[2.1] Fix concrete recycling time and other inconsistancies.

Erfar · Post by **Erfar** » Wed Jun 24, 2026 4:49 pm

TL;DR

Concrete recycling should take 1/10th of time it currently takes

What?

Some of Factorio items, such as: Concretre, Refined Concrete, Biter eggs, Nuclear fuel cells are produced in bunches of 10. (and copper wire/iron sticks 2 per craft)
Recycling time of those items should be calculated as 1/10 of the recipe to be proportional and consistent with idea of "recycling takes 1/8 time of the production" So if 10 blocks of concrete takes 10 second to produce, those 10 blocks of concrete should take 1.25 second to recycle.
Right not it take 12.5 seconds to recycle 10 blocks of concrete - LONGER than time to craft them!

Why?

Consistency and predictability of behavior. It also notable that some mods made some crafting recipe to produce a lot of items, for example Ultracube have some recipes that crafts in bunches of 500 and now it would make x62.5 times more to recycle that crafting process than to made one.
IF any material should be "hard to recycle" there should be obvious and deliberate multiplier that will tell to player that "This is hard to recycle, it takes 900% more times to do so"

Walterin0 · Post by **Walterin0** » Wed Jun 24, 2026 4:53 pm

xAeryn · Post by **xAeryn** » Wed Jun 24, 2026 5:19 pm

+1, unintentional/inconsistency that has severely negative gameplay impacts.

The time to recycle 1 concrete should be based on the time to produce 1, not the time to produce 10, so it should be 10x faster than it is right now. This mistake is why people were doing the hazard concrete recycling etc - that was removed, but this wasn't fixed.

Also affects a lot of other items significantly (just less obviously).

All in all, bloats the number of recycles that you need quite a lot and makes the needed amount of recyclers extremely inconsistent between different items/builds, which is a problem for both fun and UPS.

eugenekay · Post by **eugenekay** » Wed Jun 24, 2026 5:33 pm

Disclaimer: Factorio is a game; realism for the sake of reality does not matter.

Have you ever TRIED to break up concrete in real life? It is a very hard, durable material that is resistant to most impacts, weathering, and lasts for decades without maintenance. Heavy hydraulic machinery, dynamite, or jackhammers is the way to go.

This line of complaints seems very arbitrary; I am sure that the numbers as we see them now are the intended balance or else they would not have been adjusted! Breaking changes were reserved for 2.1; enjoy re-designing your Factory to handle them. Or don’t! Nobody is forcing you to try the Experimental versions.

Erfar · Post by **Erfar** » Wed Jun 24, 2026 6:08 pm

eugenekay wrote: Wed Jun 24, 2026 5:33 pm Disclaimer: Factorio is a game; realism for the sake of reality does not matter.

Have you ever TRIED to break up concrete in real life? It is a very hard, durable material that is resistant to most impacts, weathering, and lasts for decades without maintenance. Heavy hydraulic machinery, dynamite, or jackhammers is the way to go.

This line of complaints seems very arbitrary; I am sure that the numbers as we see them now are the intended balance or else they would not have been adjusted! Breaking changes were reserved for 2.1; enjoy re-designing your Factory to handle them. Or don’t! Nobody is forcing you to try the Experimental versions.

Have you tried to break low density structure, power armour MK2 or Foundry?
1 block of concrete takes same time to recycle as 1 whole foundry.

And that idea "don't complain that is experemental"
is totally backward. That is PERFECT time to fix such issues. And ifthere will not be complain it will left unfixed.

Walterin0 · Post by **Walterin0** » Wed Jun 24, 2026 10:06 pm

eugenekay wrote: Wed Jun 24, 2026 5:33 pm Disclaimer: Factorio is a game; realism for the sake of reality does not matter.

Have you ever TRIED to break up concrete in real life? It is a very hard, durable material that is resistant to most impacts, weathering, and lasts for decades without maintenance. Heavy hydraulic machinery, dynamite, or jackhammers is the way to go.

This line of complaints seems very arbitrary; I am sure that the numbers as we see them now are the intended balance or else they would not have been adjusted! Breaking changes were reserved for 2.1; enjoy re-designing your Factory to handle them. Or don’t! Nobody is forcing you to try the Experimental versions.

Disclaimer that reality does not matter in a game -> brings up reality as an argument.
Regardless, even IF they are intended, bringing it up as worth changing is normal, that's literally what ideas and suggestions are for. And presumably, if not brought up, this would make it into 2.1 stable, so the only time to bring it up is now.

ichVII · Post by **ichVII** » Wed Jun 24, 2026 11:12 pm

+1. Just removing the most reasonable way to recycle concrete is not a great idea. Especially as it is basically caused by a bug.

