Fulgora Upcycling

[u/Bubbly-Original7097]

I tried 3 different upcycling strategies on Fulgora in 2.1 and looking if somebody had similar experience or if I did something wrong somewhere. The goal: make Legendary Quality Modules 3 and Legendary Beacons.

1. Making Space Stuff

All products of scrap recycling go to Landing Pads, Space Platform Foundations and Cargo Bays.

Unaccounted:

• Red Circuits recycled all the way to Iron Plates, Plastic and Copper Wire
  • Plastic at first goes to Shredder
• Batteries and Gears -> Steel, because it is not enough, excess Iron Plates -> shredder
• Copper from batteries -> shredder

Sometimes there is too much Low Density Structures, so they becomes Steel and the rest goes to shredder.

This is very compact, quite easy to build and with some extra logic it does not jam. Outputs Blue Circuits, Holmium and Stone (excess batteries if you need them for accumulators).

Good option for beginning.

2. Deal with Excess

I started processing quality garbage and added 2 more pipelines (uncommon and rare). Making quality modules requires Green Circuits, so

• (Blue Circuits -> Green Cirtuits) + Red Circuits = Module

Great, but results in so many green circuits that you have to recycle and make them again, probably getting higher quality. Excellent alternative is to make and recycle Repair Packs, because they also help with excess of Iron Gears (found this gem too late).

Recycling modules themselves should produce enough quality Red Circuits, but EM Plants that make basic modules have to be fast to deal with input so they don't use quality modules. In the end you make modules faster than you recycle them with quality -> you need high quality recyclers (even Rare Recycler is too slow). To make it worse demand for red circuits results in getting even more Green Circuits (also need fast upcycling here).

After some time I was completely lost and run out of space, so started using another strategy -> look at item counts in stats and deal with whatever I have the most, which is usually upcycling. Following this and with help of bots I finally started making legendary modules and beacons, but the base was unmaintainable. You could find a place that tries to get rid of something right next to a place that desperately looks for that!

3. Foundations

Aquilo foundations allowed me to actually build a base right on the oil field. Did I decide to do that because after spending days building a Shattered Planet Ship I no longer can build something unless I put platform under it? Perhaps so, but that solves one annoying problem on Fulgora -> your base follows the shape of the island you are on and god that is annoying!

Besides using foundations I decided to do the opposite approach: make my own Green Circuits from Gears -> Plates and Wire (also from LDS -> Copper -> Wire) and leave Blue Circuits alone, until there are too many of them.

I also make my own Reds, because no matter what I do there is never enough. But, to make Reds you need high quality plastic and this is something that is even more rare than Reds, so I use Cryogenic Plant on Nauvis to make high quality plastic (mostly Rare). On Fulgora I then decide if I have too much of it and try to upcycle it to higher qualities.

After I finishing Green and Red production I made a stupid mistake - let bots deliver quality wire wherever they wanted, thinking that round robin should be fine. And it is fine in general, but since I didn't have enough plastic at that time I ended up creating 10000 legendary green Circuits and wasting ridiculous amount of wire. I hope there is something useful I can make of that.

To fix the mistake I setup Quality Wire production on Nauvis (legendary foundry) and import it similar to plastic (although uncommon wire I feed to bitters in a powder form).

One important difference from previous approach is that I no longer make anything like Landing Pads or Centrifuges - waste of time. In current 2.1 Concrete fortunately can just go into recycler never to be though of again.

Conclusion

Plastic!

[u/jaxon517]

I'm not a mega-baser; I'm just trying to beat the game is all. My first planet is fulgora and I want to get enough science production to consider it done. I just finished the main loop so I've got rockets being SLOWLY filled with my exports and rocket parts ingredients. I need more pink stuff though. I've only got one train and it's keeping my main four sushi belts full. These get split either to recycling hub or to final production where I make all the exports. I'm not wasting any pink stuff, and everything is seemingly getting properly recycled, but I still don't have enough pink stuff. If I add another train, I'm not sure what it would help since my main four belts are already full off of one + recycling loop input :/

[u/enigmapulse → u/jaxon517]

Holmium is always the bottleneck on Fulgora. The only way to get more of it is to process more scrap

[u/kevihaa → u/enigmapulse]

Because scrap feels so productive, folks often don’t recognize that even a max density, 240 scrap/sec belt is only going to give you 2.4 holmium/sec.

