Factorio Forums

h.q.droid wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 8:25 am Just one small reminder: all the "real" factories you show here will eventually jam when legendary output were constantly consumed. You need circuitry to dispose excessive intermediates from random swing, which I don't find enjoyable to design.

One of the reasons I prefer space casino over any upcycler setup is that it doesn't need clunky intermediate disposal to avoid jamming, its expected jamming time being exponential rather than quadratic.

It's already built in. Clogging by too much intermediates cannot happen, because consumption is always faster than production of these intermediates. There's no intermediate disposal required, it's intermediate production prevention needed. It's a tiny wire from the main belt (read hold all belts) to the supply belt (enable if supply < limit) to keep the main belts from overflowing with too much input. It's one of the situations where a tiny circuit wire and condition is just magic to make a factory run properly without designing a physical layout with a big footprint just to counter a small edge case. Especially with sushi belt loops. Mechanically controlled sushi belt loops are a nightmare. The belts will all unclog on their own. If you stop extracting the legendary products, it will clog everything, and if you resume extracting, everything will unclog on its own.
I do enjoy designing such stuff.

Tertius wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 9:21 am It's already built in. Clogging by too much intermediates cannot happen, because consumption is always faster than production of these intermediates. There's no intermediate disposal required, it's intermediate production prevention needed. It's a tiny wire from the main belt (read hold all belts) to the supply belt (enable if supply < limit) to keep the main belts from overflowing with too much input. It's one of the situations where a tiny circuit wire and condition is just magic to make a factory run properly without designing a physical layout with a big footprint just to counter a small edge case. Especially with sushi belt loops. Mechanically controlled sushi belt loops are a nightmare. The belts will all unclog on their own. If you stop extracting the legendary products, it will clog everything, and if you resume extracting, everything will unclog on its own.
I do enjoy designing such stuff.

Take your blue circuit example, say if you stop recycling or producing uncommon blue when there are 50 uncommon red circuits on the belt. What happens the moment you do accumulate 50 uncommon red circuits on the belt while there are only 5 green circuits from the last recycling?

Tertius wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 9:21 am

h.q.droid wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 8:25 am Just one small reminder: all the "real" factories you show here will eventually jam when legendary output were constantly consumed. You need circuitry to dispose excessive intermediates from random swing, which I don't find enjoyable to design.

One of the reasons I prefer space casino over any upcycler setup is that it doesn't need clunky intermediate disposal to avoid jamming, its expected jamming time being exponential rather than quadratic.

It's already built in. Clogging by too much intermediates cannot happen, because consumption is always faster than production of these intermediates. There's no intermediate disposal required, it's intermediate production prevention needed. It's a tiny wire from the main belt (read hold all belts) to the supply belt (enable if supply < limit) to keep the main belts from overflowing with too much input. It's one of the situations where a tiny circuit wire and condition is just magic to make a factory run properly without designing a physical layout with a big footprint just to counter a small edge case. Especially with sushi belt loops. Mechanically controlled sushi belt loops are a nightmare. The belts will all unclog on their own. If you stop extracting the legendary products, it will clog everything, and if you resume extracting, everything will unclog on its own.
I do enjoy designing such stuff.

He's referring, I think, to a balancing problem, not a throughput problem.

For example, look at that processing unit loop. When you recycle an uncommon processing unit (or a common one and get a single quality bump), you always get 5 uncommon green circuits, but you have a 50-50 chance of getting an uncommon red circuit.

So while, on average, you get 10 times as many green circuits as you do red circuits, as the system runs it's pretty rare for the numbers to line up exactly like that. Instead, after N recycle recipe crafts you get that produce an uncommon output, you should expect the imbalance to be on the order of sqrt(N).

That is, typically, you expect your uncommon chest buffer to contain either 5 * r * sqrt(N) green circuits or 0.5 * r * sqrt(N) red circuits, and on average r is going to be around 0.4. (1 / sqrt(2 * pi)) Maybe I'm off by a factor of 2 or something; I didn't check my work carefully.

