The unclogging thing is a logistical concern, not a material concern. The quantities that need to be destroyed are so small compared to the total output that worrying about them is pointless. They make an impact by forcing you to design for them, not by denting your budget.h.q.droid wrote: Thu Sep 04, 2025 2:58 am Has it occurred to you that this is a VERY NEGATIVE feedback loop? With vanilla upcycling unclogging means you need to destroy some of the high quality stuff you spent a lot of effort making.
You don’t need a large base to get a few quality machines, you need a large base to get a lot of quality machines. I mean, uncommon really isn’t too hard to produce in bulk once your quality production has been upgraded a bit, and its impact shouldn’t be underestimated. It nearly doubles the throughput of beaconed builds, and also modestly increases their output at each step. With that it should be easier to meet the requirements of feeding rare production, and so on. Of course producing every tier is still harder than the last, but like, that’s the whole point.And if you need a large base to get a few quality assembly machines, the results won't even fit in your base or produce any positive feeling by that point. The way quality items work against belts and inserters make long quality chains decisively unfun.
You know, you make a very good point about bots. Asteroids are entirely bot-resistant due to being in space, that is something important in their favor. I’ll have to think about this more.Besides, recycling lines are like the worst method for traditional quality. It's almost always better to recycle into a container like what sane people do in Fulgora. The optimal solution to vanilla upcycling is just building a big dumb bot base and enough yellow chests for byproducts of a life time. Maybe a few rocket silos for blue undergrounds. Why bother with clogging belts without speed modules? Unclogging belts only become a problem with asteroid cycling.
Well, it has to need some kind of scaling. Scaling is a really important element of Factorio, everything needs scaling. And obviously, if you have no quality items yet because you’re only beginning to engage with the mechanic, then you have no means of applying vertical scaling and can only do it horizontally. But once you have started, of course quality can benefit from its own vertical scaling. You only need to go horizontal to the start, the longer quality runs the more it can vertically scale itself. Besides, Factorio isn’t a strategy game that makes you choose between a horizontal and vertical “build”. Even with quality, you will aways be going both horizontal and vertical. And since when is there anything wrong with horizontal scaling anyway? In 1.1 it was pretty much all we had, and it was great. Quality wasn’t added to replace horizontal scaling with vertical because horizontal was flawed, it just added vertical in order to add more to the game. But everything that was there previously is still there and still good.The core of quality is vertical scaling, i.e., do more with less buildings. It shouldn't need any horizontal scaling.
I really don’t see the issue with stack inserters. Personally I only use them for common and uncommon items, the rest are simply too low throughput for it to even be worthwhile. Besides, if you have a sidegrade that’s explicitly bad at one thing, why try to use it for that thing?If you prefer vanilla upcycling to asteroid shuffling, the right suggestion is to remove the quality penalty of speed modules or making stack inserters less stupid.
And speed beacons would, unsurprisingly, make quality too fast. Everything would function the same, you would just need a lot less of it for the same output. Right now, if you want to maintain a certain quality % per upcycler, in order to scale it you need to either make more quality modules in the required quality, or increase the quality of the buildings in the upcycler. In both cases, quality items are required to scale quality, making it slower at the start but faster the longer you run it. However if beacons worked, you could use common beacons and speed modules to get the same effect that you currently need quality items for. And this would do nothing interesting, only flatly increase the throughput of every quality method at no meaningful cost.
If that was what you had in mind, and you think quality is too slow by default, then… I’m afraid that’s one thing that can’t be meaningfully argued about. You think it’s too slow, I think it’s ok, and there’s nothing either of us can say besides “it just feels that way to me”.
It's fine 
