Legendary Quality In 2.1

[u/minmpaf]

Hello, I recently set up a save for 2.1 and got to working on quality, still early days but nothing I haven't done before. I got to thinking that without space casinos anymore getting things like legendary iron and coal will be much harder on Nauvis. Obviously you can do iron on Vulcanus really easily but does that mean we will need to be shipping everything from Vulcanus to Nauvis for biolabs? Interested to know your thoughts.

[u/sniper43]

Set up quality on Vulcanus, maybe set up Science there.

You can always just make standard quality science packs, they don't all have to be legendary.

[u/sobrique → u/sniper43]

Honestly I prefer Gleba, just because of how annoying I find plastic on Vulcanus.

Bacteria cyclers into foundries are just as infinite as metals on Vulcanus.

But you also get bioplastic which is really easy to spam out.

Maybe it's just me but I really dislike the coal liquefaction cycle and only use it grudgingly.

[u/Stolen_Sky]

I'm currently building a Legendary Quality system in 2.1. It's the first I've constructed.

I unlocked all the planets and tech first, and then went to Vulcanus. I'm currently mass producing basic quality green and red chips and plastic using foundries and EM plants, and then upcycling blue chips. Blue chips are awesome, because they get the huge productivity bonus that Elecromagnetic science gives you. Legendary blue chips can be recycled into legendary green and red chips, which can in turn recycle into legendary iron, copper and plastic. Legendary iron can be smelted into legendary steel, and it gains the steel productivity bonus when it does, and that covers pretty much all of the basics.

On Fulgora, I'm upcycling supercapacitors and then recycling those into legendary superconductors, and importing the superconductors to Vulcanus to make legendary Tier 3 Quality Modules. I learned to my frustration that you cannot upcycle superconductors, so don't try!

I'm also manufacturing a huge number of grenades to upcycle for additional legendary coal and legendary plastic to fill some of the gaps.

All my EM planets are legendary, and this is really important! The first legendary Tier 3 Quality Modules that I built went to Fulgora to upcycle EM plants. If you use legendary production buildings, then you need less buildings in total, which means you can build your upcycling system with a far less legendary Tier 3 Quality Modules that you would otherwise need. This maximises the total effectiveness of each legendary Tier 3 Quality Module that you make, and this is really important as those things are gold-dust when you first create them!

Also - when you start to scale for legendary, don't aim directly for legendary Tier 3 Quality Module. Aim for legendary Tier 2 Quality Modules instead. These are almost as powerful, but then don't need superconductors to make, which makes everything a whole lot easier when you are getting started!

Scaling into legendary is really fun, but just be aware it takes many hours to get going. It's achingly slow at first, but as you make more and more legendary Tier 3 Quality Modules, it'll get faster and faster as you scale.

[u/jon3111mjk → u/Stolen_Sky]

You might want to look at just going all in on em plant up cycling. With all the holmium plate you get, you just need to import a couple of extra ingredients and you can craft the superconductors and caps directly. You'll be drowning in quality modules before you know it.

[u/Darrelc → u/Stolen_Sky]

I learned to my frustration that you cannot upcycle superconductors, so don't try!

I'm the other way round, it was much more of a ballache to do supercaps lol

[u/Stolen_Sky → u/Darrelc]

You seem to be upcycling supercapacitors, unless I'm seriously misunderstanding something here...

[u/Darrelc → u/Stolen_Sky]

They're both in that screenshot, top is superconductors which was a doddle to sort out - copy and paste and change some filters.

Did the same thing for supercapacitors and realised they didn't quality-smash into themselves so had to build that abomination hah

[u/Neither_Berry_100 → u/Stolen_Sky]

Ideally you would scale slowly. Start with no quality but max of everything if that is all you have. Upgrade to +1 quality then 2 and so on. The only weirdness being that mk2 quality modules are highly cost effective compared to mk3.

[u/Alfonse215]

Legendary iron isn't especially difficult. Cycle underground pipes if you want efficient use of iron ore (or throw in transport belts at the start for even better efficiency). Or just cycle the ore itself if you don't care about efficiency of resource but just want a smaller build per plate.

Coal isn't worth conserving, so just cycle that. If anything, legendary coal is easier to get on Nauvis because of how much coal you have and will never otherwise use.

[u/j_schmotzenberg → u/Alfonse215]

My grenade requirements for military science disagree with your assessment of coal uses.

[u/Alfonse215 → u/j_schmotzenberg]

At 100k SPM, you're only using 250k of coal per minute. That sounds like a lot, but your mining productivity should be such that a single drill can max out a stacked green belt. You should easily be able to get 250k coal from a single patch. Sure, that's 18 belts, but it's still just one coal patch.

[u/Rarvyn → u/Alfonse215]

Assuming you’re not trying to do quality science, legendary coal isn’t necessary for anything but legendary plastic, and you can cycle that directly with LDS (getting legendary steel and copper as byproducts). No need to up cycle coal.

[u/Alfonse215 → u/Rarvyn]

You have that backwards. You use legendary coal to make legendary plastic, which makes legendary LDS, which recycles into legendary copper and steel (with enough LDS productivity, this returns enough plastic that you never actually need more to keep making steel and copper). That is, legendary coal is how you make legendary copper and steel.

