Allow Quality Downgrade

[amaryllian]

I suggest a quality downgrade mechanic - taking an item with quality (i.e. Rare) and downgrading it to a lower quality (i.e. Uncommon).
- Perhaps via assembler as a generic recipe? Or (below)
- As a related idea it would also be nice to let a recipe "Use Any" quality and consider the result as if the inputs were of the lowest quality supplied.

This would allow players to create space platform foundation with quality materials, and then downgrade to a usable version.
- Currently it is not possible to place Uncommon space platform foundation, so the item seems to be purely decorative. Have not tested Rare+.
- This would also allow better inventory management for those items which the player does not care about having quality, or have no bonuses due to quality.
Furthermore it would provide some grace to players if they have made a mistake or would otherwise like to balance production.

If mechanic already exists, I have found no documentation.

[Alwego]

+1
Items had better quality at this moment is annoying. I cannot make assembling machine because i have too good steel plate. It's ridiculous.

[Koub]

For completeness, there is another loosely related suggestion here : viewtopic.php?f=6&t=116817 (Ability to craft lower quality with higher quality (ingredients)).

[Mur]

Can't you just recycle the upgraded components which would do what you want?

[cs278]

I suggest a quality downgrade mechanic - taking an item with quality (i.e. Rare) and downgrading it to a lower quality (i.e. Uncommon).

This would be extremely useful right now whilst preparing to travel into space I'm accumulating a huge number of uncommon green circuits which I don't really have any use for, it'd be useful if I could just feed these back into my regular production lines via a downgrade operation in an assembler. Or as other have suggested allow higher quality items to be used in regular recipes.

Can't you just recycle the upgraded components which would do what you want?

In later game when you've unlocked recycling sure, but this isn't possible until you've started exploring space and presumably isn't possible if you just play vanilla with the quality mod alone.

[amaryllian]

Can't you just recycle the upgraded components which would do what you want?

The recycler always keeps quality the same if not using quality modules. This does also apply to base materials which do not break down into components. Example: 25 Uncommon Iron Plates --> Recycler --> 8 Uncommon Iron Plates
Recyclers are a decent way to trash items, but that's not what I'm after.

[AssaultRaven]

I've created a proof-of-concept mod that implements down-grading (down-binning) with chests and scripting.

[Linsanga]

I think this is a better suggestion than the related topic "Ability to craft lower quality with higher quality". Both try to answer the question of how to re-incorporate unwanted quality items back into the normal production chain, but this suggestion avoids some problems of having the assembling machine be the thing that downgrades quality.

• Downgrading first means all the logistics to get to the assembler are simpler (train conditions, rocket silo requests, and item filters are all more complicated with mixed quality).
• Downgrading first means the assemblers don't need to accept and buffer multiple tiers of each input.
• Downgrading first means if you have a mixed quality iron plate line, you could downgrade the line once instead of changing the recipe on every assembler that pulls from the line.

A 2x1 building that looks like a tunnel with a conveyor belt going through, downgrading items that flow through it, would be perfect. Like an underground belt entrance+exit right next to each other that also downgrades quality.

[Panzerknacker]

I doesn't really make sense tho that you would want to downgrade things. That they cannot be used otherwise because they are 'too good'. I wanna build some machine but hey wait, those gears are too round, the teeth have too few burs on them, that aint gonna work, they need to be crappier gears first!

[Linsanga]

This being a video game, sometimes what makes real world sense does not make a better game. It doesn't make sense that a stack inserter can hold 12 normal gears or 12 shiny gears, but can't hold 6 of each. It doesn't make sense that a slot on a train or chest can hold 100 normal gears or 100 shiny gears, but can't hold a mixture. It doesn't make sense that a logistic request has to be for a specific shininess of gear. But the developers definitely made the right call here, trying to make this more 'realistic' would have made all of those systems much more complicated.

And given that there are already so many systems that treat different quality items as different items, it does make practical sense that I should be able to tell those systems to treat a shiny gear like a normal gear by downgrading it. Think of it as slapping a label on the shiny gear that says "hey logistics bots and inserters, feel free to deliver me places that don't care about the shininess of their gears".

[AssaultRaven]

You're not actually making it worse, just pretending its worse for the sake of shoving it into lower-quality recipes. That's why I've used "down-binning" instead of "down-grading" when talking about this subject.

But, requiring the player to explicitly and deliberately lose an item's QA paperwork by putting it into some kind of special device serves as a safety mechanism against assemblers just grabbing higher quality items for lower quality recipes and making them mysteriously disappear.

[amaryllian]

I second the sentiment of "don't care where the overflow goes" with the higher-quality items. Right now, because of the way the production chain is, I have uncommon steel en masse on both Fulgora and Nauvis. Besides the not-super-large amount of applications that call for it, I'm sitting on a surplus and even downgraded my Nauvis steel setup to make sure my production downstream doesn't starve. Besides the fact it feels bad not to be able to use this whole chest of steel right now, the fact I intentionally downgraded the setup is telling that the mechanic might need this.
My proposed solution is definitely just a "downgrade quality one level, for any item" recipe for the assembler. Simple, makes use of filter inserters' existing functionality.