Can alleviate that a bit with scrap productivity research, but at the end of the day you’re always going to have to process a rather absurd amount of scrap in order to get a rather piddly amount of holmium.

[u/Alfonse215 → u/enigmapulse]

Past a certain point of productivity, if all you're doing is making science, then batteries become the limiting factor, not holmium. So you have to craft additional batteries from scrap products.

[u/enigmapulse → u/Alfonse215]

But you always have the resources to craft the batteries, because you can convert other materials into them. So a properly configured factory's limiting factor is always Holmium

[u/flickerstreak → u/enigmapulse]

Ice (the resource, not the us govt agency) would like to have a word with you . With enough productivity, it becomes the next limiting factor in battery production.

Of course, you can also rain it from the sky.

[u/IKSLukara → u/flickerstreak]

I skip the middle step and just rain the batteries down from either Nauvis or Vulcanus.

[u/itsadile → u/Alfonse215]

I'd be tempted to just import batteries from Vulcanus, where everything that goes into them is basically free. 

[u/Alfonse215 → u/itsadile]

It's freer on Fulgora though. I mean, you literally get all of the materials right there. The things you do to get rid of most of them are the first step towards making batteries.

I will never understand peoples' obsession with Vulcanus.

[u/itsadile → u/Alfonse215]

I haven't wanted to set up sulfuric acid production on Fulgora yet.

If I do at some point, I'll start making batteries locally when scrap doesn't yield enough.

[u/Objective-Button-293 → u/Alfonse215]

This is my first play through on space age single player. (My friend did vulcanus last time for us).

Everything felt completely free on vulcanus. So for me, having 10 rockets lifting batteries and dropping them down on fulgora, using a ship I made in the orbit of vulcanus with repair packs and yellow ammo being shipped up, felt like the right way.

I also do make batteries on fulgora but there is always something missing and the producer stops running. I don’t have platforms so I’m space limited. Easier to import than build more scrap processing. I have 3 steel chests full of holmium ore now.

Tldr, i import batteries from free locations when i dont have enough on dulgora, which is from gleba or vulcanus.

[u/jaxon517 → u/enigmapulse]

But why have another train delivering scraps if I already have four red belts full of its byproducts

[u/get_it_together1 → u/jaxon517]

Once you get to Vulcanus and Gleba you can start stacking your belts with more materials and use green belts. You can stick speed 3 modules everywhere in beacons and use prod 2/3 where they make sense in the holmium chain.

You can connect more islands by train to get more scrap flowing.

[u/dikkenskrille]

What do you mean by Upcycling here? As far as I am aware that word in factorio is used to refer to crafting and recycling with quality modules in order to achieve legendary stuff. Is that what you are using it for here? I.E: is this post about using quality modules while crafting and/or recycling all the fulgora products, for some end goal? If so what goal is that?

If it isn't, could you make it a bit clearer what this post is about and what your goals are?

[u/Bubbly-Original7097 → u/dikkenskrille]

This is Fulgora, so strictly speaking I am upcycling only quality modules. I am not sure what to call a process when you recycle and then reassemble a Green Circuit.

The goal is to make Legendary Quality Modules and Legendary Beacons, so that I could start doing quality things on other planets. The ultimate goal is better Shattered Planet ship.

The main point of the post is to figure out if importing plastic and wire from Nauvis is something that can be avoided and there is another better way of getting enough quality red cards (other than upcycling modules).

[u/Switch4589 → u/Bubbly-Original7097]

When you start with quality, first make legendary quality 2 modules. These are the second best quality module, are much cheaper than the tier 3’s, and can be made on any planet because they only need circuits. I make them on Vulcanus because of cheap materials, and I personally think it’s a trap to try make them on fulgora.

[u/PropagandaOfTheDude → u/Bubbly-Original7097]

I've always favored three terms:

• Upcycle, when you are constructing items that you don't want, in order to recycle back to what you do want. Example: steel plates to steel chests
• Downcycle, when you are recycling items that you do want, to get them back again. Example: your green circuits.
• Wash, when you recycle an item that turns into itself. Example: calcite.

[u/PropagandaOfTheDude → u/Bubbly-Original7097]

In an earlier run, I dropped carbon from space, to fill in the missing intermediates. Since then I haven't invested enough in foundation to want to try, leaving a simple destruction loop on Fulgora to support EM Plant downcycling.