Factorio Forums

Changed hazard concrete and refined hazard concrete to recycle into the recipe ingredients of concrete/refined concrete.

Unfortunately, 2.1 patched out the ability to recycle Hazard Concrete which by far the best way to quickly deal with all the waste recycling produces.
Which in turn completely bricks my Fulgora setup so I'm trying to find a space efficient solution before 2.1

However, the difference in rates is just insane.
in 2.0 a single beaconed assembler could deal with 906 Concrete per second and since recycling only had one output (Concrete again) you could just directly pipe it into another assembler and repeat.
I tried coming up with a new solution that could fit into the footprint of the old one but there is just no chance.
This stackable design uses 3 beacons and 4 direct modules and can only handle 33 Concrete per second (per Recycler). So four together, which is about the same size as one Hazard Concrete setup, is 132 Concrete/s or about 14.5% of the previous setup.

I would need like 7 of these just to match the throughput of the old design... which used four Hazard Concrete recyclers. So my size just ballooned 28 fold. There is just no way to fit that in my current layout.
I'm probably just going to use Concrete Text Plate recycling. I've been avoiding Text Plates because it's a very cheaty abuse of the Text Plate Mod but I don't see what else can be done.

The only other thing you could craft would be Nuclear Reactors funny enough. Since they require 500 of each ingredient the 25% return is a flat 125 with no chance of different outcome so you can just pipe them directly into another Nuclear Reactor assembler.
Obviously, this doesn't fit in my current setup either since I'd have to route Steel, Copper and Red Chips in as well, and Red Chips and Steel have less return from Scrap than Concrete so that alone isn't even enough.

According to official recommendations, you can use Infinity chest “it is working how it was intended to work.”＼(^o^)／
Or you don't need 2.1

32583279 wrote: Sat Jun 27, 2026 10:58 am According to official recommendations, you can use Infinity chest “it is working how it was intended to work.”＼(^o^)／
Or you don't need 2.1

OP doesn't seem to be looking for a mod to revert the change, so I don't see what relevance the 'officially' recommended alternative to a mod has.

People have found a couple of work arounds. The easiest way I can see of doing it is to have a break down to stone then a recycler on ores and and a craft/recycle loop on walls. What's being passed around right now is cargo bays, or recipes which automatically take the concrete. But at the point where I get blue chips involved on Fulgora I feel like I should be doing EM Plants.

coffee-factorio wrote: Sat Jun 27, 2026 1:27 pm People have found a couple of work arounds. The easiest way I can see of doing it is to have a break down to stone then a recycler on ores and and a craft/recycle loop on walls. What's being passed around right now is cargo bays, or recipes which automatically take the concrete. But at the point where I get blue chips involved on Fulgora I feel like I should be doing EM Plants.

Sorry but the result of the Concrete recycling isn't even the problem. Neither the Stone nor the Iron Ore. As you can see in the screenshot above, I can just shove them into recyclers directly as they only produce 4 Stone/s and 0.8 Iron Ore/s. Both recyclers are double Beaconed so they can easily shred those into nothing.
The chests are there to keep them from deadlocking if both are currently recycling one item and therefor can't take the output of the other.

No, the problem is the Concrete itself taking way too long to break down. 33 Concrete/s vs. 900 in with the old Hazard Concrete setup in the same footprint.

I have managed to circumvent my issue by just using Concrete Text Plates. Relying on a mod crafting recipe feels like cheating but I'd rather do that than redesign my entire Fulgora base for 2.1
Of course, if you were to build one from scratch it it's a different story.

How viable would be it be to make and recycle nuclear reactors? The ingredients are also all things that I have a vast surplus of. Even if the ratios don't work out completely, it should at least take care of a large amount of concrete.

It's 1 : 1 : 1 : 1. The reason why people are going for cargo bays is that by the ratios it's 200:25:10 with concrete:steel:proc units. That's pretty close to a 6:1:1/3 ratio. The tradeoff for using nuclear reactors is that you'll end up having to balance the sort out by manufacturing advanced circuits and other parts.

JackTheSpades wrote: Sat Jun 27, 2026 2:18 pm
No, the problem is the Concrete itself taking way too long to break down. 33 Concrete/s vs. 900 in with the old Hazard Concrete setup in the same footprint.

