TL;DR
Introduce an optional setting where spoilable items degrade to a lower quality tier instead of becoming Spoilage, transforming spoilage management into a complex logistics sorting challenge.What?
Add a new optional game setting (toggleable like Enemy or Pollution) that changes the spoilage outcome for spoilable items.Current Behaviour:
When a spoilable item expires, it transforms into Spoilage.
Spoilage retains the quality of the original item and has its own uses.
High-quality items that spoil are lost in their original form, requiring the player to produce replacements.
Proposed Change:
When a spoilable item expires, it transforms into the same item at the next lower quality tier (e.g., Legendary becomes Epic, Epic becomes Rare, Rare becomes Uncommon, Uncommon becomes Normal).
Only Normal quality items transform into Spoilage upon expiry.
The factory must now include sorting logic to route items based on their current quality tier as they degrade. Items flowing down the quality ladder can be re-processed in lower-tier production lines or stored for specific recipes requiring that tier. This creates a multi-layered logistics network where item flow is managed by quality state rather than a single Spoilage output.
Why?
The current system forces a superficial automation that is gambling focused. This simplifies the outcome into a single path: produce or lose.By making quality degradation time-based and tiered:
Increases Logistical Depth: Players must design networks to sort and route items as they degrade through quality tiers. This aligns with Factorio's core theme of automation and complex system design that the current "pull "quality", dispose if not the desiered "lucky pull", retry" automation is not.
Preserves Resource Value: High-quality items retain utility even as they age, allowing for multi-tiered production lines where items flow down the quality ladder rather than disappearing, meaning there is posibility to reuse them if there is a mismatch of avalable quality.
Encourages Strategic Planning: The factory design must account for the lifecycle of an item, routing degraded products to appropriate stations. This turns spoilage into a solvable engineering puzzle. With the rewards being quality that is based on design and automation and not gambling, since this is factory game about automation and base building.
It keeps the sense of timed based but allow us to send the items off, via trian and similar, without us needing to create "gambling" dens where we send off online the legendary, since like this any can be used and all spoiled will be still the same quality spoilage, meaning a trian can take it somewhere else.
And a quality item, starting to spoil, makes more sense to degrade (lower) it's quality before even reaching the (common quality) stage, after which, it spoils.