Hello! I'm a huge fan of your ideas for quality, and I think they're easily the best ideas/executions for expansions that I've seen. (Good balance of not having bloat, nice stat variation, artstyle which seamlessly matches the base game, very novel concepts, etc).

Since you mentioned you're interested in balancing suggestions, I have a few for both the base mod and the shiny mod. I'll be posting this in the discussions for both mods - I apologize in advance for the yap, just very excited to see these two pop up and figured I'd share my two cents and try to chip in.

I'm not a great programmer, but if you would like art assets and similar, I would love to contribute. I have some ideas for shiny quality indicators in particular that I think may help distinguish them more.

Anyways, here goes.

Quality++ Thoughts:

To preface, this is my go-to quality mod set and is by far the best one out there in execution, I feel. My only real criticisms here are that I do think the mods stray a big close to "big-number-syndrome", where things become more or less impossible to get to compensate for them being extremely powerful.

-The order of magnitude based scaling for probability by default is extremely dramatic, and isn't really meant to scale to having four additional qualities-

Things like epic and legendary quality are made possible to get by higher tier modules and module slots, but there's no way after to possibly make up for the genuinely insane odds thereafter. For reference, an artifactual item from quality++ being four orders of magnitude rarer than a legendary means that the odds of getting a legendary from scratch are the same as getting an artifactual from all legendary inputs. Without some seriously crazy mods alongside things, I think that 1 out of 100 million is just too overwhelmingly unlikely to ever try to pursue.

-Quality effects are a touch too strong-

One of my favorite things about quality is how much of a power boost it offers, but legendary items are already genuinely exceptional. I love the idea of scaling past that and massively extending the late-game, but at the same time I feel that they scale a bit too much. Four times a legendary bonus more or less trivializes everything in the game.

-Quality progression-

While I think unlocking every other quality alongside legendary makes sense, it couldn't hurt to have separate researches beyond that using promethium science packs, or if you're able and willing, even integration with other planet mods. I think this could set this apart from most other quality mods even more and help it maintain a very natural and methodical progression in comparison to them.

Quality++ Suggestions:

-Probability Rework-

Either change the probability of post-legendary qualities to be 4-6 times less likely than the last, or make the entire probability scale follow factors of 7-8 and not 10. If you're looking for references here, many of the mythical quality mods out there add options to do this in the config.

The idea behind the math is below, comparing vanilla probabilities vs quality++ probabilities of getting to a maximum tier item.

Current: One in 10,000 vs One in 100,000,000 (10,000 times harder)
Custom Quality Scaling Change (Factors of 10 up to legendary, then factors of 4): One in 10,000 vs One in 2,560,000 (265 times harder). Vanilla quality chance untouched.
All Quality Scaling Change (Factors of 6): One in 10,000 vs One in 1,680,000 (168 times harder), legendary and epic are ~8 times easier to get.

-Strength-

Changing vanilla scaling and integrating into mod, to make custom qualities more powerful by comparison: 1.5 levels per quality tier, up to maximum of 12.
Keeping vanilla scaling: 2 levels per tier after legendary, up to a maximum of 13.

Another possibility would be to dial these back slightly and make the artifacted tier three or four levels higher than the previous one, to really set it apart. Maybe scaling one level per tier past legendary up to something like 8, and then jumping to 12 for the final tier. I really wouldn't recommend going above 10-12 for the maximum bonus if they're not going to be configurable.

-Design-
Possibly change "artifacted" to something else, like "Ultimate", "Unreal", "Ascendant", or "Superior"? "Artifact" almost makes the object sound a bit outdated. Also may consider shifting the colors around a bit, possibly even alongside the vanilla ones as the current tiers don't really follow an easy to read color scheme.

Shiny Qualities:

This is honestly why I'm writing this up. Amazing idea for the quality system, and the only of it's kind that I've seen. However in its current state I can't see it getting much use, unfortunately.

-Probabilities are far too low-

1/2000 on top of the already extremely low probabilities makes anything here more or less impossible to get. For the maximum tier, this rarity on top of that puts it fractions of a trillion for probability. Especially given that some of the buffs are for things like electrical poles, I don't see a scenario in which the current probabilities would ever allow for them to be used in any reasonable amount.

At minimum, I would drop this probability to 1/100. I would also allow for accumulating shiny-tier materials and crafting with them - this still requires RNG and "fishing" for shinies, but I feel that without it this would be nearly impossible to automate at scale. It also means that if a recycler or intermediate plant produces a shiny it won't be completely useless.