(the math: the number of red circuits will follow a binomial distribution; approximate it with a normal distribution and compute the expectation of the absolute value of the difference from the mean)

What this means is that your system is probably going to run fine after thousands of results, but after millions of results you have a decent chance that you have produced 10000 surplus uncommon green circuits without any uncommon red circuits to pair them with, thus filling up your buffers and making the machine halt.

h.q.droid wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 9:41 am Take your blue circuit example, say if you stop recycling or producing uncommon blue when there are 50 uncommon red circuits on the belt. What happens the moment you do accumulate 50 uncommon red circuits on the belt while there are only 5 green circuits from the last recycling?

You have a keen eye. That's a crucial part of that production line. There's a chest all uncommon circuits are being put into, and the other qualities as well into their own chests, and the EMPs are being supplied from these chests, so the belt isn't clogging as long as the chest isn't full. The chests are also solving a throughput problem - stack inserters fully work out of the chests with full hands.
And it's actually the only part from all I showed that's not yet circuit-controlled and may actually clog due to the chest getting full, because the normal-quality EMP is the only machine that's producing more than is being consumed (it has 5 recyclers instead of 4) to keep all machines running even if some quality level is being skipped at recycling. There's one wire missing from that chest to the leftmost EMP to stop that EMP if the chest has > x green circuits.

It didn't happen yet the chests got full with green circuits only - until now, recycler result was sufficiently balanced. To make it bullet proof, it's necessary to destroy stuff from these buffers, yes. Since there is already trash removal for many other material, it's just an entry in some constant combinator and changing the steel chest into a buffer chest as far as I see. On the other hand, I guess I just use legendary steel chests here and wait how many years until it clogs.

Tertius wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 9:57 am On the other hand, I guess I just use legendary steel chests here and wait how many years until it clogs.

Could even wire up an alarm for manual intervention. "Anything > 9000" for this chest.

Tertius wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 9:57 am It didn't happen yet the chests got full with green circuits only - until now, recycler result was sufficiently balanced. To make it bullet proof, it's necessary to destroy stuff from these buffers, yes. Since there is already trash removal for many other material, it's just an entry in some constant combinator and changing the steel chest into a buffer chest as far as I see. On the other hand, I guess I just use legendary steel chests here and wait how many years until it clogs.

See, even you, a person who enjoy this kind of designs, didn't put the intermediate destroying logic there by default. FYI, my legendary tank belt on a similar design clogged in days. Scale legendary production to science level, and the game either becomes overclogged-chest-cleanup, or destroy-everything-everywhere. Keeping space casino behind Asteroid Productivity 26 allowed relatively fun legendary science. The current 2.1.8 release made that... less fun.

BTW, I did like your pipe / LDS designs. With a single input there is no balance issue.

MBas wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 8:40 am It was just one example out of many giving you both (copper and iron) base resources and which can be created in cryogenic plant (meaning there is 8 + 4 modules in one loop). Roughly speaking EM plant, biochamber or foundry gives you 2 "free" module slots because its productivity is equivalent of 2 productivity modules.

I never used LDS or Blue Circuits exploit before because it seems almost like a cheating. Now I am unsure how to grasp situation when casino is nerfed but productivity research on recyclable materials stays.

And why I mentioned batteries in the first place? I still think it is one of the best options. These 8 + 4 modules is very powerful and can beat many other factors (sulfur acid consumption, high production time) easily because how the series is exponential against module contribution.

See table in https://wiki.factorio.com/Quality espetially the part "crafts" when it should be obvious how much is cryogenic plant powerful on this.

And since preffered way is to have 8 prod modules in cryogenic plant and leave all legendary modules to recycler, you may speed up cryogenic plant so its just all about speed of recycler.

But again, I am not saying it is total op. But the casino is not either. You can use green circuit then. With 5 prod modules so you have

Green circuits: Loosing 31.25 percent of material with 4 quality modules

My guess noone is using this just becouse there is still more powerful (and broken in my opinion) processing unit production.

