Ban quality modules from asteroid crushers

[Hurkyl]

For having used it, it's not OP at that level of productivity imo , because it turns plastic into copper and steel, but the ratio isn't good and i feel plastic is more valuable than copper or steel that you can have in large quantity in Vulcanus already. Now with just a couple productivity research, you can turn plastic into much more copper and steel, even if it's not 1:1 for plastic upcycling yet, it now has the potential to turn something like 1 plastic into 10 copper and 10 steel ,and even if those are "less valuable", they are not 10x times.

It's an upcycler: it's turning plastic into higher quality plastic. But you get a mass of free quality upgrades on copper and steel as a bonus, which knocks cost/benefit completely out of the park in comparison with anything else you might want to upcycle at that point in the game.

I understand what you are saying, but if you consider just plastic, it's more expensive/complex to setup up LDS shuffle than just plastic or even coal upcycler to me. That's why i see the value in the copper and steel there ( not a "good" plastic upcycler) . That's what you get from the extra cost, and i feel it's not all that much early game, so i don't find it that OP in early game.

Now if you do set this up, maybe you can avoid "plastic productivity research" entirely, that's another thing.

Maybe it's me who value more "individual block that produce a single product with no by product", i rank higher the complexity of having iron copper and plastic for the LDS shuffle, and then tossing the non-desired ressoources in lava, when you can lazily upcycle coal in a very inefficient way right at the mines and use super long belt for that quality coal. ( early game only ! x)

There aren't really any good options for plastic, IMO. Red circuits and LDS are slow recipes, recycling plastic/coal directly is stupidly expensive; something like 50x the cost in raw (normal quality) materials to get a legendary result as compared to a basic craft/recycle or reprocessing loop. Yes, I mean fifty. My old calculations say the ratio rounds to 2727 normal items to one legendary output.

I haven't been interested in making an asteroid upcycling platform so I don't have much to say in comparison.

I guess I don't really see an LDS recycling loop as being particularly complex; the only real difference from any other craft/recycle loop is that you send the copper/steel away as an output rather than loop it back with the plastic.

When I would get to the point of tossing the copper/steel into the lava, though, I switch over to red circuits. (which I might do most of the work via blue circuit craft rather than red circuit craft)

But why ? What's the point ? low quality fluid you can have in infinite quantity for almost no cost and is very easy to scale, it's much more logical to me to just disregard the amount of fluid consumed, because it's not important to care about ressource efficiency for something that's infinite.

At some point, scaling by multiplying by a number bigger than 1 (and maybe a lot bigger than one) is going to be much much easier than scaling by continuing to add the same small number repeatedly.

You need to explain a bit more how this leads to optimizing for consuming the least amount of fluid. Because to me that doesn't add up.

Do you care how many foundries are processing lava into molten copper? How much stone needs to be transported to and tossed into the lava? The inserters and belts doing that transportation? Et cetera? Because the amount of molten copper used is directly proportional to how many times you need to replicate that.

It's a proxy for something that is directly relevant, and an excellent proxy at that. Is it the whole story all on its own? No, of course not. But it's absolutely not as irrelevant as you try to make it out to be.

But anyways, I missed that the thread of discussion has moved away from lower-tech situations and is centered on how things degenerate as you near max productivity, and am now informed, so I'll drop that topic unless someone really wants to talk more about it.

Ah that's unfortunate, because it's both side of the balance, the early game counts as much as the late game to different players.

It's more that I don't want to derail the topic and people were already talking about not wanting to derail the topic. But I have no issue if the thread of discussion as moved on to this one.

[crimsonarmy]

That leaves uranium as the only raw ressource without "easy late-game upcycling" to me , and i feel it's interesting because it incentivizes players to (ab)use different upcycling techniques for different materials.

I kind of see it as uranium being more like the planet specific resource on Nauvis.

more than what ?

something like iron, copper, coal, etc. maybe I misunderstood you.

[mmmPI]

There aren't really any good options for plastic, IMO. Red circuits and LDS are slow recipes, recycling plastic/coal directly is stupidly expensive; something like 50x the cost in raw (normal quality) materials to get a legendary result as compared to a basic craft/recycle or reprocessing loop. Yes, I mean fifty. My old calculations say the ratio rounds to 2727 normal items to one legendary output.

It is stupidly expensive, that's why i added "early game only", to me it's not meant to be scaled because that would require constant addition of new coal patch, it's just the easiest / less infrastructure, to get something going like the first few modules and so on before you can use space coal imo.

I haven't been interested in making an asteroid upcycling platform so I don't have much to say in comparison.

Wait what, that's the whole point of the thread x).

I guess I don't really see an LDS recycling loop as being particularly complex; the only real difference from any other craft/recycle loop is that you send the copper/steel away as an output rather than loop it back with the plastic.

When I would get to the point of tossing the copper/steel into the lava, though, I switch over to red circuits. (which I might do most of the work via blue circuit craft rather than red circuit craft)

i'm not saying it's complex on an absolute scale, i meant that it's "more complex" than upcycling just coal or plastic. it's less complex than the whole asteroid platform, which itself isn't that complex.

But why ? What's the point ? low quality fluid you can have in infinite quantity for almost no cost and is very easy to scale, it's much more logical to me to just disregard the amount of fluid consumed, because it's not important to care about ressource efficiency for something that's infinite.

