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The original was posted on /r/factorio by /u/Kimbernator on 2024-11-09 16:18:37+00:00.
There’s been a few discussions about the developing metas for use of infinite research to eventually reach no-loss conversion of normal quality items to legendary ones.
The most common is blue chips, which after level 13 of productivity research combined with legendary productivity modules in EM plants will net you 300% productivity, offsetting the 75% loss in recyclers and allowing you to just keep re-assembling them and having the recyclers use quality modules to keep the upgrades going until you’re left with legendary blue chips. Having reached this myself, it is a pretty big game changer. You can recycle the components of these chips into iron, copper, and plastic, which gives you access to a massive range of cheap legendary buildings & equipment.
To a lesser extent, a similar outcome could be achieved with LDS productivity. There’s some issues here because you can’t use the standard recipe in them and if you use the specialty one which uses molten iron/copper you cannot have a recycling loop to turn the resultant plates back into liquid. Essentially what you’d need to have is level 20 LDS productivity and to use assemblers with 4 legendary prod modules to make it work, and even then you’d have no output of legendary iron.
Rocket fuel productivity could feasibly be used to create a loop that generates low-cost legendary rocket fuel/solid fuel, but the use case for that is pretty limited aside from just getting some quick-ass trains.
After that you’re basically left with gambling for the remainder of items. The trick is finding the simplest recipe that uses the base ingredient you’re going for that produces something that can be recycled back into the base ingredient. The fewer other ingredients involved, the better. Avoid situations where you’re just recycling an object into itself in hopes of quality upgrades, because that’s a ton of loss (e.g. for steel, turn it into chests in a machine with quality modules before recycling them). Below are the ideas I’ve come up with for some of these, but I’m left wondering what I’m not thinking of for others.
Stone
Stone is important for furnaces and anything that needs concrete, e.g. nuclear reactors, rocket silos, recyclers, EM plants, foundries, biolabs, cryo plants, and more.
Fortunately raw stone can be turned into stone furnaces and recycled right back into stone. I’ve found that if I keep a loop of that going with quality modules in both the assembler(s) and recycler, I get a pretty steady supply of legendary stone blocks, which using the foundry’s special concrete recipe can produce legendary concrete with no other quality inputs. Combined with the iron output of blue chips, you can use this concrete to make legendary refined concrete.
Blueprint string:
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Honorable mention for concrete: If you’re stacked with low-quality concrete (looking at you, fulgora) and you want to upgrade it as efficiently as possible, consider turning it into hazard concrete and recycling the hazard concrete back into normal concrete. With quality modules in both machines, this loop is extremely fast and will rip through your stock about as fast as you can get it there.
Uranium
This is somewhat useful for better atomic bombs, better nuclear fuel, and potentially portable fission reactors.
For 235, I think recycling atomic bombs is the most time-efficient method because each recycle gives you 25x U235 back. For 238, good luck. Probably recycling uranium ammo at that point. It might also be worth just quality-mining the uranium ore to begin with and then refining that. If you can manage to secure a steady stream of legendary 235 somehow, it may be feasible to kovarex it, but I suspect getting legendary 238 is actually more difficult than 235.
Holmium Plates
Holmium plates are really tricky to get quality versions of. For starters, you can’t turn quality ore into quality plates because all ore qualities turn into holmium solution first, which like all liquids has no quality designation. That’s unfortunate because legendary plates (in combination with blue chips and concrete) give you direct access to legendary mech armor, EM plants, and tesla turrets. It’s also required for a ton of other high-level tech if you can get legendary quality in a few other difficult ingredients.
My best solution thus far has been a recycling loop for supercapacitors on Fulgora. Nothing fancy, just quality modules in a recycler and a machine for each quality level.
This is not nearly as cheap as blue chips because there’s a ton of loss involved. You need to keep resources flowing in (done in mine via requester chest), but it’s also not terrible. The usefulness of this is doubled by the fact that it will also produce legendary superconductors, which are required for legendary quality modules (Everything else you need for them comes from blue chips!)
Tungsten
Honestly, I’m all ears on this one. I’ve essentially resorted to putting quality modules in miners and smelting that in combination with quality carbon (made in a cryo plant with 8x legendary quality modules) for tungsten carbide, and quality ore can easily be turned into quality tungsten plates because the only other input is molten iron. However, I lack a good idea for refining either. Recyclers don’t un-smelt, so you can’t just put them in and let it loop without massive losses. Metallurgic science also recycles into itself, otherwise I’d consider it the most obvious candidate.
Realistically, quality-looping the foundry itself like I did with supercapacitors is likely to be one of the better methods for obtaining quality tungsten carbide.
As for tungsten plates, my instinct is to suggest a quality loop for turbo underground belts.
Biter eggs
This is extremely important because legendary biter eggs means legendary prod 3 modules. This is the only one where I’ve actually resorted to just recycling them into themselves and allowing luck to do its part. Extremely inefficient, but ultimately biter eggs are cheap anyways.
Also, most of the things biter eggs can be crafted into cannot be recycled into their component parts. Biolabs, for instance, recycle into themselves. I haven’t tested it, but I assume overgrowth soil is the same because landfill recycles into itself. The notable exception is prod 3 modules, but things begin to get expensive there. I haven’t done the math, though, and I suspect it’s preferable to waiting for legendary biter egg drops.
Anything from Gleba
No idea. There’s slightly less utility here aside from stack inserters and derivatives of carbon fiber, but Gleba has been enough of a challenge without me trying to min-max quality there.
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