"Quality" almost single-handedly ruined my love of the game, here's how I pushed through that mental block

[ploik21]

If there's one thing that my particular brain worms will not allow when building; it's waste. Raw materials used imperfectly, wasted space, idle machines at peak load, excess power usage; it's all gotta go. Productivity modules will be crammed into every space they can and efficiency beacons at every corner. So coming back to play Space Age and deciding to continue on with my old save I quickly got to work making some tiny ships, just barely fit to fly between planets and didn't have too much trouble setting up equally compact factories capable of making the new materials, machines, and sciences. Time is infinite after all, so to me even a minimum output design is good enough so long as it's perfectly efficient. You can just beacon it or double it later once you've got the demand.

However it wasn't until I was preparing to head out to Aquilo that I decided to see if I could get some Quality upgrades for my gear. I had so far ignored it because the idea of scrapping items and losing so much of the raw material was just too much for me to take. Plus where could I fit in Quality modules that my Productivity modules weren't already filling? The other two options I had were:

1) Space Casino and LDS shuffle shenanigans to get infinite raw materials as Legendary, however "what's the point in setting this up now when I only have access to Epic Quality" I thought to myself. This option also seems to sidestep the whole system in a way that seems unintended, jumping from standard to Legendary all at once.

2) Rebuild everything I've ever done 5x bigger to account for a tiny trickle of Quality items in every process that would otherwise clog every machine the moment they arrive. Ouch. Most of those machines will stay idle too as they wait for the mountain of low Quality items to be processed.

"Well those don't seem appealing at all, surely I'm missing something." And there I was stuck for days. Considering tearing down everything, ignoring quality completely, maybe mods to combine Productivity and Quality modules? There must be some way you would be intended to gradually increase the quality of everything in your factory as it became available to you right? Otherwise why bother until you can jump straight to Legendary, but at that point the game is almost over. Something has got to click. But it just never did, and slowly the infinite research ticked on with nothing else to do while I drove myself in circles.

I seized up and almost quit, it wasn't fun anymore. This wasn't a puzzle I wanted to solve, but ignoring or sidestepping the problem suddenly made the game feel hollow and meaningless. I tried out a bunch of mods to tweak things, but finding anything balanced was rough.
Eventually I found the Quality Processing mod by Schneefall https://mods.factorio.com/mod/quality-processing
And the High Precision Manufacturing mod by Heinarc https://mods.factorio.com/mod/HighPreci ... ufacturing
Which didn't immediately fix my issues but allowed me to start thinking about designing for Quality differently. Schneefall's mod allows finished products to be increased in Quality for a reasonable cost in raw materials and processing complexity. Perfect for single or low frequency crafted items like armour, weapons, vehicles, etc. That would otherwise need to be crafted and scrapped a hundred times over just to get the one you want. However it isn't so cheap as to be a reasonable option for everything that is under continuous demand like science packs, modules, crafting machines, power poles, etc. To do so would be Wastefull . Combined with Heinarc's mod, which encourages upstream Quality crafting for those high demand items. With the new option to now upgrade any items that had failed to reach a higher Quality for a not insignificant cost instead of scrapping them, suddenly every percentage increase in Quality at each step of every process was helping to reduce Waste. I understand this isn't mechanically very different than the standard "scrap and re-craft until you get the Quality you want" approach, but it at least feels better than throwing perfectly good items into a Recycler.

It still isn't perfect in my mind, where do Productivity modules fit in all this if Quality is the new consideration? Maybe that's why the new crafting machines have a productivity bonus built in and raw materials on other planets are mostly infinite.
Does it make more sense to limit all Quality upgrades by 1 level per crafting step with a higher Quality chance on modules to compensate? As in: a jump from Uncommon Iron Ore to Epic or Legendary Iron Plate when smelting is impossible. That does make designing around the outputs far simpler as you only need to have 2 production lines for each crafting step instead of 5, and slowly increasing Quality as the complexity of what you are producing increases seems much more thematic to the game.

Thanks for reading. I just needed to put my frustration with Quality into words. So I hope it at least serves as good feedback for the DLC or help someone else break through the Quality barrier.

