Factorio Forums

mmmPI wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:56 pm

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:23 pm

mmmPI wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 7:46 pm 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)

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:23 pm

mmmPI wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 7:46 pm 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.

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:35 pm 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.

mmmPI wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 9:33 pm

crimsonarmy wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 9:26 pm

mmmPI wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:56 pm 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.

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 9:53 pm 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.

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 9:53 pm 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).

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 9:53 pm 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.

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:23 pm

mmmPI wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 7:46 pm

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:23 pm

mmmPI wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 7:46 pm 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.

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:35 pm 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.

crimsonarmy wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 11:08 pm

mmmPI wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 9:33 pm

crimsonarmy wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 9:26 pm

mmmPI wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:56 pm 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.

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 9:53 pm 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.

CyberCider wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 8:16 am

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 9:53 pm 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.

Hurkyl wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 8:52 am 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

CyberCider wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 9:27 am 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

If you are doing this on Vulcanus, you need to account for petroleum gas, because you need coal liquefaction on Vulcanus. If you are not doing this on Vulcanus, but on your space platform, then coal efficency is meaningless imo because you are using infinite coal from space.

CyberCider wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 9:27 am

Hurkyl wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 8:52 am 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

The innate 50% productivity bonus is a big deal in resource efficiency. For example, if you're making an output that can use productivity, then going from normal inputs to legendary outputs, if your crafter is an assembler 3 takes about 116 items, but if it's a foundry it takes about 33 items.

(legendary quality 3 modules everywhere except the legendary recipe which used legendary prod 3 modules)
(and for an EM plant it's 23 items, because of the extra module slot)
(where "item" means a whole input pack for the recipe)

Even if you don't care about the coal and gas inputs specifically, you are still losing a fair bit of throughput in the system when looping with assembler 3's just because of the resource loss. (and, for what it's worth, the EM plant runs significantly faster than the assembler 3 too. The foundry a lot faster)

I'm not definitely saying that grenades aren't the way to go; I'd have to math out the production to really be sure (e.g. the doubling from coal to plastic is a multiplier in the favor of the grenades). I just think it's likely tall these other factors are going to combine to make upcycling plastic via advanced circuits (and maybe processing units in the middle) the way to go despite the slow speed on the recipe. Especially if advanced circuits are actually the intended application for the plastic.

Hurkyl wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 10:27 am The innate 50% productivity bonus is a big deal in resource efficiency. For example, if you're making an output that can use productivity, then going from normal inputs to legendary outputs, if your crafter is an assembler 3 takes about 116 items, but if it's a foundry it takes about 33 items.

(legendary quality 3 modules everywhere except the legendary recipe which used legendary prod 3 modules)
(and for an EM plant it's 23 items, because of the extra module slot)
(where "item" means a whole input pack for the recipe)

Even if you don't care about the coal and gas inputs specifically, you are still losing a fair bit of throughput in the system when looping with assembler 3's just because of the resource loss. (and, for what it's worth, the EM plant runs significantly faster than the assembler 3 too. The foundry a lot faster)

I'm not definitely saying that grenades aren't the way to go; I'd have to math out the production to really be sure (e.g. the doubling from coal to plastic is a multiplier in the favor of the grenades). I just think it's likely tall these other factors are going to combine to make upcycling plastic via advanced circuits (and maybe processing units in the middle) the way to go despite the slow speed on the recipe. Especially if advanced circuits are actually the intended application for the plastic.

Grenades are the only recipe that balances resource efficiency and throughput. Raw coal recycling has moderately higher throughput than grenades, but it’s very resource inefficient (which you may choose to ignore, depending on your level of mining productivity). While LDS, blue circuits, red circuits and tesla guns are more resource efficient, but they’re so horrendously slow that scaling them up would be very difficult, due to needing a lot more legendary quality modules to meet a desired throughput. I did in fact math it out using a tool, and I can tell you that grenades are definitely faster than all of these methods. 300% plastic productivity makes a very big difference. It allows one coal to turn into 8 plastic, and also allows you to use 8 quality modules in the plastic cryoplant with no penalty, greatly improving efficiency. At lower levels of plastic productivity, I’m actually not completely sure it would still win out. I never checked.

mmmPI wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 10:22 am If you are doing this on Vulcanus, you need to account for petroleum gas, because you need coal liquefaction on Vulcanus. If you are not doing this on Vulcanus, but on your space platform, then coal efficency is meaningless imo because you are using infinite coal from space.

No matter where the gas comes from (crude oil, heavy oil ocean, even coal in the few cases where you do that), it’s an utterly tiny amount of resources compared to the coal that was upcycled. In the grand scheme of things, it’s definitely safe to ignore.

