Factorio Forums

Which is more profitable mine ore under productivity and speed beacons or straight with quality modules?

Once you have a few tiers of mining productivity research, the productivity modules pretty much lose their value. I don't think speed beacons make much sense either since you'll just drain the patch faster. You'll need to open the same number of ore patches in the end, with speed beacons one after another or without them in parallel.

It's rough. Because when it comes to profitable, you enter into a grey area where you'll have different objectives.

What makes the most sense is to see what you get from a normal upcycle, then compare that to various combinations of speed in your own game.
Because there's going to be a point where you can just stock a turbo belt with normal ores and leave that for five hours, and a 1.n bonus won't be attractive compared to losing that volume of production.

That tends to not happen with the other parts of an upcycle.

As your productivity raises you can add in quality to get a nice bonus but you also need to add in buildings with modules.