Moikle · Post by **Moikle** » Fri Jun 26, 2026 2:00 pm

+1. Devs have said it isn't a bug, but in that case it is an oversight with negative gameplay effects. Getting rid of concrete shouldn't be the hardest thing about fulgora.

kromulent · Post by **kromulent** » Sat Jun 27, 2026 4:37 pm

It seems like the obvious solution would be for the recycling recipe to require the same amount of items input as the original recipe outputs. So you would need to insert 10 concrete into the recycler for the recycler to run the recycling recipe. This would eliminate the discrepancy and be internally consistent, so why not do it that way?

Mar_Veloz · Post by **Mar_Veloz** » Sat Jun 27, 2026 5:48 pm

+1. Personally I would also like to see the hazard concrete trick brought back in addition to this, since I don't see it as any different than the chest recycling trick for steel/iron. It feels extremely weird/inconsistent that the devs made an exception for just that one recipe specifically.

JackTheSpades · Post by **JackTheSpades** » Sat Jun 27, 2026 6:25 pm

+1

I think the automated math for recycling times could very easily account for the number of items generated in one craft.
It might however throw off the balance the devs have created and been testing for years now by affecting other recipes that produce multiple items in one craft like for example the Copper Cable.

I feel like Concrete taking a long time to recycle is intended by the developers. If not there would have been no need to patch out the Hazard Concrete workaround.
That said, I do think it's a little arbitrary to say "these are the rules" and then patch the rules because people found a better way to do it.

worph · Post by **worph** » Sat Jun 27, 2026 11:57 pm

+1
Recycling should account for how many items are being crafted at once, not just the absolute time disregarding the amount.
I'm not against the hazard concrete change in general, but there should be a better way to recycle concrete; OR it should be communicated much more clearly, in game, that concrete is special in some way and should take longer to be recycled for *insert reason*.

Vader · Post by **Vader** » Sun Jun 28, 2026 1:30 am

Gergely · Post by **Gergely** » Sun Jun 28, 2026 9:20 am

I believe there are some inconsistencies in the other direction as well: Some items being much faster to recycle than they should be.

Take rocket silo for example. Suppose I want to produce quality rocket silos. Let's compare two methods:

Craft rocket silo then recycle low quality results.
Craft the ingredients, recycle low quality results finally craft the rocket silo from high quality ingredients.

Math for crafting then recycling the rocket silo:
Crafting takes 24 seconds and recycling takes 3.75 seconds for a total of 27.75 seconds.

Math for crafting then recycling the ingredients:
Concrete: Crafting takes 800 seconds and recycling takes 1250 seconds for a total of 2050 seconds.

Actually... let's just stop there. Cycling just one ingredient of the rocket silo takes over 70 times longer than cycling the rocket silo. If we assume the concrete recycling time is fixed that is still 30 times longer, meaning you need a lot more infrastructure and quality infrastructure isn't cheap! Cycling the ingredients is foolish. You want to just focus on cycling the final product. And if all you need is item voiding, rocket silo, nuclear reactor and centrifuge are on the list of recipes to consider. Hazard concrete being patched merely kicks the can down the road exposing the next broken voiding loop.

This in many cases leads to the same boring pattern of crafting then recycling one end product being reused for most quality buildings towards the endgame. Nuclear reactor, Foundry, Electormagnetic plant, Cryogenic plant, even the Recycler itself. For these your best bet is to quality cycle the end product. And to be clear I do not think this technique has no place in the game, I just believe it shouldn't be over 10 times more powerful than the next best thing. Strategies involving quality intermediates need to have at least some merit.

For the time being I made a mod to test out a way of balancing recycling times. The mod supports just adjusting times for product count (dividing the time by the product count) but also has a mode where it enforces the constraint that crafting a recipe then voiding the results can not take less time than voiding the ingredients. However I think this might be better seen more as a tool to understand how broken the current system is rather than as a proper and tested solution.

Jepakazol · Post by **Jepakazol** » Mon Jun 29, 2026 4:52 pm

Moikle wrote: Fri Jun 26, 2026 2:00 pm +1. Devs have said it isn't a bug, but in that case it is an oversight with negative gameplay effects. Getting rid of concrete shouldn't be the hardest thing about fulgora.

+1
Came here to write exactly the same thing

TheCoolerVanessa · Post by **TheCoolerVanessa** » Mon Jun 29, 2026 7:53 pm

TactiCool · Post by **TactiCool** » Mon Jun 29, 2026 8:14 pm

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