Hello,

Are the companions themselves not allowed to be made quality? When I make one and place the entity it immediately downgrades to normal. Accessories appear to be able to made quality. but not the bots themselves. Intended?

Thank you.

Hello!

Quality on the drones themselves was on my secondary list, so this is a known limitation rather than a design choice. Factorio can't change an existing entity's HP, resistances or fuel efficiency on the fly. So whenever you finish a global companion research (Improved chassis, Lean burn, etc.), the mod swaps every drone for a pre-made variant that already has those bonuses built in (for example, Atlas with no research versus Atlas with Improved chassis). That swap currently doesn't carry the quality over, so the drone comes back as normal.

Equipment shouldn't be affected, because each piece is its own object and keeps its quality, so that part should work fine. (I am not precisely educated on the inner workings of quality in the code. There is however, a high possibility of the higher quality doing absolutely nothing despite showing 'an effect' on the stats of some equipment)

Since you raised it here, I've moved it up to a priority fix, and I'll deploy it shortly. Thanks for the report!

Update: 2.5.32 is live now.

In the end I decided that companions stay normal quality. Quality makes a companion's equipment grid bigger, and that breaks the balance of every drone. A bigger grid also fits many more weapons firing at once, which can cost a lot of performance with a full fleet. I do have a fairly strict "do not police the player" policy, but here I had to make a call for the greater good. So a companion placed in a higher quality is now built as a normal one, on purpose. Sadly, the quality your companions already lost can't be given back. Please do read the README ('Information' tab) regarding the 'Quality' section.

The good news: equipment is the other way round. It now really gets stronger with quality. Weapons deal more damage per hit, roboports reach further, Flora's carapace, player support and Prism's healing all scale too, and shields and reactors work as in the base game. The tooltips show the numbers for each quality.

This was much harder than I expected. Sorry for the delay.

Thanks again for the report <3

Thanks for the quick response and action!

I'm playing a rampant fixed/death world run and happened to notice an epic companion immediately reverted to normal. This is an interesting mod and enjoying using it so far. Looking forward to the final companion release.

Thanks again for your time and attention!