I started a second space age play thru. I felt it was a little fast so I upped research 5x. I also decided to embrace quality, as I barely touched it in play thru #1.
It’s expensive. Let’s just assume 10% quality. If you have 10% to get uncommon, then you have to make 10 to get 1. If you recycle the other 9, then you get 25% back and 10% of that can be quality. So you get roughly 2 normal back and 0.2 uncommon.
If you make 50, you get 5 on first run. On recycle, you get 1 uncommon and 10 normal back. So you can count those as -10 on the initial cost. Net result is 6 uncommon cost 40 normal.
Am I doing that math right?
Yeah, no kidding.
I had a nice factory line on Nauvis set up that would build N-number of almost anything; it was the first time I’d done anything this tidy, and the first time I dabbled in signals.
Then I got this crazy idea to replicate it, only for quality-1 items (only taking in quality-1 ingredients, set to manufacture quality-1 products).
Holy. Fork. Just getting the right raw ingredients is absurdly difficult, and it’s slow as hell to produce almost anything. So then I thought I’d produce what quality raw ingredients I could in space and ship them down; I tried that, I tried producing stuff on Vulcanis… it’s all just too expensive.
I now have an idea that I might meet the quality steel plate by running a factory ship constantly back and fourth between Nauvis and Vulcanis - it’s the only way to get enough quality steel to actually generate quality plate in any volume with any efficiency. I may try that next. I think I could get decent quality quality steel ingredients on Vulcanis, but getting them back to Nauvis in any volume would be prohibitively expensive, so space runs is going to be my next attempt.
I got so stuck in this quality rabbit hole, I haven’t even gotten to any of the other planets yet. If the factory-ferry idea doesn’t pan out, I think I’ll give up on quality for a while, because it’s becoming a slog.