[Sworn]

I would add the mechanic as follows:

Loop the recycler to get the raw material back (copper plate, iron plate, copper wire), anything that a foundry would make.
Then add a recipe to melt it down back into molten iron, molten copper, liquid have no quality, so it would effectively reset the quality level.

Seems quite straight forward to be implemented and could easily be streamed back to main production line with current molten mechanics.

Sample, you have some green circuit at uncommon, recycle it back, get iron plate and copper wire, now iron plate would be smelted into molten iron, while copper wire would be smelted as molten copper, since the foundry already makes copper wire from molten copper.

[amaryllian]

I like this too. I do still wish the lowest-common-denominator logic was there for quality, but fluids already don't have quality so it makes use of the existing mechanic.

(Related: Me making holmium solution with quality ingredients and always having too ******* much uncommon level stone to use for anything really)

[Redmoikle]

You shouldn't even need to downgrade it. Really all higher quality items should be interchangeable with every quality of the same item below it. It doesn't make any sense from either a game design or a narrative/physical sense that your ingredients are "too good" to go into a product

[BlueTemplar]

I doesn't really make sense tho that you would want to downgrade things. That they cannot be used otherwise because they are 'too good'. I wanna build some machine but hey wait, those gears are too round, the teeth have too few burs on them, that aint gonna work, they need to be crappier gears first!

From another thread :

Rather than allowing higher quality items as inputs, I think it would make more sense to be able to down-bin excess items of a given quality by turning them into a lower quality. This is directly analogous to how excess high-quality items are handled in real-world manufacturing, which is to simply relabel them as a worse version of themselves. The computer you play Factorio on almost certainly has several down-binned components, for example.
[...]

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Can't you just recycle the upgraded components which would do what you want?

The recycler always keeps quality the same if not using quality modules. This does also apply to base materials which do not break down into components. Example: 25 Uncommon Iron Plates --> Recycler --> 8 Uncommon Iron Plates
Recyclers are a decent way to trash items, but that's not what I'm after.

Speaking of, how come negative quality (from, for instance, speed modules) is not accepted as a final total quality malus on machines ?
(Not only recycler, but that too.)
It could be written in red to help with player mistakes.

Would that make the endgame with speed beacons too complicated, or actually more interesting ?

It is also notable that we created a quality penalty on speed modules, because haste makes waste, and we wanted to reduce the number of places where beacons full of speed modules is the best way to go.

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-375

P.S.: Oh, another solution if this becomes problematic : allow quality in beacons, but only to counteract negative quality : only to raise it up to +0% ?

[Abnaxis]

I'm confused.

First, on the realism: you can't put a lower end processor in a higher-grade computer. If my i9 goes out, I can't just get a cheaper i7 to replace it with willy-nilly. That's how quality works--you're not trying to use a shiny electronics circuit in place of a dull one, you're trying to use electronics circuit v2 in a v1 slot.

Speaking as a mechanical engineer, this logic works all the way down to the plate level. IRL you can't just hot-swap different alloys in the same part. Again, don't think of it as a "shiny plate," think of it as cast iron versus wrought iron, you have to design whatever product you make from them around their chemical properties.

From a gameplay perspective can't you just... not use quality modules if you don't want quality parts? If you DO want quality parts, figuring out how to balance them is the point of the mechanic. I.e., figuring out how to efficiently build around the logistic challenges presented by quality is point of the game. Since quality is opt-in, I don't get why you are giving the impression is somehow forced?

If you can't solve the puzzle of making quality work for you before you go to space, don't opt in to quality before you go to space...

[BlueTemplar]

In many ways, a lot of the issues seems to come from quality being a 'noobtrap' ?
viewtopic.php?p=636705#p636705

A real world example :
Phenom II X3 - Enable and unlock the 4th core
Of course, IRL, quality is on a spectrum, and not limited to 5 bins.

(Of course that's just one example, in other situations it might indeed not make sense ?)

[AssaultRaven]

I'm confused.

First, on the realism: you can't put a lower end processor in a higher-grade computer. If my i9 goes out, I can't just get a cheaper i7 to replace it with willy-nilly. That's how quality works--you're not trying to use a shiny electronics circuit in place of a dull one, you're trying to use electronics circuit v2 in a v1 slot.

By the same token, you do not start up i7 production and have a random chance of some of them being i9's. But chip makers do often start up production of a given model and have some of them turn out better than others. This is completely routine, and you can just put better ones into worse systems if you want.

Quality isn't about different recipes, it's just about random chance of better versions of the same thing. So different quality levels are like chip binning, not like making different models of chip. The Factorio analog to your i7 and i9 example would be to substitute Advanced Circuits for Processing Units.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, AFAIK all those X3 processors are actually binned X4's ?
So it is very much like binning an uncommon red chip into a normal red chip.
(Except that most of these X4's probably wouldn't have worked properly in the first place, something was probably wonky with one of the cores in testing.)