Factorio Forums

I am currently trying to make an "all legendary" factory hub before making a "promethium push", and it's brutal trying to feed it resources so far. I have some pretty efficient designs for some things (iron, copper, steel, stone), but others are excruciatingly slow .. particularly the ones based on mining/upcycling raw resources without any kind of boost (like coal). I know that the asteroid recycling loophole got closed, so I never bothered making "legendary only" space mining ships. Now I am wondering if maybe it's still worth it ... my legendary coal production method only procs a handful every minute.

Can I do better in space? For example, I can envision a upcycling design for "space coal" based on recyclers and factories instead of crushers, and asteroids are a free, infinite resource, so I guess it makes sense? It's going to be a complicated design though, and as much as I will enjoy making it, I don't want to spend a ton of time on ship design that's not going to make an appreciable difference in speed. I can sink days of play time into making a mining fleet, and wait more days for the legendary loot to come pouring in .. right now I don't want to do that if I could get basically the same thing by just mining out more patches.

I have been "just about to start on promethium" for a couple of months now, and I don't want to delay it again unless I am going to get a significant boost.

Thanks in advance for any advice/insights.

DLK

there is no such thing as a asteroid recycling loophole that got closed you can use space mining, it's competitive if you don't have much mining productivity

mmmPI wrote: Tue Mar 17, 2026 2:09 pm there is no such thing as a asteroid recycling loophole that got closed you can use space mining, it's competitive if you don't have much mining productivity

I must be losing my mind. I thought for sure they I had read about them taking out the ability to place quality modules in crushers when you have any of the asteroid recycling recipes selected, but I just tried it and it seems to still work. I guess that explains why I couldn't find any posts about it searching the forums.

Anyway, thanks for sorting me out.