Basic quality ingrediants from Vulcanus (Iron, Steel, Copper, Stone)
Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2025 3:57 pm
by Premu
I built a simple module which turns standard calcite into basic quality ingrediants: Iron plates, gears, bricks, steel, copper plates and copper wire. For each basic ingrediant I have one production chain with quality modules. It became quite a spaghetti mess, but it works:
In general the main export products will be transported to my train station until the buffer is full. If the buffer is full, they will be processed further into other ingrediants with additional quality modules just to be disassembled afterwards, again with quality. By that I reduce the wastage.
Copper is simple - turn liquid copper into copper plates, and turn copper plates into copper wires in EMPs, exploiting the juicy 50% productivity bonus. In this case I send both to the train as both are practical ingrediants in many receipts.
For stone bricks I use quality modules in the initial liquid copper/iron production. The raw stone will be turned into bricks in electrical furnaces. Qualyity stone gets its own furnaces as otherwise it might block the whole process. The bricks are - if not sent to the train - turned into walls which are directly disassembled, as I have no actual need for quality walls.
Steel is simple, too - I turn liquid iron into steel, and steel which I don't send to the train into steel chests which are directly disassembled to get back the steel, hopefully in higher quality.
For iron plates and gears I have a longer chain. I create iron plates, and turn some of them into gears. The gears and iron plates are turned into yellow belts. The yellow belts and iron plates are turned into yellow underground belts. The yellow underground belts and gears are turned into red underground belts. Every time applied with quality, and for each belt production I get the 50% productivity bonus from the foundries on top. If I'd ship in lubricant I could even add an additional step and turn the red underground belts into blue ones, but I left that out.
In the end all those pretty useless quality belts are disassembled, and the remaining quality plates and gears are sent to the train.
For each product it will only stop the whole production if all buffers are full. Otherwise it will continue running. It works basically completely free of any circuitry. The only little circuitry I added is just is a constant combinator disabling the processing of rare respective epic ingrediants based on two values, as I've not yet researched the epic and legendary quality levels, and any attempt to upgrade those would be wasted.
Here's the blueprint of the most intersting part, the iron processing:
Re: Basic quality ingrediants from Vulcanus (Iron, Steel, Copper, Stone)
Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2025 6:54 pm
by angramania
Premu wrote: Sat Apr 26, 2025 3:57 pm
Copper is simple - turn liquid copper into copper plates, and turn copper plates into copper wires in EMPs, exploiting the juicy 50% productivity bonus.
If you took a closer look at the recipes, you'd notice that your approach is simply wrong, and your 'juicy 50% productivity bonus' is actually a handicap.
Premu wrote: Sat Apr 26, 2025 3:57 pm
For iron plates and gears I have a longer chain. I create iron plates, and turn some of them into gears.
"Why, Mr. Anderson? Why, why? Why do you do it?"
Same, try to look closer at the recipes before invent bike with square wheels.
Re: Basic quality ingrediants from Vulcanus (Iron, Steel, Copper, Stone)
Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:12 pm
by Premu
How is using the productivity bonus a handycap?
For example for copper plates. With standard T3 quality modules in the foundry there's a 10% chance I get some quality plates. If I feed the non-quality plates into a recycler directly with quality modules, I get 0.25 plates output, again with a 10% chance, so 0.025 quality plates on average.
If I load the non-quality plates into an EMP to turn them into copper wire first, I have a 12.5% chance to get some quality copper wire. For one plate I get 3 copper wires thanks to the productivity bonus, so 0.375 quality wires on average. If I throw these into the disassembler, I'll get one eigth of the number of wires as plates. So in this case I'll get 0.046 quality plates on average - but this time with an additional change to get another quality upgrade, e.g. from uncommon to rare. That's higher than 0.025 even not counting the additional possible quality lift.
If I throw in a quality plate into an EMP which I don't intend to use because my buffer is overflowing, it's also just a save way to immediately get 50% more of it before trying to upcycle it - with a second chance to get the upgrade.
Quality can build up in long chains, just as productivity bonuses do.
Re: Basic quality ingrediants from Vulcanus (Iron, Steel, Copper, Stone)
Posted: Wed May 07, 2025 3:10 am
by h.q.droid
Premu wrote: Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:12 pm
How is using the productivity bonus a handycap?
For example for copper plates. With standard T3 quality modules in the foundry there's a 10% chance I get some quality plates. If I feed the non-quality plates into a recycler directly with quality modules, I get 0.25 plates output, again with a 10% chance, so 0.025 quality plates on average.
If I load the non-quality plates into an EMP to turn them into copper wire first, I have a 12.5% chance to get some quality copper wire. For one plate I get 3 copper wires thanks to the productivity bonus, so 0.375 quality wires on average. If I throw these into the disassembler, I'll get one eigth of the number of wires as plates. So in this case I'll get 0.046 quality plates on average - but this time with an additional change to get another quality upgrade, e.g. from uncommon to rare. That's higher than 0.025 even not counting the additional possible quality lift.
