Higher Fluid Consumption for Quality Recipes
Posted: Fri Mar 21, 2025 6:51 am
When recipes with both fluid and item inputs use higher quality intermediates, the fluid inputs remain the same while item inputs must all be the base quality. In effect, this means those recipes yield high quality products without the corresponding additional resource cost applied to fluid inputs. This circumvents some of the increased cost of high quality items, but is not generally very problematic except in the case of the Casting Low Density Structures recipe. Since LDS can be made using molten iron and copper, but still recycles into iron and copper plates, this can be exploited to cheaply obtain legendary iron and copper plates, which can then bypass the additional cost of legendary items almost entirely.
Possible fixes:
Scale fluid consumption to recipe quality. I think an appropriate amount would be 4x for uncommon, 16x for rare, 64x for epic, and 256x for legendary, since this matches the approximate cost of recycling the item to obtain higher quality versions in the simplest form (which is appropriate, as it still bypasses the space requirements of a recycling loop).
Have recycled items always return to normal quality by default, while allowing the effects of quality modules in the recycler to apply.
Remove plastic from the requirements of the LDS casting recipe, making it a pure liquid input recipe.
Add a "quality reduction chance" that works the opposite of quality modules (chance to reduce quality level, then reduce again at 1/10 the chance), for recipes with mixed inputs. The modifier will be correlated to how much of the input is liquid (so, very low for blue circuits, medium for plastic and rocket fuel, very high for LDS). Adding quality modules would counteract this effect.
Prevent LDS casting from being performed at higher qualities (possibly with an option to re-enable it in game settings)
Possible fixes:
Scale fluid consumption to recipe quality. I think an appropriate amount would be 4x for uncommon, 16x for rare, 64x for epic, and 256x for legendary, since this matches the approximate cost of recycling the item to obtain higher quality versions in the simplest form (which is appropriate, as it still bypasses the space requirements of a recycling loop).
Have recycled items always return to normal quality by default, while allowing the effects of quality modules in the recycler to apply.
Remove plastic from the requirements of the LDS casting recipe, making it a pure liquid input recipe.
Add a "quality reduction chance" that works the opposite of quality modules (chance to reduce quality level, then reduce again at 1/10 the chance), for recipes with mixed inputs. The modifier will be correlated to how much of the input is liquid (so, very low for blue circuits, medium for plastic and rocket fuel, very high for LDS). Adding quality modules would counteract this effect.
Prevent LDS casting from being performed at higher qualities (possibly with an option to re-enable it in game settings)