Ability to craft lower quality with higher quality

[Rouilleur]

I feel that this kind of change would trivialize the quality mechanics and make it OP.
Even in ealy game, you would just end up putting quality module everywhere, keep only rare and have imediately a full mall of rare items, rare power amor, rare modules, etc.

Quality is very powerful, but has tradeoffs :
- either you extract a small percentage of your production lines to dedicated chains
- or you have to loose a lot of production through recycling.

[Ranakastrasz]

I feel that this kind of change would trivialize the quality mechanics and make it OP.
Even in ealy game, you would just end up putting quality module everywhere, keep only rare and have imediately a full mall of rare items, rare power amor, rare modules, etc.

Quality is very powerful, but has tradeoffs :
- either you extract a small percentage of your production lines to dedicated chains
- or you have to loose a lot of production through recycling.

Eh, Speed modules, Efficiency modules, and Productivity modules also exist. So there is still plenty of reason to not quality module everything.
Especially since speed modules don't play nice.
The point here is to make sure that quality modules do not make things harder than they need to be. They should be just as universally useful as the other three module types, and not just casually break any direct feed builds.

[bluegreen1024]

Of the ideas I've seen, I think down-binning is by far the simplest, and probably also less prone to exploits or unintended consequences. I haven't gotten to quality quite yet in my current playthrough, but I've already downloaded that proof-of-concept mod and will be trying it out. However I think this is a case where a native solution by the devs is still desirable even though the mod exists, for performance reasons: no matter how efficiently coded a mod's scripts may be, having the engine handle it is probably better still. (To be clear, I did try a small stress test already in a creative world, and I haven't noticed any problems with the mod, but also I don't even attempt the absurdly high throughput that some people's megabases might require).

[zebediah49]

I feel that this kind of change would trivialize the quality mechanics and make it OP.
Even in ealy game, you would just end up putting quality module everywhere, keep only rare and have imediately a full mall of rare items, rare power amor, rare modules, etc.

Quality is very powerful, but has tradeoffs :
- either you extract a small percentage of your production lines to dedicated chains
- or you have to loose a lot of production through recycling.

That's literally what I did anyway, just with a side of "oh, the gear bus line broke because the chest of uncommon gears finally filled up". For quite a while you don't even have access to recycling machines, so the two options are "don't use quality", and "set up a large enough storage facility to sink the excess".

If we're talking early game, so a T2 assembler with 2x T1 production modules -- and using 1.1 numbers because they were convenient, "all the red science" would produce approximately 10 stacks of uncommon gears and 20 rares. Green science brings that up to 25 uncommon stacks and 50 rares. That's comfortably within "chuck it in a chest and worry about it later" territory. Once you get higher tier assemblers and modules, you also can just use purple chests and have the robots throw them in a chest bank. The resource cost/"loss" is basically negligible, but it feels bad.

Hence, IMO it's not an interesting challenge to be worked around.

While we're at it, there's also the "accidentally rare" problem. Even if I want to set up a split production line where a few percent of my materials are diverted to a second tier, I'll have a tiny fraction of skips that need to be handled. There's no way to try to make uncommon green circuits without also producing a rare circuit waste stream. It's not a problematic cost to throw away, but it is rather ugly to just set up "robots get rid of waste" stations everywhere. Whereas being able to drop everything down to uncommon makes for a more interesting factory design.

[MrNukealizer]

+1 for this. The inability to use higher quality ingredients in place of lower quality or normal versions makes dealing with quality annoying if you're trying to make ingredients by any method other than recycling. Shoving excess in storage or recycling/destroying it feels wasteful and not quite right compared to just sending it along to be used in normal production.

[VertebreakHER]

To clarify, I'm thinking of explicit down-binning, that the player would have to deliberately setup, not automatic. So, there wouldn't be mysteriously disappearing quality.

Ah, I see. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
However in practice this is still not much better. The crux of the issue is that the use of quality modules outside of end-product assembly creates a great deal of potential inconvenience and frustration. If down-binning requires setup, then it isn't really preferable to a setup that ferries the quality to a different production line. We arrive back at the problem of wasting quality items, and so using down-binning as a solution just automatically becomes less reasonable then simply not using quality modules. (In real-life, the production of higher quality parts is an inevitability that can't just be avoided or turned off, hence down-binning is an explicit necessity. In factorio we have no reason to introduce that irregularity in any case where it doesn't benefit us.)

