Early Quality Wood?

[SaucePants]

Long time Factorio player here (1000+ hours across multiple mods with 1.1), been enjoying some of the changes with 2.0. Finally decided to get Space Age and am playing a no mod run to experience it as intended and to get the achievements.

I've sunk some hours into min maxing my personal gear now that I've unlocked Quality modules in this save. It's been interesting to figure out the best way to address Quality early game, what's useful, what's not, how to not stall production lines, etc.

There seems to be a small oversight in that we can get quality of everything early game except wood. Quality modules in miners gets us enough raw quality resources naturally to build some items in enough volume to be useful. It's probably niche and I won't be at this point too long in this particular save, but in upgrading my personal gear I've found that there is no deterministic way to make quality items based on wood. This currently is problematic because the Combat Shotgun is extremely useful for clearing biter bases and personal defense, but I can't just get high quality wood to make a new rare Combat Shotgun.

I've thought about it, and I guess I could just run an assembler making hundreds of regular shotguns with quality modules and wait for a rare one to pop out, but I can't recycle any of that output currently and it seems like such a waste early game and not in line with the rest of the Quality experience at this point.

Could we have some way to get quality wood early on in the game?

Maybe once quality is unlocked, some micro percentage of clearing trees will harvest legendary wood similar to having quality modules in miners, although that would potentially make players deal with quality when they may not want to. There could be an optional QoL armor grid module ( similar to Belt Immunity or Night Vision ) that could be crafted for harvesting wood and other resources that gives you that Quality percentage chance. Then people could choose to engage or not engage with it by crafting and using that module.

Having a recipe that could convert regular wood to quality wood in some ratio ( akin to looking at a bunch of boards and selecting the highest quality to craft with as a real artisan would do ), does not seem to be in line with the rest of the Quality gameplay, but would also be an option.

Thanks for taking the time to read my suggestion.

[Tinyboss]

Or take wood out of the recipe, might be a cleaner solution!

I agree it's desirable to fix this.

[Khazul]

Just have to stick quality modules in the assembler. Same with a lot of quality items to start with until other tech is researched. Quality wood is possible later, but you probably wont be using a shotgun still at that time.

And...

If you can get off planet, then some of the others may be worth an early visit just for the most basic tech unlocks that come about by doing something rather than researching something. Just make sure you take enough to make a silo and launch a rocket to get back if you dont plan on staying there.

[Tesse11ation]

>quality wood

Or take wood out of the recipe, might be a cleaner solution!

I agree it's desirable to fix this.

Agreed with Tinyboss on taking wood out of the recipe. Wood kinda makes sense for the shotgun, but not really the combat shotgun. If it were up to me, I wood would have an alternate recipe for both shotguns that replaces the wood ingredient with plastic bars. Those are easy enough to farm up in terms of quality without making quality shotguns a total cakewalk.

[Stargateur]

if you recycle wood with quality module in the recycle you can grind quality on wood. If you want let's say a shotgun it's more efficient to craft to craft like a shotgun with the wood with quality and recycle the shotgun to grind quality of wood over time and in the same time try to luck the shotgun in legendary.

[Tesse11ation]

if you recycle wood with quality module in the recycle you can grind quality on wood. If you want let's say a shotgun it's more efficient to craft to craft like a shotgun with the wood with quality and recycle the shotgun to grind quality of wood over time and in the same time try to luck the shotgun in legendary.

I think the whole point of OP's post is grinding quality wood (giggity) before having access to the recycling machine.