Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Add Concrete and Processing Units to Fulgoran Vault drop list to help bootstrap production.

What?

Recycling Scrap produces both Concrete and Processing units, and you need both to craft Recyclers. Neither can be found on the planet, causing a soft-lock.

Why?

You need just 20 and 6 respectively to get your first Recycler and then you can get copious amounts of both. Concrete is very doable and can be left as-is, but getting those 6 Processing Units is a massive pain if you don't ship them from somewhere else. It's technically possible with a Space Platform and technology from Gleba, but that whole setup would immediately be useless once you start recycling.

You can recycle scrap by hand to get those items.

Iirc there was actually a problem with getting iron sticks for power poles but those got added to the drop table of one of the doodads at some point.

... Well, you indeed can. Color me stupid.

On the other hand, I completed a couple of runs and created a base on Fulgora a couple more times, and I never "recycled" a piece of scrap by hand, not even once. The idea didn't even occur to me. So far this never came up because I just had both on the platform as supplies to build a rocket silo, or I just resorted to shipping Processing Units and creating some Concrete from scratch.

This is obviously not a big deal, but it still might be a good idea to just have those resources available on the planet. For, let's say, "less observant" players. It doesn't change anything about the core challenge.

I think enough people miss the option of hand-recycling scrap that it would make sense to highlight it somehow.

Putting it in a tip/tutorial is the obvious way. Another way would be to rearrange the tech tree so that you need to hand-recycle some scrap as a trigger to unlock Recycler, but that would remove the role of the vault ruin.

berniszon wrote: Tue Jun 10, 2025 2:29 pm On the other hand, I completed a couple of runs and created a base on Fulgora a couple more times, and I never "recycled" a piece of scrap by hand, not even once. The idea didn't even occur to me.

When I first landed on Fulgora, it didn't even occure to me that you could drop stuff from orbit without a landing pad on the surface... We both managed to build our factory there any way, kind of impresive game design in it's own way