

[dzikakulka]

Everybody understands that filtering these out for specific use is generally desired, but you shouldn't be forced to sift every line and wagon and inventory item so it doesn't screw you up.

I think frustration is leading people to severely exaggerate how difficult this is to deal with. I'm quoting you because you're the most recent but you are not the only one.

There is ZERO need to sift every line and wagon and inventory. Only the ones coming out of assembler lines where you have used quality modules. If you add quality modules to a line, you add ONE splitter to filter quality items out of that ONE line, and you're done.

I get that people won't know right away to do this. I didn't, and I got a lockup. But it really doesn't take long for that to happen if you don't filter. It's not like you have a megabase to fix when your first lockup happens.

You scratch your head and find the inserter that isn't pulling iron plates even though there's a full belt. Then you notice that every one it can reach is uncommon or rare, and you figure it out. You filter that line, suck the items off the belt, problem solved.

You might have it happen elsewhere a few more times, but now you know what's up and it takes 30 seconds to fix it so it never happens again to that line.

If you just add quality to iron ore, copper ore, and plastic, you'll be able to make a huge variety of quality items on a one-off basis, like weapons, armor, and equipment. That's a very, very simple thing to do and very effective.

You add one filter splitter, presumably to a chest, and then babysit it so it doesn't overflow. If it overflows, or you realize that you need it some time after adding quality modules, your many many lines are already contaminated. Either way if you don't have very specific prior knowledge, that IMO makes no intuitive sense, you will have to sift your lines and wait for undergrounds to clear MANUALLY. That is the biggest gripe. Just don't make a system that is SO EASY to screw up.

Make assemblers recipes take any quality input and round it down by default, and keep the current one as an option - there's already UI for that, the quality combo on the bottom of every quality-affected machine.

[Tinyboss]

You add one filter splitter, presumably to a chest, and then babysit it so it doesn't overflow. If it overflows, or you realize that you need it some time after adding quality modules, your many many lines are already contaminated.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. A filter splitter cannot overflow, only clog. Your line will never be contaminated, it will just stop until you add another chest for quality items or empty the full one.

And it takes a LONG time in the early game to fill up a chest. This problem is being greatly overstated.

[AileTheAlien]

I believe an inline belt quality-removing building is a better and simpler solution to this problem than having assemblers accept mixed quality.

I'd be OK with this, if the probability of getting different quality items was a bell-curve instead of an exponential decay thing. Or maybe even just a flat probability roll across all the different tiers. But as-is, you've got several down-binners on the output of any given assembly line, just to have one belt (or train) that takes a lot of normal quality, and one belt that takes the highest quality that you can produce. The down-binning mod lets you choose what level of qualities to down-shift (for example, keep epic and lower), but I don't see why I'd ever want to fiddle with that, and not just keep the highest level. Like, now I'm just building 4 copies of my assembly lines instead of 5? This is still treating higher-quality things as waste products, which isn't good.

I think it's worth listing what features the quality system should and shouldn't have, from what I remember in the dev blogs, and other people in this thread:

• You can add it to your factory gradually or not at all.
• You heavily invest in quality if you want to.
• Quality is randomly upgraded if you have modules.
• Quality is guaranteed if you don't have modules.
• Quality can't be too easy to upgrade.
• You should want to upgrade lower-quality items, not dispose of them like waste.
• Lower-quality items shouldn't balloon your factory with many copies of other assembly lines.

If building accepting mixed qualities is too easy because you don't need to change your assembly line enough, maybe a different building that only upgrades quality would work? (I mean, you still need to add quality modules, but apparently that's not a good enough trade-off. ) Like, maybe we've got a "cherry-picker" (a purple assembler) whose only job is to try and re-roll the quality on any items inserted into it? It could just use the normal recipe's craft-time, but it takes a batch of 10 items at once. After re-rolling the probabilities to see how many items would come out a higher quality, it then makes that many items a lower quality. If an item jumped more than one level upwards, an item would need to jump more than one downwards to compensate. This would still give you an output stream to deal with, but it would also feel like cherry-picking parts in real life, which I think is nice. (Like, imagine Aging Wheels buying four copies of a car, and scavenging parts off of them. One ends up in drivable condition, and the other three... )

[BlueTemplar]

Quality is essentially unusable at the point it is unlocked IMO.