[lovelymess]

What I don't like about how quality is implemented is that it feels like a gambling machine, I avoid mobile games for that reason alone.

It's also that, without legendary quality modules, the chances of getting an upgrade are so abysmal that doing it before endgame feels like a total waste of time and resources.

I'd love it if devs could do something like a kovarex equivalent for quality, make it expensive, but make it logical.

If not, thank you for the mods suggestions, I'll try them out.

[Hurkyl]

Genuine question: what stops you from viewing, for example, a recycling loop as being a reasonable-cost higher-complexity way to manufacture quality items?

---

That aside, I always found quality substitutes where you replace the system with higher-cost recipes for making higher-quality items as being strictly worse for the player, outside of those who experience angst over scrapping items, because I also pay attention to the other application of quality: for example, in the early game, uncommon/rare productivity 1 modules are essentially free because you can equip your production science setup with quality modules and filter out a stream of higher quality items while you're making science, and you can drop them in important places like labs or yellow/purple science assemblers over time as you accumulate them.

Similarly for quality electric furnaces, which are useful for your platforms.

I feel like the basic and intended usage is sort of like this -- situations where you have use for the stream of lower quality items generated while you're pursuing a few higher quality outputs.

There's also an incremental improvement situation where you might set up a system to make legendary assembler 3's (and other crafting buildings) over time, but rather than trying to jump straight from common to legendary, you might start using uncommon or rare buildings for most of your construction, saving the top-quality stuff for special situations.

And it's not really until you've in a post-scarcity situation that making everything legendary is meant to be a reasonable thing to do and you would be scrapping everything of lower quality.

This feels to me a lot like how in vanilla, people used to (do they still?) skip module 1's and 2's and jump straight from having no modules to builds with module 3's everywhere. Or feel like jumping straight to using blue belts everywhere even when red (or yellow) belts would still suffice. Except the expense of legendary quality is a more significant jump, which greatly stretches out the period between when you can start improving things and when it's reasonable to aim for everything being top-tier. It makes me feel like there's less pressure to go from 0 to 100, since you have a lot more time where intermediate stages should be useful.

[Tertius]

I neither see the quality mechanics as gambling nor do I see the huge input demand as waste. What made me abandon quality manufacture is the tediousness. It's boring. If you want quality items, you need to design a specialized factory for upcycling, a different one for every one of the desired products. Designing the first 3-4 production lines are fun, but then it's just a chore. There are so many of them!

I started with a factory for quality modules and beacons first, then for the Fulgora specific manufacturing machines, then for the Gleba specific manufacturing machines, and then I lost interest. It was increasingly boring to design almost the same factory lines for every new upcycling. And it's always a little different, so you cannot reuse a previous design, because if you streamline every upcycling factory and design a blueprinted parameterized factory with assembling machine 3, you waste huge amounts of input material for mediocre output. It's not fun to waste material this way while you know a specialized factory would produce that item with a fraction of the input.

Then, instead of end product upcycling, I tried to streamline upcycling of basic material, but this is also a chore if you go beyond the standard items (plates, green/red/blue circuits, ...), because some base quality material is abundant, while other base quality material simply cannot be directly created - you need to upcycle finished products, for example the stack inserter. And in this case you automatically upcycle every ingredient as well, so you don't need any quality ingredients as input in the first place.

The ratios are wrong. Why do I get up to 400% productivity for blue chips by the game engine, when I cannot use the resulting chips simply because the additional ingredients required for some crafting can only be created by upcycling? This upcycling also upcycles blue chips, so I don't need that huge productivity in the first place. The same for all the other productivity research bonuses. Seems a red herring or kind of unfinished game balancing, interrupted by the game release. Nice for producing normal base items, but useless for quality.

I went for legendary quality only. The reason: designing production for lower qualities would mean I have to create all these production lines all over again for epic, then for legendary - again. Designing the same thing 3 times, just for a higher tier. And creating just one tier is already too tedious to stand. And the lower quality items are not that good that you really need them. Also works with normal, so no demand for quality.

