Inverted Quality

Inverts the Quality system:

• Quality now consists of negative tiers and positive tiers are removed.
• Crafting items has a two-thirds chance to degrade the item quality by one tier.
  • Unlike vanilla quality, this means long production chains tend make items worse.
• Quality modules can be used to reduce the degradation chance in crafting.
  • Note that quality modules are no longer themselves affected by quality due to an engine limitation.
• The gameplay requires use of two new entities, the Downgrade Port and Meltdown Facility (more details in a later section).

Quality tiers

Getting started

This mod is generally incompatible with existing saves.

For new saves, it is recommended to increase the resource map sliders and decrease the sliders for enemies and pollution.

New entities

Downgrade port

A 1x1 entity that can be attached to the side of assemblers. Items inserted into the port are delivered to the assembler reduced in quality by one level.

Downgrade ports mean that quality in this mod is backwards-compatible: high-quality items can be used in low-quality recipes.

Meltdown facility

Items of any quality can be melted down into 1/8 of their base materials.

These materials come out of the Meltdown facility in Normal quality.

Base materials are defined as those obtained by repeated recycling. However, note that unlike chained recyclers which give a factor 1/4 at each step, meltdown performs all the steps at once with an overall factor of 1/8.

Further information

• This mod operates with minimal runtime scripting and uses the built-in quality system, meaning it is performant and stable. However, it does require a large number of manual quality undo operations (undoing 5 quality steps) to be applied across all prototypes.

  • There are likely to be some mistakes due to e.g. missing documentation on the Factorio wiki. This can cause entities to be much too powerful (if the undo operation was missed) or too weak (if it was applied incorrectly). Please report these cases in Discussion if you notice them.

• Like in vanilla, each instance of degradation has a 10% chance to be 'upgraded' to jump extra tiers. This applies to both machine crafting and handcrafting.

  • Multi-step handcrafting results in extra-degraded final products (and no junk byproducts).
• A few base game issues affect this mod.
  • Science pack durability stats are misrepresented in the UI.
  • Mining drill resource drain, science pack drain rate and beacon power usage are immune to quality due to API limitations.

Special Thanks

• SafTheLamb for discussions on the names of the quality tiers.
• Hurricane for their Arc Furnace graphics as used in the Meltdown facility.
• AnotherZach for conversations on Broken quality.