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with productivity module and passive productivity bonus on new machines we can now have more than +100% productivity on crafting machine, this mean you get bonus item before the ingredient are used. This mean you can have unlimited item by resetting the craft just before the main progress bar finish. You can do it manually or even with circuit I think. This is a big exploit for legendary recipe, you can obtain unlimited free legendary ingredient to make your stuff. (thus that limited to what new building can craft and some items that have productivity bonus in the research tree)

Possible fix:

- only give bonus items once main item is complete.
- doesn't give back item when cancel recipe like before (that could hurt player)

IIRC, without mods you can't automatically reset the recipe before crafting is complete, so you can't abuse it. In fact, there are modpacks designed around it (like Warptorio where you can easily get +140% on every machine).

BTW, definitely not a bug as devs confirmed that anything below +300% is completely OK. Feel free to open/continue discussion in Ideas & Suggestions.

Edit: Added links.

Possible fix: do nothing because this abuse needs a manual labor and so is throughput limited and every possible solution is going to be seen by someone else to be more buggy (delaying bonus until main product finishes would be confusing due to gui, not returning ingredients is going to cause suffering due to kovarex-enrichment-process, limiting productivity to less than 100% will nerf quality and make certain infinite technologies finite).

Even below 100% productivity you can still exploit this. Every time you get a productivity bonus item you can reset the recipe and reset however much of the ingredients was used up. So a 60% productivity bonus turns into 100% extra output.

Hares wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 4:42 pm BTW, definitely not a bug as devs confirmed that anything below +300% is completely OK. Feel free to open/continue discussion in Ideas & Suggestions.

Edit: Added links.

dev talk about +300% being ok was about the recycle because it's return 25% that why they put a hard cap at 300% to avoid infinite loop that produce item.

Hares wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 4:42 pm IIRC, without mods you can't automatically reset the recipe before crafting is complete

I think you can now with 2.0. I didn't try yet but you can set recipe and detect when a recipe is finish so you can probably reset it with circuit without mod now.

mrvn wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 5:29 pm Even below 100% productivity you can still exploit this. Every time you get a productivity bonus item you can reset the recipe and reset however much of the ingredients was used up. So a 60% productivity bonus turns into 100% extra output.

well at least there was at least one cycle before it's happen, but this was pretty much useless before except for speedrun, but now being able to craft unlimited legendary module is quite strong.

Stargateur wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 5:49 pm well at least there was at least one cycle before it's happen, but this was pretty much useless before except for speedrun, but now being able to craft unlimited legendary module is quite strong.

This case sounds interesting, could you show me which machine can get above 100% productivity when crafting modules?

Wasnt this also discovered quite recently in 1.1.x and fixed consequently?

Stargateur wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 5:49 pm well at least there was at least one cycle before it's happen, but this was pretty much useless before except for speedrun, but now being able to craft unlimited legendary module is quite strong.

You can't craft any non-intermediate item such way, at best you can craft legendary processors "for free". But that "free" part is not actually free as you need to manually reset the recipe, spending your time. Player time is the most important resource in Factorio.

Hares wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 6:09 pm

Well, I was doing the testing about that, indeed we can't change the recipe until the main progress is finish.

boskid wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 6:00 pm

Stargateur wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 5:49 pm well at least there was at least one cycle before it's happen, but this was pretty much useless before except for speedrun, but now being able to craft unlimited legendary module is quite strong.

This case sounds interesting, could you show me which machine can get above 100% productivity when crafting modules?

Well not directly but for example, you can use electromagnetic plant with 5 uncommon productivity modules it's make +115% productivity, than you can use this to craft intermediate material legendary material, green, red and blue circuits. But I agree with Hares it's quite a lot of manual work since for now I can't automate it.

So it's an exploit but look like it's limited.

Maybe legendary/quality recipe should not have productivity bonus ?

Panzerknacker wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 6:00 pm Wasnt this also discovered quite recently in 1.1.x and fixed consequently?

Well now that we have >+100% this exploit is again possible but again it's was minor :p just for speed runner, it's way stronger for quality, but again limited cause need manual work. As long as we can't automate it I don't really care now.

Stargateur wrote: Wed Nov 06, 2024 6:29 pm Well not directly but for example, you can use electromagnetic plant with 5 uncommon productivity modules it's make +115% productivity, than you can use this to craft intermediate material legendary material, green, red and blue circuits. But I agree with Hares it's quite a lot of manual work since for now I can't automate it.

