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.

About that pole

Look at the engineer on the logo. Look at the grip. Look at the sparks.

Small electric poles need wood. Wood comes off a tree at normal quality, normal quality is scrap,
and scrap only improves by going through a recycler and getting lucky. Until that pays off, your
entire power grid is one engineer, one wooden pole, and a great deal of enthusiastic effort. Take
your time with it. Find a rhythm. Nobody is watching.

It is a grind. It is a quality grind. You get better with practice.

(Wood recycling returns 50% instead of the usual 25%, because we are not monsters.)

Why this takes so long, on purpose

• Assemblers will not craft at normal quality. 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 eight 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. Quality modules fit in machines that normally refuse them: stone furnaces, assembling
  machine 1, even burner mining drills, so your first patch of ore can roll quality.
• 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

A short list of 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, carbon from
  burnt spoilage, and nutrients from yumako mash.
• 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 are just more scrap for the recycler.

Quality modules do nothing on these recipes, at any quality. They are an exception so the game stays
playable, not a back door for laundering cheap items into uncommon ones. The machine's small base
chance still applies, exactly like a furnace smelting ore.

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 module research moves to just after Electronics.

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.

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 and crude quality module, and
more.

Compatibility

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.