Factorio Space Age Quality Guide: Modules and Recycler Loops

Quality is Space Age's answer to a base that's already big enough. Instead of stamping down another hundred assembling machines, you push the ones you have up through five quality tiers, and the stuff at the top (legendary) works about two and a half times harder than normal. Getting there comes down to two tools: quality modules, which give every craft a random shot at coming out a tier higher, and the recycler, which grinds unwanted products back into ingredients so they get another run at it. Chain those together and you've got an upcycling loop, the machine that turns a flood of junk into a trickle of legendaries. Here's how the pieces fit, with numbers the official wiki confirms.

Unlocking Quality

The quality system ships as its own mod bundled with the expansion, so it's technically separate from the planets and platforms. In a normal Space Age run you just have it. The entry price is low: the Quality module research costs 30 seconds and 500 each of automation and logistic science, and it only needs the regular Modules tech behind it. Research that and your machines can already roll uncommon and rare items. Epic and legendary stay locked behind their own techs much later.

The tech ladder

| Research | Cost | What it gets you | | --- | --- | --- | | Quality module | 30s, 500 red + green | Tier 1 modules, rolls cap at rare | | Quality module 2 | 30s, 500 red, green, chemical + space | Tier 2 modules, needs your first platform | | Quality module 3 | 60s, 2000 red, green, chemical, space + electromagnetic | Tier 3 modules, gated on Fulgora | | Epic quality | 60s, 5000 each of six pack types, including agricultural | Epic rolls (Gleba) | | Legendary quality | 60s, 5000 each of ten pack types, including cryogenic | Legendary rolls (Aquilo) |

So the practical gates are: quality module 2 wants space science, so you need a platform. Quality module 3 wants electromagnetic science, so you need Fulgora. Epic quality wants agricultural science from Gleba, and legendary quality wants cryogenic science from Aquilo plus every other pack in the game. By the time you can afford 5000 of ten different science types, you'll have a real factory behind you.

The recycler gate

The other big unlock is the recycler itself, from the Recycling research on Fulgora. Recyclers can only be crafted on Fulgora, but you can ship them anywhere after that, including space platforms. You can play with uncommon and rare quality before you ever land there, but upcycling loops don't exist without recyclers, so Fulgora is where the quality game actually starts.

What each tier step buys

Every tier is a "step", and legendary is five steps (it double-jumps past epic). Per step, most things gain:

• +30% crafting speed, health, robot limits, and chest space
• +30% stronger positive module effects
• +10% turret and weapon range
• +1 tile of equipment grid on armor, in both directions
• 1/6 less resource drain on miners, and 1/6 less power draw on beacons
• Science packs last 100% longer at uncommon, 200% at rare, and 500% at legendary

A few things only get health: transport belts, pipes, walls, trains, cargo wagons. Quality belts are a trap for your first legendary stock, more on that below.

Installing Quality Modules

How the roll actually works

Add up the quality chance from every module in a machine; that's your Q. Each time the machine finishes a craft it rolls Q. Success bumps the product one tier above the ingredient quality. Then it keeps rolling at a flat 10% per extra tier: 90% of successes are one tier up, 9% are two, 0.9% are three, 0.1% are four. A failed roll just means the product comes out at whatever the ingredients were.

The one rule that bites people: ingredient quality has to match exactly. Set a recipe for uncommon and it wants all-uncommon items, no mixing in a few rares. Fluids ignore quality, so one tank of lubricant serves every tier. That exact-match rule is also why unsorted quality output jams factories, so keep it in mind for later.

Module chances

| Module tier | Normal | Uncommon | Rare | Epic | Legendary | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Quality module 1 | 1% | 1.3% | 1.6% | 1.9% | 2.5% | | Quality module 2 | 2% | 2.6% | 3.2% | 3.8% | 5% | | Quality module 3 | 2.5% | 3.2% | 4% | 4.7% | 6.2% |

Every tier carries the same speed penalty, -5%, and the module's own quality doesn't change that. A legendary quality module 3 still only costs you 5% speed while giving 6.2% chance. Four of them in one recycler is 24.8% per pass, and that's where the real upcycling numbers come from.

