mmmPI wrote: Tue Oct 31, 2023 4:09 am
But where ? at the very begining first like the green circuit ? they are part of the loop ?
You mean in the assembly first or in the recycler first ?
And then which step of recycling is the better ?
What if recycling is much faster than production ?
If we consider tier 3 quality module, they are made from tier 2 quality module. It's not a given that one would prefer placing its first quality module in the latest step of the chain, instead of recycling the previous. Say recycling tier 1 module is fast ( 5 second ), and making tier 3 module is slow ( 60 second ). Then there would possibly be more material processed in the recycling of tier 1 module rather than in the attempt of making new tier 3 module.
That would mean, it would be better to place the first quality module to recycle every tier 1 module, speed , efficiency, productivity, and quality, BEFORE placing quality module in some assembly producing quality module higher than tier 1.
We have no info to be categoric saying one is better than the other.
There are 20 t1 modules per t3 module. Even not paying attention to the other chips that go into each tier upgrade, if we just assume that recycling time is either constant or proportional to the crafting recipe that it is undoing, the answer is still to focus on uncrafting and recrafting just the final product with the highest bonus quality modules available. A t1 module has 15 seconds of crafting time compared to the t3's 60, meaning there's five times as much t1 module crafting time as there is t3 crafting time. Once you factor in the 30 red and blue chips for each t1->t3 chain as well, there's really just no reason to touch anything less than the t3 step itself for starters. It requires more than five times less quality modules for the same throughput unless the uncrafting recipe times are completely customized, but that seems highly unlikely.
As for recycling potentially being faster than crafting, it's very possible that this is the case. In that case, though, you would just have unmoduled assemblers feeding into a quality moduled recycler until you could afford to start filling the assemblers with quality modules, too. (Realistically you should just have some q1 quality modules in everything to start and replace with higher quality quality modules as they become available, as the math on doing a recycling loop with only a single machine with quality modules is absolutely atrociously wasteful.)
Going over some other items that you might want in quality, they appear to all have much shorter crafting times than their components, especially ones that involve anything more time consuming than gears and green circuits.
mmmPI wrote: Tue Oct 31, 2023 4:09 am
computeraddict wrote: Tue Oct 31, 2023 3:18 am
[allocation of quality modules based on known crafting times]
That is making strong assumptions with no informations i feel.
What information do I lack? We know the crafting times of all the current items, we know the crafting times of all of their components, we know the probabilities of quality upgrades. Unless the recycling time is truly something wacky, we've got all the information we need to allocate quality modules based on a given set of priorities. Trying to produce a trickle of every intermediate through recycling loops is going to take longer to produce anything of note than the t3 quality module production line is going to take to churn out the first set of 75 t3q1 quality modules.
Axs1 wrote: Tue Oct 31, 2023 4:14 am
Sorry for the confusion, I thought I had explained myself clearly.
My point was that it is better to obtain the raw materials in higher quality, because if you do it with the final product you would have to create a system for each product you want to manufacture, while with the raw materials, you manufacture any item and you would use less assembly machine.
I understood you and found no upsides to your method. It doesn't even have laziness going for it, as only producing intermediates doesn't significantly reduce how many builds are required, as there are 10+ components that you can produce interesting final items from. (Iron, copper, steel, batteries, explosives, copper cable, iron sticks, iron gears, low density structures, stone bricks, etc. And if processing units, concrete, and electric engine units always are reset to q0 because of the inclusion of fluid, you'd have to bootstrap quality of anything produced from them directly anyway.)
My point was that with your method you either have no production volume or wind up using more modules than if you just made a build for each thing you were interested in. If you hold the number of modules available constant, your method produces dozen times fewer finished products than just dedicating them all to one device, then manually switching to another later. Each module has to do more work to produce a quality finished product the earlier in the chain it is. It's just like how productivity modules have to do multiple times more crafts to pay for themselves the earlier in the production chain they are.
