Quality Mixing

[Ranakastrasz]

TL;DR

Allow mixing of quality levels in recipes and/or stacks.

What ?

For the new Quality system. Assuming that I didn't misunderstand the mechanics, It appears that quality items cannot mix in recipies or stacks, or, if they can, it always uses the lowest quality item as the quality for the recipe. I suggest allowing stacks and recipies to accept items of any quality level, and acting accordingly. This means that you can, for example, mix Q1 copper wires and Q0 iron plates, resulting in (averaged value of inputs) Quality 0.5 electronic circuit recipe, which has a 50:50 chance of acting like it does now, but with inputs assumed to be all Q0 or all Q1.

Why ?

A few concerns I have about the direction of the game with the addition of quality is that it will make the game a lot like many of the total conversion mods with huge numbers of byproducts and item explosion. As is, if you use Quality modules in, say, a classic Copper -> Copper Coil, Iron + Copper Coil -> Electronic Circuit layout, then the Copper coil maker, when it produces quality copper coils, will invariable jam, trying to shove a single Q1 copper coil into a machine, which either only accepts Q0, thus jamming the Coil maker and requring different design to extract all Q1 coils, or Ignores it, meaning it always treats all the inputs at Q0, making the Quality booster in the copper coil worthless. I would highly prefer it "Just Work" such that installing quality modules will result in some degree of quality increase regardless of whether or not you aggressively filter quality components out, although doing so will of course result in much higher and reliable outputs. In comparison, even if it messes up your numbers, Productivity modules never* cause a system to work worse or jam.

For stacking, the idea of a iron mine with quality modules feeding a train system, and the train cars not being able to fill 100% because a few of the stacks got Q1 iron ore in them while the rest are still Q0. And the same with storage, stacks of coal in boilers, etc.

*In mods with carefully calculated loops, productivity can change a resource drain to a resource surplus, jamming the system. Also the lower speed, higher energy cost, and Pollution can increase biter attacks per output, potentially resulting in larger attacks canceling the benefit of producivity.

Extra

This is arguably two seperate suggestions but are closely enough linked that I don't think it should be two posts, as one is heavily dependent on the other.
Also, some of my assumptions are based on trying out Janky Quality which I know full well isn't an idea reflection of the final product, but as no video showing the internal state of an assembler, if it has multiple outputs/inputs, How it handles mixing of quality levels, or what happens if you start installing quality modules in an existing layout without handling the quality output.
Or if there are, I might have missed them. I'll have to go check.

[boskid]

Ideas for not yet released fearures are for me inappropriate. Ability to set any quality exists (so recipes with at least 2 item ingredients can be given items of different qualities) but there wont be any weight system as it would requirevto balance which ingredient contribute most (blue chips take 20 green and 2 red, having 20 rare greens and 2 epic red should result in what quality?)

[Ranakastrasz]

Ideas for not yet released fearures are for me inappropriate. Ability to set any quality exists (so recipes with at least 2 item ingredients can be given items of different qualities) but there wont be any weight system as it would requirevto balance which ingredient contribute most (blue chips take 20 green and 2 red, having 20 rare greens and 2 epic red should result in what quality?)

Fair enough, but it isn't like there is a "suggestion for the expansion" section.
Rare is 3 and epic is 4, so it would treat it as 3.5, Yea, I thought about weighing by value or other methods but keeping it a simple average, from the average of each stack of components that go into it would work fine, and even if slightly abusable, it will still never be as good as using Q4 for all inputs.
And 3.5 means 50% to use the table for Q3, and 50% for Q4 as the base.

By slightly abusable I mean, yea, you could use high quality of a cheap and easy to produce resource while the rest are expensive. Artillery turret maybe with gears, but that will only contibute 25% to the result, which means you really don't get a huge amount.

I also thought of using Total raw, but that would require that system to also handle machine-only crafting, and it always broke with complex looping recipies in complex mods. Or having the lowest Q input count for 50%, and the other 50% split between all inputs/the rest of the inputs. But keeping it simple should work well enough.