Which machines to build loops on

| Machine | Module slots | Base productivity | | --- | --- | --- | | Chemical plant | 3 | 0% | | Assembling machine 3 | 4 | 0% | | Foundry | 4 | +50% | | Electromagnetic plant | 5 | +50% | | Cryogenic plant | 8 | 0% | | Recycler | 4 | can't take productivity at all |

Two details worth knowing here. The electromagnetic plant's built-in 50% works on everything it crafts, not just intermediates, which is unusual. And higher-quality machines don't weaken quality rolls - a legendary plant rolls just as often as a normal one, it just crafts faster. Speed modules are the opposite: they carry a quality penalty that eats into your module bonuses. One speed module in a beacon next to a machine full of quality modules can still come out ahead on output per minute. Two is almost always worse.

Quality modules do nothing in a few spots: rocket silos, labs and biolabs, recipes that only make fluids, barrel fill and empty, kovarex enrichment, and fish breeding. Don't waste the slots.

Recycling Unwanted Output

The 25% rule

The recycler is a small 4x2 building from Fulgora: crafting speed 0.5, 186 kW, four module slots, no productivity modules allowed. Feed it an item and it reverses the recipe, handing back 25% of the ingredients on average. The rounding is random per ingredient. Recycling a processing unit always gives back 5 electronic circuits (a quarter of 20) and has a 50% shot at one advanced circuit (a quarter of 2). Fluids are gone forever, no exceptions.

Two things make recyclers the engine of quality farming. First, recycled output comes out at the input's quality, and quality modules in the recycler can bump it higher, so every lap through a loop gets two upgrade rolls - one in the crafter, one in the recycler. Second, recyclers eject their own output onto belts like a mining drill does, so you don't even need output inserters.

Timing rarely matters, but it's cheap to know: recycling an item takes 1/16th of its crafting time, and the recycler's 0.5 speed doubles that to 1/8th. A steel plate takes 2 seconds to recycle, a low density structure 1.875, a processing unit 1.25.

The self-return trick

Some items can't be reversed into ingredients, mostly recipes with multiple products or non-assembler crafting. Science packs are the famous ones. Recycle those and you get a 25% chance of the exact same item back, 75% destroyed, and quality modules still get their roll on the return. That's the space science loop: make the packs up on a platform where asteroids feed the ingredients, push the surplus through recyclers stuffed with quality modules, and land legendary packs. It burns three of every four packs, sure, but asteroid-fed packs are basically free.

Quality science is a bigger deal than it sounds. Uncommon packs last 100% longer in a lab, rare 200%, epic 300%, legendary 500% - the same research value as 2, 3, 4, and 6 normal packs in the same slot. Agricultural packs also spoil 30% slower per tier, which matters a lot on Gleba.

Scrap on Fulgora

Scrap is the other recycler job. The recipe is fixed: one recycler eats 2.5 scrap per second and spits out about 1.5 items per second, so ten recyclers saturate a yellow belt. Per scrap, you're looking at 20% iron gear wheels, 7% solid fuel, 6% concrete, 5% ice, 4% each of steel, batteries, and stone, 3% each of copper cable and advanced circuits, 2% processing units, and 1% each of low density structures and holmium ore. Stick quality modules in scrap recyclers and all of that comes out with upgrade rolls on it. Scrap recycling productivity research pumps those numbers up too.

Designing Safe Production Loops

Anatomy of an upcycler

The standard loop has four parts: a row of crafters with quality modules, a quality sorter on the output belt, recyclers with quality modules, and a feedback belt. Anything at or above your target tier gets pulled off to storage. Everything else goes into the recyclers, and the 25% that survives flows back into the crafters. With legendary modules throughout, the wiki's math says you need to push this many items through per legendary that comes out: 21 for a cryogenic plant loop, 37 for an electromagnetic plant, 62 for a foundry, 171 for an assembling machine 3.

For build ratios, the wiki's conservative numbers for an EM plant loop are, per one legendary-quality crafter: 14 recyclers, 56 crafters set to normal recipes, 16 to uncommon, 7 to rare, 3 to epic, and the 1 legendary. Each tier gets its own crafters with the recipe set to that ingredient quality. It sounds big. It is big. Legendary is an endgame project.

Scale check from the wiki's own worked example: legendary EM plants set up to make legendary processing units turn about 280 normal electronic circuits and 28 normal advanced circuits into one legendary processing unit.

Keeping it from clogging

Loops die two ways. The first is the exact-ingredient rule. A crafter set to an uncommon recipe will not touch rare items, so if your sorter lets tiers mix on the feedback belt, machines starve while the belt backs up behind them. Use filter splitters or filter inserters and give each quality its own lane or chest, all the way around the loop. Plan a sink for surplus mid-tiers too - if you only want legendary, the uncommons and rares still pile up, and the clean answer is recycling those as well, one tier of machines at a time.