Also, LDS cycling is very slow, so it requires a lot of machines. Recycling coal is very fast, requiring far fewer machines. Plus, coal cycling improves its efficiency with plastic productivity; every legendary coal becomes more legendary plastic.

[u/Rarvyn → u/Alfonse215]

What I’m saying is that you can just use common plastic and cycle it up through LDS until you get legendary plastic, steel, and copper.

Four foundries - one each making common/uncommon/rare/epic LDS - and a few dozen recyclers gives you hundreds of legendary copper per minute, depending on your productivity research and module quality. All in exchange for a trickle of coal and an irrelevant amount of calcite.

Once you max out productivity, every single common coal becomes 8 plastic which becomes 8 legendary plastic, 32 copper, and 3 steel.

Why would I upcycle coal when I already have more plastic and copper than I could shake a stick at? Steel is +/- depending on what you’re making, but you can always either reuse the legendary plastic in the LDS shuffle or simply cook legendary steel from legendary iron.

[u/Alfonse215 → u/Rarvyn]

Four foundries - one each making common/uncommon/rare/epic LDS - and a few dozen recyclers gives you hundreds of legendary copper per minute

OK, let's do the math.

Let's be as generous as possible. Let's say you have only 7 levels of LDS prod and plastic prod. And you don't even have legendary QM3s yet; having to settle for legendary QM2s. You don't have legendary prod 3s, so we'll use rare prod 3s. And lets say you only have 50 levels of mining productivity.

To get enough legendary coal to make 200 legendary copper plates per minute (and 20 legendary steel) requires:

• 4.55 BMDs with leg QM2s in them.
• 5.689 recyclers for the coal with leg QM2s in them. Note that these are base quality recyclers; you can throw legendaries at it and only need like 3.
• 0.13 cryogenic plants with rare prod 3s to make plastic.
• 2.2 Foundries with rare prod 3s to cast the legendary LDS.
• 1 speed-moduled recycler to recycle the LDS into copper and steel (the plastic is recirculated).

That's merely 44 legendary quality module twos. QM3s make it even smaller.

Your "few dozen recyclers" recyclers would require more than that even if "few dozen" meant just 24.

So yes, my method is more efficient in terms of infrastructure (recyclers, quality modules, buildings, etc). And eventually, it hits 300% productivity and never needs more coal again.

Why would I upcycle coal?

Because it requires fewer buildings, modules, etc. per copper/steel generated. It is unequivocally the more efficient option.

[u/pda898 → u/Alfonse215]

And you don't even have legendary QM3s yet; having to settle for legendary QM2s.

Tbh at this moment the answer is to go legendary QM3s, this is the first upcycle you setup.

[u/Alfonse215 → u/pda898]

Cycling legendary QM3s has two problems. The first is that they are a very slow recipe, so you need a lot of EMPs, recyclers, and quality modules. The second is that they require a ton of holmium, so you need to scale up production specifically on Fulgora. Which is not the easiest planet to scale up on. Sorting one stacked belt of scrap outputs is easy; sorting the results of processing 6 stacked belts of scrap is much harder.

Legendary QM2s may be less good, but they can be scaled up much more easily. If you have access to large quantities of molten iron, molten copper, and coal, you can make them in bulk using a few relatively small production setups. And there are two planets where you can get that amount of stuff very easily.

With legendary QM2s, you can build a nice supercapacitor cycler, which gives you access to 3 intermediates you need at legendary at once. And once you get enough superconductors, you can replace its modules with legendary QM3s to make it even more efficient.

[u/pda898 → u/Alfonse215]

Which is not the easiest planet to scale up on. Sorting one stacked belt of scrap outputs is easy; sorting the results of processing 6 stacked belts of scrap is much harder.

You need 25 superconductors per minute to output 24 legendary QM3 (edit: per hour) without using quality at all (and in 4 hours it will self upgrade). It is not insanely compact setup, but with this low superconductor per minute requirement... Just drop them onto Vulcanus. And 25 superconductors per minute is 0.5 yellow belt of scrap.

[u/Alfonse215 → u/pda898]

You need 25 superconductors per minute to output 24 legendary QM3 without using quality at all

At what timescale?

Using base-quality quality module 3s ("without using quality at all"), according to my calculator, a setup consuming only 25 superconductors/minute would only produce 0.07 QM3s per minute. After 4 hours, you have 16 legendary QM3s. Which is not nearly enough to upgrade the 24 EMPs making the base quality QM3s, let alone the recyclers and other EMPs.

Perhaps you mean to use legendary QM2s to do the cycling. Well, 25 superconductors/min going into that produces a more respectable 0.35/m. So after 4 hours, you have 84 leg QM3s. Which is still not enough to upgrade the 23 EMPs making the base quality version, let alone the other recyclers and EMPs.

In the same four hours, the slowest version of my quality ladder setup (using rare QM2s as a stepping stone to legendary) can produce ~384 legendary QM2s. Which is almost enough to upgrade itself and triple legendary QM2 production with only a modest increase in resource consumption.

