Quality Tiers as Durabilty and Drain

[vitharr]

TL;DR

Rather than discrete items per quality, utilize the concepts of drain and durability similar to science packs, ammo, and spoilage

What?

A normal iron ore is a 1:1 for a normal iron plate, but an 'uncommon' iron ore would last for more than 1 cycle, with that durability increasing like science packs do

• Now, all iron ore stacks, it doesn't matter the quality

How long does an 'uncommon' iron ore last? Make it based on the drain of the recipe and machine, which also gives machines another scalar to tweak, drain effected by quality, as in a higher quality machine could drain at a slower rate (unneeded, but interesting consequence)

• If uncommon iron ore lasts 2x longer, have uncommon iron plates be forged at 2x drain, or to keep the design of filtering quality off to separate instances, have either a malus to non matching, or a bonus to matching, ingredients

How do inserters/splitters work if the iron ore is stacked together? Use the spoiled/fresh feature setting of inserters

• Now that the actual 'amount' of iron ore is abstracted into the 'spoilage' meter, with each individual item contributing its own amount of 'freshness' to the durability, an inserter grabbing the 'freshest first' of a stack of mixed normal, uncommon, and rare, should pull out 'rare' iron ore of the amount that corresponds to > rare threshold

• This is also similar to ammo usage and science packs being placed into 'fresh' stacks

Why?

Quality as a mechanic is mainly about density, this emphasizes the theme of it from the moment you create any quality item. It also provides a density bonus anywhere it is applied, quality becoming an aspect of belt stacking naturally. It also makes the scaling of logistics solutions like trains and logistic bots more efficient by a result, enabling each cargo wagons to carry virtually far higher throughput without encountering the issues of increasing the storage slots. On the other side, it prevents 'meta' conflicts such as needing to know the complications of researching epic or legendary before researching them

[crimsonarmy]

Neat idea.

I don't see this as being a good change overall as in most cases it turns quality modules into worse productivity modules, but for some things (holmium ore for example) I could see it as being useful.

[vitharr]

The target wouldn't be to compete with prod modules as a mechanic, since they're already best at what they do, but to provide a smoother way for quality to benefit your factory in a unique way, logistics density. Right now, there's a contention around cargo wagons and their difficulty keeping up with attached turbo belts, needing something like a full wagon load every 3 seconds to keep up. This is just an example, but if legendary plates and cable into a legendary circuit crafter operated at a similar speed of a normal variety, thanks to drain and durability matching, that contention goes away completely, without touching a single train schedule or wagon.

There is also a significant improvement on base UPS when slowing things down in this way. Factorio 2.0 is already impressive, but quality as density allows for the UPS consuming actions to slow down without losing any of the throughout, those actions being inserter active\wait cycles and train pathings

It also naturally tries into rockets becoming better, weight to cargo ratio would improve with every addition of quality, rather than being broken by it