A Quality Grind

You crash land on an alien world carrying a bag of uncommon gear and one instruction from your
assemblers: bring us something better than normal, or do not come back at all.

So you grind. Slowly. Thoroughly. With feeling.
It is a grind. It is a quality grind. You get better with practice.

Why this takes so long, on purpose

• Assemblers will not craft at normal quality (for most items). Pick a recipe and the quality selector snaps to
  uncommon. Anything normal you had loaded gets handed straight back to you.
• Quality is rolled, never given. Every crafting machine and furnace gets a 2% base chance to
  bump a result up one tier. That is it. No shortcuts, no freebies.
• The recycler is the whole loop. Feed it scrap, get a quarter of it back, and about one piece
  in seven of that comes back better if your modules are decent. Then feed the rest back in. Again.
  And again. You start with six recyclers because you are going to need them.
• Your hands are not invited. The game can only hand craft at normal quality, so the crafting
  queue is switched off entirely. Everything is made in machines, which means every single item is
  something your factory had to earn.
• Every mechanic is in play from minute one. Uncommon and rare are unlocked before you take your
  first step. Mining drills roll quality on their own, so the very first patch of ore can come up a
  tier, and quality modules fit in machines that normally refuse them: stone furnaces, assembling
  machine 1, even burner mining drills.
• The factory gets wider before it gets further. More machines means more rolls, and more rolls
  is the only thing that moves you forward. Expect to spend the early game building sideways.
• Gleba is its own kind of punishment. Trace one agricultural science pack all the way back and
  it costs roughly 90 pieces of fruit.

You do get a starter kit

The pod comes stocked, all of it uncommon, so you are not stuck at minute zero:

6 recyclers, 8 burner mining drills, 8 stone furnaces, 2 assembling machines, steam power, pipes and
underground pipes, poles, belts, inserters, chests, 200 iron plate, 200 coal, a pistol with ammo,
and 42 uncommon quality modules, which is exactly enough to fill every module slot in the kit.

Freeplay's normal quality handouts have been confiscated.

What you may still craft at normal, and why

Some things genuinely have to be normal quality, so the mod leaves them alone. Same recipes as
vanilla, same machines, and the quality selector, blueprints and circuit signals all work on them as
usual:

• Tiles, because construction robots flatly refuse to build with quality tiles. Landfill, all
  four concretes, space platform foundation, foundation, ice platform and the Gleba soils.
• The handful of things those tiles need, which could otherwise never exist at normal: iron
  sticks, copper cable, tungsten plate, lithium and its holmium plate, carbon fiber, and carbon
  from burnt spoilage.
• Gleba fruit processing, because every planting spends a seed, and seeds from uncommon
  processing come back at a tenth or less of the rate a farm plants them, so your farm would
  quietly starve. Processing at normal returns seeds at the vanilla rate, and the normal mash and
  jelly it leaves behind go into nutrients and bioflux, or the recycler.
• Nutrients, from spoilage, yumako mash and bioflux, because nutrients are what a biochamber
  burns and Gleba only ever harvests normal fruit. Spoilage is the one that matters on landing:
  it is the only nutrient recipe an assembler can run, so it is how your first biochamber gets
  fuelled at all. Without this, the only way to get started was shipping fish in from Nauvis.
  Put a quality damper in your nutrient machines, or sort the odd uncommon nutrient off the belt
  and keep it, because uncommon pentapod eggs are bred from uncommon nutrients.
• Pentapod egg breeding, because spawners only ever drop normal eggs, and every biochamber
  and agricultural science pack wants an uncommon one. Before, your first uncommon egg came out
  of a recycler a quarter of a loot pile at a time, while the rest hatched in your hands. Now a
  normal breeder feeds itself, and its base roll turns out the odd uncommon egg: about one every
  two minutes per breeder. Keep quality modules and dampers out of the breeders, and filter the
  uncommon eggs out, because a normal breeder will not take them back.
• Your first biochambers, because eggs are only bred in a biochamber, and a biochamber needs
  an uncommon egg. So the first 2 you craft may be normal, built from a loot egg and things Gleba
  already hands you at normal: nutrients from spoilage, iron and copper from stromatolites,
  circuits and landfill. After that they are uncommon like every other machine, and a machine set
  to a normal biochamber tells you how many you have left.

• Bacteria, because they are how Gleba mines, and once the stromatolites run out there is no
  other iron or copper on the planet. Iron and copper bacteria and their cultivation run at
  normal, so a bacteria line is Gleba's drill: normal ore, and a base roll on every craft that
  turns out the odd uncommon bacterium. Cultivate those at uncommon and they multiply, which is
  where a quality Gleba starts paying for itself. Sort them out first, because a normal
  cultivator will not take them back.

• The rocket, because rocket fuel is made from solid fuel, and solid fuel only ever comes out of
  fluid-only recipes, so the game will never make it at anything but normal. Rocket fuel, low
  density structure and processing unit are allowed at normal, along with the plastic, circuits and
  cable they are built from. Without that there is no rocket, and no second planet.

• Your first foundries, because tungsten ore can only be mined by the big mining drill, and the
  big drill needs a foundry. Until you have one, every piece of tungsten is hand-mined from volcanic
  rocks, and hands only make normal. So carbon and tungsten carbide may be made at normal, and so
  may the first 2 foundries you craft. After that, foundries are uncommon like every other machine,
  and a machine set to a normal foundry tells you how many you have left. Normal carbide is also
  the best thing to feed the recycler on Vulcanus: each craft gets a roll on the way through, and
  it comes back as ore and carbon together.
• Molten iron and copper from lava, because the molten metal cannot carry quality anyway. The
  stone they spit out used to drag them onto the grind.
• Pipes, because quality buys a pipe nothing but health, and the foundry casts them only at
  normal anyway. Underground pipes still have to be uncommon.
• Explosives, the rocket fuel problem again. They are made from sulfur, and sulfur only ever
  comes out of fluid-only recipes, so the game never makes it at anything but normal. Without this,
  normal rockets and cannon shells were allowed and still could not be built. Cliff explosives come
  too, with their grenade: they take ten explosives each, and you throw them away. Put a quality
  damper in your sulfur plants, or the odd uncommon sulfur will jam the explosives line.