At some point, scaling by multiplying by a number bigger than 1 (and maybe a lot bigger than one) is going to be much much easier than scaling by continuing to add the same small number repeatedly.

You need to explain a bit more how this leads to optimizing for consuming the least amount of fluid. Because to me that doesn't add up.

Do you care how many foundries are processing lava into molten copper? How much stone needs to be transported to and tossed into the lava? The inserters and belts doing that transportation? Et cetera? Because the amount of molten copper used is directly proportional to how many times you need to replicate that.

It's a proxy for something that is directly relevant, and an excellent proxy at that. Is it the whole story all on its own? No, of course not. But it's absolutely not as irrelevant as you try to make it out to be.

To me that doesn't change the point that you are not optimizing for having less fluid consumption, what is relevant is UPS. So to me there is no point optimizing for less fluid consumption, especially if you can create builds that increase your consumption of fluid to improve your UPS in the process, that makes it a bad proxy to me. The full quote was :

You need to explain a bit more how this leads to optimizing for consuming the least amount of fluid. Because to me that doesn't add up. What you need to do to optimize the fluid consumption may makes expanding "easier" , but it's already "easy" to expand at this stage, what you want is to expand "efficently" imo, not "fast", or you'd reach faster the limit of your computer and you'd have lower number than if you optimized for UPS. The thing that should be optimized imo is UPS if you want to scale. Even if that means you pay 10x time the price for a setup that has the same output per minute or consume 10x as much fluid, if your UPS are better, then do this, using robots make any scaling easy at this stage.

It's more that I don't want to derail the topic and people were already talking about not wanting to derail the topic. But I have no issue if the thread of discussion as moved on to this one.

I feel part of the discussion has shifted after it was mentionned that a dev talked about this. I also saw OP mentionning explicitly LDS shuffling in a comparaison, so i believe it's not completly off topic albeit the whole UPS vs fluid consumption thing kinda is, it was from my end, to clarify what i believed was erroneous claim.

That leaves uranium as the only raw ressource without "easy late-game upcycling" to me , and i feel it's interesting because it incentivizes players to (ab)use different upcycling techniques for different materials.

I kind of see it as uranium being more like the planet specific resource on Nauvis.

more than what ?

something like iron, copper, coal, etc. maybe I misunderstood you.

Oh ok, that make sense now, i didn't understand, but yeah it can be seen not as "raw" ressource, but more as a planet specific ressource from Nauvis, like Holmium is for Fulgora.

[CyberCider]

There aren't really any good options for plastic, IMO. Red circuits and LDS are slow recipes, recycling plastic/coal directly is stupidly expensive; something like 50x the cost in raw (normal quality) materials to get a legendary result as compared to a basic craft/recycle or reprocessing loop. Yes, I mean fifty. My old calculations say the ratio rounds to 2727 normal items to one legendary output.

I recently looked into this myself, so I can help you. Grenade upcycling is exactly what you’re looking for. Also, once you reach level 30 plastic productivity, don’t aim for legendary coal. Aim for rare coal, then make plastic out of it with 8 quality modules. You will get a mix of rare, epic and legendary plastic. After that, all you need to do is direct recycle the rare and epic bars up to legendary. I used a calculator to check, and this is dramatically more efficient than trying to go for 100% legendary coal.

[Hurkyl]

There aren't really any good options for plastic, IMO. Red circuits and LDS are slow recipes, recycling plastic/coal directly is stupidly expensive; something like 50x the cost in raw (normal quality) materials to get a legendary result as compared to a basic craft/recycle or reprocessing loop. Yes, I mean fifty. My old calculations say the ratio rounds to 2727 normal items to one legendary output.

I recently looked into this myself, so I can help you. Grenade upcycling is exactly what you’re looking for. Also, once you reach level 30 plastic productivity, don’t aim for legendary coal. Aim for rare coal, then make plastic out of it with 8 quality modules. You will get a mix of rare, epic and legendary plastic. After that, all you need to do is direct recycle the rare and epic bars up to legendary. I used a calculator to check, and this is dramatically more efficient than trying to go for 100% legendary coal.

Hrm. I generally write off the assembler recipes since missing out on the +50% productivity bonus of an EM plant or Foundry is painful. But, you save a lot of petroleum gas if you raise quality before making the plastic, which is a significant factor I hadn't thought of last time I looked hard at this. So it's something to look at, especially in a setting where I'm also using coal to make that petroleum gas.

[CyberCider]

Hrm. I generally write off the assembler recipes since missing out on the +50% productivity bonus of an EM plant or Foundry is painful. But, you save a lot of petroleum gas if you raise quality before making the plastic, which is a significant factor I hadn't thought of last time I looked hard at this. So it's something to look at, especially in a setting where I'm also using coal to make that petroleum gas.

Craft > Recycle > Craft is always a lot more resource efficient than Recycle > Recycle, no matter the machine or modules. If the craft accepts productivity modules, they help. If it doesn’t, then quality also helps. Also I only compared the coal efficiency, I ignored petroleum gas. It’s quality-free, so I basically consider its cost zero in a quality context. I upcycled coal instead of plastic purely because there are no plastic upcycling recipes with decent throughput