So I stopped doing this and continue to build factories with normal items only.
I enjoy designing factory lines in every part of the game, but designing quality creation/upcycling is a chore and not a challenge because of its vastness and its lack of direction.

[crimsonarmy]

What I don't like about how quality is implemented is that it feels like a gambling machine, I avoid mobile games for that reason alone.

It has some aspects that feel like that (armor for example). However, for most cases, you are "gambling" thousands of times at least (likely far more). In this case, the law of large numbers kicks in and the randomness doesn't really matter; it is just ratios (think about uranium ore processing and how it is "random").

[Hurkyl]

I went for legendary quality only. The reason: designing production for lower qualities would mean I have to create all these production lines all over again for epic, then for legendary - again. Designing the same thing 3 times, just for a higher tier. And creating just one tier is already too tedious to stand. And the lower quality items are not that good that you really need them. Also works with normal, so no demand for quality.

FWIW, when I played, I just used one design aimed to produce legendary quality things. But at first I don't send anything uncommon or above off to the recyclers unless I already had a sizeable stock of it: I use the uncommon stuff, and save the fewer high quality crafts when a particular building needs extra oomph to make a build convenient or whatnot.

Then when rare started becoming plentiful, I would send the stock of uncommon items off to the recyclers and stop keeping them in stock, and start using rare items by default. And so forth.

[lovelymess]

it is just ratios (think about uranium ore processing and how it is "random").

I never felt this way about uranium, it doesn't take long before you can start kovarex and that's not random at all, it also feels very useful right from the start, unlike quality to me.

[coffee-factorio]

I've tried it both ways.

With the "go for max" strategy what I ran into was that I'd be designing for a factory so powerful the standardization I'd do between levels just wouldn't hold, so I'd have to be implementing normal factories and max factories for a period of time. So my gap wasn't at the point of "I need to make a legendary line" but rather "wait, there's now so much empty space here I can't fill it".

Investing in t1 modules in components, produced a much more satisfying game because I'd be knocking ~300 foundation off a ship in a context where that matters; in early game investment. If I put them into an iron furnace, I lose 2% iron off 15 items a second but gain a factory that's twice as fast once you stack on all bonuses. Plus occasional chances for surprises where I get a rare quality instead of a uncommon quality item. Even following rush to space rules, I'm seeing outcomes like being able to outright buy rare quality tanks within four hours of placing modules into the components of chemical science.

It's fraught with technical problems and not for the faint of heart. But it creates a scenario which is very satisfying because instead of avoiding purchasing things that are twice as powerful for the running time of a standard game, you're deciding the order in which to buy them with a green "cake" line and a blue "frosting" line. It's been done in such a way where you can get an uncommon item or a rare withing a few hours of opening an operation but will struggle to fill a mine if you are operating on a high speed time frame (sub 40 hour win).

If you are operating on a well paced 100 hour time frame though, it positions you quite well to develop your post game operation because your buying power will be based off operating a factory that is at least twice as fast on a unit buy unit basis. Which means that given the same space, you tend to be able to cram in much more than twice the buying power. Things get to be particularly crazy at rare quality because the power to weight ratios of modules start to overcome their balancing drawbacks on productivity, and while you're mass producing that you can filter a couple of strategic legendary parts into a promethium ship or science line.

[Shadowhawk]

I went for legendary quality only. The reason: designing production for lower qualities would mean I have to create all these production lines all over again for epic, then for legendary - again. Designing the same thing 3 times, just for a higher tier. And creating just one tier is already too tedious to stand. And the lower quality items are not that good that you really need them. Also works with normal, so no demand for quality.

FWIW, when I played, I just used one design aimed to produce legendary quality things. But at first I don't send anything uncommon or above off to the recyclers unless I already had a sizeable stock of it: I use the uncommon stuff, and save the fewer high quality crafts when a particular building needs extra oomph to make a build convenient or whatnot.

Then when rare started becoming plentiful, I would send the stock of uncommon items off to the recyclers and stop keeping them in stock, and start using rare items by default. And so forth.

Im working with a similar idea, upcycling from uncommon to legendary. Making modules also means your quality grows fast because each rare or epic module improves your quality chances a little bit.
But i start at uncommon everything and grow from there on.

