mmmPI wrote: Mon Sep 01, 2025 9:34 pm
"destroy" ?! you mean upcycling the epic plastic to legendary ?
I meant destroying them for nothing

It's like a ~4% yield difference and not worth the logistics hassle or the UPS. I tried throwing them into lava too but that was actually slower than recyclers. To think I mourned every rotten fruit at the start...
mmmPI wrote: Mon Sep 01, 2025 9:34 pm
That seem to be the general consensus that asteroid shuffling is bad for UPS compared to ore mining when you have large level of productivity, which overall makes the game progression interesting i believe, because there is several alternate ways to make quality that unlock over the course of the progression.
They buffed the UPS significantly in some recent update. Also when used for legendary iron ore specifically, they were better than ore mining before the buff considering that you get ~5 legendary ore per asteroid. They are indeed worse than ore mining for coal though. The key trick is don't get too greedy with asteroid density. The cost of turret aiming is at least the total number of asteroids / in-range turret pairs, which is effectively quadratic. So a fleet between Vulcanus and Nauvis can be better than a single big ship to shattered planet, or even Aquillo.
Asteroid shuffling also has a subtle benefit of producing iron in the easiest-to-transport form: legendary asteroids. Each rocket of that gives you 6k legendary iron plates which you can use on smaller ships.
mmmPI wrote: Mon Sep 01, 2025 9:34 pm
I see no problem in having methods that only works in late game be "very strong", like defending the base becomes easier with new weapons, expanding the factory becomes easier with faster bots, making quality also becomes easier, first with some very basic upcycler for one item , like EM plant , then temporary build like asteroid shuffling, that are situationnal, because of the trade-off throughput /UPS, they don't stay viable into the latest stages of the game where the high mining productivity allows "simpler build", like it was the case already in factorio for a long time, before space age, megabases reached a point where mining drills were used to fill the wagon directly when mining productivity was researched enough that it was no longer necessary to use belts and group the ouput of several mining drill.
The same! Asteroid shuffling is an amazing design that necessitates multiple iterations of the optimal strategy:
- Transition from reprocessing to basic processing at asteroid productivity 26
- Transition from upcycling rare / epic byproducts to throwing them away at UPS / clogging bottleneck
- Transition into full-quality plastic making at plastics productivity 30
- Transition to coal mining at enough mining productivity
- An envisioned future transition to calcite mining
Ore mining also has much more depth than simple upcycling:
- Transition to mining into rocket silo, then into train-crushed-cars
- More efficient crusher train design at rocket fuel productivity 30 where legendary fuel can be mass-produced locally
- An envisioned future transition: mining into railgun-shot cars / chests (you inspired me that overgrowth soil can make eggs with predictable spoiling progress on Vulcanus with high-enough throughput)
I briefly mined into train wagons on Fulgora but at that time it was already too slow for me
Upcycling EM plants though, is one of the best recipes end-game. It actually has better yield rate than asteroid shuffling, though lower throughput due to requiring holmium and lower "density". Kinda sad I haven't found a use of the byproducts yet due to the low throughput and the high transportation cost.
mmmPI wrote: Mon Sep 01, 2025 9:34 pm
Of course there will always be some fake purist asking for the game to be much harder than it is, sometimes they already make the game harder for themselves by using bad methods and advocating the others use them too. There are plenty of mods that actually make the game harder, but for some reason no-one created a mod that removes quality module in crushers. Maybe i haven't found one, but my guess is more that this is terrible idea to just remove something that many players find interesting without proposing something to make up for it. ( judging by the amount of views and interaction people have with space casinos, spreadsheet, discussions and so on).
Agreed. Legendary science is like Chekhov's gun. If it exists, it should find a use. It's more canon than recycling grenades or blue undergrounds