The second death is backed-up recyclers. They hold limited output slots (12 internal slots, one stack per item type) and stall when full, which chokes everything upstream. Make the recycler output belts fast and the storage roomy, at least while you first spin the loop up.

The LDS loop

Low density structure is the classic closed loop. The assembler recipe is 2 steel, 20 copper, 5 plastic, 15 seconds. Recycling one LDS gives back half a steel plate, 5 copper, and 1.25 plastic - the same three materials that went in. So the loop feeds itself and only bleeds on the recycler's 75% cut.

That cut is beatable. Each lap, crafting productivity multiplies your materials while the recycler eats 75%, so the loop breaks even when total productivity hits 300%. LDS has its own productivity research: +10% per level, infinite levels, capped at 300%, needing metallurgic science. An assembling machine 3 with four legendary productivity module 3s starts at 100%, so 20 research levels (about 10 million science, give or take) caps you out, and from there the loop runs forever on a fixed pile of steel, copper, and plastic. Put the quality modules in the recyclers and let productivity live in the crafters. One warning: use the assembling machine recipe, not the foundry's casting version. Casting eats molten metal, and fluids never come back out of a recycler.

Platform loops

Crushers have two module slots and quality modules still work fine on crushing recipes. What changed in 2.1.7: reprocessing recipes no longer accept quality modules at all, which killed the old 80%-return legendary chunk loop. The chunk-return chance on basic crushing went up from 20% to 30% in the same patch, so upcycling chunks still works, it's just hungrier - keep crushing quality chunks and re-rolling until they hit legendary. The crushed outputs roll quality too, so a platform can ship legendary iron ore, carbon, and ice (from metallic, carbonic, and oxide chunks) straight down to the surface.

Choosing Items Worth Upgrading

So what's worth all that effort? Mostly the things that hold modules or multiply everything else.

First in line

Quality module 3s come first, always. A legendary one is 6.2% versus 2.5%, and every legendary quality module makes the next legendary cheaper to roll. It's the bootstrap, and the game even hands you an achievement for your first legendary one.

Productivity module 3s sit right behind. A legendary prod 3 gives +25% productivity instead of +10%, and unlike stacking more productivity modules, the quality bonus costs you no crafting speed.

After that, spend on the machines that hold the modules:

• Big mining drills: resource drain drops from 50% to 8% at legendary, so each patch lasts about six times longer. They've got four module slots if you want quality ore too.
• Electromagnetic plants: crafting speed 2 to 5, plus those five slots.
• Foundries: speed 4 to 10.
• Beacons: a legendary beacon is about 1.66 times stronger than a normal one, so you need roughly a third as many, and every tier step shaves another sixth off their power draw.

The payoff stacks multiplicatively. The wiki's example: one EM plant with five productivity 3s in twelve double-speed-module beacons makes about 45 green circuits a second at normal quality. Make every piece legendary and the same layout makes about 600. That's over 13x from the same machines.

Personal gear and comfort picks

Mech armor is the fun one. Each tier step adds +1 equipment grid in both directions, and personal roboports gain a recharge slot per step, so a legendary suit holds way more stuff (filling one completely with legendary equipment is literally an achievement). Laser turrets stretch from 24 to 36 tiles of range, and ammo damage climbs 30% per step. Steel chests go from 48 to 120 slots. Small electric poles grow from a 5x5 to a 15x15 supply area with 17.5 tiles of wire reach, which quietly deletes half the poles in a grid. Asteroid collectors gain an arm and a bigger reach per step if platform throughput is your ceiling. And quality science packs are the endgame research play - legendary packs counting as six is a straight 6x on whatever flows through your labs.

Usually not worth it

Belts, pipes, walls, trains, and cargo wagons get health and nothing else, and you probably weren't losing trains to damage anyway. Inserters do spin 30% faster per tier (302 to 756 degrees per second for a base inserter at legendary), but that's a rounding error next to what the same modules do anywhere else. Rocket silos can't use quality modules at all, and a fancy-tier stone furnace is still a stone furnace.

So the spending order: legendary quality module 3s, then productivity 3s, then the drills and plants that hold them, then the armor if you want the fun stuff. That 280-circuits-per-legendary-processing-unit price is what skipping the upgrade path costs you - pay it once and you won't want to pay it again.