Quality machines make more fluid. Craft a fluid recipe at higher quality and it produces proportionally more fluid - and, kept fair by default, consumes proportionally more input fluid to match.

What it does

Crafting a fluid recipe above normal quality gives +50% fluid output per quality level by default: uncommon +50%, rare +100%, epic +150%, legendary +250%.

So a Foundry set to make legendary molten iron turns lava into 3.5× the molten iron. The output bonus also scales with the machine's productivity - productivity is "free output," so it makes the quality bonus bigger too.

Fair by default

Free extra output would be unbalanced, so a high-quality craft also consumes proportionally more of its fluid ingredients (configurable, and fully optional). This applies to any recipe that uses fluid - even ones that output only items, like barrel filling - so nothing can be looped for free fluid.

The extra fluid is pulled straight from the connected pipe network, not just the machine's little buffer, so it keeps up with fast, high-throughput builds.

The missing wish

At first I wanted to be able to craft directly high quality items by using MORE input fluid, like directly casting molten iron into legendary iron plates with a massive price increase. Sadly the quality recipes are build on the fly and cannot be edited, the next best thing is just creating more fluid, to get more common plates, to recycle into legendary plates.

Under the hood

• Event-driven. Built on the raise_on_crafted recipe event from Factorio 2.1.12 - it reacts only when a craft finishes, and costs nothing per tick. No machine scanning.
• Works everywhere. Every crafting machine and fluid recipe, including flow-through inputs like the Electromagnetic Plant.
• No dismantle cheese. A machine's outstanding fluid cost is charged when it's mined or destroyed, so you can't build-craft-remove to dodge it. (Or at least it tries to, there's way to cheese it but it require more manual work than it's worth)

Settings

• Fluid output bonus per quality level (%) - default 50.
• Quality increases input fluid consumption - default on.
• Fluid input cost increase per quality level (%) - default 50.
• Fluid settle interval (ticks) - default 1.

A bindable hotkey (Options -> Controls) overlays each machine's pending fluid balance, for tuning and debugging.

Requirements

Factorio 2.1.12+ and the Quality mod. Best with Space Age, where the fluid recipes really shine.

Help

I very likely missed some test variable, so if you find something please let me know.