New ideas after asteroid shooting UPS buff

[h.q.droid]

In case anyone isn't aware of this, recently asteroid shooting UPS has been significantly buffed. My 210k-eggs-per-trip promethium hauler now runs at 30+ UPS on Apple M1 Asahi Linux in an emulator. My fleet of asteroid recyclers (for 1M eSPM legendary science mining productivity) now only reduces 45 UPS to 40.

With this buff in mind, what new ideas can you think of? Asteroid mining and on-platform science production? Massive shuttle fleets for large scale inter-planet trading like supplying all oil from Fulgora ocean?

[coffee-factorio]

I don't think you'll like this idea:

Gleba biosulfur.

Join spoilage from overgrowth jellynut soil and bioflux upcycled from capture rockets to make legendary sulfur. As a note: it has to be quality done throughout the process, because if you just just those two upcycles you're probably going to be worse off for attacking the problem. So that means biochambers making mash have to have quality, bioflux initially has to have quality, and then you might figure out if bioflux -> nutrients -> 2.5x spoilage because recycler should have quality somewhere.

I do think you'll end up liking this idea: replace asteroid rerolling with 300% productivity blue circuits.
You'll end up having a lot of "fun" doing it though.

[h.q.droid]

I don't think you'll like this idea:

Gleba biosulfur.

Join spoilage from overgrowth jellynut soil and bioflux upcycled from capture rockets to make legendary sulfur. As a note: it has to be quality done throughout the process, because if you just just those two upcycles you're probably going to be worse off for attacking the problem. So that means biochambers making mash have to have quality, bioflux initially has to have quality, and then you might figure out if bioflux -> nutrients -> 2.5x spoilage because recycler should have quality somewhere.

I do think you'll end up liking this idea: replace asteroid rerolling with 300% productivity blue circuits.
You'll end up having a lot of "fun" doing it though.

Both ideas are currently unrealistic, but inspiring:

- First of all, it's a very bad idea to waste quality bioflux on sulfur, since legendary agriculture science is much more profitable than legendary chemical science.
- Spoilage has better yield upcycling nutrients from biter eggs on Nauvis. With the promethium egg surplus, you can easily afford eating legendary fishes non-stop on Nauvis if you can spare the UPS
- It's very bad to use quality modules in mashing / bioflux biochambers. They greatly reduce bandwidth with little yield advantage (1/13 => 1/7) due to the 40% productivity loss.
- Upcycling capture rockets has bad enough yield to cancel out the shelf life advantage of quality agricultural science. Though it can be done in space where metal is cheaper. Could be worth trying with the asteroid buff.
- I've been thinking of legendary bioflux for a while. Quality jellynut can be obtained by quantity-upcycling stack inserters. Sadly nothing recycles to yumako yet.
- When used for iron, blue circuits are actually worse than asteroids in terms of bandwidth / UPS. It's 4 constantly running machines for ~5 iron plates/s, but asteroid gets 400 legendary ore per 81 crusher runs even if you throw away all the epic ore generated as byproduct. It's worthwhile for yellow science though, which I'm planning right now. Should also be usable for red circuits on blue / purple.

[coffee-factorio]

What I'm thinking about would be stacking on a massive set of quality bonuses. You'd be going for bioflux->nutrients because I see a chain of bonuses that could cancel out the cost penalties. It is something I'm going to try out someday for a laugh. Unless I see something come back which is 1 : 6 or better I don't see a reason to be optimistic and see the glass half full.

- When used for iron, blue circuits are actually worse than asteroids in terms of bandwidth / UPS. It's 4 constantly running machines for ~5 iron plates/s, but asteroid gets 400 legendary ore per 81 crusher runs even if you throw away all the epic ore generated as byproduct. It's worthwhile for yellow science though, which I'm planning right now. Should also be usable for red circuits on blue / purple.

You're underestimating what 20 plates of iron in green circuits would do to automation science

At the same time I'm less confident about it being useful in applications other than red, green and gold science. You'd want LDS (item) for the copper plates on red and for steel.

Stone becomes a throughput bottleneck on purple and... I mean I wouldn't be suggesting odd ways of getting sulfur if chemical science didn't have the same problem.

[h.q.droid]

Well, green circuits does help too so blue circuit upcycling could be better than I thought.

Stone becomes a throughput bottleneck on purple and... I mean I wouldn't be suggesting odd ways of getting sulfur if chemical science didn't have the same problem.

Actually, asteroid rolling gives a quite generous stone throughput since each calcite gives 37.5 stones and you don't actually need that much stone for each purple science. Asteroid sulfur throughput is a little worse than stone but still descent. Just use basic processing at productivity 30 instead of rerolling for the epic asteroids you actually want. I did mining productivity 500-1200 using legendary purple and blue sciences exclusively.

[coffee-factorio]

I can see it for purple science. Forgive me, when I'm trying to track so many possible combos, it's pretty easy to miss a good one. At the end of the combo chain you're getting a huge bonus on stone if you use the copper fluid recipe.

With sulfur, the thing is given directly and by a 5% return on an asteroid instead of a 20%. That's one where I might just say "It's a beautiful art and I respect the art, but it seems more like a mass market item". I have very low hopes for the odd idea I have about Gleba. It's very much a "crazy scheme" grade idea where the final product might only have a practical purpose if you do something like use legendary bioflux purely to wipe up spoiled legendary bioscience. Unless I can demonstrate a better rate to myself than crushers, I'm mainly doing it to document a trap recipe at that point. It won't directly help UPS, it might technically hurt it because it's a pessimistic assumption that you don't use the bioscience.