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I need quality items. But with the amount of options I have, I feel really lost. This is especially, because I know there's really just one or two ways to effectively create high-quality items. Everything else is just wasteful. This makes it quite frustrating for me, because I like the puzzle, but I also don't want to spend hours to calculate the best approach. (I really don't like the way how WUBE implemented qualities in this game. It is overwhelming, but feels pointless at the same time.)

Anyway, I've been at rare quality for a while and when I had to have rare items, I was just putting down the production for said item three times. In normal, uncommon and then rare quality. All end products (never intermediaries!) that did not have the quality I wanted were recycled. Now I'm at legendary, and I am being flooded with lower quality items and intermediaries, while also constantly being bottlenecked on higher quality items. I'm really not sure if my previous strategy of putting down five production lines per end product (one per quality) is still a feasible strategy.

I've read numerous times that production modules are better than quality modules, as well, but not really enough to understand when or why.

What is the best approach to craft legendary items and not get bottlenecked?

You should just recycle everything that isn't legendary. So whatever items you want should go into your system, and you should only get legendary out. More details (spoilers) below.

Here is what works best for me:

• Low Density Structures Recycle into Plastic (looped back into LDS), Steel, and Copper. Using the Foundry's Casting recipe means that you can use Liquid Iron/Copper (made from Lava, or any-quality of Ore off-Vulcanus). This works great for a lot of situations.
• Quality Scrap turns into lots of different Quality Intermediates.
• Asteroid Reprocessing recipes with Quality Modules. This outputs Iron Ore (Iron, or more Steel); Carbon/Sulfur (yielding Synthetic Coal --> Plastic for method #1), and lots of useless Oxide Asteroids.
• Quality Mining --> Quality Smelting --> Quality Intermediates works, but its a logistical nightmare if you don't deal with every level and every item type, overflows of chests, etc.... I have been trying to do some Train stuff to make it work, but it's painful.
• Quality Bacteria, if you hate yourself or something. I was never able to make this work reliably.

I don't know that there is a "Best Way" - hopefully somebody will contribute some Math?

No math needed.
And I think you're making it much too complicated.

***SPOILER AHEAD***

- Whatever item you want to make legendary, make them.
- If any of those are legendary, save them.
- Recycle everything else
- Sort recycled parts by quality, and make more of that item at each quantity.
- If any of those are legendary, save them.
- Recycle everything else.

- Put quality modules in all assemblers, electromagnetic plants, etc.

It's just a simple closed loop.


Here I'm making Legendary cargo bays. You can make almost any other Legendary item this same way.
This isn't a terribly difficult puzzle. But the brilliant thing about the game is, once you do this, then you have to figure out how to build enough of stuff in order to make it Legendary, and that extends the game for hundreds more hours, at least.

I see a bit of confusion here, if you don't mind my words :

CheeseMcBurger wrote: Sat May 10, 2025 11:07 pm I need quality items.
It is overwhelming, but feels pointless at the same time.)

This sounds like a paradox and maybe is a hint on how to resolve your questions, what do you need ? how can it feel pointless if you are getting what you need ? Do you have "arbitrary need" ? do you WANT quality ? and more importantly why ? because the way to upcycle are different if you want say mass production of substation or beacons or a full space ship and full armor , or you plan a megabase and you "need" almost everything in quality.

• 1)At least the way i understand it, if you want certain specific items like substation or beacons, it's easier to make dedicated loop for those items.

• 2)If you want a full spaceship or a full armor, you want a bit of many different material, but not in mass production, you don't really need recycler you can have a few % of your machines dedicated to this, or a specific small quality subfactory switching receipe that backs up when nothing's needed.

• 3)If you want most everything in high quality, you will probably use different methods that are only available/making sense with advanced infinite research in productivities area and try to have the raw ressources of high quality for fully legendary production lane.

CheeseMcBurger wrote: Sat May 10, 2025 11:07 pm I know there's really just one or two ways to effectively create high-quality items.
What is the best approach to craft legendary items and not get bottlenecked?

If there is really just one or two ways then why ask which is the best approach ? I think there are countless ways to effectively create high quality items. But they all have requirements / trade-off or are best suited to certain goals and situations.

Even in the little breakdown i mentionned there are different possibilities, i understand more the feeling of being lost than the 2 'paradox' i quoted. Some of the "efficient techniques" to me involve getting the asteroid in high quality, it's efficient because it's "infinite ressources" and doesn't require a lot of footprint/investement ressources for the parts ; compared to on-planet factories they are also easy to duplicate.

