Factorio Forums

When you craft a Power Armor, you don't need the modular Armor any more. From its sprite it looks like you added something onto it instead of starting from scratch again.

So you should make heavy armor require light, power requires modular and Mk2 requires Mk1 armor. The only gap should be between heavy and modular armor.

Why?
This feels much more reasonable and you are producing less trash.
Even other (less reasonable) items require the previous version (e.g. Combat robots, all Mk2 Modules, most ammo, assembling machines, etc), so why not armor too?

This is on the list of commonly requested recycling options, along with stone furnaces, steel furnaces, burner inserters, burner mining drills, pistols, shotguns, wooden and iron chests, and wooden power poles. And other things I might have forgotten.

In the case of modular armor, this also has the slight complication of destroying all equipment inside a grid when the host item is consumed in a recipe. This could be resolved by "spilling" the equipment should it be destroyed, but its not something that occurs in vanilla.

In addition, the price involved in producing modular armor is tiny compared to the sheer amount of resources you produce. You only ever should have one, MAYBE two, but it isn't a big deal by the time you can also produce powered armor.

This is also true for the rest of them. Its more a psycological cost than a resource cost. The overall waste is tiny and negligible, but feels massive for some reason.
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In any case, Yes, I would approve of this, but no, I doubt it will happen.

Currently when armor goes into a recipe, all the armor modules get ground into dust and are never seen again. So rather than cause the heartache, they simply don't get used.

The main reasoning against changing the status quo is that none of the aforementioned useless items need to be mass produced. So the matter is rather trivial (and likely disappearing in stacks of wood)
On the other hand, armor modules (like roboports and batteries) wich are used in somewhat greater quantity depend on stacks of lower iteration.

For die hard fans of trash reduction this might be for you

It would certainly be neat to have a crafting chain from basic armor all the way to mk2. Overall, the module space inherent in the armor never decreases, it only increases. So it could theoretically work in the default game, the armor only gets better after all. It does seems like a pretty low priority feature to have, other than being neat.

If you really don't like wasting old equipment, there's always the handful of uncrafting mods.

Old armor is not always useless, I use it to “park” equipment, it needs just one slot for the armor.