Quality Sparks adds rare moments of surprise to crafting: eligible player and machine crafts can spark directly into Uncommon, Rare, Epic, or Legendary quality.
It is designed to feel like occasional lucky discoveries, not passive quality inflation. By default, it avoids intermediates, science packs, science ingredient chains, pipes, and rails so your belts and logistics do not get flooded with quality clutter. Buildings, equipment, armor, vehicles, weapons, ammo, and modules are enabled by default.
Each quality tier has its own startup chance setting, so you can tune or disable Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary sparks independently. Higher qualities roll first, so a Legendary spark can happen directly without passing through lower tiers.
Chat notifications can be controlled globally and per quality tier, with separate runtime toggles for Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary sparks. Machine chat messages include a clickable GPS tag so you can find the lucky machine.
Recommended chance settings
The default chances are inspired by early Factorio quality setups: roughly the kind of luck you might expect from crafting with a few Quality Module 3s, then tuned down for real factory throughput.
If you want sparks to feel rarer, lower the chance values. If you want a noticeable playtest, raise them or disable the lower tiers and leave only the quality tiers you want to have. The mod is highly configurable for a reason.
Developer's recommended settings
I recommend increasing the chances because the shipped defaults are intentionally very conservative. They are meant to be safe for large factories and long saves, but they can feel almost invisible in a normal first playtest.
A good starting point is:
Uncommon: 0.25%
Rare: 0.125%
Epic: 0.08%
Legendary: 0.05%
That is about 2.5 Uncommon, 1.25 Rare, 0.8 Epic, and 0.5 Legendary sparks per 1,000 eligible crafts before category filters. It should make the mod noticeable without turning every belt into quality spaghetti.
Default exclusions
- Science packs
- Science ingredient chains, such as belts, inserters, piercing rounds, firearm magazines, grenades, rails, productivity modules, electric furnaces, pipes, and accumulators
- Intermediate products
- Pipes, underground pipes, and rails
Current release
Version 0.1.9 adds per-quality chat notification toggles and improves science ingredient filtering so firearm magazines and similar short-chain science components are excluded by default.