Production Issues Due to Quality Imbalance on Fulgora

[MHplays]

I know I’m kinda late to the party, but I’ve been having trouble with quality product imbalance on Fulgora.

Previously, I was using speed modules in my scrap recyclers, but after acquiring (rare) Quality Modules 3, I swapped out the speed modules for the quality ones. My thinking was that producing quality resources directly from scrap would help me make quality products more efficiently overall.

To handle the different quality levels of each required material in recipes, I built a linear belt that takes in mixed-quality inputs of a material, and then used splitters to filter and send the five different qualities into five separate assembly lines. Each line runs the matching quality recipe.

The problem I ran into is this: say a recipe needs four materials—A, B, C, and D. Over time, because of the randomness of the quality of the input material, it’s extremely likely that, for example, the belt for material A ends up clogged with a surplus of common-quality items, while the belt for material B gets clogged with an excess of rare-quality items. This results in every belt eventually clogging due to mismatched surpluses or some assembler belts running out of materials, and production stopping completely.

While I found that setting up a circuit network that enables material voiding in recyclers—once it detects that some of the assembly lines have excess products and the assemblers are idle—is a good workaround in some cases, for productions that require materials with many crafting ingredients (blue circuits, for example), it’s not such a good solution due to the many recyclers needed for the voiding, and it’s prone to clogging anyway.

So I’m reaching out to ask: how do you guys deal with this situation? Maybe there’s a known community solution that’s more efficient, or perhaps using quality modules in scrap recyclers isn’t even worth it, and I should go back to speed modules (but now that I think about it, this problem seems bound to happen on any planet that uses quality modules in the production of any material, so eventually I’ll have to deal with it).

What do you recommend?

[eugenekay]

I use the "Output Priority" of Splitters to send any Backed-Up product outputs back to the Input side of the Recycler array - where it takes "Input Priority" over the Scrap coming in from the Mines. This reduces the total Output slightly, but it keeps the system from choking.

[NineNine]

I just use as many input chests as I can (3-4 per assembler/EM), and go back and check them every few playing hours. I'm sure it could be done better with fancy circuit programming, but once you have a few chests as buffers, it happens so rarely that I don't worry about it.

[mmmPI]

I know I’m kinda late to the party, but I’ve been having trouble with quality product imbalance on Fulgora.
What do you recommend?

Find the thing you have the least and you need the most, the thing that is missing all the time . Supposedly holmium if you only do science, but maybe copper or steel or plastic if you export other thing than science.

Limit your mining/input when this thing is above a certain threshold.

Void everything else above that threhold to nothingness using chain of recyclers. ( yes even if it's legendary blue circuits ).

Easier said than done i know x) but that's the principle in my mind, then in practice it's changing the thing that is the most missing, so you may want to still be mining if "holmium" is not missing, but "copper" is. And if you need "steel" along the course of the game you need to add that as the "most needed item", eventually all item that have been required as the "most needed" will be accounted for by the logic.

There are different ways to make such logic in game, using logistic bots is the easiest imo because you can connect the inserter to the logistic network directly to control when things are recycled without combinators , just reading the threshold written in their GUI, and it makes the logisitic easy. But it's also possible to do with belts, it requires a lot more organization on the tiny fulgora islands ^^


That being said, Fulgora is imo the planet where it's the easiest to start quality ( with quality scrap mining) , but not the planet where it's the easiest in the long run, quite the opposite, its normal to have production issue due to imbalance on Fulgora when producing quality, production imbalance in general, so you will have a lot of recyclers, many because it's fulgora and you need them anyway, and additionnals ones if you are doing quality.