Factorio Forums

I thought that the quality system was supposed to produce components that increase the chances of getting a quality output.

I put a quality module on a gear factory feeding my yellow inserters. When it produced a quality gear, it locked up and would not feed it to the yellow inserter factory, borking my entire inserter production for 30 minutes.

My blue circuit factory is having the same issue; several quality red circuits got on the belt and blocked it up, since they were apparently not valid inputs.
I even made some +Quality engines to try to boost the production of +Quality electric motors to help with a better power armor... but all they did was clog the belt and stop production.

What's the point of +Quality items if you can't use them except in some specific recipes? I managed to make a couple of higher quality laser turrets but that's about it.

If there's a way to tell what will be able to use +Quality items and what will reject them and treat them as invalid inputs, I don't see it.

Treat items of a different Quality as a belt contaminant. Remove it with a Splitter filtered to that contaminant. Put it either into a box, or route it to where you want it used.

As astroshak said, quality items are treated like a different item than their lower quality version for most purposes.

You can't create a receipe using mixed quality level of component.

The simplest/most straightforward way to go about using quality material to me would be , something like : recycle say "laser turrets" with quality module in the recycler. This will give "quality material", the ratios will average over many repetitions, so you can then create an assembly machine designed to make "uncommon" laser turrets from "uncommon" input, one to make "rare laser turret" again, only from "rare" input, and one to make "epic" similar only using "epic" material and one for "legendary".

Those won't work most of the time, except when the recycler would have accumulated enough of them to be craft one "quality" turret.

That would be an example of an 'end-product' recycling loop.

Another way would be to recycle iron ore and copper ore, to get quality ore, then from quality ore make quality plate, and then from the quality plate the quality circuits or battery, and then the laser turret.

As you noted though it is "blocking", in my game i used quality module for electric furnaces, thinking as it's required for science, all the "regular quality" furnaces would be gone, leaving me with only "quality" ones. That happened, a full chest of quality 2 furnaces that clog my system and stopped the science for a bit.

I recycled them, had lot of quality 2 material and a few quality 3 and 4 that i had unlocked. But i didn't used those for making other furnaces, i kept the red circuit and steel of high quality to try and make parts for spaceplatform.