Is the recycler honest?

[Loren Pechtel]

Upcycling green chips on Fulgora. A factory of each quality, a few recyclers. It should run completely unattended and remain approximately in balance. Yet I keep having to dump wire in it to balance it. Likewise, upcycling supercapacitors--I'm feeding it red chips which should stay in balance, yet likewise, I keep having to dump in wire. Even adding low density structure eventually ends up with more plastic than copper--yet right now it has 10x the plastic as copper. Everything I've ever added has either been neutral or had excess copper.

[NineNine]

Statistics say that they should stay in balance over the long run. Over the short run, there's no guarantee at all.

I know that in the long run (over hours, thousands of items), everything I push through a recycler to upgrade quality stays in balance.

[jdrexler75]

It's a stochastic process, in the long run completely predictable but in the short term the imbalance could get arbitrarily large.

I generally just get rid of any excess product from it, much easier than trying to balance it perfectly. It's not like scrap is in short supply.

[edit] One more thing I thought of, and more likely to mess up your calculations: the recycling recipe outputs are rounded. So if it returns 0.25 items of something on average, the recipe claims the rounded number 0.3 instead, which is a 20% error. If you use these rounded numbers to figure out your output balance, it will be way off!

[Loren Pechtel]

It's a stochastic process, in the long run completely predictable but in the short term the imbalance could get arbitrarily large.

I generally just get rid of any excess product from it, much easier than trying to balance it perfectly. It's not like scrap is in short supply.

[edit] One more thing I thought of, and more likely to mess up your calculations: the recycling recipe outputs are rounded. So if it returns 0.25 items of something on average, the recipe claims the rounded number 0.3 instead, which is a 20% error. If you use these rounded numbers to figure out your output balance, it will be way off!

I wasn't looking at the recycler outputs at all. Rather, the ratio in the inputs. I would expect some deviation around the mean but one should be copper-neutral and the other copper-positive, yet both are ending up repeatedly copper negative.

[Shulmeister]

I wasn't looking at the recycler outputs at all. Rather, the ratio in the inputs. I would expect some deviation around the mean but one should be copper-neutral and the other copper-positive, yet both are ending up repeatedly copper negative.

This must be caused by something else, maybe ressource leaking toward another production lane because the recycler is honest.

[eugenekay]

Factorio is deterministically random - this means that the Random Number Generator both affects the Game State, and that if the Game can determine the State of the RNG it can effectively predict future outputs (and make changes to exploit them), within a margin of Error.

This has been explored, but it seems difficult to reliably exploit for Legendary purposes. There are recent changes which appear to have separated out Asteroid Generation to reduce side effects. If you have a persistent imbalance in Recycler outputs it may be possible that you have accidentally created a RNG exploit mechanism.


I think that a lot of the “Fun” of the Quality & Recycler mechanics comes from the fact that you have to Buffer intermediates and handle under/overproduction.

[NineNine]

I'm (very) late game, and in trying to create Legendary versions of almost everything, I'm running into instances where a single chest (all 48 slots) feeding an assembler of some kind does sometimes run out of one kind of material if it's being fed by a recycler. Even in that case, I'm relatively sure that the recyclers are being "honest". Statistically speaking, it's entirely possible that you'll get some crazy results sometimes. And, the longer you'll play, the more likely it is that you'll see some crazy outliers. I'm going to move to no fewer than two chests feeding an assembler, and I think that will take care of 99% (but not all) of these unusual situations.

Statistics is fun. I'm very glad to see some statistics introduced into the game!