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.

+1

Quality just ends up with so much waste, I was running a simulation of making Blue Circuits using the quality system, and making 1,000,000 blue circuits with quality modules every step of the way results in over 7,000,000 copper cables of uncommon-legendary quality that just has no where to go. It's ridiculous being in a situation where your factory is shutting down because your cables are too high of quality for circuits. Players shouldn't be rewarded for having unbalanced quality production, but I don't think they should be punished for it either.

One of the costs of producing quality items is dealing with byproducts. Otherwise, what's the point?

radical_larry wrote: Sun Jun 28, 2026 7:06 pm One of the costs of producing quality items is dealing with byproducts. Otherwise, what's the point?

Cost of making quality items is quality modules, randomness and not using any other modules.

There are only 2 kind lf techs in factorio that could brick factory. Steel production and quality.
And if steel is something that brick only with bad design, quality is something that lots of player ignirring exactly because of breaking.
Why to bother with quality in early-mid game If in the end everything will be solved with upcycling loops?
That exactly why quality needs buff. To become usable in midgame before legendary closed loops

I've always seen quality as a two part puzzle:

1) How do you get quality components?
2) How do you deal with quality components?

The former is a problem of scaling: building taller and wider will give you more quality stuff. We do this anyway in this game, so nobody cares. The latter is an extra logistics puzzle. (We also do this anyway, so I don't understand what the big deal is.) Like all logistics puzzles in this game, you can choose between the complicated way of belts or the simple way of bots. This makes me wonder how early-game "early-game" is — surely you're not actually rushing to put quality modules in everything before unlocking logistic networks... Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

There's nothing wrong with having a massive storage area for unused high-quality components. They come in handy until you have robust quality production. And it needn't really be a massive storage area because you won't produce too many epic or legendary components accidentally. A couple dozen yellow chests should suffice.

Why we need to make 5 chemical plants to melt common/uncommon/rare/epic/legendary quality ice?

A second chemical plant using decider logic to set quality recipes can shrink the footprint if you want to maximize water per tile. Otherwise you can just chuck all your legendary ice overboard like one of them wasteful Fulgora natives (but look where that mindset got them).

evanrinehart wrote: Wed Jun 24, 2026 6:23 am And accidentally losing your rare iron gears to the common engine factory sounds like its own kind of error prone.

To me this sounds a lot worse than just having a bunch of low-quality items floating around.

Imagine e.g. a legendary gear getting wasted on creating a common engine because you have "use better parts for worse stuff" enabled.

Kyralessa wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 11:47 am

evanrinehart wrote: Wed Jun 24, 2026 6:23 am And accidentally losing your rare iron gears to the common engine factory sounds like its own kind of error prone.

To me this sounds a lot worse than just having a bunch of low-quality items floating around.

Imagine e.g. a legendary gear getting wasted on creating a common engine because you have "use better parts for worse stuff" enabled.

How you set your factory - tha how it it will work.
That is the key - it will work and will not stop because you get too much of legendary gears.

You stil can and should prepare system filtering high quality materials that is moved to other facility or stored in special buffer. But If your buffer for 48 stacks of legendary gears is full your engine production will not suddenly die

neo-necro wrote: Mon Jun 29, 2026 10:15 am I've always seen quality as a two part puzzle:

1) How do you get quality components?
2) How do you deal with quality components?

The former is a problem of scaling: building taller and wider will give you more quality stuff. We do this anyway in this game, so nobody cares. The latter is an extra logistics puzzle. (We also do this anyway, so I don't understand what the big deal is.) Like all logistics puzzles in this game, you can choose between the complicated way of belts or the simple way of bots. This makes me wonder how early-game "early-game" is — surely you're not actually rushing to put quality modules in everything before unlocking logistic networks... Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

There's nothing wrong with having a massive storage area for unused high-quality components. They come in handy until you have robust quality production. And it needn't really be a maoassive storage area because you won't produce too many epic or legendary components accidentally. A couple dozen yellow chests should suffice.

Why we need to make 5 chemical plants to melt common/uncommon/rare/epic/legendary quality ice?

A second chemical plant using decider logic to set quality recipes can shrink the footprint if you want to maximize water per tile. Otherwise you can just chuck all your legendary ice overboard like one of them wasteful Fulgora natives (but look where that mindset got them).

First of the all "decider logic" is bad by design answer. Factorio has no wast circuits logic tutorials and that is more than optional, it is toy for those who want more control and have outside of game knowledge. There is a reason why chests have limiters even when you can limit insertion with wires to insertier.

Second of all. Why I should not be able to just put quality modules everywhere? I can do this with speed, productivity and efficiency modules
Meanwhile just 4 items of wrong quality could stop machine from working by cloging belt

They did add substantial capability to the quality recipe modding API that let me overhaul my mod that addresses this issue. It both allows easy quality capping of an item stream and prevents machines from silently consuming quality items like an automatic downgrade feature would allow.

AssaultRaven wrote: Tue Jun 30, 2026 12:28 pm They did add substantial capability to the quality recipe modding API that let me overhaul my mod that addresses this issue. It both allows easy quality capping of an item stream and prevents machines from silently consuming quality items like an automatic downgrade feature would allow.

Thank you for effort, and I saw already few mods like this, but
viewtopic.php?t=30240

But speaking about lowering quality machine are probably workable middle ground if implementing mixing of quality have some issues with things like machine inventory slots as 1x1 or 1x2 machine could catch wrong quality items inline with belt and are low effort solution in spirit of idea