Factorio Forums

Suppose you've made the decision to opt in to quality. You've dedicated a small section of your factory to producing Rare Beacons, and it's working perfectly.

Then, you visit Gleba, and you research Epic quality. Suddenly, your Rare Beacon factory occasionally produces Epic quality stuff:
But your factory is designed for Rare quality, not Epic! Eventually, the Epic items start to gum up the factory.

If it's just the one factory, no big deal. You go improve that factory as soon as the Epic research finishes. But if you have a dozen scattered across a few planets, you're probably going to miss one or two, and then be frustrated when you realize something's been broken for a few hours.

How do you design around this?

Why wouldn't you just use those Epic and Legendary parts to make Epic and Legendary items?

If you want to avoid changing your factory later you have to add those inserters and splitters to sort out higher qualities directly from the start. Luckily you can add filters that simply say "anything above rare".

It's a pretty quick fix with a filtered inserter and a chest, so I can't say I've thought about it ahead of time...

Here is (approximately) how I set up my first quality quality module factory. By splitting each output quality into its own belt, the remaining belt branch becomes the place where all higher qualities go, and the place to build the next row — this tiles all the way up to legendary Q3 and you only need to build as much as you currently have researched. All extra production goes into the chests.