But spaceship cost UPS, compared Vulcanus lava, which can also be used to get infinite ressources, and with the addition of calcite potentially from space, stone too, and those provide easy way to get high quality materials if you use certain receipe recycling like low densisty structure or undergroud pipes. Though you may have a bottleneck by the landing pad if your science is already in the million per hour or so x).

Those methods are available for "very late game" "postgame" or "mid game" depending on the playstyle i would say. They correspond to different ways of approaching the 3) because i think that may be what you have identified as the one or two best ways to do.

But it's also possible to have "some machines" alongside your whole factory like 1 furnace out of 12 or the 17th when you really needed 16, with quality modules in it, reading a chest that take away the "lucky-quality-thing" you get from the rest of the factory ; and not working when the chest has a decent buffer of "rare" or "uncommon".

Then at the circuit level. If you get half a chest of iron plate copper plate steel and circuits , of "quality level 3" this way, you are able to make certain item from "quality material" ,to be sure to have them, like the personnal armor or weapons or other things that are not produced in high enough quantity to hope to get them if not from material already "quality".

It's "efficient" because there is no recycling involved, and you get access to "what you need" "when you need". It can "evolve" during a game if you add some recycler loop for certain item, It's a bit up to each players i'd say to choose where to invest, i know many players goes for the exoskeletons as the first item for which they use recycler loop, often manually or bot fed, as a side production in their factory. I know others don't because they use a lot more remote view. If you start by recycling 1 item like exoskeletons, and you already had some quality material from machine with modules but no recycler ( on nauvis), it can combine, you now get access to "lubricated engine" and "blue circuit" from your recycler loop for exos alongside the other quality material from furnace or EM plant to maybe start a dedicated line for thrusters or beacons, bot/manually fed. ( combining the (1) and (2) from previous answer).

Conclusion :

How to upcycle depend a lot on what you want to have and when, the mass production method are only available late game, they involve producing raw ressources at high quality. Some players consider the game as "finished" by then , others the game as "only starting". Thus it's hard to advise a particular setup without more information on "what do you need ?" and "when ?". Hopefully i provided explanations on the second part for why i think it's important to answer those question before thinking of the actual design, beause there are options to choose from that would work to different degree. I think having an idea of the different ways that exist allow to plan better the strategy over the course of a full game, to only focus on quality when necessary without over investement or postponing it forever, but it's a delicate balance to anticipate our own needs during a game and choose the design that match best.

CheeseMcBurger wrote: Sat May 10, 2025 11:07 pm I've read numerous times that production modules are better than quality modules, as well, but not really enough to understand when or why.

I don't think it's true that they're unconditionally better in all cases. There is some detailed math on the wiki on the best division of productivity and quality modules.

As to the reason why, though, consider the two possible options:

Producer with quality modules - low quality to recycler - low quality circles back to the producer
Producer with productivity modules - input to recycler - low quality circles back to the producer

The second will send more items to the recycler to get quality rolls. The first will get quality rolls at the producer, then send fewer items to the recycler. The former can be more efficient at producing quality items than the latter, depending on the level and quantity of the respective modules.

eugenekay wrote: Sun May 11, 2025 12:30 am Here is what works best for me:
Asteroid Reprocessing recipes with Quality Modules. This outputs Iron Ore (Iron, or more Steel); Carbon/Sulfur (yielding Synthetic Coal --> Plastic for method #1), and lots of useless Oxide Asteroids.

One hack I found out is that if you make quality plastic, you can aslo make quality structures. If you make them in fully prod mod foundry and then run it through recycler, you'll get quite a lot of legendary copper.

mrkev wrote: Wed May 14, 2025 11:33 pm One hack I found out is that if you make quality plastic, you can aslo make quality structures. If you make them in fully prod mod foundry and then run it through recycler, you'll get quite a lot of legendary copper.

And a smaller (but still nonzero) amount of legendary steel.

Get your LDS productivity tech up enough, and you'll get 100% of your seed plastic back when you recycle.

Mr Wednesday wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 3:37 am

mrkev wrote: Wed May 14, 2025 11:33 pm One hack I found out is that if you make quality plastic, you can aslo make quality structures. If you make them in fully prod mod foundry and then run it through recycler, you'll get quite a lot of legendary copper.

And a smaller (but still nonzero) amount of legendary steel.

Get your LDS productivity tech up enough, and you'll get 100% of your seed plastic back when you recycle.

