Factorio Forums

Recycling machine perhaps?

A recycling machine would be interesting only for the more complex items, where maybe core processing units are involved. For other items i feel it would only add more items to deal with, and i'd rather burn those inserters than have to manage those two iron plates and copper wire i'd gather from their recycling.

In F-mod is item-destroyer

moved. there are soooo many threads about recycling...

This game needs two ways to deal with extra junk:

Recycling Machine - turn junk back into raw ores

Incinerator - turn junk into electricity

I understand the idea of a recycling system. It could give back some parts or iron/copper plates. Giving ores wouldn't make much sense.
Recycling should be handled balanced though, since we don't want that in combination with current productivity modules you could make iron/copper plates out of nowhere. (max return should propably be around 50%)

I am against the incinerater. That is already in the game and is called: "boiler".
Anything that burns can be put in there. Anyting that doesn't burn should not be placed in an incinerater.

Robbedem wrote:Anything that burns can be put in there. Anyting that doesn't burn should not be placed in an incinerater.

A good 50% of what is incinerated in industrial waste disposer are not useable as fuel but still burn and become more compact under fire. Typically, iron is perfectly combustible, but good luck to squeeze actual energy from an iron fire in a practical way.

I don't know what kind of iron you put in an incinerator, but iron doesn't burn*. Same for copper.
Perhaps you mean stuff that has iron in them? That is often burned and the iron that's left behind can easily be seperated for reuse with magnets.

It is true that a lot of things that don't burn very well are burned together with fuel. But for factorio that would only be stuff that has plastic and/or sulfur in them or in its components.

In the end it comes down to the same as recycling since the incinerator is only used to remove burnable stuff from the metals before recycling.
So I still believe that an incinerator wouldn't add anything compared to a recycling option.

*Iron can however rust and because it is an oxidation reaction it is sometimes reffered to as burning, but thats not what would happen in an incinerator.

Well, iron can burn (not in the rust sense, in the "produce a flame and heat" sense), as can most thing actually. It can even explode (which is somewhat more common than burning, since if you want an actual iron flame you will need iron powder or very thin sheet of metal, or a similar way to have a lot of surface between the iron and the air, which is also a good way to get an explosion). A waste disposal thing tend to both have a lot less output than one with actual fuel and to create a lot more pollution than a boiler. Also, it produce a lot more slag.

All that to say that a boiler is not equivalent to a waste disposal plant at all. Of course, why anyone would want to use a waste disposal plant is another question. Even if incinerating your old belts and stuff would compact them significantly, space is not scarce in Factorio, and having a "boiler" equivalent who do triple time the pollution don't seem too useful.

Iron can burn, it is just the opposite reaction of what happens in a furnace! Buildings constructed only out of steel can burn! (Needs to be really hot)
https://answers.yahoo.com/question/inde ... 807AA93V1N
Take some steel wool and hold a fire under it.

Ok, apparently iron can burn. But normally you don't want that to happen, not even in an incinerator because it is better to remove the iron out of the ashes for reuse.

This is how I reckon a disassembly machine would work.

1) choose base components that every item in the game may be crafted from

Let's say they are...

• gears
• iron plate
• steel plate
• copper plate
• plastic bar
• copper wires
• wood

I argue for these because it makes some sense to me that they are what would be left behind should you take a sledgehammer to the item.

2) traverse through the tree of intermediate products that are required to craft said item

Example: electric engine unit
3) if a node is on the list of base components, we record it and go back up to the previous branch and continue traversing the tree

For this example, the base components would be 4 iron plate, 1 steel plate, 1 iron gear wheel and 6 copper cable.

What fraction of these base components the machine outputs depends on what the developers consider balanced.

A lot of demand for the recycling machine:) We have talked about this couple of times and somehow in the current gameplay it does feel like a minor issue. As multiple people suggested you eighter get little waste or you are so advanced that you don't really care (just put the stuff in the chest and destroy it). That is my opinion as well. The game is built around automation and this just feels to have kind of limited usage.

It seems useful to reduce pollution. You already have modules to make things go faster, more productive and more efficient. In the same way it would be possible to have modules with scrubbers that reduce pollution at the cost of energy and recycling (at the cost of energy and fabrication speed) that give you waste as byproduct but near zero pollution. I'd expect a lot of waste from the research centers (they could visually burn their waste as default) so with recycling you would have to remove waste or your research and factory stops. Waste can be put into chests and destroyed but it can take a lot of room in a chest so it's not practical to do it manually or it can be sorted and recycled into new raw material (iron, copper, wood, oil) again at the cost of energy but with near zero pollution.

I always thought the game was also about resource management and it always bugged me that all that stuff that you put into the research center just disappears.