In order to use it in any meaningful way, you need a way to collect increased quality plates as well as the intermediate products.
[...]

Why unusable ? Other solutions aside, nobody forces you to use it on intermediates.

I feel that this kind of change would trivialize the quality mechanics and make it OP.
Even in ealy game, you would just end up putting quality module everywhere, keep only rare and have imediately a full mall of rare items, rare power amor, rare modules, etc.

Quality is very powerful, but has tradeoffs :
- either you extract a small percentage of your production lines to dedicated chains
- or you have to loose a lot of production through recycling.

Eh, Speed modules, Efficiency modules, and Productivity modules also exist. So there is still plenty of reason to not quality module everything.
Especially since speed modules don't play nice.
The point here is to make sure that quality modules do not make things harder than they need to be. They should be just as universally useful as the other three module types, and not just casually break any direct feed builds.

[...]
But it is of course true that no solution proposed here nor any strategy that's currently possible in-game can beat the strategy of "don't use quality modules" in terms of simplicity.
[...]

Everybody understands that filtering these out for specific use is generally desired, but you shouldn't be forced to sift every line and wagon and inventory item so it doesn't screw you up.

I think frustration is leading people to severely exaggerate how difficult this is to deal with. I'm quoting you because you're the most recent but you are not the only one.

There is ZERO need to sift every line and wagon and inventory. Only the ones coming out of assembler lines where you have used quality modules. If you add quality modules to a line, you add ONE splitter to filter quality items out of that ONE line, and you're done.

I get that people won't know right away to do this. I didn't, and I got a lockup. But it really doesn't take long for that to happen if you don't filter. It's not like you have a megabase to fix when your first lockup happens.

You scratch your head and find the inserter that isn't pulling iron plates even though there's a full belt. Then you notice that every one it can reach is uncommon or rare, and you figure it out. You filter that line, suck the items off the belt, problem solved.

You might have it happen elsewhere a few more times, but now you know what's up and it takes 30 seconds to fix it so it never happens again to that line.

If you just add quality to iron ore, copper ore, and plastic, you'll be able to make a huge variety of quality items on a one-off basis, like weapons, armor, and equipment. That's a very, very simple thing to do and very effective.

A significant amount of my time spent interacting with quality on my first playthrough is figuring out how to get rid of it, which I don't think is the intended experience. I am learning that I need to have a plan for deleting quality everywhere I make quality, so my next playthrough should be smoother, but some of the lessons I'll be taking into the next playthrough are probably not good ones from a game design standpoint. E.g. don't interact with quality early, dealing with quality before recyclers is not worth it. Don't organically put quality modules on normal production lines to filter off some fun early quality items, wait until I can set up dedicated quality producers that are isolated from normal production.

In my first playthrough I put quality modules on various early-game production lines and on miners, but I don't think I'll be doing that again unless we get a way to reincorporate excess quality items into the main production lines.

You add one filter splitter, presumably to a chest, and then babysit it so it doesn't overflow. If it overflows, or you realize that you need it some time after adding quality modules, your many many lines are already contaminated.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. A filter splitter cannot overflow, only clog. Your line will never be contaminated, it will just stop until you add another chest for quality items or empty the full one.

And it takes a LONG time in the early game to fill up a chest. This problem is being greatly overstated.

Yeah, and at which point you can greatly reduce the storage requirements by producing something else from the overflow. (And by then, recycler should be near.)

Overall, one of the issues with Quality seems to be that it's acting as a 'noobtrap'.

I suggest that it might be placed a bit too early in the tech tree : yes, it's much more expensive to research than the other modules, but it's only RG, and a much more complicated mechanic !
It should probably be pushed out to blue science (expensive blue science or not ??) - at which point the player might already have conbots to easily deal with the copy-pasting of assembly lines that might be required.
(Logibots are also blue science, but Requester / Active Provider / Buffer chests are early blue + space science.)