[Ranakastrasz]

There are a bunch of issues. The biggest is that we ALREADY had quality, in a sense, since that is literally the whole point of having T1-T3 assemblers or modules. But, the difference is that you have to use not just more resources, but different resources and longer chains.

The random nature isn't a big deal. That mechanic has already existed, in various forms, in mods, already. random yields which you have to plan around, not a huge deal because law of large numbers. Heck, vanilla had a bit, with uranium. But, it wasn't a blanket coverage, but only for a specific subset of things.

Seablock I believe had it for ore, crystals, and maybe plants. But eh, you are sieving sea-water for ores. If it wasn't a bit random, it would feel weird.
Ultracube has the modules themselves, which literally work almost just like quality. You make a module casing, and then insert increasing expensive materials to try to upgrade it up the tiers, and might succeed, might get wreckage, the input tier, or a casing, or w.e. So recycling and upcycling is absolutely there. But only for that one set of items. This feels like you are pushing beyond safe limits and hoping for the best, while expecting and planning for catastropic failure.
Space Exploration had quite a bit, with things being broken and lost in a lot of recipies, requiring you to do garbage collection and clean up, and then make sure you top up the resource loops safely to avoid jams. This felt like dealing with wear and tear and maintanance.


Fundimentally, it isn't a BAD mechanic.
The problem is, it is applies to literally everything, is poorly integrated, it isn't user friendly, and it doesn't play nice with other modules, and it compares poorly to how mods tended to handle the same type of up-tiering.
Petty complaint wise, It feels like gambling, and the naming scheme is still stupid.

It applies to everything. Rather than isolating it to a limited subset of the game, it applies everywhere, so you can't really avoid it.
Its poorly integrated. You cannot downbin quality items, so higher quality items are literally inferior. And since you have that surge tierup, where it jumps 2 tiers, you can't avoid accidently making "Rare" items, when you are trying to make uncommon items. Congradulations, you made a useless rare circuit. You now need a bunch more, plus rare of these other items. You have to filter out them and shove them in a chest til sometime later.
Maybe if you could downbin them, it would run smoothly.

You can't just slot these modules in. I used to hate Producivity modules because they screwed up my ability to do mental math easily. At least producitivity can be slotted in without breaking everything.
Not that this is bad, as a special mechanic. You can't just process uranium ore and expect to get purely depleted uranium. so handling is nessesary.

Again, lack of downbinning, isn't user friendly. Qualities don't stack together (which would be complex to do, yea, but I still kinda hoped) and overall it feels like a worse version of all those massive mods with 3-4 levels of each machine, except you can't really reliably get 100 t2 machines without accidently ending up with 3 T3 and a t4. Which sounds nice in theory, but in practice is just annoying. And its lazy in comparison, because each tier in those megamods always used a new set of complex materials and longer chains. Not just the same boring upcycling loop.

Uptiering. I look at a megamod, and it has hundreds of new items and thousands of recipies. Or even a smaller mod like Ultracube. Sure, many recipies will be very similar, or functionally clones of each other. But I know that advancing will invariable require solving a new, handcrafted puzzle. With quality, I already know it will be the same boring problem, and be just as annoying as the first time. I think the only vaugely interesting part is when liquids are involved, because of the low density structure/plastic thing. Putting recycling and quality on the only planet with a required liquid intermediary for the science is stupid though.

Oh, and the friday facts circuit upcycler example jams after a while, because the law of large numbers ruins a loop which expects perfect ratio preservation. Just in case I wasn't disappointed enough.

I don't know. The rest of the expansion is reasonably good, (Except gleba, which should be next to Aquila instead of a starter planet to reflect it's complexity) but quality just feels aweful to play with.

But hey, at least its "optional". just like Modular armor is optional. Sure, you can play without it, but it is part of the expected progression.

[TamTamTam]

There is certainly a waste. When you recycle a product, you don't get the ingredients in same proportion. For example when i upcycle uranium ammo for dark green rocks, i get way more of the ammo back than i do green rocks, on every level of quality, so if i don't destroy it, my upcycling will jam. So it is a quite literal waste in many cases.

