Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Example: Assembler set to "produce uncommon gears" will take uncommon, rare, epic, and legendary iron plates and treat them as uncommon.
To prevent quality from clogging base allow to use hight quality items as input for low quality items change ingredients from "quality of ingredients = quality of product" to "quality of ingredients => (larger or equal) quality of product".

What?

Allow to input high quality ingredients to craft low quality items, for example common gear with rare iron plates.

As far as I know, the developers were considering the idea of "mixed quality" at the beginning but idea was discarded, most likely because of "productivity abuse" where you can made 99%progress with production of common items and that input legendary ingridients and get 2 legendary items for price of one.

BUT productivity/quality was already changed to reset with changing of modules and recipe and we already can choose to made items of particular quality that restrict ingredients input.

So now there is no reason to not allow player to use rare iron plates to craft common gears. It especially painful as you can't use quality items for crafting.

Why?

There are several reasons
1. Now any early quality setup is prone to failure. Quality is unlocked at green science tech. The is no robots, no recyclers, no ability to throw items to space or any other way to prevent factory from clogging on uncommon/rare intermediates. You can only do lots of chests and buffer intermidiates unless ytou gor for M.Hendricks scale of production.
2. Some recopies just doesn't make sense, Why we need to make 5 chemical plants to melt common/uncommon/rare/epic/legendary quality ice?
3. There is no way to prevent production of higher quality. If you made setup that handle common, uncommon and rare items as soon as you research Epic quality - your base could break

That all combined leads to common decision for quality "Don't interracti with quality utill you unlock Legendary quality and made dedicated quality setups"

Quality should be same as any other module in terms of "you cam throw it in every single machine in your base and it will be fine", it should awwrd player for engaging with system, not punish for "incorrect engaging".

+1. I pretty much never use quality early-game because it's so prone to failure.

You can use quality items for crafting. And accidentally losing your rare iron gears to the common engine factory sounds like its own kind of error prone. Though I agree this idea would make everything way easier. Which is why I don't like it.

evanrinehart wrote: Wed Jun 24, 2026 6:23 am You can use quality items for crafting. And accidentally losing your rare iron gears to the common engine factory sounds like its own kind of error prone. Though I agree this idea would make everything way easier. Which is why I don't like it.

Right now you can't do this and those "rare gears" will make your factory clog. Sou you MUST design special handling of quality

With changes you CAN design special handling of quality, but Quality will not destroy your factory production.

Difference is, now you can't put quality to everything. Idea is allowing player to do so without shooting arrow to thier knee.

+1

It's especially frustrating that you have to design Quality to account for Epic and Legendary quality even though you haven't unlocked them, because unlocking them will cause items to rarely jump up multiple quality levels to epic/legendary and clog your existing and formerly working setup.

It's more efficient to take those items and process them separately, but it's a lot more complex and unapproachable.