So you can dedicate 30 EMPs to very slowly crafting legendary QM3s. Or you can just use hundreds of leg QM2s for a while. You'd be surprised how efficiently you can make legendaries with just leg QM2s.

[u/pda898 → u/Alfonse215]

I am curious about your calculator because it overestimates the amount of EMPs. I personally benchmarked a setup with 12 EMPs producing normal QM3s, 2 for uncommon and 1 of each remaining rarity.

(using rare QM2s as a stepping stone to legendary)

And grinding rare QM2s will take twice as much time, so x3 overall time. Like QM3 production using quality QM2 looks fine if you have them already. But if you have none, it is faster overall to start QM3 through QM3 just because uncommon QM3 = rare QM2 but you get more uncommon than rare (and all until legendary QM2).

[u/Rarvyn → u/Alfonse215]

And eventually, it hits 300% productivity and never needs more coal again.

Unless you need more plastic for, for example, making more legendary red chips (since the blue chip upcycler disproportionately gives you more greens than reds).

The actual math for how many machines a full upcycler with any given set of assumptions needs requires linear algebra that I'm not going to do, but I consider building the LDS upcycler a one-time investment that lowers the amount of coal input to get the same result by ~700-fold in exchange for some calcite.

[u/Alfonse215 → u/Rarvyn]

Unless you need more plastic for, for example, making more legendary red chips (since the blue chip upcycler disproportionately gives you more greens than reds).

But the coal maker is still there churning out legendary coal. So while the copper-plate portion doesn't need more coal, the rest of the system can still use it.

The actual math for how many machines a full upcycler with any given set of assumptions needs requires linear algebra that I'm not going to do

I did do the math (well, I told YAFC-CE to do it). I did not make those numbers up. You are incorrect; I reported the results of the math.

I consider building the LDS upcycler a one-time investment that lowers the amount of coal input to get the same result by ~700-fold in exchange for some calcite.

Lowering the amount of coal consumed only matters if coal is a resource that whose consumption must be carefully monitored and measured. My bases tend to have access to more coal patches than calcite patches.

Plus, I remind you: my 200 legendary plate example only needed five mining drills. And those weren't even using legendary QM3s.

The only reason I could think of to do it the way you suggest is if you're trying to live off of asteroid or nutrient-based coal production, where getting more coal means scaling up space platforms or bioflux/egg making or whatever. Even on Vulcanus, 5 mining drills aren't going to substantially impact your coal reserves.

[u/Darrelc]

Wouldn't worry too much about coal, just build a quality smasher on a patch and let it do it's thing

I've not checked this in days and I'm backed up on legendary coal lol

https://i.ibb.co/6R52TGL5/image.png

[u/Mel_Gibson_Real]

I just setup bots on fulgora with quality miners and recyclers. 

I have a circuit system that tracks the number of items in storage and if its over a specific amount it sends it to quality recyclers. Items are tracked by quality as well, so if I have too much uncommon steel it goes to the recycler as well. 

Then I have a assembler circuit setup can can craft items I request at specific qualities.

[u/ventisei]

I can’t recommend Dorrian’s tutorials enough - https://youtube.com/@dorrianfactorio

He built out a series of 2.1 based tutorials on quality techniques, breaks down what he is doing and why, shows comparison with other techniques and their effectiveness, and of course provides blueprints.

I’ve got probably 1200ish hrs in Factorio between Space Age and non-Space Age and I still learned stuff from these.

[u/kevihaa]

The advantage of using Vulcanus is less that iron is unlimited, and more that you can make really compacted designs since you can create and fill lava patches as needed.

If such designs aren’t important to you, then Nauvis works fine. Legendary big mining drills + mining productivity makes Nauvis ore patches both extremely dense and functionally unlimited.

Honestly, you can easily have more iron than you need with only a fraction of the ore patches you’d need for even an entry-level Megabase in vanilla Factorio.

[u/nindat]

Blue Chip cycling is the easiest answer at the end game. 1:1 ratio of normal chips in to legendary chips out. You can get everything except coal out of this. (Iron, copper, wire, plastic, green/red chips)

[u/Satisfactoro → u/nindat]

This is the answer, because of infinite circuit productivity research. 5-10 levels already help, 15 is max IIRC.


28 green circuits per second to 28 legendary green circuits per second. Credit to DaveMcW.

[u/nindat → u/Satisfactoro]

Yup, and once you upcycle them you can tear apart the blue processing units for raw materials, even with two recycle steps it's nearly as efficient as anything else.

I've got 480/sec processing units being upcycled and shredded when I need materials

[u/Darth_Nibbles]

Not just quality, but almost everything I supply to other planets comes from Vulcanus

[u/red_dark_butterfly]

Space casino stops working as in you cannot put quality modules into crushers, but shouldn't you be still able to crash common asteroids for resources and recycle them until legendary?

[u/bubba-yo]

Iron is pretty easy with underground pipes. Fast craft time means high output. Just hard upcycle coal on nauvus. You don't need it for power and between mining prod and plastic prod, your patches will probably grow faster than you can deplete them.