Page 1 of 1

Legendary electronic circuits 28/s

Posted: Thu Dec 26, 2024 2:25 am
by DaveMcW
This design upgrades normal quality circuits into legendary circuits.

Input is 28 green circuits and 2.8 red circuits per second.
Output is 28 legendary green circuits and 2.8 legendary red circuits per second.

It is optimized for Processing Unit Productivity 13. At lower tech levels it has reduced yields.



circuit_upcycle.jpg
circuit_upcycle.jpg (617.3 KiB) Viewed 3594 times

Re: Legendary electronic circuits 28/s

Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2025 6:36 pm
by waterBear
You're saying this thing converts common inputs to legendary outputs in a 1-to-1 ratio? How is that even possible? I am genuinely curious. Level 13 productivity gives you 2.8x the outputs per input, but recycling divides that by 4.

Edit: Added in the emag plant productivity.

Re: Legendary electronic circuits 28/s

Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2025 7:12 pm
by Nidan
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.

Re: Legendary electronic circuits 28/s

Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2025 7:48 pm
by waterBear
Nidan wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 7:12 pm 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.
Ah, good call. I didn't look close enough and assumed those were quality modules. So all the quality up-conversion happens via recyclers.

Thanks for the explanation.

Re: Legendary electronic circuits 28/s

Posted: Tue May 20, 2025 10:00 am
by spacedog
Here's a version meant for large scale production. It's only 22 circuits per second instead of 28, but at a lower UPS cost due to the following optimizations:
  • Cursed design abusing cargo wagons, to eliminate all internal belts and minimize the number of inserters. This doubles as the buffer storage to handle uneven red circuit production from the recyclers (see below).
  • Quality modules are used in the EM plants as well, so fewer loops are needed through the EM plant and recyclers. Note that this requires Processing Unit Productivity 30.
  • The beacons are fine-tuned to produce the highest possible number of successful quality rolls per second, for the given EM plants and recyclers.
  • Significantly fewer entities (obviously).
Upcycler.jpg
Upcycler.jpg (755.08 KiB) Viewed 1580 times


There are a couple more minor optimizations possible if combinators are used, but it probably wouldn't matter much unless you're stamping down hundreds of these.

This was a fun deep dive into optimizing upcycling production chains. There are a few things around throughput dependencies that aren't immediately obvious, and I finally got the chance to really dig into the math for mixing quality and speed modules. (Spoiler: for situations involving high productivity bonuses, it's a good idea most of the time.)

An important pitfall with this kind of upcycling is failing to adequately deal with inconsistent outputs from the recyclers. In this case, you have a 100% chance to get exactly 5 green circuits back, but only a 50% chance to get 1 red circuit back. Since the game is making a random roll for the red circuits every time, you can get bad RNG streaks where you get a lot less (or a lot more) red circuits than the average. So it requires a reasonably large buffer of some kind to ensure nothing backs up. I kind of wish the recyclers kept track of fractional amounts internally so this didn't happen, because it would make building these kinds of things a lot more straightforward.

Anyway, I ran this for around 20 hours at high speed in the editor, and the cargo wagons seem to be large enough that nothing ever gets stuck, but I can't guarantee that it won't happen if an exceptional unbalanced streak comes along with the RNG. Use at your own risk in mission critical applications. (Or modify it so each EM plant gets its own cargo wagon.)

Re: Legendary electronic circuits 28/s

Posted: Tue May 20, 2025 11:13 am
by vjbone
spacedog wrote: Tue May 20, 2025 10:00 am Here's a version meant for large scale production.
pls include wagons in your bp, its hard to find place available

Re: Legendary electronic circuits 28/s

Posted: Tue May 20, 2025 2:59 pm
by spacedog
vjbone wrote: Tue May 20, 2025 11:13 am pls include wagons in your bp, its hard to find place available
I updated the blueprint with the cargo wagons included.

I thought they removed this in 2.0... it took a lot of searching to realize you have to hold down shift while capturing the blueprint for it to include trains.