Factorio Forums

Posted: **Sat Dec 28, 2024 7:02 pm**

Using only x molten iron as an input, how many legendary iron plates can you craft, using any combination of legendary buildings/modules? Obviously if you allow using copper, you can just put prod modules in EM plants and with +300% purple circuit productivity you can just upcycle purple circuits, which is boring.

Hint 1:

Consider all items that can be built in the foundry

Hint 2:

It's difficult to figure out the solution without using a solver

Solution:

Recipes: # of machines needed to consume 100 molten iron/s

Foundry Cast Iron Plate Normal P2 Q2: 1.7771
Foundry Cast Underground Pipe Uncommon P0 Q4: 0.0373
Foundry Cast Underground Pipe Rare P0 Q4: 0.0293
Foundry Cast Underground Pipe Epic P0 Q4: 0.0112
Foundry Cast Underground Pipe Legendary P0 Q4: 0.0057
Assembler Iron Gear Wheel Normal P4 Q0: 0.5487
Assembler Iron Gear Wheel Epic P4 Q0: 0.1298
Assembler Pipe Uncommon P0 Q4: 0.6246
Assembler Pipe Rare P0 Q4: 0.2093
Foundry Transport Belt Normal P0 Q4: 0.1715
Foundry Underground Transport Belt Normal P0 Q4: 0.0982

to get .312 legendary plates/s

Interpretation: The central mechanic is to abuse the free upcycling of liquids in the Cast Underground Pipe recipe; even legendary pipes are worth more to craft with than to recycle. However, you only craft pipes using uncommon or rare plates because the normal cast underground pipe recipe doesn't give you any advantage. Instead, to get better plates you want to use them in foundry crafts to get the 50% prod bonus, then recycle back down. First, you can freely convert normal plate to gears with prod modules, then craft transport belt, then craft underground transport belt which takes in more plates instead of fast transport belt which takes in more gears. Finally, if you have a epic plates then you don't want to craft epic pipe because you will "overshoot" on quality and lose too much to the recycler, so you just shuffle with epic iron gear wheel.

Posted: **Mon Dec 30, 2024 11:49 pm**

The foundry is the technicians delight.

Is it okay if I use tungsten carbide in a recipe to boost theoretical iron output? And how much lube?

?

Posted: **Tue Dec 31, 2024 6:15 am**

What is the goal here? Is it to figure out the best ways to abuse only the foundry's prod bonus? Or to get the most legendary plates per minute?

A single upcycled metallic asteroid chunk will net you (with full crusher prod bonuses) 120 legendary plates after smelting the ore. I'm pretty sure nothing comes anywhere close to beating that.

Posted: **Tue Dec 31, 2024 12:23 pm**

For now I'll say you're right, but I'm still very interested in the bonuses and as an exercise practicing with this stuff feels healthier than just building it (I work through iterative designs and keep iterations). Curious as to other thoughts though and this will take me a minute. Some clarification needed as to what buildings and other processes can be involved.

But I think it's worth pointing out why: You're right about crushing. Once you hit a full production modded work station with legendary components, I think that dominates whatever you can say. And at a thousand yards/without testing the 40% on asteroid rerolling is going to be better than the 25% on a recycler. Particularly since it isn't a flat forty and I can use the other stuff that comes out right?

Where a forge becomes worth mentioning is getting legendary stone as a part of the asteroid process.

Because you take a legendary calcite, get 25 stone * (1.5+4*prod mods)? But you have to void the resulting fluid and the only way to do that is by operating another forge or manual voiding. So this discussion can yield ways to turn a waste product into useful parts on iron (copper and steel are also viable choices of course).

The thing is that at a certain point, my tricks for getting more stuff won't use only forges. And I'll happily show but ah should I?

Posted: **Tue Dec 31, 2024 10:46 pm**

Okay, I understand then, if the point is to make use of a waste product.

I'm not convinced it's worth the extra effort, and there are automated ways to void fluids. But I can appreciate the challenge of a "zero waste" factory.

Posted: **Wed Jan 01, 2025 2:38 am**

You're good. That kind of needs to be in the room as it were.

I reread the Factorpedia and for iron it's 10 stone. For copper it's 15. So

I'm smart.

At the same time there's a lot more you can do with iron or steel. You can compact a line by using stack compression through iron or steel boxes and get quality applied to that step. I'm running Monte-Carlo sims using the map editor because... yeah, the math here is stuff that's rough. And I've yet to have a guy with a bachelors in math step up, so 10 hours at 64x speed it is.

The link to asteroid cycling gives a reasonable amount of fluid that you can apply scaling arguments to it if someone just spams buildings in the editor. So 10 stone also outputs 250*1.5 fluid. And or 250*2.5 fluid with max productivity applied. So that's 375 to 675 fluid for making iron that you'd have to consume. That gives us an X.

It's also kind of why I want some clarification because you can also put quality in assemblers.

So generate pipes from assemblers after recycling. And then you could use a 5 sort on five furnaces. You have a 50 iron fluid stream that's probably going to come out normal suddenly being used to make a lot more underground pipes.

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