Ban quality modules from asteroid crushers

[coffee-factorio]

I'm not sure it is well known that you can make a build before you do an LDS shuffle with some outstanding characteristics.

The setup you linked is possible since release and is well known, but it makes little sense to claim you can do it before LDS shuffle imo.

An em plant has five slots for productivity modules. As such it can get a 175% research because it has a natural +50% production bonus. A foundry has 150% native productivity bonus as well, meaning that it has 150% research. This means that if you add 130% research, you hit the 300% research limit 2 levels earlier than you would if you used a foundry. So you can build a production line that shreds blue chips into raw materials 2 levels earlier.

You've never read that post. That's noted in the first three sections.

5 legendary prod modules add another +125%, pushing the total over the cap of +300% / x4.

This works for all recipes where you can reach the +300% prod cap and get the ingredients back by recycling.

If you are not familiar with thing, you would do well to not rush to conclusions.

[mmmPI]

I'm not sure it is well known that you can make a build before you do an LDS shuffle with some outstanding characteristics.

The setup you linked is possible since release and is well known, but it makes little sense to claim you can do it before LDS shuffle imo.

An em plant has five slots for productivity modules. As such it can get a 175% research because it has a natural +50% production bonus. A foundry has 150% native productivity bonus as well, meaning that it has 150% research. This means that if you add 130% research, you hit the 300% research limit 2 levels earlier than you would if you used a foundry. So you can build a production line that shreds blue chips into raw materials 2 levels earlier.

You've never read that post. That's noted in the first three sections.

That illustrate well why it makes little sense to me, you are just counting the level of researchs and conclude that because the EM plant have 1 more module slots.

That makes no sense to me because you can use such builds even before having all the research level, it's less efficient but you can use them for sure.

5 legendary prod modules add another +125%, pushing the total over the cap of +300% / x4.
This works for all recipes where you can reach the +300% prod cap and get the ingredients back by recycling.

If you are not familiar with thing, you would do well to not rush to conclusions.

what Nidan said is correct though

[crimsonarmy]

To clear up some confusion:
LDS can be upcycled at a 1:1 rate (like blue circuits); this is very strong. However, the casting LDS recipe takes molten metals. This allows for setting up a foundry to produce legendary LDS, recycle it, and feed the legendary plastic back in; this profits legendary copper and steel without any upcycling (this is the absolutely broken part).

[mmmPI]

To clear up some confusion:
LDS can be upcycled at a 1:1 rate (like blue circuits); this is very strong. However, the casting LDS recipe takes molten metals. This allows for setting up a foundry to produce legendary LDS, recycle it, and feed the legendary plastic back in; this profits legendary copper and steel without any upcycling (this is the absolutely broken part).

Fully agree that's what i was saying before the non-sensical interruption

I feel here it depends on how/why you use the LDS shuffle, if you use it to get quality LDS that's not "cheaty" to me and very similar to blue circuits, but LDS shuffle can also be used to generate easily quality steel or copper out of very little to no input with research, it's not just doing a 1=>1 upcycle, this i found much more un-balanced than the asteroid recycler. I wouldn't use a mod to re-introduce LDS shuffle if it's removed or altered, but i'd be tempted to do so for asteroid recycler depending on how the re-balance is handled, cuz even if it's not that hard, it involve some law of large numbers that i found are interesting to use in a puzzle.

[CyberCider]

You agree with me on LDS shuffle, but you seem to compare it to blue circuit upcycling

With 300% productivity, the bonus items you get out of the craft exactly (on average) balance the loss you get from the recycler, so you get a 1:1 ratio between normal blue circuit inputs and legendary blue circuit outputs.

Well I know that, but that’s just your reward for finishing tons of research. The 1:1 part isn’t what’s wrong with LDS shuffle, it’s the fact that you don’t need an upcycler to do it. The loss of complexity is what makes it broken, not the loss of resource requirements. It’s also way easier to scale as it requires fewer machines and way fewer legendary modules.

That’s like saying only purple science should be produced via actual recipe, the others should be made of nothing but water. It’s different, it adds variety, you’ve already built production for purple so “there’s no getting away from it”. But would this change, all science packs except for purple being made of water, make the game better? I hope you agree that it wouldn’t.

think simpler is indeed wrong, if it’s strong.

To me it sound more like the opposite, you have made your production line for all the sciences, and late game there's a new way that unlock to make purple science out of water. which is easier and stronger and different than the other methods, which acts as reward and increases the variety of viable builds. Not too dissimilar to how fusion power is "simple" yet very strong, potentially replacing all other source of energy in the "post late game", but you need to have started with other source of power.

Power generation cannot be compared to quality production, they’re fundamentally different things with fundamentally different balancing. Second of all, while fusion is simpler than nuclear, it’s definitely more complex than Vulcanus, Gleba, Fulgora and early Aquilo power. And even compared to nuclear, it’s only simpler in terms of logistics. It has built in smart consumption, no spent cells, no water requirement in space, sure. But there is more substance to fusion design than there is to fission design, its internal complexity is higher. So with all this in mind, there isn’t nearly as clear of a difference as there is between upcycling and asteroids.