You don't really need steel nor excess plastics, if you are making your stuff from asteroids. Because you have too much of it anyway. The point was, that production from asteroids is inherently unbalanced, because when you crush metallic asteroids, you will always get 5:2 of Iron ore vs copper ore. If you want to produce something that is copper heavy (all the circuits, heat exchangers, turbines, heating towers), you'll either have to get rid of the excess iron ore or produce more extremely iron intensive things (steel chest, motors). Using LDS production as a bypass for the copper production is a great way how to balance things out. If you need more iron - take it from the metallic asteroid crusher, if you need more copper - take it from the LDS recycler. Sure, you can use the plastic and steel and feed it back to the iron line, but you'll usually end up destroying most of it, when the iron line clogs up.

CheeseMcBurger wrote: Sat May 10, 2025 11:07 pm I need quality items. But with the amount of options I have, I feel really lost. This is especially, because I know there's really just one or two ways to effectively create high-quality items. Everything else is just wasteful. This makes it quite frustrating for me, because I like the puzzle, but I also don't want to spend hours to calculate the best approach. (I really don't like the way how WUBE implemented qualities in this game. It is overwhelming, but feels pointless at the same time.)

There Isn't just "one or two ways to effectively create high-quality items", there are many. The principles are only two or three, but the implementation can be extremely broad. Also, some really complicated builds can be more eficient, but it's up to you if the complexity is worth it.

There are four ways how to get quality item:

• Make it from quality materials
• Make it from low quality materials in a production building with quality modules
• Recycle it from an item of the same quality (where the item is one of the materials)
• Recycle it from an item of the lower quality, in a recycler with quality modules (depending on recyclability)

Every quality production is a combination of those four. Now, upcycling means, that you take the stuff you don't want and feed it back using recyclers. Which means more items, more rols, more quality items. How to do it? You pick an item you need (f.e. foundry) or a recyclable item that uses items you need (toolbelt for carbon fiber) and you make a loop.

Some general tips:

• The best places for upcycling are Space, Vulcanus, Fulgora and Gleba
  • Space - As was already mentioned, you can upcycle asteroids. Crushers take only two modules, but the reprocessing returns almost 80% of input. This will give you all the basic materials (Iron, copper, coal, plastic) for everything that can be build on Nauvis. Add LDS production to balance copper production.
  • Vulcanus - Making stuff from lava means unlimited resources. Acid neutralisation provides tone of cheap power. Vulcanus is great for making all the circuits, concrete and the production of tungsten carbide/plate is a must for legendary foundries, big drills and legendary fusion.
  • Fulgora - Great way how to make different quality of all kinds of stuff, but the mass production is hard to balance out. Putting quality modules in miners and scrap recyclers is somewhat pointless (in late game), because holmium is a liquid and quality holmium plates can't be produced from quality holmium ore.
  • Gleba - Has pretty much unlimited resources, but designing well working chain is hard. Gleba is great for the production of inserters (it's the only place where you can make quality stack inserters).
• You don't have to upcycle on Aquilo, because lithium plates can be made from imported quality holmium plates.
• If you can, use production buildings with more slots (Electromagnetic plant, Kryogenic plant)
• Best items for upcycling are:
  • Foundry - Crucial item on its own, also gives you a ton of tungsten carbide and refined concrete
  • Elecromagnetic plant - Crucial production plant, recycling it gives holmium plates, refined concrete, procesors and steel
  • Stock inserter - Recycle to get bulk inserters and carbon fibers
  • Toolbelt - One of the imtes you don't really need, but it's great way how to get huge quantity of carbon fiber
  • Bateries - Used in quality capacitors, can be produced in cryogenic plant, recycle to get balanced copper and iron plates
  • Stone furnace - Best way how to get quality stone, can be directly recycled
  • Capture bot rocket - Pretty much the only way how to get quality bioflux and crucial material for biolab
  • Atom bomb - It's a bit weird, but if you wanna make quality biolabs (which can't be upcycled), you need a ton of quality enriched uranium and this is the way how to make it
  • Productivity module - You'll need a lot of them, but it's also the best way how to make quality biter eggs
  • Overgrowth yumako soil - Can be used to make quality biter eggs and spoilage, but you have to have a huge production on Gleba, with wast excess of Yumako seeds
  • Railgun turret - Can be used for quantum procesors, but those can also be produced directly from quality resources

mrkev wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 2:07 pm [*] Best items for upcycling are:
[*] Stone furnace - Best way how to get quality stone, can be directly recycled

You can get quality stone with legendary calcite from space in Vulcanus, it's infinite source of it.

Best items for upcycling are also those where you can get the 400% productivity cap.