If you hold the production volume constant, your method requires dozens of times more modules. In both instances your method requires stupendously more raw materials on an ongoing basis, because you're throwing away four free productivity products for every quality product that is produced.
Axs1 wrote: Tue Oct 31, 2023 4:14 am
mmmPI wrote: Tue Oct 31, 2023 1:28 am
snip
I consider this solution to be better, because by having the legendary raw material and applying the productivity modules, you directly eliminate the process of creating the legendary product.
I will proceed to try to give a clear example:
Objective: Create Solar Panel
Note: only legendary modules will be used. Iron plates and copper plates are considered raw materials. The cost of a legendary product is assumed to be 56 times more expensive than the normal one.
snip
Conclusion: The two ways consume the same amount of raw materials, but the process defines which is cheaper, for the first case it only works for the manufacture of a single item, while the second, although the cost is the same, It can be applied to any recipe without the need to make a recursive system for each product you want to make.
Note: I was surprised by the result, I mistakenly believed that mmmPi's method was cheaper. If I have made any mistakes, I would appreciate it if you would let me know, thank you.
You didn't count how many modules were being used in each process. The "without the need to make a recursive system for each product you want to make" is a goal without a good reason for it. The builds for each are going to look nearly identical, just like how each chunk of current mall looks very same-y.
mmmPI wrote: Tue Oct 31, 2023 4:36 am
That's the same tradeoff when you have furnaces for iron plate that are dedicated to green circuit, but you need steel, and not green circuit, so half your furnaces for iron plate are idle, and you are not happy because they could be helping making more steel but no they are dedicated to green circuit
Where modules are allocated is not the same tradeoff as where furnaces are outputting to. Allocating furnace output is a horizontal transfer of resources. Allocating module placement is a vertical one. Moving modules up or down the tiers of production changes their efficacy. Changing where a furnace outputs to does not change its efficacy.
Say you have an iron gear assembler and a roboport assembler. A quality module in the roboport assembler is doing
MORE THAN FOURTY-FIVE TIMES as much work when it's working as if you stuck the same module in the iron gear assembler. Even if it's idle 97% of the time, it's still better off in the roboport* assembler than in a 100% uptime iron gear assembler. (Once you factor in the red chips and steel that go into a roboport, the roboport assembler could be idle 99.9% of the time and still be a better use case for the module than the iron gear assembler.)
Axs1 wrote: Tue Oct 31, 2023 5:33 am
mmmPI wrote: Tue Oct 31, 2023 4:36 am
snip
Yes, I find it much better to get the legendary raw material and then craft, as you said, for a recipe that needs red or blue circuit it takes a lot of time and imagine crafting 56 times that amount, while the legendary raw material can be obtained from recipes that are very quick and make the red or blue circuit directly, which saves 56 times the time
You have it exactly backwards. By putting the modules on the precursors, you take 56 times the time at the step that takes more time. There is no recipe that requires more time for the final step than for the sum of the preceding steps. Even tier 3 modules with their 60 second craft time have less than the sum of their immediate ingredients. Sure you can build a green chip in 0.5 seconds, but if you need 10 of them that's 5 seconds of crafting time. And a lab only takes 2 seconds of crafting time, to give just one example. So you just had your modules work for 5 seconds (plus another 5 seconds for the gears and 1 second for the belts) to make the precursors for a finished product that only takes 2 seconds, wasting 9 seconds of module time.
It gets worse for other buildings. Probably the absolute worst offender for your approach would be a nuclear reactor. A final build time of only 8 seconds, but the 500 red circuits, 500 concrete, 500 copper, and 500 steel that go into it have a cumulative craft time of nearly 4.9 hours.
mmmPI wrote: Tue Oct 31, 2023 5:41 am
Whereas if you use quality first, and then productivity
You can't. The number of steps that you can use productivity on is finite. Adding quality at the end does not replace a productivity step. Adding quality early on replaces a productivity step, and that productivity cannot be recovered.
