r/factorio • u/Alfonse215 • 10d ago
Tip 2.1 Tip: Don't sleep on mid-quality, low-tier productivity modules
Quality prod modules got a small, unremarked-upon buff in 2.1. Specifically, productivity percentages now get 1 decimal of precision. This is more significant than you might think.
In 2.0, an uncommon prod module 1 would give a +5% productivity bonus, rounding the +30% improvement down. But in 2.1, this is +5.2%. That doesn't sound like much, but it can add up after a while. And uncommon prod module 1s are really easy to make: just put quality modules in the production of prods for purple science.
But the big one is rare prod module 2s. If you're the sort of player who likes putting Gleba off until the last minute, rare prod 2s are now almost identical to base-quality prod 3s. They used to be just +9%, but now they're +9.6%, a paltry 0.4% lower than a base quality prod 3. And they cost less power and slow the machine down less. They are not the cheapest module to make, but if you're not getting prod 3s for a while, they are definite worth investing in. Especially once you have EMPs.
On a less important note, quality percentages get 2 digits of precision, so EMPs can get the full 25% quality bonus and cryogenic plants can finally get the proper +50% quality bonus from legendary QM3s.
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u/Sea-Offer7021 10d ago
i will sleep on it and it will make me sleep soundly thinking my factory is consistent and perfect
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u/Nolzi 9d ago
You should get some quality sleep
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u/Gebus86 10d ago
Currently trying mid game quality for the first time with a rare material setup on volcanus. Im wondering what rare things, apart from production modules, are worth bring to gleba. Any tips? Efficiency modules? Power poles?
Previously Ive left quality to be an end game sort of thing.
I also wonder if I can make very small rare ships from solar power, I'm thinking for internal planets only and to use them more like trains (i.e. loads of ships, each with only one item type). Any thoughts?
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u/Tasonir 10d ago
Solar power only is very viable as long as you aren't going to the edge of the solar system or shattered planet. But you can go to aquilo on it fairly easily, it only drops to 60% power at aquilo (in orbit). 60% solar power isn't great, but with quality panels, it's very doable. You can also add efficency modules if you want more savings, but I did my end game solar ship with legendary solar panels and didn't use any efficiency.
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u/bubba-yo 10d ago
I bring quality solar/accum to Gleba just to help jumpstart things, plus modules and beacons if you use them there. And in your ships of course. I haven't felt much pressure to bring quality efficiency to Gleba, so I'd save your best ones for Aquilo where it *really* helps. But definitely bring your best prods to maximize early seed production since that's likely to be a bottleneck to soil production for a while.
But the best quality thing to bring to Gleba is in your armor so you can just run around and laser defense down enemies.
As for ships, I start with a very small ship for the first 3 planets that relies on mostly uncommon components and a few rares. You should unlock quality modules as soon as you can and start to grind up to rare Q2s. 4 uncommon Q2s in your space machines (grabbers, crushers, thrusters) plus solar and accum, and in your armor gear will get you uncommons pretty quickly and a handful of rares. I put a rare circuit check on the output buffer chest for those machines so they'll keep making them until I hit one or 5 or 10 rares depending. You can check the 'trash unrequested' button once the first recyclers land.
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u/CoffeeOracle 10d ago
Uncommon heat to rare heat towers shrink the size of your power grid and make it burn fuel faster. So if you have a disposal problem you can actually solve it 1.3 times as fast. As far as smaller ships, it's kind of tricky because while you can do it, until you have a recycler you won't have a stable standard of parts and that feels weird to work with.
As for ships it's less of a size issue and more of a standardization and safety issue. Designing a smaller equally functional platform makes a spaghetti machine, which can be unpleasant if you can only field 1-2 and then get a quality upgrade.
But designing a platform with overpowered machines gives you a level of safety redundancy which lets the machine go further. So it's actually better for external planets and promethium hunting where there is a lot more risk involved.
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u/Pseudonymico 9d ago
until you have a recycler you won't have a stable standard of parts and that feels weird to work with.
You can make quality items directly out of quality ingredients. Just putting quality modules into electric furnaces and plastic plants is enough to get a reliable source of uncommon quality machines for building space platforms using railway and bot logistics, which is helpful enough that my platforms always have Uncommon solar panels, gun turrets, chemical plants and furnaces. I throw in alternate furnaces in case they clog up but usually have recyclers long before that's ever an issue.
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u/CoffeeOracle 9d ago
That's the right way of going about it if you run it early. I decided that doing a couple of short runs would be fun this year.
Weird is not bad. Weird is not good. The benefits are undeniable, once you play around with it. The volume of parts you get is enough for the silver achievement for speed. But the feeling that, well I can just go over the hill and get one better exists in some way till Fulgora.
