Recycling+Quality is weird, why not an Inspection Machine

[DavidEscott]

I think the use of recyclers on Fulgora is an interesting gameplay mechanic (not my favorite, but certainly interesting). However recyclers have also become a back-door way to improve quality, and I don't like how that works at all. I'm watching Nilaus' videos where he does ridiculous things like recycle low density structures (made in a foundry) to make legendary copper plates in bulk from legendary coal and lava?!?! While it works and is a creative way to get around restrictions on crafting higher quality items, it feels very wrong; so much so that Nilaus describes it as an exploit.

At the core of this weird "exploit" is the use of recycling in a quality loop. The existence of the recycler to handle the bulk of unwanted ordinary items makes some sense, but the use of it in closed loops to repeatedly produce items with higher and higher quality just feels wrong.

I think the simplest solution is to introduce a "Quality Inspection/Rework" machine. Such a machine might behave similarly to the recycler in that it destroys the bulk of material that is fed into it, but it would output the same item fed in but with a quality bonus. One would have to go over the math to ensure that this is better than chaining production and recycling, but it would make a lot more sense to me to say that the machine looks through millions of items looking for the few that are of better quality to pass on.

[PureTilt]

why simplify decent system for no reason? going from craft > recycle > craft > recycle to recycle > recycle > recycle first has different ways of tackling the problem second is a just loop of 1 building with minimal infrastructure or interaction with the rest of the game

like i don't understand what you don't like besides one edge case interaction where main culprit is infinite productivity tech not quality or recyclers

[Nemoricus]

I think the use of recyclers on Fulgora is an interesting gameplay mechanic (not my favorite, but certainly interesting). However recyclers have also become a back-door way to improve quality [snip]

At the core of this weird "exploit" is the use of recycling in a quality loop. The existence of the recycler to handle the bulk of unwanted ordinary items makes some sense, but the use of it in closed loops to repeatedly produce items with higher and higher quality just feels wrong.

It's not a backdoor. It's a front and center feature of quality ever since its introduction in FFF #375. See the section on recyclers.

[CyberCider]

It's not a backdoor. It's a front and center feature of quality ever since its introduction in FFF #375. See the section on recyclers.

Yeah, lol. I mean, just look at this excerpt from the Fulgora fff:

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