Have excess quality act like a durability bonus

[spacedog]

There are several threads talking about ways to deal with excess quality materials:

Ability to craft lower quality with higher quality
Allow Quality Downgrade
Output more fluid when using higher quality recipes (i.e. for Holmium Solution)

I was thinking about what if the solution to all of this is simply to "downgrade" ingredients right when they are input to crafting machines, but also impart a bonus from the excess quality. It's similar to how labs will accept any quality of science pack, where quality science packs just have more "durability".

The idea is that higher quality ingredients just get instantly turned into the expected quality upon insertion (lower than expected quality are still ignored). However, the net quantity of items inserted into the machine would be multiplied by some factor based on the quality difference, so the quality behaves kind of like the durability on science packs. To avoid fractions complicating things, I'd go with a super simple formula like this:

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ItemsNet = ItemsInserted * ((QualityInserted - QualityExpected) + 1)

Here are a few tables to help visualize the effect better, for various qualities (noting that legendary quality is actually 2 tiers above epic):

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Recipe quality is common, 2 items inserted:

Inserted Quality   Bonus   Net Items in Input Buffer
----------------   -----   -------------------------
     Common         1x                 2
    Uncommon        2x                 4
      Rare          3x                 6
      Epic          4x                 8
    Legendary       6x                12

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Recipe quality is rare, 3 items inserted:

Inserted Quality   Bonus   Net Items in Input Buffer
----------------   -----   -------------------------
     Common         N/A        Nothing inserted
    Uncommon        N/A        Nothing inserted
      Rare          1x                 3
      Epic          2x                 6
    Legendary       4x                12

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Recipe quality is epic, 1 item inserted:

Inserted Quality   Bonus   Net Items in Input Buffer
----------------   -----   -------------------------
     Common         N/A        Nothing inserted
    Uncommon        N/A        Nothing inserted
      Rare          N/A        Nothing inserted
      Epic          1x                 1
    Legendary       3x                 3

That first table might seem like a big bonus, but remember that higher qualities are pretty rare. Here's a table showing the aggregate impact over 1000 items produced with a 24.8% quality bonus:

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 Quality      Count     With Bonus  
---------   ---------   ----------
 Common      752.000      752.000
Uncommon     223.200      446.400
  Rare        22.320       66.960
  Epic         2.232        8.928
Legendary      0.248        1.488

TOTAL       1000.000     1275.776

So overall it's a 27.5% bonus. That means quality items would impart a kind of watered-down productivity bonus if you choose to "waste" higher quality ingredients in lower quality recipes.

For example, let's say you are producing common quality green circuits. You're always feeding common quality copper wire into the assembler, but the iron plates are always uncommon quality. Each time an uncommon iron plate is inserted into the machine, two common iron plates show up in the input buffer. So instead of 1 iron plate per 3 copper wire, you'd only need 1 iron plate per 6 copper wire. Basically the higher quality ingredient "goes farther" than the lower quality ones do. But the end result is still the same exact number of green circuits, because it doesn't affect the actual output rate of the crafting machine.

Another example would be producing holmium solution. If you insert 10 uncommon holmium ore into the chemical plant, 20 common holmium ore show up in the input buffer. This in turn results in more holmium solution being produced, so you're actually getting something out of the higher quality ore. Per the table above, if you use all qualities of holmium ore your recyclers produce, this would result in about a 27.5% overall bonus, which doesn't seem overpowered.

This really nice things about this approach are:

• It doesn't require a separate "downgrading" step (so you don't need extra machines and all the downsides that go along with that)
• It doesn't just "waste" the higher quality items (you at least get something extra out of it)
• It doesn't require any complex quality averaging in the crafting machines
• It doesn't require multiple input buffers for different qualities in the crafting machines
• It doesn't require keeping track of extra fractional inputs/outputs/productivity in the crafting machines
• It allows different qualities to be inserted into a crafting machine asynchronously
• I would have to assume it's relatively trivial to implement in the game code