So you want to play with quality, but why? You have to realize that, as of this moment, playing with quality is a HUGE time sink.

You should also only take this step AFTER you've reached Aquilo, established a base there, and regular trading routes. Not for any other reason, but because playing with quality will constantly deplete your resources on Fulgora. And you will need those for transfer to Nauvis or Gleba (or Aquilo) before you start destroying them for better quality.

Ok, so now you have nothing else to do with those resources, and are okay to start destroying them? Awesome, let's move on.

The following things are essential for this.

1. Electromagnetic Plants

This is silly, but I only found out in late game, that Electromagnetic Plants can make wires and circuits with a "natural" productivity to them. They can also make quality modules, which we will need tons of. This is the most important feature: That they can literally make final products with productivity.

We will also recycle them later on for increased quality of holmium plates, which at this moment is the ONLY way to get them, by recycling Elec Plants. That's because Holmium Plates are made of liquid, and liquids don't have quality, therefore it's impossible to raise the quality of the plates by normal means.

2. Recycling

I don't care what sorting setup you have on Fulgora, we will need a different setup. We will need one that also increases the quality of the recycled scrap. And yeah, this will waste most of the resources, but that's why I said make sure you don't need them.

3. Train network

The biggest headache tbh will be this, making a sufficient train network to constantly supply our recycling setup with scrap. I will tell you about this too, no worries.

4. Make -> Recycle loop

This means make a product, then recycle it, then make it again, until its quality increases, then do the same until it reaches the desired quality.

5. (Optional): Orbital carbon extractor

The only way to make plastic on Fulgora is by creating coal through carbon and sulfur. You might say, why not transfer plastic or coal? That's because recycling plastic doesn't result in coal, just less plastic, and the same goes for coal. So we can't efficiently upgrade their quality. Trust me, I'm trying it with carbon right now with legendary quality modules and it takes AGES to get a legendary carbon. We can also transfer carbon from Gleba though so that's something.

Finally: Lots and lots of time. This will take ages.

Though I explained this before, I decided to make it another section so that I say it again. Use them to make wires, green/red/blue circuits and, most importantly, quality modules!

We already get a lot from recycling, and yeah, we will need even more. Recycling anything causes you to get 1/4 (25%) of its materials, if I'm not mistaken, which means you need to re-supply it with 3/4 of the original materials you already supplied. If you spent 200 wires on something, you will only get 50 back, you basically destroyed 150 wire and maybe for no reason at all (as quality might not have increased). On a large scale, this would mean you would spend 2000 wire, to only get 500 back, and require 1500 more. Imagine that, as it will happen xD

Put productivity modules in all of these and speed beacons, as we are using them for "base" materials. Since speed reduces quality (ffs) we need these base materials to be built quickly, and we will need many, so don't increase the quality on those.

Here's an example:


Not the most efficient, but that's what I did, and it works just fine.

I got this blueprint from Factorioprints:

https://www.factorio.school/view/-OBdvHoEr2jlVweXSUKW

I can't post the blueprint, as it is longer than the allowed text. So, yeah it's in that link. This will need some adjustments.

First, to add a "wire" filter at the end of the sorters, so that we can get the wire too.
Second, we don't need to upgrade ice, at all, but you can do so if you want.
We also don't need to upgrade holmium ore, and stuff like that, but I left it as it is because who knows, they might change the game and liquids may have quality later on.

With this monster as your base of operations, you will have a lot of resources, some of higher quality. So yeah, I put down two of these, one next to the other, and I have 3 sites for that.

But putting down 1 is sufficient for now. It needs a LOT of quality modules though, so be aware of that.

We need a large network to constantly supply the recycler with scrap. So I have this setup:


Then we need depots for trains that don't have anywhere to go:


Finally, junctions:


And now we get to design our trains!

Any base must have the same name,
any mining site again, same name,
any depot, same name.

Then, design the train, put it in group "scrap train" or something, and put it to go to mine site, full cargo, go to base site, empty cargo. Simple. But then add the interrupt:


So what this means is that a train will go to *any* mining site, return to *any* base station, and if it has nowhere to go (i.e. if you have many trains, which you should) it will go to a depot and wait until a station is available.

IMPORTANT: All stations in this network must have a "train limit: 1"
IMPORTANT2: I haven't yet mastered the junction, it might cause some problems with 4-directional traffic, but here's the blueprint:

IMPORTANT: It's best to make 2-rail network. I will turn to that myself tbh.

So I swapped my entire rail network with double rails, and that's what you should definitely do from the start. This is how it should look like:


Stations like:


And depots:


And then the double roundabout:


And here's its blueprint:


Don't make a single rail network or you're gonna have a bad time with this.