Six more are a deliberate choice rather than an engine problem. All are settings, and switching
them off gives you the stricter game the rest of this describes:

• Ammunition, because it is fired and gone. It is the one thing your factory makes that never
  comes back into it, so letting it be scrap costs the grind nothing, and quality still raises ammo
  damage if you want to roll it up anyway. It matters most in space, where shooting asteroids is
  not optional and a crusher makes nothing better than normal without quality modules, so a
  platform would otherwise need an onboard recycler loop or a standing rocket delivery just to
  defend itself. Artillery shells come too, and they are built from a radar, so radars may be
  normal as well.
• Repair packs, for the same reason: they get used up, and quality still buys them durability
  if you want it. A space platform asks for normal repair packs on its own whenever something
  needs fixing, and the game does not let a mod change that request, so on the grind it simply
  never arrived.
• Belts, because quality buys a belt nothing but health. A legendary belt carries exactly what a
  normal one carries, so paying the grind for every belt in the factory was the most expensive
  thing in the mod and bought you nothing back. Every tier, plus undergrounds, splitters and
  loaders, and the iron gear wheels and circuits they are built from, because a normal belt still
  has to be built out of normal parts.
• Walls, for the reason ammunition is here rather than the reason belts are. A wall's health is
  the whole point of a wall, so quality walls are genuinely worth having and stay worth building
  toward: normal walls are your baseline perimeter, quality walls are the upgrade. But defence is
  not what this mod is about, and the price was farcical. Stone brick comes out of a furnace, so it
  takes around 21 normal bricks to win one uncommon through the recycler, which is something like
  105,000 bricks for a thousand tiles of wall. Gates come too.
• Rails, the belt argument in its purest form. A rail has no throughput and no speed of its
  own, that is the locomotive, so quality buys it health and nothing else, and a rail network runs
  to thousands of pieces. Ramps, supports, signals and train stops come too. Locomotives and wagons
  do not: those are built once, not laid by the thousand.
• Military science, for the ammunition reason once more. What it unlocks is defence, and on
  Space Age that defence is not optional: physical damage, rocketry and the railgun are what keep a
  platform alive. On the grind a pack cost about three times a green one, grenade coal and all. The
  piercing rounds and walls it is built from come from their own settings, so this one only works
  while ammunition and walls are both allowed.

Ammunition, walls and military science together mean defence is off the grind entirely, apart from
the turrets and guns themselves. That is on purpose. If the mod ever feels too soft, that is the
first line to move, and military science is the gentlest place to start.

Quality modules and crafting at normal do not mix. A machine set to one of these at normal quality
pauses while it holds quality modules, and tells you why. Pull them out, or switch the recipe to
uncommon, and away it goes. These recipes are an exception so the game stays playable, not a back
door for laundering cheap items into uncommon ones. The small base chance of the machine still
applies, exactly like a furnace smelting ore. A quality damper is welcome, though, and never
pauses anything: it takes quality away rather than handing it out.

Early escape hatches

• Crude quality module. Smelt 10 copper plates, craft one green circuit, and a half strength
  quality module unlocks. No science required.
• Crude recycler. Red science and some steel gets you a rusty recycler that runs four times
  slower than the real thing, long before the proper one is an option.
• Quality damper. A module that switches the base quality chance off for the machine holding
  it, exactly and no further. Five iron plates, five copper cable, no research. Put one in anything
  deliberately making something at normal, because a 2% roll on a belt line is not a bonus, it is
  contamination: the stray uncommon belts leave with the normal ones and jam the next machine along
  when it fills its ingredient slot with belts it cannot use.

Driving recipes by circuit

Send your recipe signals at uncommon or better. A machine told to make something at normal quality
will pause, with a status telling you why, rather than quietly filling your belts with scrap.

Logistic requests

The item picker always opens on normal, and asking your robots for a normal inserter on the grind
is asking for something that will never exist. So a request you set at normal, for anything no
machine will make at normal, quietly becomes uncommon: on your character, requester and buffer
chests, vehicles and space platform hubs. Things that really do come at normal, like plates, ore,
tiles, belts and ammo, keep whatever you picked, so a requester feeding scrap to a recycler still
works. Filters on inserters and splitters are left alone, because that is how you sort scrap out.
Turn it off per player in the mod settings if you would rather do it yourself.

Tune the grind

Too slow? Not slow enough? Mod settings cover the base quality chance, module strength, extra module
slots, the starting kit, wood recycling return, the crude recycler, the crude quality module, the
quality damper, whether mining drills roll quality, how many normal foundries and biochambers you
get, and
whether ammunition, repair packs, belts, walls, rails and military science may be made at normal
quality at all.

Compatibility

Works on Factorio 2.0 and 2.1. Each release comes in two versions, 2.0.x for Factorio 2.0 and 2.1.x
for 2.1, and the game downloads the one that matches yours.

Requires the Quality mod, which ships with Space Age. Not compatible with Everything has Quality,
since it sets the same base chance and the two would stack.

Early days

This mod is in early development. I am still balancing and testing it, and I have uploaded it now
to get feedback from people actually playing it. Expect rough edges, numbers that move between
versions, and the occasional moment where you wonder what on earth it just did. If something breaks,
or simply feels bad to play, please tell me in the discussion tab.