If I throw in a quality plate into an EMP which I don't intend to use because my buffer is overflowing, it's also just a save way to immediately get 50% more of it before trying to upcycle it - with a second chance to get the upgrade.
Quality can build up in long chains, just as productivity bonuses do.
Because in optimized chains, legendary copper plate is an overflowing byproduct needing active destruction. There is no point producing it in the first place.
The optimal path to legendary steel is recycling foundry LDS from legendary plastic / recycling green chips obtained from recycled legendary blue chips. You eventually get 300% productivity for them with research and even before that point, you still get the same yield with a much short chain. Both would produce a lot of excessive quality copper you can't use.
Re: Basic quality ingrediants from Vulcanus (Iron, Steel, Copper, Stone)
Posted: Wed May 07, 2025 3:51 am
by eugenekay
h.q.droid wrote: Wed May 07, 2025 3:10 amBecause in optimized chains, legendary copper plate is an overflowing byproduct needing active destruction. There is no point producing it in the first place.
The optimal path to legendary steel is recycling foundry LDS from legendary plastic / recycling green chips obtained from recycled legendary blue chips. You eventually get 300% productivity for them with research and even before that point, you still get the same yield with a much short chain. Both would produce a lot of excessive quality copper you can't use.
I disagree with the Spoiler-tagged approach to producing Legendary Steel / Copper as the primary method. It is absolutely useful for producing Copper in Bulk - but I think it is wasteful to produce / recycle all those Resource, just to throw it away after extracting the Steel.
I think that using an Assembler/Recycler chain like this to produce “stockpile” of materials by repeatedly doing Quality Assembler steps - not just the Intermediate juggles or Asteroid casino rolling - is a great idea. I am going to try to incorporate this technique in my next Vulcans buildout.
Re: Basic quality ingrediants from Vulcanus (Iron, Steel, Copper, Stone)
h.q.droid wrote: Wed May 07, 2025 3:10 amBecause in optimized chains, legendary copper plate is an overflowing byproduct needing active destruction. There is no point producing it in the first place.
The optimal path to legendary steel is recycling foundry LDS from legendary plastic / recycling green chips obtained from recycled legendary blue chips. You eventually get 300% productivity for them with research and even before that point, you still get the same yield with a much short chain. Both would produce a lot of excessive quality copper you can't use.
I disagree with the Spoiler-tagged approach to producing Legendary Steel / Copper as the primary method. It is absolutely useful for producing Copper in Bulk - but I think it is wasteful to produce / recycle all those Resource, just to throw it away after extracting the Steel.
I think that using an Assembler/Recycler chain like this to produce “stockpile” of materials by repeatedly doing Quality Assembler steps - not just the Intermediate juggles or Asteroid casino rolling - is a great idea. I am going to try to incorporate this technique in my next Vulcans buildout.
The point is, throwing away all the copper still gives better yield (in terms of calcite / UPS) than an assembler/recycler chain. Upcycling blue chip has 100% legendary yield from common materials. Throwing away all the copper and plastic drives it down to ~30%, whereas the best single-component assembler chain gives you something like 5%. Besides, quality assembler chains clog fairly quickly unless you add some logic to start destroying stuff from your overflowing lanes.
Re: Basic quality ingrediants from Vulcanus (Iron, Steel, Copper, Stone)
Premu wrote: Sat Apr 26, 2025 7:12 pm
How is using the productivity bonus a handycap?
For example for copper plates. With standard T3 quality modules in the foundry there's a 10% chance I get some quality plates. If I feed the non-quality plates into a recycler directly with quality modules, I get 0.25 plates output, again with a 10% chance, so 0.025 quality plates on average.
If I load the non-quality plates into an EMP to turn them into copper wire first, I have a 12.5% chance to get some quality copper wire. For one plate I get 3 copper wires thanks to the productivity bonus, so 0.375 quality wires on average. If I throw these into the disassembler, I'll get one eigth of the number of wires as plates. So in this case I'll get 0.046 quality plates on average - but this time with an additional change to get another quality upgrade, e.g. from uncommon to rare. That's higher than 0.025 even not counting the additional possible quality lift.
If I throw in a quality plate into an EMP which I don't intend to use because my buffer is overflowing, it's also just a save way to immediately get 50% more of it before trying to upcycle it - with a second chance to get the upgrade.
Quality can build up in long chains, just as productivity bonuses do.
Because in optimized chains, legendary copper plate is an overflowing byproduct needing active destruction. There is no point producing it in the first place.
The optimal path to legendary steel is recycling foundry LDS from legendary plastic / recycling green chips obtained from recycled legendary blue chips. You eventually get 300% productivity for them with research and even before that point, you still get the same yield with a much short chain. Both would produce a lot of excessive quality copper you can't use.
I don't have legendary stuff yet, though, because I set that up as preparation for Gleba. That's not an endgame quality production, it's a first setup to get uncommon and rare which can also extend to higher degrees later on as a bonus.