[Hurkyl]

There is certainly a waste. When you recycle a product, you don't get the ingredients in same proportion. For example when i upcycle uranium ammo for dark green rocks, i get way more of the ammo back than i do green rocks, on every level of quality, so if i don't destroy it, my upcycling will jam. So it is a quite literal waste in many cases.

If that's true, make a bug report.

You should be getting ingredients in the same proportion, on average. But if you run for a very long time, random variations that have a negligible contribution to the proportion can nonetheless be large enough to overwhelm buffer space. (and will eventually do so if your buffer sizee is fixed) This phenomenon is probably what you're seeing if you're describing what I think you're describing.

If you do take a strategy of voiding things when the excess gets too large, I'm curious about the asymptotic behavior of the amount voided. I'm betting it averages out to a proportion of the total. A tiny proportion (whose value probably goes down very quickly as you increase buffer size), but not something that converges to zero in the long run.

[TamTamTam]

I know how probabilities work, no need to be condescending by telling me that what i am seeing is not what i am seeing.

[Ranakastrasz]

I know how probabilities work, no need to be condescending by telling me that what i am seeing is not what i am seeing.

Given the ratio should be 1:1, it is likely that you have recycled a sufficiently huge quantity for the gamblers ruin varient (dunno the name) to have biased it in one direction or the other. But without more data, like how many recipes have run or how big the buffer has been filled, it's hard to do anything but guess on our end.

[Ranakastrasz]

I know how probabilities work, no need to be condescending by telling me that what i am seeing is not what i am seeing.

Given the ratio should be 1:1, it is likely that you have recycled a sufficiently huge quantity for the gamblers ruin varient (dunno the name) to have biased it in one direction or the other. But without more data, like how many recipes have run or how big the buffer has been filled, it's hard to do anything but guess on our end.

[Hurkyl]

I know how probabilities work, no need to be condescending by telling me that what i am seeing is not what i am seeing.

There is no condescension meant in the original post: people make mistakes. And this is an easy mistake to make and numerous others have made this mistake. There's even a (not a) bug report making this mistake over in the other forum

(there is a little bit of it intended in this post)

I did not tell you what you are seeing is not what you are seeing. Because as far as I can tell, what you are seeing is that your buffers are filling up with one ingredient and not the other, and that's what I expect to happen when the proportions are right.

What I am telling you is that what you are inferring is probably not what's going on. Because people mistakenly infer the proportions are off when the reality is that the proportions are right and the buffers fill up through random fluctuations accumulating over time.

There could also be an imbalance in the feeds into the process, which is something that would need to be controlled for if you do submit a bug report about this.

[andystrangelove]

Same here. I’ve been thinking about starting a new playthrough of Space Age, but the whole quality thing just puts me off. Even though I don’t have to use it, it feels like a broken mod I can’t uninstall. When part of the joy of Factorio is making your factory run perfectly and elegantly, having this awkward system sitting in the background just nags at me.

It feels unpolished and out of place, thematically and mechanically. Factorio for me was fundamentally “research = better stuff,” and quality sidesteps that with it's gambling mechanic. There’s also the opportunity cost: I love the new buildings, so instead of having quality for essential endgame progression (especially in space), I’d much rather see proper Tier 2 versions of turrets, asteroid collectors, and so on. And for things like inserters, just make their speed researchable.

It’s one mechanic too many, and a very widely impacting one, which shows in all the inconsistencies and exploits that have cropped up since. And ridiculous things like legendary mech armour with a dozen legendary exoskeleton, which just breaks immersion. (Honestly, allowing multiple exoskeletons instead of tiered upgrades was always a bit silly.)

And then there are stacked belts. I initially liked the idea, but it also feels... wrong. It’s too big a leap. We already had a clear mechanic for belt throughput—speed. Suddenly being able to quadruple yellow belt throughput for almost no cost feels like cheating.

Unrealistic, maybe, but I’d love to see 2.1 make quality an optional, standalone mod and rebalance the game accordingly.

