Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Allow Epic and Legendary items to be produced before their respective researches, with an additional 10× penalty for each unre­searched tier.

The researches would then improve the odds rather than act as hard gates.

What?

With a 10% quality chance, the normal progression is:
I suggest applying one additional order-of-magnitude penalty to each unre­searched tier.

Before Epic research:
After Epic research, but before Legendary research:
After both:
Everything below the affected tier remains unchanged.

Why?

The hard gates feel out of place in a system based on increasingly unlikely outcomes.

The existing 10× progression already gives us a natural way to make higher qualities extremely rare. Applying that to the research gates makes Epic and Legendary possible without making them practical to target.

It also gives the quality system a smoother progression. Exceptional results can happen before the corresponding research, while the research makes them substantially more accessible.

This may make the game harder and easier at the same time — and that is good

This also creates an interesting factory-design problem much earlier.

With the current system, you know that unre­searched quality levels cannot appear. You can design your production around that assumption.

With this change, every quality level is potentially part of your output from the moment quality production starts. You have to consider where those items go, what can handle them, and how to prevent unexpected qualities from disrupting your production.

That is a more interesting kind of difficulty because it comes from the quality system itself rather than from an artificial restriction. Extremely unlikely outcomes become something the player can prepare for instead of something the game guarantees will never happen.

There is also a difference between preparing for this up front and dealing with it later. With the current system, unlocking Epic or Legendary can suddenly invalidate a setup that was deliberately designed around those qualities never appearing. That can be more disruptive than having to account for the possibility from the beginning.

How this differs from similar suggestions

This is not simply moving the Epic or Legendary researches earlier, and it is not removing them.

The researches remain where they are. They stop being binary unlocks and instead remove the additional rarity penalty.

It also leaves the quality mechanics themselves untouched: no changes to rerolls, module effects, or quality jumps.

Expected result

Before the corresponding research, Epic and Legendary are possible but extraordinarily unlikely.

After the research, the system works exactly as it does today.

The progression changes from:

* Impossible → Possible

to:

* Extremely unlikely → Rare → Practical

This seems like a better fit for a system whose core mechanic is already based on orders of magnitude. It also should meaningfully deter people from trying to maximize epic or legendary items before they have the corresponding research. It would litterally just allow you to get lucky occasionaly.