The calculation was on my PC (forman2 doesn’t work on mobile), which I won’t have access to until later next week. If you would like, I could post the exact gas requirements when I’m able to.

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 8:23 pm

coffee-factorio wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 7:18 pm

Hurkyl wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 5:41 pmI think you're still really overlooking the free quality upgrade. While you're upcycling plastic the system spits out endless quantities of quality copper and steel that don't go back into the system since you keep pumping in qualityless molten metals in their place; a far far better proposition than casting wire or steel plates from scratch.

And foundries can't work with solid parts, they only cast. Which produces a truly horrifying result since you use 250 fluids to cast with plastic, while a bunch of normal to epic materials simply vibe. And the line does this at a 1x rate so you get billed for material you've already produced multiple times.

Your analysis need proofreading so I really can't make out what you're thinking, but I think this is our main disconnect. The point isn't to let the quality copper sit around vibing: it now feeds into your system using EM plants to upcycle copper, or whatever other process needs quality copper injections to stay balanced.

Effectively, rather than that epic copper plate having to go back into the plastic upcycling process, you get to pay for a normal copper plate to use in its place and keep the epic one to use elsewhere.

This is what LDS Cast produces. It does what you suggest.
This is how much it costs. 64000 copper fluid/minute.
This is what a normal LDS build using the same strategy makes. it's about half as much.
This is what it normally costs. 2.4K fluid/minute.

It's fair to call me out as disrespectful. I can't be what I should. It's horrifying because the shuffle suggests it's a good idea. People are extremely bad at guessing the effects of geometric behavior, there's no way to know till you try with these builds.

evandy wrote: Fri Aug 15, 2025 7:47 pm
Yeah, this is my stance. 300% productivity (on anything) is broken. That said, it's not broken enough for me to complain about - it takes so much research to get there, that it's basically irrelevant.

I respectfully disagree. You have two 300% researches attached to two equally difficult components that happen to also be rocket components, a trademark of the game. When someone develops something in two years, they are going to test out what happens at different productivity's at least once. A hallmark of this game is exponentially increasing difficulty that is met with exponentially increasing capability.

So imo this is what is known as in game design as "dropping a hint".

mmmPI wrote: UPS

That's relevant to this discussion due to where we are operating at.
In general it's a horrible metric because it doesn't affect players until it does, and because each computer is different a player will experience it differently.

It is being applied in a way borders on being blatantly deceptive.

mmmPI wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 10:22 am

CyberCider wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 9:27 am 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

If you are doing this on Vulcanus, you need to account for petroleum gas, because you need coal liquefaction on Vulcanus. If you are not doing this on Vulcanus, but on your space platform, then coal efficency is meaningless imo because you are using infinite coal from space.

Vulcanus you may mining productivity, you get around the issues of liquifying coal very quickly.

You're directly contradicting your arguments about UPS in this post. You need to add running gun turrets every 2 meters of platform and running engines to harvest coal there, where you generate segments of rock.

You can't act like it's an important metric then just neglect how it affects operations. It isn't something a player can optimize by efficient beacon placement because a player can make processors that easily exceed all their processing needs using beacons, but that means they have expand crushers and guns and add thrusters to maintain the rate of movement on the platform.

As for the points you made about fluid though:

If you run a reroll section and it only scales linearly due to its upgrades, it will lose out over time to the bonuses provided by scaling research productivity's on LDS and Blue Chips, whether you do something like the shuffle or just invest in an honest build.

Here's how that actually manifests:
At level 13 Blue chips, you can buy about 5 green circuits a second. I can turn that into 1.25 iron plates a second and 2.5 a second copper wires. That's ~0.6 copper plates a second. Which means about 36 plates a minute, after recycling.

If you convert fluids to ores at even a pessimistic rate of 1 ore = 15 fluids (on account of the +50% research on foundries). The for the amount of fluid I'm allowed by the five copper ores, I can buy five copper from a shuffle done on any surface and run that operation on 4500 fluid.

Compared to copper plates using copper wires. I can do that at 1.2k for 6.5 plates a minute, just under 4 times. That's going to be between 20-26 plates before I go to a calculator.

But for 191 million research, and an asteroid. I buy half of a copper plate every time I put down the layout for the crushers, the steel for the platform, and all the miniguns covering that. Even when I factor in what modules do to forge a plate from an ore, I get ~30.4 plates a minute.

Which suggests that it's slightly better than an EM plant you can buy without 191 million research.

That might suggest that the asteroid reroll section might not be unbalanced at all and it's down to training players to use it if necessary. Then attack builds that seem broken because they show exponential increases of legendary outputs.

CyberCider wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 10:57 am Grenades are the only recipe that balances resource efficiency and throughput. Raw coal recycling has moderately higher throughput than grenades, but it’s very resource inefficient (which you may choose to ignore, depending on your level of mining productivity).