Well, I can't believe I overlooked green circuit upcycling for iron plates. That's actually high-throughput.

Now I recall, the main problem with battery is it's very slow to recycle. Being made in batches of 2, the recycling time not-bug made it 2x slower recycling compared to making, and batteries are slow to make in the first place. The higher yield doesn't mean much when throughput is too little compared to available materials.

h.q.droid wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 7:57 am
I think they mean battery upcycling for iron plate. I tried that too because the high theoretical yield. It sucked: batteries are impractically slow to make and consume ridiculously large amounts of acid. One of the reasons space casino worked is because they were quite fast: each chunk was worth 400 plates so the average per-plate time cost was quite low.

The same reason for blue chips: it was also too slow for legendary science at +300% productivity with 31% quality. And the byproduct ain't free (in terms of UPS) to dispose either. My base were dumping entire cars of legendary blue chips as holmium byproduct.

For the normal use of base building materials, they work to some extent. They are still a bit slow if you want to build a legendary promethium ship.

You don't put quality on processing units once they hit 300% productivity. So if you did 300% with -20% speed, it's going to look the same as 300% with 125% speed and so on because you just print 4 chips per recipe.

Even then it isn't a free lunch though because the ratio of parts coming back does some interesting things on belts. Technically you can do things to speed up the recyclers with speed modules. Realistically only the chips you successfully upgrade leave that system and the rest stay to jam up belts or short buffers, so if you try and just throw q2L, s2l into a recycler you'll still have to know what you're doing.

It's also a situation where there's practical hidden factors having to do with recycler behavior that you have to account for if you're going to play games. It isn't impossible, and it's the best alternative for doing general supplies. But it definitely is not asteroid rerolling in terms of how you handle the inventory it gives you. I don't mean small random residues I mean at scale.

h.q.droid wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 7:57 am I think they mean battery upcycling for iron plate. I tried that too because the high theoretical yield. It sucked: batteries are impractically slow to make and consume ridiculously large amounts of acid. One of the reasons space casino worked is because they were quite fast: each chunk was worth 400 plates so the average per-plate time cost was quite low.

The same reason for blue chips: it was also too slow for legendary science at +300% productivity with 31% quality. And the byproduct ain't free (in terms of UPS) to dispose either. My base were dumping entire cars of legendary blue chips as holmium byproduct.

For the normal use of base building materials, they work to some extent. They are still a bit slow if you want to build a legendary promethium ship.

Eventually it's clarified, my personnal appreciation is that if you want speed you go for upcycling nuclear reactor or EM plant, stuff that represent a lot more material than a module in a space casino would be transforming. For iron plate , i have already discussed with someone trying to convince me to upcycle belt, but it failed , they couldn't convince me away from underground pipes if you want fast "iron plate". Those are different consideration if you want legendary science, or just infrastructure / prom ship , i agree.

I think the point that was made and with which i agree was that there exist different method that in terms of balance complexity/reward were roughly on par with space casino depending on which particular metric you wanted to maximize, like fastest growth, or best UPS , or "simplicity" or "ressource effciency" which appealed to different players making them not necessarily choose space casino all the time. ( henceforth questionning the need to remove them entirely ).

MBas wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 8:40 am I never used LDS or Blue Circuits exploit before because it seems almost like a cheating. Now I am unsure how to grasp situation when casino is nerfed but productivity research on recyclable materials stays.

Were you using some form of casino before ? if not was it because you saw it as an exploit similar to LDS/blue circuit, or more something like in your games you didn't see the benefit or using casino ? to me the longer the game the better were space casino because a bit like mining productivity, there was no hard limit on asteroid "chunk" productivity, whereas the other things like LDS and Blue circuit reaches a cap.( and battery or underground pipe are yet another "lower tier"). To me the relation with research is an important factor.This cap was already quite costly to research but also giving more immediate benefit for things outside of quality than asteroid productivity, it made each planets more efficient in various ways. Eventually asteroid productivity was the only infinite science competing with science productivity for me in late/post game. Whereas now i am unsure if other players see reasons to research something else than only science productivity.