[h.q.droid]

Same here. I’ve been thinking about starting a new playthrough of Space Age, but the whole quality thing just puts me off. Even though I don’t have to use it, it feels like a broken mod I can’t uninstall. When part of the joy of Factorio is making your factory run perfectly and elegantly, having this awkward system sitting in the background just nags at me.

It feels unpolished and out of place, thematically and mechanically. Factorio for me was fundamentally “research = better stuff,” and quality sidesteps that with it's gambling mechanic. There’s also the opportunity cost: I love the new buildings, so instead of having quality for essential endgame progression (especially in space), I’d much rather see proper Tier 2 versions of turrets, asteroid collectors, and so on. And for things like inserters, just make their speed researchable.

It’s one mechanic too many, and a very widely impacting one, which shows in all the inconsistencies and exploits that have cropped up since. And ridiculous things like legendary mech armour with a dozen legendary exoskeleton, which just breaks immersion. (Honestly, allowing multiple exoskeletons instead of tiered upgrades was always a bit silly.)

And then there are stacked belts. I initially liked the idea, but it also feels... wrong. It’s too big a leap. We already had a clear mechanic for belt throughput—speed. Suddenly being able to quadruple yellow belt throughput for almost no cost feels like cheating.

Unrealistic, maybe, but I’d love to see 2.1 make quality an optional, standalone mod and rebalance the game accordingly.

Just in case you don't know, quality is already a mod you can disable in the mods menu.

I love my legendary mech armor with a dozen legendary exoskeletons but yeah it does feel a bit silly. Especially when it's faster than legendary train (which does nothing) with legendary uranium fuel, or legendary spidertron filled with legendary exoskeletons, rendering personnel transport obsolete.

[eugenekay]

Just in case you don't know, quality is already a mod you can disable in the mods menu.

The “Space Age” mod requires the Quality mod, so no, you really cannot do this and still play the DLC. You can simply not-research Quality (or use a Mod which disables its effects entirely), but you cannot disable it… unless you are happy to play the “base game” only.

I honestly don’t understand why everybody talks about Quality as “gambling” - no money is changing hands! It is (arguably) non-deterministic on whether a particular Crafting yields a Normal or Improved Quality item, but this is an Automation game - you are not doing this by hand. If you just keep the machine running it will produce higher-Quality output, that you can sort and utilize. I like that properly-running Quality factories are always moving to prevent clogs - it is a much more fun dynamic than “produce until Full” like all-Normal setups. I am also the type of player who thinks that Gleba’s “just in time” production is a great idea because it encourages direct Inserter machine-to-machine transfer, rather than letting items spoil on a belt. Maybe I’m just a fan of complexity?

[meganothing]

Same here. I’ve been thinking about starting a new playthrough of Space Age, but the whole quality thing just puts me off. Even though I don’t have to use it, it feels like a broken mod I can’t uninstall. When part of the joy of Factorio is making your factory run perfectly and elegantly, having this awkward system sitting in the background just nags at me.

It feels unpolished and out of place, thematically and mechanically. Factorio for me was fundamentally “research = better stuff,” and quality sidesteps that with it's gambling mechanic. There’s also the opportunity cost: I love the new buildings, so instead of having quality for essential endgame progression (especially in space), I’d much rather see proper Tier 2 versions of turrets, asteroid collectors, and so on. And for things like inserters, just make their speed researchable.

It’s one mechanic too many, and a very widely impacting one, which shows in all the inconsistencies and exploits that have cropped up since. And ridiculous things like legendary mech armour with a dozen legendary exoskeleton, which just breaks immersion. (Honestly, allowing multiple exoskeletons instead of tiered upgrades was always a bit silly.)

And then there are stacked belts. I initially liked the idea, but it also feels... wrong. It’s too big a leap. We already had a clear mechanic for belt throughput—speed. Suddenly being able to quadruple yellow belt throughput for almost no cost feels like cheating.

Unrealistic, maybe, but I’d love to see 2.1 make quality an optional, standalone mod and rebalance the game accordingly.

Next time when I visit a restaurant I'll tell them that I don't drink beer and I don't like that they have beer on their menue. Sure, I could just not order it, BUT it feels like that beer is staring at me

Really, you want an option for optional stuff ??????