I do think that having down-binning as an option could be great under specific circumstances like circuit-controlled logistics network management, quality farming setups ,or for lazy engineers who just wish they could craft with those spare quality intermediates (assuming mixed crafting never becomes something you can do in your own inventory.) But fitting it into a normal production chain would probably be extremely niche at best.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into an older thread with the same suggestion.

[ncc1702]

I am a big fan of Down Binning I think that'd be a great way to prevent production stalls while also not being exploitable.
For instance in the screenshot below I should be able to sacrifice this rare solar panel, or higher, into this recipe for the uncommon Portable Solar Panel. Doing so should not have any impact on any of the output statistics.

11-02-2024, 20-01-02.png (759.54 KiB) Viewed 833 times

[bluegreen1024]

To clarify, I'm thinking of explicit down-binning, that the player would have to deliberately setup, not automatic. So, there wouldn't be mysteriously disappearing quality.

Ah, I see. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
However in practice this is still not much better. The crux of the issue is that the use of quality modules outside of end-product assembly creates a great deal of potential inconvenience and frustration. If down-binning requires setup, then it isn't really preferable to a setup that ferries the quality to a different production line. We arrive back at the problem of wasting quality items, and so using down-binning as a solution just automatically becomes less reasonable then simply not using quality modules. (In real-life, the production of higher quality parts is an inevitability that can't just be avoided or turned off, hence down-binning is an explicit necessity. In factorio we have no reason to introduce that irregularity in any case where it doesn't benefit us.)

I do think that having down-binning as an option could be great under specific circumstances like circuit-controlled logistics network management, quality farming setups ,or for lazy engineers who just wish they could craft with those spare quality intermediates (assuming mixed crafting never becomes something you can do in your own inventory.) But fitting it into a normal production chain would probably be extremely niche at best.

One advantage of down-binning over the current system which I wouldn't describe as niche is that it gives you the option to deal with differing quality items at the inputs of your sub-factories, rather than the sub-factory outputs. This means it is okay if a sub-factory starts outputting a different quality or qualities of product into the wider world, because you don't have to decide how to handle it right then and there, you can handle it at the start of the sub-factories that take that product as an input. Basically you don't need five entire factories running in parallel with ingredients being shunted between them, instead you just need multiple production lines for exactly the situations where you care about quality, and not the situations where you don't. And once the amount of higher quality production increases enough for it to be more broadly useful, you can just start raising the target quality for down-binning setups at the start of some assembly lines and also raise the ingredient quality for those assemblers, but you don't have to do that for the whole factory in an all-or-nothing manner.

But it is of course true that no solution proposed here nor any strategy that's currently possible in-game can beat the strategy of "don't use quality modules" in terms of simplicity.

Now that I think about it, allowing assemblers to accept multiple quality ingredients and treat them as the lowest acceptable quality is basically a less flexible but simpler variant of down-binning that occurs at the instant the ingredient enters the assembler. (At least, some variants would be, depending on on implementation details, and assuming that the current behavior remains the default).

[dragon_gawain]

As bluegreen1024 mentions, down binning in that way is a way of dealing with quality at time of input as opposed to at time of output.
But even at time of output, we don't have an elegant way of dealing with quality beyond 'if buffer is full, void item' and using the recycler to effectively void the item, with maybe getting some potentially useful by product. If you build a quality factory on Vulcanus, IMO you may as well just dump excess quality into the lava (if you don't want to try to use the recycled output somewhere).

Anyway, this is leading up to the idea that to deal with the quality at time of output, maybe we could have a circuit condition to toggle quality mods on/off? For balance, the speed penalty would always remain, but you could choose (via circuit) if the output can improve quality, or must stay the same. (this would only work if quality is decided at the moment the craft is finished and isn't impacted by how long quality modules are present during the crafting process). Then we could say "if quality buffer is full, do not produce items of quality" and create a self-balancing system for quality that does not have nearly as much waste due to overproduction. (I'm considering everything you need to put into a recycler/dump into lava as waste)

[Ranakastrasz]

Can quality modules be put in beacons? I just realized that you might be able to use that weird thing where inserters can add or remove modules from beacons.

Or speed modules, to cancel out the quality boost.


Still a complex solution, but it just occured to me lol.

[dragon_gawain]

Can quality modules be put in beacons? I just realized that you might be able to use that weird thing where inserters can add or remove modules from beacons.

Nope, quality modules can't be put in beacons. I just tried putting the quality module directly into the inserter's hand, and it still didn't go in.