Hurkyl wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 9:48 am That is, typically, you expect your uncommon chest buffer to contain either 5 * r * sqrt(N) green circuits or 0.5 * r * sqrt(N) red circuits, and on average r is going to be around 0.4. (1 / sqrt(2 * pi)) Maybe I'm off by a factor of 2 or something; I didn't check my work carefully.
(the math: the number of red circuits will follow a binomial distribution; approximate it with a normal distribution and compute the expectation of the absolute value of the difference from the mean)
What this means is that your system is probably going to run fine after thousands of results, but after millions of results you have a decent chance that you have produced 10000 surplus uncommon green circuits without any uncommon red circuits to pair them with, thus filling up your buffers and making the machine halt.

Ah that's some beautiful math in there, all about predicting the necessary buffer for intermediate byproduct of upcycling. Now if you are using chests though , and an alarm to ring when it's full, it's not the full Factorio spirit one could say, and there you would want to automate what happens when the alarm rings. The same challenge design manifest itself when you try to make a space casino, both the throughput and the ratios are to be considered so that the belts are properly dimensionned to carry all the potentially clogging material away from the platform and into space before any jamming could occur. It's quite of a challenge too because in space you can't use robots, which are often use to alleviate the logistic concerns. And chunks only stack by 1 in cargobays making it yet another puzzle to have a buffer of 10000. Space casino are a beauty of math and designs

coffee-factorio wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 11:32 am You don't put quality on processing units once they hit 300% productivity. So if you did 300% with -20% speed, it's going to look the same as 300% with 125% speed and so on because you just print 4 chips per recipe.

Even then it isn't a free lunch though because the ratio of parts coming back does some interesting things on belts. Technically you can do things to speed up the recyclers with speed modules. Realistically only the chips you successfully upgrade leave that system and the rest stay to jam up belts or short buffers, so if you try and just throw q2L, s2l into a recycler you'll still have to know what you're doing.

It's also a situation where there's practical hidden factors having to do with recycler behavior that you have to account for if you're going to play games. It isn't impossible, and it's the best alternative for doing general supplies. But it definitely is not asteroid rerolling in terms of how you handle the inventory it gives you. I don't mean small random residues I mean at scale.

Well, I was doing it at processing unit productivity 30 (playing for weeks at Fulgora-only 1M espm did that, even researched 25 -> 30 for my leftover assembly plants), so I got +300% productivity without any module. So I put in quality modules with speed beacons and there was still some positive quality...

Maybe one still should prefer speed modules over quality modules at productivity 30 for throughput. But I stopped optimizing due to the constant clogging and not willing to add de-clogging to every version of the draft.

coffee-factorio wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 11:32 am You don't put quality on processing units once they hit 300% productivity. So if you did 300% with -20% speed, it's going to look the same as 300% with 125% speed and so on because you just print 4 chips per recipe.

If you are at 300% productivity, why would you put quality on recyclers and then deal with up to 10 different outputs, instead of mixing speed/quality on assemblers for max uplift flow and dealing with only 4?

h.q.droid wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 12:57 pm
Well, I was doing it at processing unit productivity 30 (playing for weeks at Fulgora-only 1M espm did that, even researched 25 -> 30 for my leftover assembly plants), so I got +300% productivity without any module. So I put in quality modules with speed beacons and there was still some positive quality...

Maybe one still should prefer speed modules over quality modules at productivity 30 for throughput. But I stopped optimizing due to the constant clogging and not willing to add de-clogging to every version of the draft.

My use case is a lot different because I just lack the emotional switch to make going for legendary science engaging. My game is probably just as broken because the spawning behavior is different. So I don't know if I could build the project I'm trying to make.

And frankly it's a situation where, it's basically a developer endorsed cheese. And you probably won't optimize it for UPS by going to level 25-30 because you'll make enough normal parts at levels 13-20 to be set for a year. If you resolve the jams and if your goal is to make enough parts for a project, there's just not a compelling reason to use something with less productivity short of being out of sulfuric acid which shouldn't happen on any surface.

