Simplify quality system

[Vaik]

TL;DR
Quality items and equipment are super cool and fun, the process to upgrade them is bad, make it simple.


What?
Change the recipe of all quality upgrades to (3 normal quality) = (1 uncommon) etc. The recycler is 1:1 ratio downgrade. Delete all the quality modules. Delete all green or greater quality components, or anything you can't use quality on its own.

Why?
All science research improves your productivity, efficiency or fighting abilities in some way. Quality research, on the other hand, is a dangerous research. If you are a new player, you will ruin your production lines and make a huge mess. If you are a veteran, you will not want to rebuild independent lines just for green or blue quality, you will wait for the end of the game and just try and go for legendary. It is such a huge effort that you will just do it on a single planet or in space, in essence making everything else obsolete. So quality research is mostly regressive, it only hurts you. But if you simplify it, you can have all the fun of having epic quality items and equipment, without making your old bases obsolete. You could even have an option to change the ratios of cost, I want to keep it simple, but here is the breakdown as I would see it.

(3:1) 3 normal(grey) to 1 uncommon(green), 3 green to 1 blue, 3 blue to 1 purple, 3 purple to 1 Legendary(orange). Total cost of 1 legendary is (81:1)

Thanks everyone,
Vaik

[usafphoenix]

"Quality research, on the other hand, is a dangerous research. If you are a new player, you will ruin your production lines and make a huge mess. I"

No you won't. researching quality (even upto legendary) has NO impact what-so-ever on ANY "in place" designs UNLESS (until) you insert quality modules into the assemblers, miners, furnaces, etc. Also, your problem likely arises from the misguided notion that once you unlock quality modules, you should (or need to) have or produce all things in higher quality. No. You should be highly selective about WHAT things you want to obtain in quality, and your design philosophy has to change to respond to the variance produced from random quality outputs. the actual implementations of upcyclers, quality crafters, "priority consumption" balancers, active-providers + filtered inserters for quality + inserters filtered to normal inserting onto belts for a main bus approach (and then combined with circuit logic to handle overflows is the method by which one can scale the use of quality.

Back before 2.0 even released (when the janky quality mod and such were released, i also struggled with how i needed to change my mindset about how to transition from "standard" factorio (the 1.1 approach) to redesigning my methodologies to account for the eventual desire to have certain things process into quality materials.

It's not meant to be easy. it being easy would make it objectively worse.

There are many different approaches to quality. The SAFEST approach is to only insert quality modules into the "final step" assemblers of things you want a chance to get higher quality items of (things that aren't intermediates). This is things like: asteroid collectors, armor and ammo, gun turrets and lasers, power poles, and electric furnaces, beacons and assemblers, inserters!!. Put a few quality modules in the assemblers crafting these and you don't "ruin your factory", instead, you'll get a steady stream of uncommon versions of these items over time and selective usage of them can make all the difference in the design of your ship or base defense. likewise, you can introduce UPCYCLING (recycling the uncommon and rare results back into intermediates, with then a secondary "recrafting" step for those items to hopefully get a chance at epic or legendary quality. ......all this with absolutely NO belt contamination on your main bus,

If, instead, you want to do the "I want max potential for high quality items approach", You put quality modules in your miners, quality in the furnaces, quality in the circuit assemblers, you split / sort / filter, and upcycle the uncommon and rare so what you're left with is Common, Epic, and Legendary materials. You use the common materials for science and quality-irrelevant items, and you invest your epic and legendary materials where they'll matter most.
And if something fails....recycle it. Try again. Understanding the filtering mechanics of splitters, inserters, and the use of circuit logic is key to success with regards to quality if you really want to maximize the benefits you can get from it...but with how you're struggling, i wouldn't suggest this latter approach until you have a firmer grasp on things.

Quality does not ruin you production lines if you understand how to implement and design for it.

If you're REALLY struggling, look into a mod called quality down binning. It might provide the solution for the problems you create (in however it is you're trying to approach quality). But understand, the research of quality, itself carries no impact on the factory what-so-ever. It's only after inserting quality modules into things you ARENT READY to deal with that problems arise.

[Vaik]

usafphoenix,

I appreciate the thoughtful reply, I kind of assumed I wouldn't see any. When Factorio changed the 1st step of oil refining to just petroleum, it was because it was a jump in complexity for newer players, and I didn't mind either way. Consider a new player adding speed, prod, or efficiency mods into any building, it won't break it(only hurts our perfect ratios). But quality mods add by-products, and if you recycle them, it's a whole can of worms. The complexity in Factorio should come from the player's designs, not from the system.

