Allow quality modules with fish breeding

[DefGie]

How is there not already a topic for this (besides someone erroneously reporting it as a bug)? Is it just because most people do Fulgora before Gleba?

What? Allow quality modules with fish breeding. Since it behaves as a catalyst recipe, I assume outputting all three fish with improved quality would not be desired. So, (within the same update tick) generate the one newly-produced fish output first, then the output of the two catalyst fish. If the generated output rolled a quality increase, the catalyst will be invisibly buffered until the output is clear, the same as when output of any normal recipe is generated at different quality from currently loaded output. This would however require a double buffer - in the event the catalyst has not been cleared by the time a second recipe run completes, and the second run also produces quality output. Combining the catalyst output of the consecutive runs or reversing the order of the two output components doesn't help. If consecutive runs produce different quality-improved output, without being unloaded in between, you would end up with three quality tiers including the catalyst competing for the output slot. So just make a layered buffer.

But you could also just let all three fish jump in quality.

If need be, increase the nutrients cost of the recipe for balance.

Why? The only real purpose of fish breeding is to get quality fish, most obviously to make quality spidertrons. It's a Gleba tech, but you can't actually make quality fish without the recycler too. This makes it only meaningful as a Gleba-Fulgora tech. It's one of the rewards you bring home from conquering Gleba and takes a little bit of setup (admittedly only a very little bit). Between the expectation that the tech is useful on its own, the fact that similar Gleba recipes (pentapod eggs, bacteria cultivation) are not quality-restricted, and the lack of advance notice (e.g. in factoriopedia), discovering after you configure the recipe in a machine that you can't use the recipe for what it's for is nothing short of a bait-and-switch.

It would even be an improvement if the fish breeding tech took electromagnetic science, so it's clear up front that it's a Gleba-Fulgora tech. But I strongly prefer removing the recycler dependency.

Technically I see three uses for fish breeding.
1. Quality fish
2. Mass-produce spidertrons
3. Convert nutrients into a form with long shelf-life
But,
2. Does anyone need/want to do this?
3. Bioflux has a long shelf-life. You don't craft it from nutrients, but it fits the role of a transportable nutrient source pretty adequately. You might want to package quality nutrients as fish, perhaps, but this would require you to get some quality fish in the first place.

[CyberCider]

Technically I see three uses for fish breeding.
1. Quality fish
2. Mass-produce spidertrons
3. Convert nutrients into a form with long shelf-life

I’m afraid you missed one: It’s funny.

I think the science pack cost (only lime and space) makes this pretty clear. It’s a meme research that also happens to have a niche purpose in quality spidertrons.