As far as I can tell, there is no way to recycle on Rubia which means no upcycling.

I was kind of looking forward to the challenge of an upcycling loop here, which is harder due to the wind, but doable at the end once you unlock the armored trains.

Maybe we could unlock a tech to either create an armored regular recycler or allow regular recycling in the biorecycling plant (as a recipe?).

I can of course just ship craptonite frames elsewhere to do it as well but that doesn't sound as fun :D

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, Rubia’s crafting chain only works because all recyclers are banned from the surface. Rubia’s recipe chain is designed to require specific unique recipes to go down through intermediates. Allowing recyclers on the planet completely changes how science is made, especially at scale. For example, consider that junkibacter + cupric scrap => blue chip + engine provides materials that could be recycled to invalidate many biorecycling recipes used for science. Several other recipes have the same issue.

At the end of the day, I had to choose between upcycling craptonite vs maintaining the production line for science. The two are mutually exclusive. I chose the latter, because I had many ideas in mind as to how everything would work in a late-postgame megabase. To compensate for this, I designed craptonite to 1) be the most precious intermediate in the game, and 2) be very easy to produce in quality (with imported legendary concrete).

The only alternative to allow recycling would be to surface lock many recycler recipes to be banned from Rubia, but this would be extremely confusing (and almost impossible to control with all the different overhaul mod recipes), so I decided against it.

Ah ok, that makes sense.

Hmm, while long bulk inserters are fairly trivial in this way, it does make the long stack inserters a lot more annoying, and in particular it means that you cannot use typical upcycling builds at all for them since they can only be crafted on Rubia.

So, you are forced into actually crafting them directly to legendary from legendary ingredients. In my case I have all but the Uranium-238 already being crafted so its not bad, but I do think its a bit unfortunate you are forced into this method and cannot use normal upcycling.

Granted, at the stage of the game where you are making legendary everything most people probably won't be too burdened by this.

Given you can construct the long bulk inserters on other planets maybe just allow crafting the long stack inserters on other planets as well?

I totally forgot that the long stack inserter recipe was still surface locked, since I was doing both on Rubia for playtesting purposes. I can just unlock it, as you need to export quality craptonite frames etc to do it anyway.

Cool, I think that makes sense.

It is live now.

sweet thanks :)