Quality Scaling rebalance

[EvilCooky]

I have recently come across an idea about the scaling of quality and after thinking about it for a while, I have to agree.
Since I haven't seen any topic like this in the forum, I thought I'll make my own.

What do i suggest?
Instead of linearry scaling the bonuses one gets form higher quality, I suggets a logarithmic scaling.

Currently every level of quality gives an additinal 30% bonus to nearly every value that is affected by quality (legendary is the exception with a 60% bonus)
In my opinion, this incentivices people to ignore quality alltogether untill they unlock Legendary and then just go straight to it.
Instead I suggest a logarithmic scaling where earlier levels of quality have a higher bonus.

Old Quality
Normal 0%
Uncommon 30%
Rare 60%
Epic 90%
Legendary 150%

Screenshot 2026-06-27 094129.png (25.37 KiB) Viewed 203 times

New Quality
Normal 0%
Uncommon 60%
Rare 100%
Epic 130%
Legendary 150%

Screenshot 2026-06-27 094144.png (25.05 KiB) Viewed 203 times

This change would result in earlier qualitys to be more impactful for the improvement of your factory.
It would also bring quality in line with the beacon changes.
(Higher reward for small earlier investments, but it is still possible to reach the same improvment level as before when going all in)


This change would also better reflect how improving a products quality works in real life.
While first improvements are often simple but still achieve a high increase in quality, any further improvemets will have to deal with diminishing returns.

[radical_larry]

I think the double bonus of legendary could be spread across rare, epic and legendary.
So uncommon = 30%, rare = 70%, epic = 110%, legendary = 150%
Cost for each quality level scales exponentially, so uncommon is already quite strong for how easy it is to get. Rare and epic could use some love though.

[angramania]

Just another quality rebalance suggestion without understanding the real reason behind "legendary or nothing". And as all other it will not change anything. But you may spend 5 minutes to create trivial mod, that implements your idea, and see yourself.

[Hurkyl]

I can't figure out how exactly quality bonuses are specified in the files, but the way I understand it, the engine is set up to give a flat bonus per quality level, and legendary is actually two levels above epic, but they wound up cutting the level between epic and legendary.

That said, I guess there's nothing stopping you from rearranging them to be levels 0,6,10,13,15 rather than 0,1,2,3,5... except that you'd have to figure out how to rescale all the quality bonuses down by a factor of 3.

Rearranging the levels to 0,2,3,4,5 would be a much easier ask to get similar results to what you're looking to implement. Or maybe 0,1,3,4,5 if it makes more sense for the jump to be at rare. That looks easy to change in {Factorio install}\data\quality\prototypes\quality.lua.

[Hurkyl]

Just another quality rebalance suggestion without understanding the real reason behind "legendary or nothing". And as all other it will not change anything. But you may spend 5 minutes to create trivial mod, that implements your idea, and see yourself.

That said, I agree with this sentiment.

Legendary-or-nothing, afaict, comes from a mindset where, in the cost-benefit analysis, the marginal cost of each quality level is* negligible, and this change won't affect that.

And if you are in a situation where those marginal costs are actually pertinent, you already have good reason to use plentiful mid-quality items rather than throw them away for a handful more top-quality ones.


*: this could refer to the actual material cost and time involved, or just the player's perception of such