Mining productivity is yet another thing that helps make the game easier with progression that wasn't mentionned in my previous list ! It reminded that i received no asnwer when i mentionned to you that quality could have similar mechanism, and that's why i dislike this suggestion, it removes one. If the best way to make quality plastic , as anticipated by players in discussion becomes "recycling grenades", i don't think it's a big win in term of "increasing complexity with alternate process that are more efficient to unlock when progressing in the game", unlike that point where you can start making a space platform for asteroid shuffling.

On the other hand, it seem to imply that space coal would "still be strong", if you retrofit some transport space-platform to dump excess, or make dedicated ones, instead of asteroid shuffling platform which is a positive point to me as it would constitute one of those alternate process, that's what i'd do when my coal run out on Vulcanus which i see as another reason to maybe ignore ressource efficency ( not just mining productivity).

CyberCider wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 10:57 am While LDS, blue circuits, red circuits and tesla guns are more resource efficient, but they’re so horrendously slow that scaling them up would be very difficult, due to needing a lot more legendary quality modules to meet a desired throughput.

Ha that's maybe a good illustration of a case where you can "pay more ressources" to "improve UPS", if the receipe are slow, you need more machines for same output, so maybe the "ressource inefficent receipe" would be preferable in some cases / for some players.

CyberCider wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 10:57 am No matter where the gas comes from (crude oil, heavy oil ocean, even coal in the few cases where you do that), it’s an utterly tiny amount of resources compared to the coal that was upcycled. In the grand scheme of things, it’s definitely safe to ignore.

The calculation was on my PC (forman2 doesn’t work on mobile), which I won’t have access to until later next week. If you would like, I could post the exact gas requirements when I’m able to.

That's only if you are upcycling the coal i imagine, but it would be different if you upcycle plastic=> plastic and use quality module in the drills that mine coal, you can use the "no quality" for liquefaction, recycle or not the excess "no quality", maybe up only up to "uncommon". I've seen some players do similar things on Vulcanus when joining random multiplayer, and it seemed made to avoid depleting ore patches too fast.

I have never reached a stage where i had enough mining productivity and/or rich enough coal patch to "not worry" about them depleting in Vulcanus, i usually deplete a few, and switch to space coal to not have to go further than the places where i still have tungsten on the map ( i don't explore for coal) . I'm not familiar with foreman but i'd have a look at it if/when you can share the math.

Heavy oil ocean is currently the worst for plastic to me because you don't get coal on Fulgora to turn it into plastic, i did a modded game with Fulgora start + ennemy and i couldn't do military research nor grenades it was tough challenge.

I'm curious to where you think it would be the "optimal" place to do the grenades recycling as it seem your favored option. considering wether or not the LDS shuffle is also dis-allowed.

coffee-factorio wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 3:17 pm You're directly contradicting your arguments about UPS in this post.

No, i think it's you who don't understand, but it look like you're doing no effort to communicate your reasonning which sounds just like gibberish to me so it's not easy to see where you got it wrong. Now given your previous behavior on this topic and others i don't think it matters all that much or is worth the try. I think the other persons most likely can parse what i wrote. I would propose you to send PM but you ignored them last time only to make more noise on topic where i participated , so that's also probably not going to happen right ?

CyberCider wrote: Sat Dec 28, 2024 5:29 pm This means that asteroids can be used as a backdoor to mass amounts of high quality iron, stone/concrete and plastic.

I was re-reading the OP to see if the discussion has drifted to far away from the main thread, and i couldn't help but notice this error !

There's no stone on asteroid !

CyberCider wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 10:57 am
Grenades are the only recipe that balances resource efficiency and throughput. Raw coal recycling has moderately higher throughput than grenades, but it’s very resource inefficient (which you may choose to ignore, depending on your level of mining productivity). While LDS, blue circuits, red circuits and tesla guns are more resource efficient, but they’re so horrendously slow that scaling them up would be very difficult, due to needing a lot more legendary quality modules to meet a desired throughput. I did in fact math it out using a tool, and I can tell you that grenades are definitely faster than all of these methods. 300% plastic productivity makes a very big difference. It allows one coal to turn into 8 plastic, and also allows you to use 8 quality modules in the plastic cryoplant with no penalty, greatly improving efficiency. At lower levels of plastic productivity, I’m actually not completely sure it would still win out. I never checked.

Grenades does 1.25 ore per second. Red one's is 0.66 plastic per second. But upcycling has calculated ratios so you can see how much you get of the process. Grenades is 1 in 80, and em plant ends up doing 1 in 14. If you divide your rate of input by your rate of return, grenades end up being 1.25/80 to 0.66/14.