If it's possible, I may also consider more complicated mechanics. The 1/2000 chance would make sense if there was a way to increase it - perhaps shiny chance goes up exponentially with higher quality bonuses, or there's even a dedicated module to boost shiny chance specifically? I think that possibly even making it an alternative route to normal quality scaling could be extremely interesting mechanically.

-Lack of a 9th tier shiny-

I really love the idea of these as "in-betweens", but I also think that there should probably be a shiny to match tier 9, possibly even just a straight up tier 10 one if going all in with this. It feels a little strange to not have an ultimate variant of the highest tier quality.

-Shiny scaling-

While the idea of the previous level + 2 is a great idea for power, I think that it also makes things confusing and makes shiny rarities for higher tier items proportionally less effective. I'd consider making it a +25% - with a maximum level for the base mod of maybe 10, for an absolute cap of level 12.5. This is still insanely powerful but I think helps dial things back overall and ensures that both higher and lower tiers benefit, but do not outshine those above them outside of their specific niche.

-Shiny effects-

I think shinies need more varied effects, and for their specific effects to be a little bit less insane. What I would suggest is that at each tier, shinies affect one major stat, possibly two at higher tiers, for a few different specializations. Only affecting one stat on one building is I think much too niche.

For instance, a rare shiny could specialize in electrical networks and boost wire reach for electrical poles, maximum accumulator charge. A legendary could specialize in manufacturing and increase module slots for assemblers, productivity in chemical plants, and mining speed for drills. Mythic shinies could do weird things like give weapons damage bonuses (there are mods that make quality do this that might be nice references), increase science pack productivity massively, and so on. The top tier could even give a sizeable extra bonus to everything but specialize in personal equipment, making it a jack-of-all trades but not necessarily the best for every single situation outside of player gear.

In general, I would favor additive multiplicative bonuses over flat ones. This especially applies to the current one for the equipment grid - a 30 by 30 equipment grid boost is almost arbitrarily large, and I think at most it should be a +25-33% increase when considering that the base tier also increases size. With current math, an artifactual mech armor would push north of 60 by 60, and I don't think there's a way to even use, let alone balance, having 3,600 equipment grid slots when the base game is built around an absolute maximum of around 300.

At the absolute most, I would have these be +50% to +100%. Giant bonuses like +250%, especially those that end up stacking multiplicatively, could end up completely trivializing a lot of game mechanics just from simple luck. Like all things factorio, the end goal of shinies I think should still be to get them en masse, so they should be balanced around that possibility - both in terms of being able to get them, and not breaking the game, in large amounts.

-Design-

I think perhaps shinies should have brighter colors and slightly different icons to differentiate them from their base tiers. The legendary shiny could be yellow or light orange, and possibly have a different icon. I mainly say this as things like the rare shiny just look like a recolor of rare, which I don't think captures things.

-Conclusion-

I love these two mods. I would say that the core of my balancing feedback is that the higher levels are nearly impossible to get, but if acquired, end up being game-breakingly strong. In a game about automation and mass production, I think that toning both of these down to strike a balance would be ideal.

I also do think that it wouldn't hurt to lock certain higher tiers and shinies behind specific research projects. Unlocking legendary on Aquilo and suddenly having to account for four more qualities above it immediately would be a bit overwhelming, and I think shifts a lot of what's best left to late-game progress much closer to the midgame than is ideal, especially with mods.

I am going to review all of this, consider it, and give you the thorough and concise response you deserve.

Preliminarily though, there was a balance pass that was deployed today (I scanned through the response already), as I also agreed about the numerical balancing in the mod. Cheers!

Personally, I think the quality effects with this new version have been nerfed too much. Nothing is wrong with godlike items if its rarity is 1:10,000 that of legendary. It would be a serious setup even to get the smallest trickle of the simplest items. In vanilla, from rare to legendary is a +2 jump as a reward for grinding your way to reach that point, so according to the game's canon, by logical extension the reward should be proportional to the increasingly extreme setups required to achieve it.

Incremental +1 across these new quality tiers is better than nothing, but it loses its allure since the items are only a little bit better, not substantially better vs legendary. I'd argue if you insist on weakening the effects of this mod, it shouldn't be through dampening the quality effects, but rather reducing the chances of reaching it less than 10%. It would make it a serious grind to reach a handful of items, let alone upgrading your factory with it, and you still keep that sexy allure to chase it because of its crazy bonuses. The bonuses and the labor to achieve it go hand it hand; looking at it in a way disconnected from that just undermines the quality system and breaks the implicit pattern for exponentially more work = increasingly more tempting products.

$.02

That's a good two cents to interject and was my original thought process during the creation of the mod. I did leave the settings open in hopes of letting the user establish the vision they hope for when playing with extended qualities, and it's something I'll review again probably on Monday. I don't consider your opinion lightly.