I can't think of any way to get a quality module inside of a beacon that wouldn't be considered a bug (not that I've tested any bug methods either though )

Being able to put quality modules in beacons would be interesting though - similar to my earlier thought of turning quality mods on and off, you could add/remove quality mods to a beacon.

AH! ok, here's a (kinda) solution the: since speed reduces quality, to turn off quality, have an inserter put some speed mods in a nearby beacon. To turn quality back on, remove the speed mods.

That sounds a bit jank (and would prolly mess with perfect ratios), but hey, we need a self-balancing setup for quality anyway, so this might reduce the need for recyclers.

[Ranakastrasz]

--snip

Yea. That was the idea. Admittedly I think speed modules fall behind on their quality penalty as tier and quality improve, but using more beacons probably counters that.

Massively janky and still probably easier to filter out and void the excess. Plus you have to be proactive in whatever logic you use. Once enough quality materials show up to jam it, it's too late.

[mooklepticon]

Yes, please add ability to use high quality inputs in low quality outputs.

[dragon_gawain]

Yea. That was the idea. Admittedly I think speed modules fall behind on their quality penalty as tier and quality improve, but using more beacons probably counters that.

Imagine reading something, then instantly forgetting the second line of it, but then still coming to the same conclusion *facepalm*. Now I feel both silly and smart at the same time..

According to the factoriopedia (and my crafted quality speed mods), the quality penalty does not change with quality and remains constant at -1% for T1, -1.5% for T2, and -2.5% for T3.

But also keep in mind that beacons now have an effect transmission of over 100%, and that applies to the penalties as well. So a T1 speed mod in a common beacons (which has an effect transmission of 150%) will reduce the quality of machines in range by 150% of it's penalty: -1.5% quality.

---

Also, on a tangent (and feel free to point me to a better place to ask this, but I didn't see a question/answer about this elsewhere, and umm, I don't know where to ask..) but has anyone done the math on quality science packs? Is it even worth it?

By 'doing the math' I mean will using quality modules in as many steps as possible in the crafting chain net in more science per resource consumed than if you used productivity everywhere?
As far as all my calculations have told me (cause I've done some, but haven't mapped out the entire chain), using productivity everywhere possible, and only using quality where you can't use productivity (i.e. stuff like belts/inserters for green science) is the best way to do it (and again, by best I mean most science produced for fewest raw resources consumed). Assume all tech is available, and infinite productivity bonus research (steel, plastic, blue chips, etc) have been researched to give 100% productivity bonus (not that that bonus should matter - just cause you get more for free doesn't mean that you lose any less by not using prod mods)

[Ranakastrasz]

Dunno. I saw 1% quality vs 4% productivity and a 5% penalty and assumed it was only useful if you are already buffing quality everywhere universally, or shipping from another planet.

I can justify it for green potions tho. But only because all components are immune to productivity. Or rather resistant now, because foundries. Dunno if inserters have a booster structure, but probably the gleba one at a guess since stack inserter.

Remember, you have to boost quality in all components for any result lol



As for the products stacking, yea. I pretty much stopped using productivity modules in drills once the universal thing was added, because speed multiplies it, and efficiency cuts the actually pretty bad pollution. But it does in fact give the same benefit regardless, at least from a resource produced per time perspective. I think. Actually it slows it so maybe not?

Actually this is off topic.

[dragon_gawain]

mhmm, I see. Thanks for you thoughts.
I might try to crunch all the numbers myself to see what's actually going on, but my gut and surface math has all been telling me that quality in science is not a good idea (which IMO sucks cause that's where I want to use it. Science is the main output of my factory after all. If quality is only good for a mall/personal equipment, then, well, eh. Not much use of a point to me.. (this is an opinion)).

But anyway, yeah, this is off topic for this thread. Very much a tangent, so let's speak of it no more here.

Feel free to PM me or something if anyone has done any calcs for this though! I would love to see the math/spreadsheets!

[splitice]

I too am a big fan of allowing higher quality ingredients to be used in lower quality recipes. What else I am going to do with the mountains of mid tier quality items? Recycle loop them for higher tier? I'm going to end up with more recyclers than factory

I'm probably going to resort to a mod (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/quality-down-binning) in the interim and see how that goes.

[lindenk]

I honestly thought this was how it worked initially. It just seems way more intuitive. The only real downside is accidentally mixing belts and losing quality materials which is a factory design challange, not a gave design issue

[Tinyboss]

How would this interact with shift-RMB on the assembler then shift-LMB on a requester chest?