Output more fluid when using higher quality recipes (i.e. for Holmium Solution)

[ividyon]

TL;DR

When using a high-quality recipe that outputs a fluid, the quantity of the output fluid should be increased according to the quality.

What?

Somewhat self-explanatory; see TL;DR.

Why?

Currently, creating things such as Holmium solution with higher-quality ingredients leads to just nothing happening. You simply get the same amount of regular Holmium solution as you would normally.

Now, I understand that quality fluids are undesirable, but at the very least, the higher-quality recipe should produce a higher amount of fluid output.

Otherwise, the Quality mechanic is completely wasted on items such as Holmium ore, which provides zero benefit above its normal-quality variant.

[Nypyren]

+1

[Fharkas]

That would be nice.

[yert527]

+1

Quality Holmium either needs to do something beneficial or needs to be removed, as it only clogs up the system.

An alternative is to make all liquid creation recipes ignore quality.

[Sworn]

+1 yah would be a good way to making use of the annoying quality ice and holmium, which is probably what people are already doing, but with no added benefit.

[dehook]

+1

Quality Holmium either needs to do something beneficial or needs to be removed, as it only clogs up the system.

An alternative is to make all liquid creation recipes ignore quality.

+1 I found this thread because I was looking to see if anyone had suggested liquid creation ignoring quality. I'm guessing that making the quality liquid recipes produce more product would be technically easier to implement.

[PSYCHOELECTRIC]

+1 would actually incentivize me to make infrastructure that supports quality holmium ore

[DeathJunkie88]

This bothered me enough to create a mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/fluid-quality-bonus

It could use some optimization and configurability. I'll put some more time into if it gains some traction and/or the base game doesn't adopt this idea.

[Quezler]

Saw a link to this pass by as i browsed the recent mods section and stumbled upon the mod above, figured i'd namedrop mine as well:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/quality-h ... m-solution

[IsaacOscar]

What we really need is quality fluids! So you use legendary holmium solution to make legendary holmium plates. (or is that going to cause to much hell with fluid mixing?)
But yes, I like the idea of quality just changing the output of fluids, this would be great.
Quality modules could also effect fluid recipes similarly (but that would be redundant with productivity modules, but they could have different trade offs with speed and energy usage, also having quality modules work with everything could make using auto-assembling easier, and maybe even quality modules in beacons?)

[drakhri]

+1

[rapus]

What we really need is quality fluids! So you use legendary holmium solution to make legendary holmium plates. (or is that going to cause to much hell with fluid mixing?)
But yes, I like the idea of quality just changing the output of fluids, this would be great.
Quality modules could also effect fluid recipes similarly (but that would be redundant with productivity modules, but they could have different trade offs with speed and energy usage, also having quality modules work with everything could make using auto-assembling easier, and maybe even quality modules in beacons?)

Given fluids can't mix anyway, how would that create more problems? I'd also like if fluids could have quality. I guess we'd need a fluid filtration facility for proper quality buffing since not all fluids have item ingredients in their creation. And then, just as for the recycler, have it only output the better fluid by chance.

If you get some very filtrated (=legendary) coal and some very filtrated steam and some very filtrated heavy oil, you can make more very filtrated heavy oil

[IsaacOscar]

What we really need is quality fluids! So you use legendary holmium solution to make legendary holmium plates. (or is that going to cause to much hell with fluid mixing?)
But yes, I like the idea of quality just changing the output of fluids, this would be great.
Quality modules could also effect fluid recipes similarly (but that would be redundant with productivity modules, but they could have different trade offs with speed and energy usage, also having quality modules work with everything could make using auto-assembling easier, and maybe even quality modules in beacons?)

Given fluids can't mix anyway, how would that create more problems? I'd also like if fluids could have quality. I guess we'd need a fluid filtration facility for proper quality buffing since not all fluids have item ingredients in their creation. And then, just as for the recycler, have it only output the better fluid by chance.

