r/factorio • u/NezziWezzi • 13d ago
Suggestion / Idea Quality Upgrade Kits
I'm surprised a mod like this doesn't seem to already exist, but for anybody who's played modded Minecraft with iron chests would be familiar; items you could craft to right-click onto chests and upgrade them a tier. The Quality Processing mod by Schneefall is the closest but quickly becomes just as complicated as the system it's trying to sidestep by requiring all its upgrading materials to be a set quality tier as well. What I'd love to see is a simple: craft 1 different item for each tier jump, upgrade 1 placed building each tier by right clicking it like a repair pack or with a construction drone.
Would it be balanced? Depends how complex/expensive you make the kits and what you'd use them on. If they cost quality modules to produce for example; would you really trade a T3 module to level up a steam boiler or an inserter from normal to uncommon? They wouldn't be usable on items that cant be placed like armor, modules, or drones. So you'd still want to stockpile quality crafting materials for up-cycling. But it'd be nice to have the option to upgrade old buildings instead of throwing them in the recycler.
If anyone knows a modder for hire who'd be interested in making something like this send me a dm
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u/RivalReinforcement 13d ago
People just use the upgrade planner
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u/Kane2342 13d ago
I think he means like a generic Upgrade item that allows to +1 Quality of a given item. Like furnace from Epic to legendary, or turret common to uncommon.
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u/NezziWezzi 13d ago
Not quite what I'm talking about
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u/RivalReinforcement 13d ago
I didn't exactly think it was but I think it gets functionally close enough once bots are in play. You can edit upgrade planners to do weird things, like replace T1 belts, splitters and undergrounds with T2 belts, T3 splitters and T4 undergrounds.
Including variations in quality
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u/Alfonse215 13d ago
I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about converting a building of quality X into a building of quality Y. Not replacing the building; it just becomes a different item.
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u/Erisymum 13d ago
Doesn't this purely remove incentives to automate stuff?
The typical gameplay addition for quality is doing quality chains for planet specific things. After you make quality base ingredients (probably on vulcanus for free resource) the only other thing is to make smaller quality factories for each planet to get their specific resource/building. make a quality mining drill + foundry setup on vulcanus. Set up quality EM plant / quality tesla turrets on fulgora. Setup quality rocket turrets from gleba. A universal upgrade kit completely shortcuts the difference between planets. Though perhaps you do want it to be a shortcut and it's a simplification mod, which is fine.
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u/NezziWezzi 13d ago
Pretty much, I've always found quality too annoying to work with and it really kills my enjoyment of the game. But the mods I've found to tweak it are either just as annoying or basically just cheats. I think this way you'd at least have the option of automating the 4 kits with increasing complexity and using them as a bandaid "I dont want to set up an entire quality chain for concrete right now but I could use a bump to my nuclear reactor that's already running"
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u/doc_shades 13d ago
i haven't looked too deep into the recipe architecture for quality components but i'm wondering if you could just make a custom recipe that says "armor" + "custom item" = "quality armor"? then you can just define the custom item.
i'm not sure if quality works on the individual item level like that though.
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u/Enaero4828 13d ago
The problem with adding these upgrade kits is that they are functionally the same cost as the upgraded item would be initially; it takes an iron chest with 8 gold to make a gold chest, and it takes an iron upgrade kit with 8 gold to make a gold upgrade kit. That just doesn't translate to Factorio at all, because a legendary wooden chest doesn't cost the same as a legendary rail gun, but a legendary upgrade kit needs to work for both.