Low density structure in particular.

mmmPI wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 2:44 pm

mrkev wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 2:07 pm [*] Best items for upcycling are:
[*] Stone furnace - Best way how to get quality stone, can be directly recycled

You can get quality stone with legendary calcite from space in Vulcanus, it's infinite source of it.

Best items for upcycling are also those where you can get the 400% productivity cap.

Low density structure in particular.

Sure, that also works. On the other hand, I prefer to reprocess all oxide asteroids into metallic or carbon ones. If you use quality modules in stone miners before the furnace upcycler, you'll get almost infinite source of stone too. Since refined concrete is pretty much a waste product from holmium plates (electromagnetic plant upcycling) and tungsten carbide (foundry upcycling) production and since you can recycle it down to the stone brick, the only item where you'd need actual stone is the furnace - mainly as a material for legendary heating tower.

LDS is the only recyclable item that can reach the 400% productivity cap with research (meaning you can have quality modules and still get insanely high productivity). But I don't think that upcycling it makes much sense. Because it's best to make it in a foundry, which is using two liquids and output quality is dictated by the quality of plastic. It's great for boosting the quality copper production once you have the high quality plastic, but not for upcycling, as you'd end up with a ton of unused lower quality copper and steel plates.

mrkev wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 3:54 pm Sure, that also works.

That's a true infinite source of stone though, so for me it is the "best way" or "best at ressource efficiency" to get quality stone, but i can understand you value things differently and that in your opinion there is another thing that is "the best". It would probably help communication if you were to precise "best at what purpose" ( maybe different stage of the game or different planet ? )

mrkev wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 3:54 pm LDS is the only recyclable item that can reach the 400% productivity cap with research (meaning you can have quality modules and still get insanely high productivity).

No processing units too, if you have EM plant in Vulcanus, the sulfuric acid is free there.

mrkev wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 3:54 pm But I don't think that upcycling it makes much sense. Because it's best to make it in a foundry, which is using two liquids and output quality is dictated by the quality of plastic. It's great for boosting the quality copper production once you have the high quality plastic, but not for upcycling, as you'd end up with a ton of unused lower quality copper and steel plates.

When you say it's best i suppose you mean "ressource efficient" ? or "require less machine " ? or maybe easier to setup ? or your personnal preference ?

I was indeed refering to making LDS in foundries , with the 400% bonus, which allows to upcycle plastic for free. ( and you get quality copper and steel too, but you can just drop them into lava if you don't want them). That's one of the late game method i mentionned earlier

mmmPI wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 5:29 pm That's a true infinite source of stone though, so for me it is the "best way" or "best at ressource efficiency" to get quality stone, but i can understand you value things differently and that in your opinion there is another thing that is "the best". It would probably help communication if you were to precise "best at what purpose" ( maybe different stage of the game or different planet ? )

It's IMHO the best way, because it's easy to setup, efficient, you don't need aditional stuff that isn't used anywhere else (legendary calcite is pretty much useless, outside of stone production) and it's directly producing that one item you need it for (furnace - for boilers that are used for legendary heating towers).
Your way is definietly the best if you have an excessive need for legendary concrete, because you can make it in another foundry, using the molten iron. But as I've said, I'm mostly using the refined concrete from other upcycling.

mmmPI wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 5:29 pm No processing units too, if you have EM plant in Vulcanus, the sulfuric acid is free there.

True, I've missed that one.

mmmPI wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 5:29 pm When you say it's best i suppose you mean "ressource efficient" ? or "require less machine " ? or maybe easier to setup ? or your personnal preference ?

I was indeed refering to making LDS in foundries , with the 400% bonus, which allows to upcycle plastic for free. ( and you get quality copper and steel too, but you can just drop them into lava if you don't want them). That's one of the late game method i mentionned earlier

For me, it's a combination of several things, mainly how does it fit with the other production, amount of waste and logistics. Upcycling LDS means that you have a ton of waste, that you can't effectively use (sure, you can dump it into the lava, but it's still a waste). What you get at the end is plastic, a ton of copper and some steel. This means you are missing iron and you'll have to make it elsewhere. It doesn't really fit with the other production, because you don't have use for the copper alone. Items that benefit the most from quality are all the production plants (assembly, foundry, electromagnetic plant, chem plant, refinery, etc.), circuits, modules, beacons and el. distribution. They all need iron plates (or higher products). Most items that are great for iron will give you some copper anyway (for example processing units you've mentioned). So it's IMHO better to upcycle processing units and if you need more copper, just recycle few of them and use LDS to get copper from legendary plastic.