----

[...]
The "rocket parts" recipe is emblematic of the problem raised in this thread. With the way the system is currently designed you are punished for doing "bottom up" quality on Fulgora. I have quality modules in my miners and first-stage recyclers. This is nice because I get a bunch of high tier intermediates. But then I have all this "rare solid fuel" that has no use except for train fuel.
[...]

Yeah, note how the entities that work more with 'reals' than 'integers' like turrets' ammo or burners (including vehicles) don't have most of these issues.

See also :

Allow rocket silos to take a much wider variety of fuels to build rocket parts
Allow higher quality rocket fuel for rocket silo recipe
Allow us to make rocket parts with quality components OR give as a method to lower quality of resources

----

I'm this close to say quality ingredient don't make sense.

1/ productivity-quality exploit. During development there was an option for any quality recipe where a base rolled quality was lowest quality of provided ingredients. There was however exploit when using productivity modules: a machine could be fed normal quality ingredients that would "charge" the bonus crafting progress and when bonus progress was close to finishing a higher quality ingredients were given causing the bonus productivity to give an additional set of products of the higher quality.

This was fixed right ? The progress reset when you remove ingredient now.

It doesn't and it never did. You're probably confusing it with changing the recipe of an assembler ?
(Which at some point wouldn't even return you the ingredients to prevent productivity exploits !)

[...]

my ideal solution to this issue is that assemblers have 5 rows for input qualities. You wouldn't even select a quality in the recipe, it would just craft at whatever quality you throw in. An item won't craft unless all materials match, and then that quality will be crafted.

This seems like it would hide quality problems from the player. Like, if you're missing quality on red circuits but you have lots of quality greens, then your long line of assemblers making blue circuits would need to all be moused over, since they're holding all these extra ingredients. (But this is just theorizing; I haven't built a factory that uses quality for intermediate items. )

EDIT:
I forgot, that we need separate inputs for different qualities, since they can't stack. (And if they could, you'd have to "open" the stack like someone else pointed out.) But five different input boxes for different item qualities would be compatible with using different qualities on a single craft, which I still prefer.

Yeah, and outputs. (And maybe trash slots ??)
And including 5 rows of productivity progress bars.

I suggest that the currently used quality would be the only one that would show, but clicking on the progress and/or the productivity progress bar (or maybe even in-between them) would open up all 5 of them.
And somewhere near the bars you would see an icon if there are any other ingredients / outputs of different qualities.
(To not have to deal with the readability issues that we have with 'stashed' fluids.)

But overall, the overall suggestion of this thread might be either unworkable or overcomplicated, and I think that the one of the other thread is a better one :
Allow Quality Downgrade
(Maybe also just by using speed modules.)

EDIT : Almost forgot : Quality Downgrade + better tools to deal with quality :
Upgrade recipes with Upgrade Planner (Quality !)
Allow custom Upgrade Planners to generically upgrade Quality
Change recipe button ought to remember previous recipe

[dragon_gawain]

mmk, so, I've have now gotten to Aquilo and done all the non infinite techs, so I feel like my opinion on quality is a lot more informed. I also (before I got to Aquilo) built a large scale factory on Vulcanus that can do 600 quality SPM* of all science that can be done on land there (*: production needs were calculated as if the science was not being prod modded, but then I prod modded the science assemblers and increased the number of them that I had to deal with the speed loss. I'm using T2 common prod mods, so 600*1.24 = 744, it should be producing approximately 744 SPM).

I have 5 parallel factories, 1 for common, and then 4 duplicate factories for uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary. (I'm calling them duplicate factories because they are built the exact same, with the only differences being the quality inputs that they take).

Every single machine has quality modules (with the exception of the end science assemblers).
I built it to handle legendary originally, but it hasn't produced much legendary yet.

I'm still not sure if I've gotten all the recyclers I need in (I've yet to see it fully stabilize at over 700 SPM..), but I have seen it hit expected production numbers in individual dry runs, and with buffers, it's hit just under 1k SPM (edit: got an exact figure: it's going pretty steady at around 935 SPM. 200 rare labs running full time. I might actually be getting lab throttled here..), so it should have the juice to squeeze.