If you get some very filtrated (=legendary) coal and some very filtrated steam and some very filtrated heavy oil, you can make more very filtrated heavy oil

Unfortunately, quality modules are allowed on various fluid recipes. This means your machine could get stuck if it's trying to output the wrong quality. Also machines have an internal fluid storage. Fluids are also much harder to try sort as their are weird rules around fluid mixing. Also adding extra state information to fluids to store quality would have performance considerations.

If they disallow quality modules for fluids though, it's probably work able.

[Tinyboss]

Given fluids can't mix anyway, how would that create more problems? I'd also like if fluids could have quality. I guess we'd need a fluid filtration facility for proper quality buffing since not all fluids have item ingredients in their creation. And then, just as for the recycler, have it only output the better fluid by chance.

If you get some very filtrated (=legendary) coal and some very filtrated steam and some very filtrated heavy oil, you can make more very filtrated heavy oil

It would be awfully easy to delete a terrible amount of legendary fluid by accidentally deconstructing a storage tank, in a way that can't happen with items.

[IsaacOscar]

Given fluids can't mix anyway, how would that create more problems? I'd also like if fluids could have quality. I guess we'd need a fluid filtration facility for proper quality buffing since not all fluids have item ingredients in their creation. And then, just as for the recycler, have it only output the better fluid by chance.

If you get some very filtrated (=legendary) coal and some very filtrated steam and some very filtrated heavy oil, you can make more very filtrated heavy oil

It would be awfully easy to delete a terrible amount of legendary fluid by accidentally deconstructing a storage tank, in a way that can't happen with items.

At the moment, what seems to happen is if you're machine is connected to a pipeline, and you've set it to make a fluid, then it will fill it's own internal storage up, and then if the pipeline has a different fluid, it will just get stuck and wait. So it won't delete any fluids.

Now you just need some barrelling machines + recyclers to destroy any fluids you don't want, thus emptying the pipeline the machine is connected to. And you can have an automated quality-module fluid setup!

The only way I could get fluids to delete is by connecting pipelines together when building ghosts.

[IsaacOscar]

TLDR: Quality modules for fluid recipes would be totally doable!
Actually, unless you want to save space, you wouldn't need combinators.
Consider this test setup:

12-06-2024, 16-23-08.png (1.69 MiB) Viewed 962 times

If we assume we've only unlocked "uncommon" quality, and the lubricant icons are for "uncommon lubricant",
and the light oil stuff is "common lubricant". And we were to put quality modules in the chemical plant, it will automatically fill up the tank on the top-left with uncommon lubricant, and all common lubricant that is made will be disposed of (at the cost of some iron ore).

I've tested it and it works when manually switching the chemical plant between "lubricant' and "heavy oil cracking to light oil".

If you want more quality levels, you can just have one barreling machine per quality you don't want, and one pump + storage tank per quality you do wan.t
Or, you can have only one barreling machine by connecting a storage tank to the output of the chemical plant, and then use combinators to set the barreling recipe to match the contents of the tank, whenever it's a quality you want to discard.

[rapus]

What we really need is quality fluids! So you use legendary holmium solution to make legendary holmium plates. (or is that going to cause to much hell with fluid mixing?)
But yes, I like the idea of quality just changing the output of fluids, this would be great.
Quality modules could also effect fluid recipes similarly (but that would be redundant with productivity modules, but they could have different trade offs with speed and energy usage, also having quality modules work with everything could make using auto-assembling easier, and maybe even quality modules in beacons?)

Given fluids can't mix anyway, how would that create more problems? I'd also like if fluids could have quality. I guess we'd need a fluid filtration facility for proper quality buffing since not all fluids have item ingredients in their creation. And then, just as for the recycler, have it only output the better fluid by chance.

If you get some very filtrated (=legendary) coal and some very filtrated steam and some very filtrated heavy oil, you can make more very filtrated heavy oil

Unfortunately, quality modules are allowed on various fluid recipes. This means your machine could get stuck if it's trying to output the wrong quality. Also machines have an internal fluid storage. Fluids are also much harder to try sort as their are weird rules around fluid mixing. Also adding extra state information to fluids to store quality would have performance considerations.

