Factorio Forums

Did someone already do the math for getting quality items?

What is the best way? Fulgora seems to be the place to do it. Only a few intermediates are not a product of scrap. Lets say I mass recycle scrap on fulgora with quality modules in miners and recyclers:

Option 1: Everything is recycled over and over until only legendary items remain. Intermediate tiers are not used.

Option 2: Everything is recycled over and over but intermediates are used in machines with quality modules. For example craft normal to epic level 3 modules but recycle everything below legendary.

Without doing the math I think Option 2 would be better because it involves more possible quality increasing steps. For example legendary blue circuits: With option 1 there is only one source: Recycler. With option 2 they could also come from crafting epic blue circuits from epic intermediates with quality modules.

Both.

If you have access to Legendary, Uncommon (and maybe Rare in some cases) are just clogging your logistics by sheer volume by that time.
Since you can't use Speed modules with Quality (well, you can, but you can't) and unclogging by building surface wasting is not always an option - it's probably better to toss everything below Epic into grinder indiscriminately.

Math sez that whatever gives more rolls on the route from raw material to resulting product is better, obviously.
So, Fulgora's "scrap > blue circuit > red > green > coil > copper plate > then > all > the > way > back > to > blue" is, indeed, best mathematically... but there are other options too.

on fulgora you can mine legendary scrap and directly get high end legendary material.