Once you get processing units and LDS up to 1 to 1 by using a bunch of productivity modules, the rate goes to be 1 to 1. And since you can manage upcycles with just recyclers at that point you can beacon all the things on Dave's blue chip build. Even though recycling the red chips only gives back a small share of plastic... I mean, one. What where you going to use the plastic for?

That isn't the whole story though, I should account for your tool's output, I think it was honest. You can use the cryoplant to make plastic also, and you'll see a similar bonus. But it is more technically difficult to pull that off on advanced circuits build since you have to match rates of quality input, so I think it's part of a pool of valid choices when you have no better option in "quality early game".

It's also extremely valuable to think about grenades in the context of processing tungsten carbide. Since you can upgrade coal ores to meet an input stream of carbide.

Having rerolling kind of mitigates the need to analyze this in that level of detail though.

mmmPI wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 3:48 pm

coffee-factorio wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 3:17 pm You're directly contradicting your arguments about UPS in this post.

No, i think it's you who don't understand, but it look like you're doing no effort to communicate your reasonning which sounds just like gibberish to me so it's not easy to see where you got it wrong. Now given your previous behavior on this topic and others i don't think it matters all that much or is worth the try. I think the other persons most likely can parse what i wrote. I would propose you to send PM but you ignored them last time only to make more noise on topic where i participated , so that's also probably not going to happen right ?

I understand just fine. I understood when you mocked an inexperience player for getting lost and taking my help. I understood when you got into a fight on Yumako balance when you acted the same way you do now to another player.

The moderators are aware that if we attempt to have a discussion in private you will send me a block of random text.

You are now arguing that no balancing action is necessary because it's an infinite rate, you seem to be terrified of people analyzing this topic.

In fact we have finite computing resources and we have to judge the topic at hand in light of that.

mmmPI wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 3:53 pm

CyberCider wrote: Sat Dec 28, 2024 5:29 pm This means that asteroids can be used as a backdoor to mass amounts of high quality iron, stone/concrete and plastic.

I was re-reading the OP to see if the discussion has drifted to far away from the main thread, and i couldn't help but notice this error !

There's no stone on asteroid !

And you are attempting to start another discussion that will drag this into the weeds because at this level of play we know we can distribute material to a surface of interest with any space platform.

Which means we can deliver legendary ores to join a rate of legendary iron to a rate of legendary stone.

I have not lightly tolerated you showing up and engaging me in discussion.

CyberCider wrote: Sat Aug 16, 2025 10:57 am
I did in fact math it out using a tool, and I can tell you that grenades are definitely faster than all of these methods. 300% plastic productivity makes a very big difference. It allows one coal to turn into 8 plastic, and also allows you to use 8 quality modules in the plastic cryoplant with no penalty, greatly improving efficiency. At lower levels of plastic productivity, I’m actually not completely sure it would still win out. I never checked.

Ah, I'm having an emotional moment. You'll forgive me for not analyzing this a bit more. I had some more thoughts on it and how it relates. TLDR summary is that you have a bunch of intermediate steps which you can apply to get productivity bonuses (and it is long).

So, if you do coal, 1/4 of your cycle can be converted to uncommon. Then 1/40th (division is always by 10 per rank...) gets tagged as rare. Well, then that means you can go grenades into plastic then, for that huge bonus.

At that point you're using buildings like a productivity module so I expect your power to grow. And if you use a combination of quality and productivity till you hit 300% using research, you can grow your population of plastic for the next cycle up then see a large fraction upgraded.

In the context of asteroid rerolling, we get a quality pass on coal once we get an (1) uncommon carbon that lets us get 12.8% at the point of a reroll. We get another upgrade from asteroid (2) processing, which benefits from productivity. Then we get another pass at (3) quality from artificial coal for 18.6%. Assuming we use all quality modules. (4) Play the grenades as a 1 tier cycle (24.8%), (5) then go to plastic (6, variable depending on productivity) and an upcycle of your choice (7, variable depending on playstyle and skill)... is that fair or even easy to sort out?

...and what would this nightmare look like? I am sensitive to UPS on the platforms specifically because the cost of a 25 rate minigun is probably going to add up fast. I don't think it's trolling to point out that a player can overdo this.

This compares to say, drilling coal (1, 24.8%) then grenades (2, 24.8%) then plastic (3, variable) then your proper upcycle (variable). Gleba has some interesting variations but it grows slow, so it kind of supplements the moving rate provided by a platform and the variations play well with the lower rate.

Fulgora's like... huh. Blue chips and LDS... well now. That looks like it goes off on level 13 and level 20 of the right productivity. 60 will do some interesting things there. But that's mine (1), recycle (2), remanufacture (3) instead, so you can actually see an interesting application of balance there.