If you make quality stuff from asteroids and you have fully researched LDS productivity, you'll have to dump the excessive plastic too. Making LDS upcycler in space is not trivial and without lava, you'll loose its main advantage (lava is free on Vulcanus). Yet transporting copper from Vulcanus to space is another logicstic you wouldn't really need, if you'd make it all in space. Having the main market in space is also advantageous, because you can supply all planets with stuff and you don't have to move it from one planet to another.

mrkev wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 7:04 pm It's IMHO the best way, because it's easy to setup, efficient,

This is why the term "the best" makes no sense used here to me, because it boils down to personnal preference, it's not "the best way" it's the one you do.

If you define efficency with cost in ressources, calcite from asteroid and lava are infinite so they win, they are more efficient than the method you describe.

For me, the best is the simplest. I'll just do a version of the image I posted above for each item I want Legendary, and forget it.

I can't imagine dealing with all of the complexity y'all are describing in dealing with all the different qualities of the different individual components. No, thank you!

NineNine wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 7:55 pm For me, the best is the simplest. I'll just do a version of the image I posted above for each item I want Legendary, and forget it.

I can't imagine dealing with all of the complexity y'all are describing in dealing with all the different qualities of the different individual components. No, thank you!

The simplest for me is to upcycle only the raw ressources, and then have legendary chain of production instead of having to deal with every intermediate of every quality. But it's when doing this that i realized it's not the most efficient in terms of player time if you want to only get a few products. So it depends on the game now what i do, it's a lot of planning, and when playing well it's not 100% of time that the plan is followed x)

mmmPI wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 7:43 pm

mrkev wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 7:04 pm It's IMHO the best way, because it's easy to setup, efficient,

This is why the term "the best" makes no sense used here to me, because it boils down to personnal preference, it's not "the best way" it's the one you do.

If you define efficency with cost in ressources, calcite from asteroid and lava are infinite so they win, they are more efficient than the method you describe.

No. It's not about personal preference, it's about all the stuff mentioned in my post - which is mostly objective.

And no, that's not how you define efficiency, efficiency is about the otput cost vs the overall input cost. Sure, lava is pretty much free, but you also need that legendary calcit. Where you get that? Probably by upcycling asteroids. So you need to have that whole setup, before you make any stone. Upcycling asteroid with normal crushers is pretty space demanding and you won't get that many of them on the output. The real price of that single legendary oxid asteroid is huge, because it can be reprocessed into metallic or carbon asteroid, which could give you few hundereds of legendary copper and something like 30-200 legendary iron ore (depending on the research levels and production modules).

If you'd really want to be efficient, you'd combine both methods. Use quality modules on several foundries where you're making molten iron or copper from lava (sacrificing about 20% of their speed), divert all the stone that is above normal quality and then upcycle it by making furnaces.

mrkev wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 10:04 pm

mmmPI wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 7:43 pm

mrkev wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 7:04 pm It's IMHO the best way, because it's easy to setup, efficient,

This is why the term "the best" makes no sense used here to me, because it boils down to personnal preference, it's not "the best way" it's the one you do.

If you define efficency with cost in ressources, calcite from asteroid and lava are infinite so they win, they are more efficient than the method you describe.

No. It's not about personal preference, it's about all the stuff mentioned in my post - which is mostly objective.

And no, that's not how you define efficiency, efficiency is about the otput cost vs the overall input cost.

That "input cost" could mean all sorts of things. Efficiency could be maximum number of quality units per time, per amount of input material, per space used, per amount of time building the system, etc. I personally don't care about raw materials. All raw materials are unlimited. Space is also unlimited. Time, I don't care about too much, as long as I can get enough as I need it. To me "input cost" means the amount of time I have to spend messing with systems to give me the Legendary items I want. But, this is a sandbox game, so if you want to strive for "efficiency", whatever that means to you, then go for it.

So, in this case, mmmPl is right... there's no objective "best" way to do it for everybody, unless you have other self-applied constraints (ie: fewest raw materials used, fastest production, etc.).

mrkev wrote: Thu May 15, 2025 10:04 pm No. It's not about personal preference, it's about all the stuff mentioned in my post - which is mostly objective.

And no, that's not how you define efficiency, efficiency is about the otput cost vs the overall input cost.

You can define efficiency this way, again it's your personnal preference, you seem to have hard time realizing this.

You can either consider you take into account the initial cost of upcycling the asteroid, or not, it's personnal preference, if you start a new game most likely you count in efficiency the cost of the initial space platform, but OP mentionned being late game, if you already have the space platform that upcycle asteroid setup, and you are wondering if you can somehow use your output better, then you count efficiency differently.