It's safe until the point that quality fluids get done, because you'll get to a point where you just don't have balanced red chips and green chips for a module 1 legendary and you'll go "oh, that's why this one got let through. It's a balancing puzzle..."

Because I don't pretend to know these people's mind but they where pretty clear they unit tested all this stuff at some point. There's no way they could not know the ramifications of giving their community a method that gives them a reliable rate of an ingredient that they have to recycle, that won't give them a universal advantage on science.

emty wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 6:07 pm

coffee-factorio wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 11:32 am You don't put quality on processing units once they hit 300% productivity. So if you did 300% with -20% speed, it's going to look the same as 300% with 125% speed and so on because you just print 4 chips per recipe.

If you are at 300% productivity, why would you put quality on recyclers and then deal with up to 10 different outputs, instead of mixing speed/quality on assemblers for max uplift flow and dealing with only 4?

Sometimes players do not purposedly choose a sub-optimal method as part of a self-imposed challenge but rather because they didn't have knowledge of which alternatives are available or made a mistake in their design due to improper anticipation or hypothesis. It's much more comon than the amount of time where such players recognize it and correct, as those cases are only a subset of the more frequent cases where people just make mistakes ^^

Mixing speed and quality opens up for a lot of different module and beacon combo which can quickly make a player feel lost in the complexity, or just to be lost , not necessarily feeling it, which may admitedly be worse.

Here at least i am feeling a bit lost because the initial claim appears to make no sense to me, and the follow up question seem to be on the same level, if you want to upcycle to legendary stuff, you may end putting quality module in both your processing units making EM plant, and their recyclers depending on your tech level and on your designs choices, but in any case you have to deal with the same amount of different types of output materials, which in both case will be all the quality level of processing units, and green and red circuits because that is their component. And since sulfuric acid is a fluid, it is not creating byproducts and is just a simple imput you can get from one of the infinite source in the game. Is this what you're talking about ? It sounds to me like you are both seeing only a part of the problem, and not the same.

What makes Space Casino more beautiful in my eyes is that although you didn't need recycler, the crusher was effectively turned into a machine that created all those quality tiers for all three of the asteroid types, so in that regard you had to as many different byproduct as in say the processing unit upcycling loop. And you were forced to deal with that within the confine space of a platform without robots nor possibility to use chests, only a centralized modular but inneficient storage, making it the only place where you were effectively forced to use belts for quality as i saw it.

mmmPI wrote: Tue Jun 30, 2026 7:46 am Here at least i am feeling a bit lost because the initial claim appears to make no sense to me, and the follow up question seem to be on the same level, if you want to upcycle to legendary stuff, you may end putting quality module in both your processing units making EM plant, and their recyclers depending on your tech level and on your designs choices, but in any case you have to deal with the same amount of different types of output materials, which in both case will be all the quality level of processing units, and green and red circuits because that is their component. And since sulfuric acid is a fluid, it is not creating byproducts and is just a simple imput you can get from one of the infinite source in the game. Is this what you're talking about ? It sounds to me like you are both seeing only a part of the problem, and not the same.

What makes Space Casino more beautiful in my eyes is that although you didn't need recycler, the crusher was effectively turned into a machine that created all those quality tiers for all three of the asteroid types, so in that regard you had to as many different byproduct as in say the processing unit upcycling loop. And you were forced to deal with that within the confine space of a platform without robots nor possibility to use chests, only a centralized modular but inneficient storage, making it the only place where you were effectively forced to use belts for quality as i saw it.

For upcycling blue chips you can do: quality on recyclers, assemblers or both.

While you are below 300% productivity, it's better to hit 300% with modules, so you have to put quality modules on recyclers.
Once you reach 300% productivity on assembler, you can put some quality into assembler as well.

But at this point it also makes sense to remove quality from recyclers, because while it is viable and speeds up the upcycling process, it also produces greens and reds of multiple qualities which you then have to sort. It works, but it's ugly.

