I felt like the default 20 second time was ... reasonable. It meant a significant investment to deconstruct a large amount of stuff, but I could dump a small amount of overproduction into a chest and it'd run through the machine fine.

I understand wanting to reduce it, but can I advocate for 10 seconds instead of 5? This is a powerful tool, and I feel like it should be at least a bit painful or annoying to use in bulk. :)

Your call, of course.

I think you might have misunderstood the recent changelog notes, but there was really no easy way to phrase it (at least not in one line).

What changed in the recent version was the crafting time for the machine itself. Each reverse factory took 20 seconds to craft, which made it take 60 seconds to recycle. (PS. I kinda snuck this into a previous patch note, as I forgot to include it on release, but recycling recipes have been changed to 3x the base recipe time, as opposed to a set time which might be lower or greater than the original recipe)

The assembling machines (which the recyclers are mostly balanced around) only take 0.5 seconds to craft, even for the t3 assembler. The electric furnace (which is also taken into account in balancing for vanilla) similarly only takes 5 seconds to craft. Even structures like the nuclear reactor and oil refinery only take 8 seconds, so 20 was a little absurd.

Of course, your complaint is still valid, just for a different reason lol. During my testing of the 6.1.x version, I had recycling recipes set to 5x the base cost, which felt like... maybe a little overkill?

Thing is, I don't want structures to take infinitely long to recycle, but I also want intermediates to take longer than they took to create in the first place. Hmmm, maybe just setting a minimum recipe time would work... and leaving any recipe times above that as is.

Oh! haha, well, yeah, I did misunderstand. (and didn't test, shame on me.)

This seems fine.

Changed the recycling recipes to a minimum of 5 seconds, or to the base time cost if greater than 5s. Most items seem to have time cost of less than that, so it should be fine to bump them all up to 5. And those longer recipes like nuclear reactor, rocket silo, etc remain unchanged.

I just checked, but in the older 6.0.x versions, I actually had the time cost of the recycling recipes set to a whopping 30s, which is just crazy. I might still bump the time cost again, if it's too low. Or maybe just make it a setting lmao. Custom setting seems to be the best option in these cases.

Yeah, that seems fair enough. honestly, I never noticed: they were slow to recycle, so I put stuff in a chest and left it.

It felt like something to clean up those seventeen burner mining things that clog inventory, or a minor production mistake, not a tool to let me yolo my way through planning, then turn everything back to raw stuff if I got it wrong.

The new time feels fine to me. It has the same effect: you can recycle large amounts of stuff, but it requires a big investment in machines. If you just use it to clean up some of the little rough edges, you barely notice, because by the time you back to your chest to throw a new outmoded machine in, bam, it is already empty. :)

Finally implemented this change. Though it was part of the (now removed) v6.1.6 release, it should still be in the newer releases as well.

Basically, there is a minimum energy required in place for all reverse recipes dependent on the tier of recycler. For example, in the t1 recycler (which can only recycle finished products like stone furnaces and assembling machines) the minimum is set to 1 second, which means anything below the minimum is bumped up to that minimum, while anything above that is unchanged.

Thus, assembling machines that craft in 0.5 seconds are recycled in 1 second, and electric furnaces that craft in 5 seconds are recycled at 5 seconds. This minimum is bumped up to 2 seconds for any recipes in the intermediate products tab (which cannot have prod modules used on them; which literally only includes the satellite in vanilla, but may include many more recipes when modded) for the t2 recycler; and so on up to 4 seconds for the t4 recycling recipes.

This means recipes from the lower tiers are recycled fairly quickly in higher tier machines, while anything that can use productivity will take longer to recycle (although at that point, you should probably have the beacons to make recycling anything happen fairly quickly).

Balancing pass complete! (....although I may eventually come back to this yet again, if 4 seconds for productivity products is still too fast. Right now it matches the speed of the recycler, so a t1 recipe in a t1 machine takes the same amount of time as a t4 recipe in a t4 machine. Or I might leave it as is lol.)