But I don't mind taking the side of only quality mods in the last step, and just deleting the quality components, but I just want to keep the system simple and clean.

Vaik(usaf also)

[sarge945]

I should probably chime in here as I have recent, direct experience with this.

Up until very recently, I didn't bother with quality in my early-game factories AT ALL, because I was convinced that upcycling and mass-crafting was necessary.

Since about a week ago, I've taken the approach of "give some assemblers quality modules", especially if the only real alternatives are speed and efficiency modules (which don't matter much for a basic early-midgame mall), and then using circuit conditions to limiting chests to 50 normal quality items (rather than restricting the number of slots manually), and it's been great. I've gotten pretty unlucky with producing things, but the occasional uncommon item is nice.

This is absolutely an important mindset and the people saying "You need Legendary before you can use quality!!" really need to just try using quality modules in their early-midgame factories, I think they will have a really positive gameplay experience.

ALL THIS BEING SAID, I feel like an ultra-lategame resource should be available as an alternate way to upcycle items. Such as item + 100 prometheum chunks = item of next higher quality tier. This would give people an alternate way of getting quality that would scale linearly with their ability to mine prometheum vs building around chance.

[Vaik]

Imagine my late game run, I am making legendary Iron plates, copper, plastic, steel etc. on Volcanus. Then I transport it to other planets who need it. My main bus on Navius is unneeded now, I don't need to expand and get more basic resources. On Gleba I just need to make science and carbon fiber, no need to build big. I don't need to use productivity or speed mods either, because I use quality for everything on Volcanus.

But, if we had a Simple Quality System option(maybe on game creation). I could still use my main bus to uplevel items, but it will still be expensive. I would upgrade speed and prod mods to legendary first. They will cost 81x the base cost, so you will still need a big base. 405 red and blue circuits, plus 324 tier 2 mods for each one. So even though it's simple, you will have to have an economy.

Any thoughts on having this be an option?

[Hurkyl]

I appreciate the thoughtful reply, I kind of assumed I wouldn't see any. When Factorio changed the 1st step of oil refining to just petroleum, it was because it was a jump in complexity for newer players, and I didn't mind either way.

It wasn't just the jump in complexity -- IIRC you didn't actually have a (non-cheesy) way to deal with the heavy/light byproducts. I don't recall if basic oil processing enabled the solid fuel recipes for them, but you're actually limited in how much solid fuel your factory can consume. And that limit might even be zero if you're running pure solar.

So the usual (AFAIK) advice given to people was to spam fluid tanks to buffer fluid while you hurry to do the research to allow you to handle the byproducts.

With early-game quality, getting overwhelmed with intermediates you can't handle is user error, rather than something baked into the system.

[Vaik]

I agree being overwhelmed by intermediates is user error, and it is baked into the system.

But remember, I am advocating for a change in that system. I love some by-products and finding interesting ways to be more efficient. I loved sea-block mod, and A+Bobs.

I think the complexity should come from the player more than the system, 5 quality-types times number of components is just too much and could be more fun with a simpler quality system.

[front]

Not the answer you want from me, but with 2.1 recipes can affect quality directly so modders can revamp this system.

[worph]

ALL THIS BEING SAID, I feel like an ultra-lategame resource should be available as an alternate way to upcycle items. Such as item + 100 prometheum chunks = item of next higher quality tier. This would give people an alternate way of getting quality that would scale linearly with their ability to mine prometheum vs building around chance.

+1
Giving Promethium more use and tying it to (legendary) quality is absolutely perfect.

[Vaik]

I really like the idea of adding a late game resource like promethium to boost quality somehow, or just as an extra input for the legendary step-up.

We could even expand on this idea.

Green quality- needs +1 (special item from Volcanus, gleba or Fulgora)
Blue quality- needs +2 (special item from Volcanus, gleba or Fulgora)
Purple quality- needs all 3 (special item from Volcanus, gleba or Fulgora)
Legendary quality- needs all 3 (special item from Volcanus, gleba or Fulgora) And 1 promethium

Just an idea for anyone to expand on, as long as we don't have quality component by-products ruining our builds.

[eugenekay]

Promethium is Quality serves as a good preview of this idea. I personally do not like the change in balance that it adds, favoring Promethium mining ships for doing everything quality related, not building “a better Factory” to process materials & refine them towards producing Legendary items.