So it's an exploit but look like it's limited.

The best you can do is to stop the assembler after it it's done with extra result.

Maybe legendary recipe should not have productivity bonus?

Nah.

It requires manual input, but is possible to parallelize:



If this ends up _not_ getting fixed, factorio speedrunning may end up no longer "glitchless". Which may be an interesting world to live in?

GlassBricks wrote: Sun Mar 02, 2025 9:48 am It requires manual input, but is possible to parallelize:
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If this ends up _not_ getting fixed, factorio speedrunning may end up no longer "glitchless". Which may be an interesting world to live in?

Time is a resource.

Possible fix:

- only give bonus items once main item is complete.

Also possible fix: Count the ingredients as consumed for the current crafting cycle, whenever a bonus productivity item is created.

- doesn't give back item when cancel recipe like before (that could hurt player)

But please please don't use this "solution". Forcing the playing to micromanage cancelling crafting for expensive items is horrible game design.

thuejk wrote: Wed Mar 05, 2025 6:43 pm

- only give bonus items once main item is complete.

Also possible fix: Count the ingredients as consumed for the current crafting cycle, whenever a bonus productivity item is created.

- doesn't give back item when cancel recipe like before (that could hurt player)

But please please don't use this "solution". Forcing the playing to micromanage cancelling crafting for expensive items is horrible game design.

You are self contradicting yourself. If ingredients would be marked as consumed when bonus products are given, that means when doing kovarex-enrichment-process, after 40 good uranium was consumed due to ingredients, after being given just 1 good uranium due to bonus progress, if at this point you would cancel the recipe, you would not be given back the 40 good uranium because it was marked as consumed.

Just to make it clear, we Speedrunners don't relie on a dev fix here. We can just ban the exploit if we wish to do so in the Speedrun rules.

boskid wrote: Wed Mar 05, 2025 6:47 pm

thuejk wrote: Wed Mar 05, 2025 6:43 pm

- only give bonus items once main item is complete.

Also possible fix: Count the ingredients as consumed for the current crafting cycle, whenever a bonus productivity item is created.

- doesn't give back item when cancel recipe like before (that could hurt player)

But please please don't use this "solution". Forcing the playing to micromanage cancelling crafting for expensive items is horrible game design.

You are self contradicting yourself. If ingredients would be marked as consumed when bonus products are given, that means when doing kovarex-enrichment-process, after 40 good uranium was consumed due to ingredients, after being given just 1 good uranium due to bonus progress, if at this point you would cancel the recipe, you would not be given back the 40 good uranium because it was marked as consumed.

This can be designed around: separate "catalyst" ingredients from "input" ingredients (filter by ignored_by_productivity). "catalyst" ingredients are always returned, "input" ingredients aren't returned after the first output. I think this addresses all cases.

...Why am I advocating to fix something I kinda hope would stay in the game to make things interesting

There exists only one solution that would prevent any type of abuse where product is given when ingredients can still be recovered: delaying giving bonus items until main crafting cycle finishes. That way clearing recipe before main crafting cycle will give ingredients but no bonus items, and when recipe finishes, bonus items are given but ingredients are gone. This is not trivial to solve in the gui because a machine would have to show that it has bonus products pending to be given.

boskid wrote: Thu Mar 06, 2025 9:11 am There exists only one solution that would prevent any type of abuse where product is given when ingredients can still be recovered: delaying giving bonus items until main crafting cycle finishes. That way clearing recipe before main crafting cycle will give ingredients but no bonus items, and when recipe finishes, bonus items are given but ingredients are gone. This is not trivial to solve in the gui because a machine would have to show that it has bonus products pending to be given.

Nah. I don't see this being necessary. Without external mods (ref: Mod Portal: Recursive Blueprints), the only way to abuse this is to manually switch recipes, and doing so will consume your time (ref: YouTube: Michael Hendriks -- Warptorio: Evolved HomeWorld #2: OOPS, did I screw up?) effectively making this into a cheeky gameplay mechanic.

I don't see this exploit as much of an issue. Any fix that comes with a draw back seems bad for the playerbase. Seems useless for casual play. Only seems useful for Speedrunners. But we can ban it if we like.