Thanks for putting in the time.

In response to Optics, I totally get your point, and definitely respect wanting to play it with a higher scaled config. The problem I personally have is that the rest of the game doesn't scale to handle those increasingly extreme setups well. At a certain point, there's no difference between +5,000% and +50,000% speed on machines, and I don't necessarily think that the top-end rarities should only ever be relevant for things like personal gear - things which also scale past the point of relevancy when you start getting 60 by 60 equipment grids.

My core problem with ultra-rare items that are insanely powerful is that factorio is fundamentally an automation game, not an RPG. While luck is ultimately something which is a major part in quality, the core mechanic is built around the same thing that the rest of factorio is built around - scaling. In a game all about mass production, I'm not sure that things that are so rare that they're impossible - and pointless in terms of effect - to automate past a certain point isn't really ideal.

Double a legendary is already extremely strong - that's at minimum five times stronger than a rare in terms of raw numerical effect on a single item. The extremely rare = extremely broken balancing philosophy is one that intuitively makes sense to me as well, but I can't actually think of a game in which it's ended up being balanced, fun, or healthy in the long run.

The biggest component, though, is that the scaling here isn't linear. Across every level of quality, the net effect ends up being polynomial due to the way in which they interact with each other. The most obvious example is armor, where an increase from quality increase scales both height, and width. Because it scales to the square of quality, this means that even a one level increase will always be substantial as every level will add more than the last (IE a 5x5 to 6x6 is an increase of 11, while a 10x10 to 11x11 is an increase of 21). The same applies to basically everything else - productivity modules of a higher rarity apply across every step of production - if they apply five times, as is the case with many intermediates, a 20% bonus to productivity from higher quality isn't really a 20% bonus - it's a 250% one.

If everything scaled in a linear way, I would probably agree that scaling can be a bit more dramatic, because 20 is still only four times as powerful as 5. But when accounting for the fact that these bonuses apply multiplicatively across basically everything they affect, all of a sudden it starts looking like, as an example, 5^3 (125) vs 20^3 (8000) - 64 times more powerful. I just don't think that's mechanically sustainable.

As a reference, from testing I've gotten some numbers that quickly pass the point of relevancy with tier-9 rarities. I really don't know that +20,000% speed on an assembler from vanilla beacons and speed modules is within the scope of what the game is built around, or honestly, handle well. This problem will become even more noticeable with mods, where things like modded beacons and machines will massively exacerbate these effects. I think the thing to avoid is making things like modules and beacons so powerful that you no longer need to plan them, and instead can just stick one module in and forget about it.

Testers,
As promised, a review of the feedback --

@Ambit205

Beginning: I appreciate the thoughtfulness of the response and really am glad you (and presumably others are enjoying the mod(s) I’ve written. Its nice. I didn’t actually expect much traffic around here, and namely wrote the mod for myself because I wanted more diversification in what the quality system could offer and none of the other mods really did it for me. So I do really appreciate the kind words.

Art Assets: I definitely wouldn’t mind a proposal for art assets. I did some variations with the shiny artwork that involved gradient effects, and was looking to see if quality icons supported animation, but none of that turned out well. I am also looking into shiny-variant sprites that are used when an entity of shiny quality is placed in the world. There’s a LOT to do on that front though.

Numbers/Balance: I agree. That is why I chose to do a balance pass on the qualities introduced in the EQ portion of the mod. Things tend to scale way out of control when paired with beacons and other modifiers. 10 (12 for shinies) seems like a good hard limit for now, but it needs tested further. To that end, I will always keep settings open so that people can do whatever they want with the mod. I never want to gatekeep people and tell others what “fun” is. I like tighter numbers and more of a challenge, but others may not. Though, I do tend to resonate with your balance concerns.

Probabilities: A lot of what you say here is sort of true. If you go from raw (normal) and you’re shooting for artifactual, you’re very much unlikely to get it (though, I did end up pulling a legendary: shiny quality electric mining drill the other day during a testing setup, using only normal quality materials and it was crazy. The odds are astronomically low). That being said, to be able to use the extended qualities in any meaningful way, you will first have to design a legendary factory, and then upcycle from there (that was the original intention anyway), which was generally intended to be done in the creation of very large, specialized factories. Though, I want to test this in-depth before I make too many default changes. If I test this and find it to be unfun or unsatisfactory, I will absolutely adjust the odds across the board to ensure satisfying gameplay.