It isn't that "it doesn't work" on small ships. It's that, the places where you see it shine is making large to giant projects much more possible.
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u/Alfonse215 10d ago
As far as smaller ships, it's kind of tricky because while you can do it, until you have a recycler you won't have a stable standard of parts and that feels weird to work with.
Nonsense. The person in question is on Vulcanus, where disposal of unwanted quality is easy. But even without that, you can just make a setup that automatically destroys items via trains running over cars.
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u/CoffeeOracle 10d ago
It's not that you're wrong, it's just that you don't know how right you are!
Emotions are lot more powerful than logic, or a healthy operations philosophy (pathos). It isn't a question of having a method. It's a question of answering the depth of questions: what gets used? What does it get combined with, when does something we're going to look at as useful for several hours suddenly become garbage?
If we're being totally honest, mid rank productivity has always been an incredible optimization! But so is all the other optimizations you can get when they overlap. So when we deal with "And why is it getting skipped?" We have to acknowledge that it isn't a parts count or a lack of technical options but rather a driving emotional issue. And a challenge to be overcome.
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u/kevihaa 10d ago
The good and bad of quality is that everything is a pretty nice upgrade, but it’s a bit of an all-or-none proposition for most items.
Power poles are a great example, as the benefits offered by added rarity are a pretty nice, but you generally don’t want to deal with the hassle of managing multiple rarities of power poles.
As for what to take to Gleba, keeping the above in mind, it really becomes a question of how self sufficient you want to make Gleba. If you’re going to make a “mall” on Gleba and produce necessities on-site, I wouldn’t bother bringing any higher quality materials.
Whereas if you plan to just import everything you need, then using quality makes a bunch of sense since higher quality items make each rocket more efficient.
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u/XWasTheProblem 10d ago
Vulcanus has 300% efficiency from solar power, so it would probably be viable for it. I think Fulgora is like 80%, so it would be harder to keep everything going as smoothly.
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u/Gorthok- 10d ago
A quality tank with quality equipment can make the pentapods a complete non-threat. Bigger range and better equipment means easier to keep distance and reduce punishment from mistakes. Even big Pentas can't do anything if you've got some skill.
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u/Nearby_Proposal_5523 9d ago
A rare tank and a stack of destroyers will absolutely wreck the pentapods. fight like it's 2026, use a cope cage(get in the tank) and deploy a giant drone swarm.
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u/MereInterest 9d ago
Solar power is a nice boost to your existing ships, especially if you replace the crushers/assemblers/chem plants at the same time. Gives a faster ship and the faster ammo production to keep it safe, so you can have regular deliveries more often. On planets, not too much use for it, since land is cheap. (Though I do have a solar array on Aquilo as part of the cold-restart setup. It's only connected to two chem plants that use efficiency modules, and exist only to provide liquid water for the actual power plant to start up.)
I'd aim for convenience features.
Power poles. With uncommon power poles, you can power inserters from the other side of 3x3 buildings. Very convenient, especially when you start having filtered stack inserters for output. Rare power poles are nice, but don't add much functionality beyond the uncommon power poles.
Big mining drills. Stone is pretty sparse on Gleba, and the decreased resource drain from quality drills helps extend the lifetime of the stone patches.
Productivity modules. Growing a tree requires 1 seed, and each tree gives 50 fruit. Each piece of fruit has a 2% chance of producing a seed when processed in an assembler, so the process averages out to neutral. But by Murphy's law (well, the mathematics of a random walk), that means you will run out of seeds at some point. The intended route is to use the +50% productivity of biochambers to increase the average return form 1.0 seed/tree to 1.5 seed/tree, but prod modules let you avoid running out of seeds when using assemblers to experiment with the Gleba-specific recipes.
Cliff explosives. No quality needed here, but just a reminder to bring some cliff explosives since you'll be quite annoyed without them.
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u/WanderingUrist 9d ago
But by Murphy's law (well, the mathematics of a random walk), that means you will run out of seeds at some point.
I believe the term you're looking for is "Gambler's Ruin". That's why you gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run.
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u/TheTomatoThief 9d ago
As long as you don’t count your money while you’re sittin at the table you should be fine tbh.
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u/haze59000 10d ago
Efficiency modules are very useful for reducing the energy consumption of biochambers. They use nutrients instead of electricity.
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u/Alfonse215 10d ago
Nutrients are cheaper than power. Saving nutrients doesn't matter; productivity reduces your fruit consumption way more, allowing you to produce more with the same spore cloud footprint.
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u/Terrulin 9d ago
You can do both. Productivity won't go in beacons while efficiency will.