A simpler design is just to do small loops where recycler disassembles uncommon back into uncommon only and directly inserts it into assembler. Then you only need to worry about multiple qualities of the blue chips only, coming from one assembler, but this is easier and you can use stack inserters almost everywhere as a bonus.
(Ok, you need a side channel for red/green chips overflow inside of this single node, but this is still simple, as it's always only one quality.)

So I wonder why would anyone do that, since for me quality on recycler INSTEAD of quality on assembler sounds like worst of all options.



As for space casino, I see it as the normal asteroid reprocessing/crushing, just repeated 5 times.
Figuring that basic block is a very fun challenge in itself that you have to solve through the game, but I don't see casino much different from it.
The only thing that one reprocessing step at the legendary level needed to be broken via circuit network, to avoid endlessly eating asteroids.

emty wrote: Tue Jun 30, 2026 9:42 pm
For upcycling blue chips you can do: quality on recyclers, assemblers or both.

While you are below 300% productivity, it's better to hit 300% with modules, so you have to put quality modules on recyclers.
Once you reach 300% productivity on assembler, you can put some quality into assembler as well.

But at this point it also makes sense to remove quality from recyclers, because while it is viable and speeds up the upcycling process, it also produces greens and reds of multiple qualities which you then have to sort. It works, but it's ugly.

A simpler design is just to do small loops where recycler disassembles uncommon back into uncommon only and directly inserts it into assembler. Then you only need to worry about multiple qualities of the blue chips only, coming from one assembler, but this is easier and you can use stack inserters almost everywhere as a bonus.

(Ok, you need a side channel for red/green chips overflow inside of this single node, but this is still simple, as it's always only one quality.)

So I wonder why would anyone do that, since for me quality on recycler INSTEAD of quality on assembler sounds like worst of all options.

So what you're telling me is that you are choosing to wait till you have a few levels more of an exponential cost science in order to have an ideal input condition for the build.

And what I'm telling you is that it sure is nice having to deal with only legendary quality... god an EM Plant goes to +125% with P3L's so its on par with a cryo plant by level 8. 5% better but whose counting.

You've really never interacted with someone whose ran these builds early since release?

coffee-factorio wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2026 3:27 am So what you're telling me is that you are choosing to wait till you have a few levels more of an exponential cost science in order to have an ideal input condition for the build.

In context of the earlier answer:

coffee-factorio wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 11:32 am

h.q.droid wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 7:57 am The same reason for blue chips: it was also too slow for legendary science at +300% productivity with 31% quality. And the byproduct ain't free (in terms of UPS) to dispose either. My base were dumping entire cars of legendary blue chips as holmium byproduct.

You don't put quality on processing units once they hit 300% productivity. So if you did 300% with -20% speed, it's going to look the same as 300% with 125% speed and so on because you just print 4 chips per recipe.

"300% with 31% quality" looks already like level 25+ to me.
So I'm not arguing with quality only in recyclers in the early game, but at level 25+ "no quality on processing units" sounded extremely weird to me.

emty wrote: Tue Jun 30, 2026 9:42 pm For upcycling blue chips you can do: quality on recyclers, assemblers or both.

While you are below 300% productivity, it's better to hit 300% with modules, so you have to put quality modules on recyclers.
Once you reach 300% productivity on assembler, you can put some quality into assembler as well.

But at this point it also makes sense to remove quality from recyclers, because while it is viable and speeds up the upcycling process, it also produces greens and reds of multiple qualities which you then have to sort. It works, but it's ugly.

A simpler design is just to do small loops where recycler disassembles uncommon back into uncommon only and directly inserts it into assembler. Then you only need to worry about multiple qualities of the blue chips only, coming from one assembler, but this is easier and you can use stack inserters almost everywhere as a bonus.
(Ok, you need a side channel for red/green chips overflow inside of this single node, but this is still simple, as it's always only one quality.)

So I wonder why would anyone do that, since for me quality on recycler INSTEAD of quality on assembler sounds like worst of all options.