Anyway, I think we have different understandings of how progression through alternate processes works. The more advanced, later unlocked processes should have superior efficiency and/or throughput, yes. But they should always have greater or at least comparable complexity. Advanced oil processing produces more gas, but it involves cracking. Foundries don’t turn ore into gears, they keep the same amount of steps. Except plates are replaced with a liquid and, most importantly, calcite becomes required. They do drop the simplicity of LDS specifically, but that’s only a minor feature. Same with biochambers and oil. When a better process is unlocked intended to replace a previous process, it should never be simpler than the basic process. That would simply be nonsensical in a game like factorio which is all about complexity. It would be a progression backwards instead of forwards.

[coffee-factorio]

To clear up some confusion:
LDS can be upcycled at a 1:1 rate (like blue circuits); this is very strong. However, the casting LDS recipe takes molten metals. This allows for setting up a foundry to produce legendary LDS, recycle it, and feed the legendary plastic back in; this profits legendary copper and steel without any upcycling (this is the absolutely broken part).

It produces a fascinating scenario. By using about a hundred legendary plastic, the LDS cast recipe can recycle the plastic until the RNG destroys it with noise, at the full rate of the building. You see about 320 copper plates per minute out for 4000 copper fluid a minute at level 15. In comparison a LDS item build does that rate of copper if you optimize it well at level 22 productivity or so, although at level 20 you should be able to see similar.

This is in comparison to the 6.5 ipm you get out of copper plates when you invest 1.2k fluids per minute into it. You get about 0.8 ipm of steel out before you start adding in productivity for 1800 fluids. Nothing can manufacture steel from plates, so productivity doesn't benefit it (edit: except in the initial production phase, where the benefit is much less). A shuffle takes 1300 iron fluid to make 33.5 steel per minute.

Since the action is unaffected by quality you can scale vertically using speed modules. It's less effective in terms of quantity of plates produced but its so easy to scale that doesn't mean so much. I believe that was noted as I was writing this, I'm a slow.

However, if you attempt to use the full casting build instead of just the shuffle section, you can't optimize fluid use by putting productivity into the casting steps on copper or steel. And so you take in 5 plastic, but get the full fluid bill of the cast recipe. It's effect on the amount of resources you have to invest in a line is horrifying since at 300% productivity each step has to run at full blast, and produces copper and steel you have to upcycle using less productive techniques. The scale of the thing is hilarious

[Hurkyl]

People don't think LDS shuffle is overpowered at 0% productivity research?

[coffee-factorio]

People don't think LDS shuffle is overpowered at 0% productivity research?

It's an interesting question, I don't think it's been explored.

The reason why would be that the cast recipe penalizes you for using less space and plastic, it actually won't benefit you to pursue it at that research level. Actually, both the LDS recipes can potentially be worse than say EM plants for copper because the EM plant both has a high productivity bonus and copper casting can be optimized by applying productivity or quality modules.

You should see a geometrically increasing benefit though which ends at the 1 : 1 use behavior. It would shred plastic faster at lower levels but then go to using only the amount that would be accounted for by random noise.

[coffee-factorio]

I feel like I should bring this back to rerolling though. Without checking too deeply, it's about a 1 in 47 edit rate coming off the reroll step. Editted because I rechecked a source on it. https://dfamonteiro.com/posts/factorio- ... lity-level

If your target is iron, great. That's probably default ~1/2 an ips (30 ipm) because you get 20 iron back per recipe, plus a decent rate of productivity from random asteroids.

If your target is copper... then it's 5/47 ~> 1/9 copper a back and a lot of junk ore you have to chuck off. So it comes down to how 400% from rerolling effects the chunks coming back randomly. If someone could say that was a simple multiplicative bonus it would be productive.

[Hurkyl]

People don't think LDS shuffle is overpowered at 0% productivity research?

It's an interesting question, I don't think it's been explored.

The reason why would be that the cast recipe penalizes you for using less space and plastic, it actually won't benefit you to pursue it at that research level. Actually, both the LDS recipes can potentially be worse than say EM plants for copper because the EM plant both has a high productivity bonus and copper casting can be optimized by applying productivity or quality modules.

You should see a geometrically increasing benefit though which ends at the 1 : 1 use behavior. It would shred plastic faster at lower levels but then go to using only the amount that would be accounted for by random noise.

I 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.

I feel like I should bring this back to rerolling though. Without checking too deeply, it's about a 1 in 47 edit rate coming off the reroll step. Editted because I rechecked a source on it. https://dfamonteiro.com/posts/factorio- ... lity-level

In fact, if people aren't concerned about LDS shuffle at 0% productivity, I find it completely bizarre that asteroid reprocessing is even on the radar as something to worry about.

If your target is iron, great. That's probably default ~1/2 an ips (30 ipm) because you get 20 iron back per recipe, plus a decent rate of productivity from random asteroids.

If your target is copper... then it's 5/47 ~> 1/9 copper a back and a lot of junk ore you have to chuck off. So it comes down to how 400% from rerolling effects the chunks coming back randomly. If someone could say that was a simple multiplicative bonus it would be productive.

And on the (basic) asteroid crushing recipes with +300% productivity*, I feel like that's about the same as the LDS shuffle with 0% -- you're still getting the 1/47.70 return (which, IIRC, is a little better than an recycler loop with +100% productivity and a little worse than one with +150% productivity), but you're getting free quality iron much like the LDS shuffle is mostly free copper/steel.

*: which I assume the productivity crafts can have returned asteroids at the same rate as the normal crafts