It was annoying to build for a few reasons:

• You can't easily change the quality input of an assembler
• You can't easily change the quality that a filter splitter is filtering out
• There were a number of intermediates that I forgot to put in recyclers for, so it had a lot of startup pains as I kept needing to check on my SPM (super grateful for the new SPM graph when you hover over the research bar!), then go to Vulcanus, see what was clogged, add a recycler, go back to doing other stuff, check back in later, etc. You know the loop.

Overall, it works pretty well, but a few things to note:

• Quality science is terrible. Every bit of math I have done tells me that using prod mods everywhere you can will produce more science at a lower cost than using quality modules. So there's no point in even making a quality science factory. (this is a big issue to me, but the discussion around it belong in a separate thread)
• In a similar vein, you waste a lot of resources due to recycling, so quality also has that issue - quality generally leads to resource loss (I'm actually pretty OK with this)

In terms of handling the whole quality separation thing, it really was not that bad. Sure it clogs, but I have it set to split off commons, then each of the quality levels one at a time. My recyclers are set up between those two phases - so they can recycle anything of quality higher than normal, and they recycle when the stuff of all quality backs up, which would clog up the normal line.

So, while its a pain and annoying to manage, I've since changed my opinion on this - I don't think we need a down binning system. I think what would be better would be to somehow encourage using quality only in bulk systems (i.e. buff quality science).

Quality machines are very meh to me. I don't see the use of them. The only stuff of quality that has value is: personal equipment, modules, beacons. That's it. The argument of using down binning to craft lower tier stuff is a good suggestion, but I think it hides the true problem of "we don't want to build 5 parallel factories", which yeah, I've done it large scale, it sucks.

I think a change in the quality system where you can input items of different quality levels into a machine and the quality of the output is based on the quality of ingredients would make more sense.

It would need to be structured such that the complexity and amount of the input determines the weight it has on the end product (i.e. something like a flying robot frame, which has a lot of intermediates and is a complicated item should have more weight then say, a copper plate). Same with number - a blue chip takes 20 greens and 2 reds. If I have 2 epic reds, 10 uncommon greens, and 10 common greens, the sheer quantity of greens would bring the end result to being closer to an uncommon than a rare, or even an epic.

I do think that the quality system needs more work (particularly, I want to see quality science actually be useful, that would frankly make me go from not liking the quality system to have a great time with it, even as is), but I no longer think down binning is the solution.

The only really annoying part was needing to duplicate and set recipes for the parallel factories of quality, and all the recyclers I forgot to put in. (and blue science, where I forgot to make any quality intermediates, and had to pull out some crazy spaghetti techniques).

Overall, I had fun designing a large scale factory using quality and dealing with all the challenges it provides! I just wish there was an actual benefit to it...

[SupplyDepoo]

I have 5 parallel factories, 1 for common, and then 4 duplicate factories for uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary. (I'm calling them duplicate factories because they are built the exact same, with the only differences being the quality inputs that they take).

Why would you duplicate the factories, instead of building a 25% sized factory for Uncommon, 6% for Rare, 2% for Epic, and 0.5% for Legendary? (assuming legendary quality module 3's)

I've not played Space Age yet but I'm trying to learn quality in the base game (plus elevated rails), and I just made a yellow science assembler to handle the excess because yellow science (utility science) uses almost all of the raw resources and intermediates (stone isn't used, need purple or black science for that). It seems to be working so far and the whole thing is only twenty or so machines and was super easy to build, using the logistic network for I/O). To be fair my main factory is an unoptimised spaghetti mess so I'm not dealing with huge quantities.

Also, that's just for Uncommon stuff. I'm still just stockpiling Rare until I verify that everything is working smoothly. Haven't even researched Epic and Legendary yet (or Recyclers, because quality recycling loops are kinda boring imo, I'll use them for spidertrons though). I think it's good that all of the quality tiers aren't unlocked at once because it gives the player some time to make mistakes and fixing them is easier with +2 qualities than +4.