As for space casino, I see it as the normal asteroid reprocessing/crushing, just repeated 5 times.
Figuring that basic block is a very fun challenge in itself that you have to solve through the game, but I don't see casino much different from it.
The only thing that one reprocessing step at the legendary level needed to be broken via circuit network, to avoid endlessly eating asteroids.

It's an interesting proposal to remove quality from recyclers. It's viable at 300% productivity since you don't lose anything anyway.

But your logistics simplification seems flawed to me: if you direct-insert recycler output to your EM plant, it will eventually clog from random drift. At that point, there's no easy way to unclog it because you can't automatically take stuff out of the EM plant's **input** slot. Changing recipe can do it, but that can be quite slow due to having to unload everything before the next cycle could begin.

For mass production using +300% productivity blue circuit, the optimization goal should be `expected # of quality levels gained / time taken` (or acid taken) per loop. Optimizing acid consumption is trivial since you can just go all quality and no speed. For throughput, I took into account that you can put speed modules anywhere and ran a brute-force search. The optimal configuration at research level 25+ is:

- Put 5 quality modules in the EM plant.
- Put 4 quality modules in the recycler.
- Use one rare beacon with 2 legendary speed 3s for the recycler, for a total broadcasting efficiency of 3.2.
- Use 4 beacons like this for the EM plant to add up to a total broadcasting efficiency of 7.4:
- Legendary beacon with 2 * Legendary speed 3
- Legendary beacon with 2 * Legendary speed 3
- Rare beacon with 2 * Legendary speed 3
- Rare beacon with 1 * Legendary speed 3

Turns out it's still better to speed modules in beacons and it still pays off to have quality in all stages. Well, it also looks messy on paper already.

At lower research levels, you're supposed to get +300% productivity and maximize speed in the EM plant first. In the recycler, put in 4 quality modules and use this beacon configuration for a total broadcasting efficiency of 2.7 to maximize throughput:

- Any beacon with no speed module
- Common beacon with 1 * Legendary speed 3
- Epic beacon with 1 * Legendary speed 3
- Legendary beacon with 1 * Legendary speed 3

By "total broadcasting efficiency", I mean the total number of standalone modules equivalent to the beacons' net effect. 7.4 means "the beacon configuration netting the effect of 7.4 modules".

h.q.droid wrote: Thu Jul 02, 2026 5:36 am It's an interesting proposal to remove quality from recyclers. It's viable at 300% productivity since you don't lose anything anyway.

But your logistics simplification seems flawed to me...

Actually I agree with emty on this. If you have 300 productivity already, you are not loosing anything. Lets state the obvious first

1. Electromagnetic plant has base production speed 2, multiplier 4 from productivity and recycler has 0.5 base production speed. That means EM plant is 16 times faster but recycling takes 1/16 time => need one recycler per one EM plant if no speed modules are used.
2. You have one type of recycler. But several types of recipes for blue circuits for different quality. You may have EM plants of each quality or you can make a recipe swapping system (my personal favourite is hybrid solution. Basic example: 2 EM plants for basic quality and 1 with swapping recipes to produce whatever ingredients you have in the highest amount). That wont matter, either way you need some system for EM plants and you need nothing for recycler.

Now because of 1. point there is no argument of some sort of efficiency of speed up to try to speed the slowest process. Because as we see, EM plant and recycler is working 1:1.

Because of 2, it is much more easier to achieve less recyclers and keep the number of EM plants than other way around. Because with higher number of EM plants you may spread the numbers of different quality recipes more easily. And if you are swapping recipes there is also much lower overthread from swapping (first you need to ensure you are not loosing productivity bar during swap and second swapping is time consuming because you need to take out ingredients from the old recipe. Btw. this is a very nice challenge to optimise and to be honest my most favourite from all!)

Note: This is just a theory as I said many times before. I never used spoiled mechanics of productivity research for quality upgrades. So I might miss something. But I did a lot (I mean really a lot ) of research on recipe swapping systems on regular quality upcycling like building quality modules etc.