An overhead rail support has an 0.5 second craft time and an 0.03 second recycle time for 20 refined concrete and 10 steel.
When I checked on a full legendary setup that was capable of voiding several thousand in under a second.

I assume someone will find that eventually. So harden your heart.

jdrexler75 wrote: Sat Jun 27, 2026 4:08 pm How viable would be it be to make and recycle nuclear reactors? The ingredients are also all things that I have a vast surplus of. Even if the ratios don't work out completely, it should at least take care of a large amount of concrete.

As mentioned in the original post, it is an option but you get more Concrete than you get Steal and Red Circuits. You could try to simply craft the missing items since all the base ingredients are produces by Scrap recycling.
However, at that point you probably already have a significantly larger footprint than just recycling Concrete directly.

Doing some quick math:

With Nuclear Reactors your biggest bottleneck is actually going to be the inserters. An (all legendary) Assembler with speed Beacon could theoretically handle 1.4k Concrete per second. But it requires four input materials. So best you can probably do is 2 legendary Stack inserters for each. There is no data on the wiki for belt->chest so I'll use the chest->belt throughput which is 80/s which gives you a rate of 160 of each item per second.

Scrap recycling gives

• 6% Concrete
• 4% Steel (2/3 of Concrete)
• 3% Red Circuits. (1/2 of Concrete)
• 2% Blue Circuits. (1/3 of Concrete)

Going with the 160 Concrete per second, you get 106.6* Steel, 80 Red- and 53.3* Blue Circuits per second.
Blue circuits themselves recycle into 50% Red Circuits = 80+26.6* = 106.6* Red Circuits
So we need to make 107 Steel per second and 107 Red Circuits per second.
A legendary furnace with +250% Steel productivity researched and legendary speed Beacon gives you 7.92 Steel. So you need 14 to meet the demand. The spill over can be recycled as usual with steel chests.
A legendary EM Plant with legendary speed Beacon makes 9.06 Circuits per second. So 12 are needed.

In total:
14 Steel Furnaces, 12 EM plants all with a speed Beacon to supply an Assembler for Nuclear Reactors. All to get rid off 160 Concrete per second.

As a reminder, the Hazard Concrete could do 900 in a single Assembler -> Recycler -> Assembler -> Recycler loop (see OG screenshot).
Also, the failed setup I showed handled 130 Concrete/s on its own.

The benefit of the Nuclear Plant is that it also takes care of Steel and Red Chips (minus some spill over) but is that really worth it?

coffee-factorio wrote: Sat Jun 27, 2026 4:38 pm It's 1 : 1 : 1 : 1. The reason why people are going for cargo bays is that by the ratios it's 200:25:10 with concrete:steel:proc units. That's pretty close to a 6:1:1/3 ratio. The tradeoff for using nuclear reactors is that you'll end up having to balance the sort out by manufacturing advanced circuits and other parts.

JackTheSpades wrote: Sat Jun 27, 2026 2:18 pm
No, the problem is the Concrete itself taking way too long to break down. 33 Concrete/s vs. 900 in with the old Hazard Concrete setup in the same footprint.

An overhead rail support has an 0.5 second craft time and an 0.03 second recycle time for 20 refined concrete and 10 steel.
When I checked on a full legendary setup that was capable of voiding several thousand in under a second.

I assume someone will find that eventually. So harden your heart.

For Cargo Landing Pads (which I assume you meant) the crafting time of 30 seconds is extremely punishing. Same for Refined Concrete.

I tried the Rail Support strategy and when I choke the Refined Concrete Assembler with legedary speed Beacons I get a cool 98.6/sec.a with a stackable design which might be better
The Rail Supports themselves are great for eating through any amount of Refined Concrete and the Recycling output can just be fed back to the assembler.
However, I have no idea how you could possible be voiding "several thousand in under a second." Unless you mean the Rail Supports and not the actual Concrete itself. But even then it's footprint isn't all that much better than the "just recycle Concrete" design which can eat 130/sec. and doesn't require any additional setup like crafting Iron Rods or Rail Supports.