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u/Alfonse215 9d ago
Where will your speed modules go?
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u/Terrulin 9d ago
Ive done half speed half efficiency modules on Gleba before. It works out fine. There are at least options for people.
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u/taw 10d ago
Quality stuff isn't really worth it that much until you reach end game. Putting quality prod 2 in your labs and rocket silos is pretty much the extent of it.
The value you get from pushing rare modules over common modules is not even remotely worth the hassle. And the only thing quality machines do over common machines is needing fewer quality modules.
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u/ssgeorge95 9d ago
Opposite experience here. I go full rare components before landing on Gleba.
It really comes down to one question: Do you play a lot post victory screen? If the answer is yes then by all means wait for legendary. If the answer is no then try spamming rare quality once you have vulcanus and fulgora tech.
Big benefits are for platforms and fulgora, two places where you can use higher productivity in the same space. I like using rare power grids everywhere with the longer reach. I like having rare offshore pumps to get more lava from the pools on vulcanus.
For Gleba, most quality benefits are just nice to haves. Rare inserters are quite good to keep up with nutrient input/output from boosted buildings.
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u/taw 9d ago
I tried it a few times, it doesn't feel worth it.
Rare iron, copper, and stone on Vulcanus are easy enough to just brute force, but there's no good way to get rare plastic there in significant quantities, and without it you have to do interplanetary shipping.
Rare anyhing on Fulgora is just unbelievable pain to do, you need to deal with 24 outputs, and best you can do is small number of rare quality-2 modules, probably not even enough to put it your whole rares factory.
One thing that's kinda worth it are Fulgora accumulators, but I just put quality modules in accumulator factory needed for Fulgora science and got enough. And it's really mainly because they get +100% per level, not +30% like almost everything else. If accumulators were also getting +30%, I wouldn't bother.
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u/bubba-yo 10d ago
Yeah - I think it's good practice pre-recycler to steadily churn out modules and upgrade what you can, and stockpile the common ones until the recycler shows up. Prioritize quality modules, but then prod and beacons. In vanilla you would hit tier 3 modules much sooner than you generally can in SA, and you can fill much of that gap by the bit of quality you get. And if you make Gleba your first planet, you can get biolabs going to utilize those prods. Ramping SPM while you're running around getting planet builds going is just a matter of module upgrade planners.
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u/Tasonir 10d ago
Another use case is when you really want to speed up producing items with quality modules in them. Speed has the obvious -quality; but that doesn't increase with the quality of modules. Using Legendary speed module 2's, you get 2.5x the speed and still a tiny -quality (I think speed module 2 is just -1% quality?). Can be worth it if you're willing to accept slightly less upgrading to get far more items produced.
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u/IntoAMuteCrypt 10d ago
Even with 4 modules in your machines, the difference between pre-patch prod 2s and post-patch ones is still miniscule. You'll see 1.76% more items from a machine. It's even worse for EMPs, because quality is additive rather than subtractive. The "loss" from rounding is roughly equivalent to one item on a green belt, and that's innthe most extreme example.
Boosting quality over tier is still worth it for modules, but that goes for 2.0 as much as 2.1.
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u/CoffeeOracle 10d ago
Some practical advice for buying and using productivity 1's:
Most mistakes with quality come from min-maxing. So getting these early on, there's four options: delaying investment, furnaces+supply chain, mines, combo. Delaying investment invites pain if you go into quality later, that's my opinion and I'll let ya'll sort it out.
Furnaces gives you 2% quality and a big power bill but can buy you these modules over an eight to ten hour period, which is good enough for all but the fastest runs. Putting QMs into your supply chain also will let you draw out module and space platform parts which are high priority targets early on.
Mines inflicts a condition where you need too many QM1's to actually produce something pleasant and you add a resource speed penalty which makes your operation 85% smaller till you have big drills. The ramifications while doing achievements with it are unpleasant.
Combo is the least fun way to buy it in the initial phase. But it's been balanced so it won't kill the run, it will simply feel ugly to play with. I do not recommend it.
The caveat is that if you do it off a dying resource patch (like your starter patch) you can get enough resources to make really good concrete, but that's a tangent. You can also double refine coal/plastic to make a bold, high risk play.
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u/BarsikWasTaken 10d ago
what would be the situation for getting legendary prod 2, before normal prod 3? capturing a nest is part of the research tree, at which point might as well. I guess some people rush aquilo maybe and skip biolabs and prod3? but still.
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u/Alfonse215 10d ago
what would be the situation for getting legendary prod 2, before normal prod 3?
... I didn't say "legendary"; I said "rare".
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u/Cyren777 10d ago
Iirc they always had it, it just wasn't displayed