Small drawback for quality modules in EM plant: For the last recipe (the legendary production) quality modules are pointless. So if you prefer quality in EM machines, this one better have different modules which brings some inconsistency. But that is really a minor issue.

MBas wrote: Thu Jul 02, 2026 9:48 am

h.q.droid wrote: Thu Jul 02, 2026 5:36 am It's an interesting proposal to remove quality from recyclers. It's viable at 300% productivity since you don't lose anything anyway.

But your logistics simplification seems flawed to me...

Actually I agree with emty on this. If you have 300 productivity already, you are not loosing anything. Lets state the obvious first

1. Electromagnetic plant has base production speed 2, multiplier 4 from productivity and recycler has 0.5 base production speed. That means EM plant is 16 times faster but recycling takes 1/16 time => need one recycler per one EM plant if no speed modules are used.
2. You have one type of recycler. But several types of recipes for blue circuits for different quality. You may have EM plants of each quality or you can make a recipe swapping system (my personal favourite is hybrid solution. Basic example: 2 EM plants for basic quality and 1 with swapping recipes to produce whatever ingredients you have in the highest amount). That wont matter, either way you need some system for EM plants and you need nothing for recycler.

Now because of 1. point there is no argument of some sort of efficiency of speed up to try to speed the slowest process. Because as we see, EM plant and recycler is working 1:1.

Because of 2, it is much more easier to achieve less recyclers and keep the number of EM plants than other way around. Because with higher number of EM plants you may spread the numbers of different quality recipes more easily. And if you are swapping recipes there is also much lower overthread from swapping (first you need to ensure you are not loosing productivity bar during swap and second swapping is time consuming because you need to take out ingredients from the old recipe. Btw. this is a very nice challenge to optimise and to be honest my most favourite from all!)

Note: This is just a theory as I said many times before. I never used spoiled mechanics of productivity research for quality upgrades. So I might miss something. But I did a lot (I mean really a lot ) of research on recipe swapping systems on regular quality upcycling like building quality modules etc.

Small drawback for quality modules in EM plant: For the last recipe (the legendary production) quality modules are pointless. So if you prefer quality in EM machines, this one better have different modules which brings some inconsistency. But that is really a minor issue.

My issue isn't the logic of the micro optimization. It's for the intended use case of "replacing something the developers have found unbalanced".
From that point of view, I need 4 electronic circuits to make 1 iron plate and 3/8 copper plates (wires are 1/8, not 1/4). With some small residues of copper showing up from advanced circuits. This is going to be say, 240 extra prng calls plus 720 calls to render the copper into plates. And then you have an entire extra building running the shuffle making small prng calls to break the LDS down.

Compared to a reroller, you have a rate that's about as good as an EM Plant direct crafting things (ingredients returns worse rates).

Since it's an emotional moment, I'm merely noting the implication that "I don't understand" as an expression of grief.

The PRNG calls more or less have made every benchmark Abucnasty has run for quality science be on par with normal quality.
If your camp is "I want a challenge run." That's valid. But lets call it a technical challenge and maybe only one that is personally fulfilling. I have some other things to say about that since I think the presence of production puzzles is going to excite and frustrate players to the extent that they can burn out.

If your camp is "I want to find out exactly what those numbers are, for science." That's a profoundly useful service to us all because benchmarks are a black box. To my knowledge this strategy hasn't been extensively benchmarked.

If your camp is "I want to relax and have a game of my own." Well, you're taking on a megabasers problems when you sound like you watch items spin around like it's roulette. The emotions are valid because the world is a dumpster fire in general, but the outlet is just going to frustrate you.

As it relates to my little world, the chips automatically craft on the assembler and back up into the inventory of the recycler. So there's a combinator on the tail end of the recycler to offload residues from the PRNG. I think emti actually mentioned something about it. If it were not for the fact that I'm going to hit my own goal way earlier I'd adopt it. I'm the sort of technician who will say "If I went for using P2 modules legendary rather than others as a challenge, P2LS recreate the scenario of I can make a machine run at an earlier time for less research." Since the context is hundreds of thousands of research and what I'm after is a replay-able experience.