The most important thing of all. This will create a thing, and if it's not of the required quality, it will recycle it and try again. I have found the blueprint that does just this here:

https://www.factorio.school/view/-OBfNRgbgvPmtEsId15L

Don't be a fool like me and start with base materials to construct more complex materials of higher quality, or you will lose a ton of resources and time. Your goal at this point is to have just 1 upcycler, set to "uncommon" (the second quality), only for tier 3 quality modules. Nothing else.

Once you get an uncommon quality module, then start replacing the common modules in your upcycler with those ones. Once it's full of uncommon, then what I did was to create a "rare" upcycler for tier 1 and 2 modules, replace everything with uncommon, and then a single elec plant for ONLY rare tier 3 modules.

Again, replace tier 3 upcycler modules with rare, maybe wait until all 3 upcyclers are filled with rare, and then you can move on to epic. This means, replace the original upcyclers to epic, build a single legendary elec plant, then fill them with epic and legendary modules. Remember the "legendary elec plant" doesn't need any quality modules, as it's the last quality.

Once you have everything epic, it's not time to replace the upcyclers yet. NOW we can move to base materials. Have an epic upcycler for wire, and have a box to also collect legendary wire.

Then make 4 elec plants for each green, blue and red circuits. One for each quality. The reason we need these, is because now we can get legendary materials in this way, as we can fill them up with epic modules. So we are making legendary not via upcyclers, but directly, from materials.

To get holmium plates we can start upcycling elec plants.
To get plastic you could upcycle plastic (by just recycling it endlessly) but that will waste a ton of plastic. My way is to get carbon from space, upcycle that (since it's free), upcycle sulfur, and then make legendary coal with water, and then legendary plastic from that. However, note that carbon reaches legendary wayyy too slow.

Anyway in the end, you will have plenty of legendary modules to fill up your setup. However, we're not done yet. The epic modules are really good, so what I did was start to move them in my recycler (the base for scrap recycling we talked about earlier) while I'm replacing everything else with legendary.

Once you have enough spare legendary modules, let me count, we don't need any for the elec plant, but 4 for the recycler, times 3 for all tiers, that's 12 SPARE legendary modules, THEN replace the epic upcyclers with legendary ones, and fill em up with legendary modules.

I'm not there yet personally, but it's become really fast now. I doubt the carbon is doing anything though tbh, but it's free. Anyway, in the end it will look like this:



etc.

Like I said in 4, this is entirely optional, as carbon doesn't reach legendary quality that fast. But it's an entirely free resource you can get from space, so why not? This is my orbital carbon extractor, but it's needlessly large tbh. But this is mine anyway:

Yeah, steam won't allow me to upload the blueprint as it's too large, but here's an image:


Like I said, needlessly large, but it does the job. Free carbon yay.

Will this guide improve your life? No, it will probably deteriorate it. Upcycling takes a huge amount of time and frustration, especially since speed beacons REDUCE the quality increase, which makes things take even more time.

But now I'm on this path and I will see it to the end.

Remember, the most important thing is the train network and recycling. If you have a TON of resources, then upcycling will work that much faster.

Also also, I don't even know what you will actually gain by having everything of top quality. Some stuff is good, others are completely needless. Turrets and asteroid catchers of higher qualities are really good though - which is why I started on this path.

Oh, also, logistic bots. Legendary ones are amazing, they last forever before they recharge.

Oh also, make a double-rail network, not single rail like mine. It will save you a lot of headaches.

That's all. See you next time.

So as I was preparing to move my upcycling to full on legendary modules, I thought hey, why don't I first upcycle recyclers?

Well, turns out, legendary recyclers are really good for modules. See modules take a lot of time to get recycled, and with quality modules inside the recyclers it takes even more time. I think the legendary version does it at half the time or something.

So yeah, at least the tier 3 modules definitely need legendary recyclers.

With the upcycling blueprint you can easily do it. Wait until they've been filled with legendary modules too, before you move on to more upcycling.

Ok, so this will take a TON of time as well. But I decided to put epic quality modules (yeah, 4 dots ones) into all my scrap recyclers, to immediately get high quality items.

It takes more than 100 epic quality modules for one recycling thingie from the blueprint I provided. Just look at this:


But if I'm honest I don't know if it's worth it. Maybe it would be better to move on to upcycling red and blue modules, to legendary, and make legendary modules instead. Once you have many of those you can fill em up straight with legendary anyway, which you will be doing by the end anyway, so I think you could skip this.