This is a helper mod to allow mods to mess with recipes and have recycling products reflect those changes, with minimal fuss or impact on loading times.

This mod does absolutely nothing without Quality installed, so you can have it as a mandatory requirement to handle recycling compatibility without negatively affecting compatibility with non-Space Age.

This mod must load last (hence the ZZZ), so you should ensure it is a non-order-affecting dependency in your mod's info.json (i.e. prefixed with ~).

But why?

In short: Quality generates recycling recipes in data-updates (the second of three stages of prototype loading.) This gives mods somewhat of a short window to modify recipes to ensure items will recycle into the correct products. It's also questionably possible to ensure you load before Quality, or you might even want to load after Quality for various reasons (say, you add new resources to the game, and need to load after Space Age so the planets actually exist for you to add resources to.)

The current solution is for mods to just require() the file from Quality that generates the recipes after every recipe change. This breaks mods specifying auto_recycle = false on their recipes, and while Wube is addressing this in a future update, it's still the case that having many mods repeatedly regenerating the recycling recipes leads to longer load times (which is more a problem for modders who have to tweak something and restart the game frequently :P)

This mod ensures faster load times as long as every mod installed uses it (a tall order, I recognize), by regenerating recipes exactly once at the very end of the loading process.

There are also additional options for modders to control how the recipes are generated, since loading last doesn't leave an opportunity to correct the output. See the FAQ for details.