Progression: This is something I am looking into and has been requested prior. I am definitely willing to write compatibility patches for other planets. Another objective of mine is to write expansions for Krastorio 2: SO. I have always been a K2 fan and I want to ensure the maximum amount of compat there. Though I have no issue with writing in other patches. To that end, your request is heard, and this feature is coming.

Reworks: All duly noted. The math will be re-referenced during future balancing patches. Additionally, I am looking into Shiny Modules to increase the chances for fishing for shinies, though due to the way this must be implemented inside of Factorio, this could be tricky. If you want a further explanation on the mechanics of shiny gambling and how that was implemented, let me know and I’ll talk about it. I thought it was kind of cheeky and clever on how it ended up working out, but I could be dumb. XD

Design: On Artifactual – I wanted to do something different, but I also wanted to follow design intent. Intent seems to be that they are following standard RPG syntax choices, and my incorporation of Artifactual comes from DnD and the power of items in the “Artifact” tier, which typically exceeds the “Legendary” tier of items. Though a new, and certainly made-up word, I thought it followed the convention in a sort-of-intuitive way for us DnD nerds. I am certainly open to suggestion though, as I am not married to any of the name choices thus far.

Shiny Odds: Perhaps the odds are too low. I haven’t had the chance to test this out in actual game conditions, but I am rapidly approaching a point in my new save where I will be able to do so, and will be able to give honest and solid feedback (to both you and myself). I will watch this one closely. Also this will be a setting that gets implemented in the Shiny Mechanics mod such that you can adjust the probability of a shiny event occurring. This feature will likely come this week. I hear you on this one though. In testing arrays, the odds look good, but I will be able to report more on this soon. If you have a real-world, in-game setup that is tuned for mass production, and you can’t seem to find any shiny items, please let me know.

Shiny Materials: I don’t know what to do with this yet. The options available to modders are really limited when it comes to qualities, and to get shiny qualities to even work, I essentially had to exploit raw math. I will see what I can do in terms of letting people do stuff with shiny materials, but I am stuck on this one. It would be kind of a pain to have 17 different qualities dropdown in a list when selecting the quality of ingredients to craft with, and it also increases the allure of shiny products to begin with, but I am willing to hear others out on any ideas in this realm.

Shiny Tiers: There is definitely a tier 9 shiny. Artifactual: Shiny exists as a shiny quality. I had considered adding a 10th tier, though I am not sure how to stat it out or what to do with it.

Shiny Effects: This one is challenging. As of the time of my writing, most of the effects you see listed in the mod do nothing. This is because we are just now getting new levers to tune in the next release of Factorio, as they added a variety of attributes and properties for us to tune in the new QualityPrototype. My array of options is very limited. I may be able to script some things up, but currently Machines play very lightly with quality and it makes it hard to make things truly unique. Ill see what I can do about the equip. grid in the next release. Its going to be absurd (like you had outlined).

Design: Yeah, I’m not married to the icons either. If you have a proposal, please let me know and I will review it.

@ HighInFiberOptics

What you said was my original intention of the mod. Ultimately I wanted each new jump to be rewarding and huge. Unfortunately, doing that makes everything absurdly powerful very quickly. I then later adopted the philosophy that all of these added qualities should be viewed as “Legendary+”. Essentially, I thought that it would be wise for me to plan everything out as though everything was going to be Legendary, and accept that Mythical or Masterwork, could be slotted into those kinds of plans and that those sections of the factory would be slightly stronger. You can always choose to shoot as high as you want, of course, and to make extremely powerful upgrades. As with the last section of feedback, I will be looking at probabilities again and seeing what I can do to make the experience a little bit more rewarding such that there is no real need for massive jumps in power. Hopefully this turns out to be the case.

You do present a good argument though. If that’s how you enjoy playing, I would recommend going back to the old defaults [7, 10, 14, 20], and then adjusting probabilities to match the desired gameplay experience. I will never write out this functionality to ensure that there is always something for everyone inside of the mod.

Conclusion: I appreciate the feedback. I hope to get more of it. Ill be playing around with some ideas and seeing what I can implement to make sure everyone is happy. Feel free to contact me on discord if you have a suggestion (or just want to talk about quality). Best of luck in your gambling endeavors, engineers.

Puzz1ebox

Heya, thank you so much for the incredible thorough response. I'm working on RimWorld mods myself at the minute, and I truly, sincerely appreciate both your asking for feedback and being willing to actually look through my massive word-salad response.

Do you have contact info? I can send over some ideas for rarity icons, though of course no pressure to use them if you don't end up liking the cut of their gibs.

I also totally see what you mean with the shinies - in truth, I have no idea how you even did those - I was just kind of throwing out ideas for when those tools are available haha

Thanks again for the great mod!