I think a down-binner could be a good (automated) solution to the overflow problem for those who need it (not enough space to build extra chests, not using bots for example). Seems much simpler to implement and less error-prone than mixed quality recipes. An inattentive player is more likely to unintentionally lose quality items to mixing than by using a down-binner which is explicitly a quality-remover.

[dragon_gawain]

The uncommon/rare/epic/legendary are indeed 25% the size of the one for common quality.

And for red and green science, I even scaled down rare, epic, and legendary as well. (though by the time I got to rare, I was already at only 1 machine for everything...)

For the others, I didn't bother downscaling past uncommon because:
a) I had some nasty spaghetti that I didn't want to bother untangling
b) I've designed the same system over and over and over and over again already (I played Seablock, and my metal system went through many, many revisions, all the way up to version 5.3, and all the version 5's were extremely similar). So I didn't want to redesign.
c) the upper qualities past uncommon would be the same uncommon design, just with fewer machines, and I have all the machines and modules to spare, so I don't mind sinking the extra cost for simplifying the design process.

So I just need to design 2 things: common, and uncommon, then I duplicate the (massively downscaled compared to common) uncommon factory and swap out the recipes.

[Tinyboss]

The only stuff of quality that has value is: personal equipment, modules, beacons. That's it.

• Asteroid collectors have an additional arm for every quality level (and two more at legendary...I won't keep repeating this but the legendary bump is twice as much as the bump for other levels). The arms reach farther, and they can grab more chunks before pulling them back in.
• Cargo bays have a larger inventory.
• Solar panels generate *significantly* more power.
• Accumulators store *drastically* more energy, it's literally multiplied by the quality level, so rare stores 3x per accumulator, legendary 6x.
• Every crafting machine runs faster. Not only does that let you make a production line faster, it also gives you more options for matching production rates.
• Turrets have a longer range. That's especially valuable on Gleba where you can't stop a stomper with walls. You just have to kill them before they reach your buildings, and quality turrets get more shots in.
• Tesla turrets in particular get *much* better, because the chance for the lightning to fork to two targets when it jumps goes up a lot. This is extremely effective on Gleba, because the electricity can arc between different legs of the same stomper or strafer.
• Uncommon medium electric poles reach the other side of assemblers and other 3x3 buildings. Quality substations give you more room in each grid square. The number of them you need reduces quadratically, not linearly, with the wire reach.
• Quality inserters work significantly faster, which often makes the difference between needing one or two (when two is even an option).
• Drills and pumpjacks deplete their resources *much* more slowly for the same amount of output
• Nuclear reactors generate much more heat per reactor, which improves space efficiency.

Almost everything you use on space platforms makes a huge contribution, letting you do much more in the same space, or do the same in a much smaller space. You can have fewer solars, a fraction of the accumulators, fewer crushers and chemical plants, and fewer collectors. It's an incredible difference.

Many of the others aren't useful or convenient early, and that's okay. For example, I'm not going to bother crafting a few quality inserters and electric poles in the early game and carry both kinds around. But after getting Fulgora set up, for most items, uncommon is the new common (I have all I could ever want, don't even bother producing commons anymore), and a few stacks of rare is no problem for space platforms or important things I build relatively few of, like reactors and silos.

Respectfully, this just tells me that you haven't tried it out in very many places. Items that aren't worth messing with quality versions are the exception, not the rule.

[StansTheMan]

There is a machine in the game that can do mixed quality just fine.

The science lab. You could just feed your surplus quality item into additional science production chains specifically of that quality.
Surplus Steel plates might be harder to deal with, but you'd just need quality plastic and sulfur for blue research (both very easy to get in higher quantities and quantities because chem plant module slots.)

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[AssaultRaven]

• Nuclear reactors generate much more heat for the same fuel.

Is that so? The wiki describes their energy consumption as scaling directly to their increased power output.

[Tinyboss]

• Nuclear reactors generate much more heat for the same fuel.

Is that so? The wiki describes their energy consumption as scaling directly to their increased power output.

No, it's not true at all. It's more heat in the same space. I will fix that, thank you!