If they disallow quality modules for fluids though, it's probably work able.

That's why I'd propose to always output fluid at the same quality as the recipe. so no gambling in ordinary machines. For quality increase in fluids you'd need that filtration facility which has internal tanks and separate outputs for all qualities. And regarding the quality increase recipe that works in there, I'd imagine inquality->qualitymod*(inquality+1) + (1-qualitymod)*(inquality-1)

So if I have 10% quality on that filtration facility, 100 rare liquid will be filtrated to 10 epic and 90 uncommon liquid. 100 common liquid will be refined to 10 uncommon liquid (and 90 below common quality are destroyed). because all these are fed and taken from internal tanks I don't think it'll suffer from that extra cycle.

[Khazul]

+1, but I would also suggest that all liquid product recipes should except any quality of ingredients.

[spacedog]

They could make it work similar to labs, where any quality is accepted, but higher quality ingredients just have more "durability".

Here is a similar suggestion, but without the issue of the input buffer only being able to hold a single quality level at a time:
Have excess quality act like a durability bonus

[Khazul]

TLDR: Quality modules for fluid recipes would be totally doable!
Actually, unless you want to save space, you wouldn't need combinators.
Consider this test setup: 12-06-2024, 16-23-08.png

If we assume we've only unlocked "uncommon" quality, and the lubricant icons are for "uncommon lubricant",
and the light oil stuff is "common lubricant". And we were to put quality modules in the chemical plant, it will automatically fill up the tank on the top-left with uncommon lubricant, and all common lubricant that is made will be disposed of (at the cost of some iron ore).

I've tested it and it works when manually switching the chemical plant between "lubricant' and "heavy oil cracking to light oil".

If you want more quality levels, you can just have one barreling machine per quality you don't want, and one pump + storage tank per quality you do wan.t
Or, you can have only one barreling machine by connecting a storage tank to the output of the chemical plant, and then use combinators to set the barreling recipe to match the contents of the tank, whenever it's a quality you want to discard.

Not quality switching but is solving aspect of the same problem - fluid switching. This was a creative mod test setup to try out dynamic recipes with multiple fluid ingredients. It works by luck - until I can find/mod a way to get ingredients by original ingredient index so that I can ensure that fluids end up on the correct input pipe, it is only good for single fluid recipes.

12-14-2024, 00-31-20.png (3.72 MiB) Viewed 674 times

These are a couple of images of an auto recipe switcher for the foundry. Again, this is a creative test setup, but I do have a ship based upon this as well. Some recipes produce fluids, all the other have a fluid as an ingredient so it has another pump arrangement. It uses most of the foundry recipes.
Upper 4 pumps at the top supply fluids (and hoover them back into tanks at recipe change), so are two reversed pairs with the combinators presenting the correct input fluid required by the current recipe. The lower 2 filtered pumps clear fluid from the machine and pipes into the tanks when the foundry is creating a fluid.
Just out of shot below is a platform hub for solid storage.

Producing a fluid:

12-14-2024, 00-34-56.png (1.81 MiB) Viewed 674 times

Fluid is an ingredient:

12-14-2024, 00-36-10.png (1.77 MiB) Viewed 674 times

If fluids had quality, we can certainly handle them and dealing with filters and routing etc. The one bit against it is that I have seen evidence of machine possibly just erasing fluids when the recipe is switched instead of waiting for them to be emptied properly. I can kind of understand why they may have felt the need to do this, but I also wish there was an option to prevent it because you have pumps all around it to deal with the problem instead of simply erasing it.
That might get very annoying very fast with a legendary fluid handled in small qualities where the loses overhead may be huge and very noticeable compared to bulk normal fluid use losses as a percentage.

At the moment we get legendary fluids as inputs for free except for the foundry recipes. If adding legendary fluid, we would likely loose that. Be careful what you wish for.

I would stick with the OP suggestion and just output something better, or more inline with other quality boosts, so legendary ingredients output 250% more.