Tutorial:Scrap recycling strategies

Unlike with most other resources, processing scrap yields a variety of items. Furthermore, besides imports from space platforms or other planets, it is the only long-term source of most resources on Fulgora, leaving players with no choice other than to rely on scrap.

The easy part

To make the task of sorting the recycled scrap less daunting, some may be easiest to first deal with the items that have a known destination:

• Ice only serves one purpose while on Fulgora, and that is to be melted for water.
• Solid fuel can be used in one of two ways: it is either burnt directly or converted into rocket fuel. The latter is needed to make rocket parts, and since can also be used as fuel, there should be no problem in simply converting all solid fuel into rocket fuel (which can even make trains go faster). Note that converting solid fuel into rocket fuel also requires light oil, which can be cracked from heavy oil using water from melted ice. Heavy oil can be obtained from the oillands by using an offshore pump.
• Holmium ore only has one use, which is to create holmium solution by combining it with water and stone.

Aside from the above, stone has various uses (even aside from its use in producing holmium solution), but as will not interact with the remainder of the recycling process (it is neither recyclable nor gained by recycling another item), it can also be sorted right away.

Sorting the above leaves only 8 items left to be dealt with among the 12 items produced by scrap recycling.

Further recycling

Among the 12 items produced by scrap recycling, 7 of them are themselves recyclable:

• Processing units can be recycled for electronic circuits and advanced circuits.
• Advanced circuits can be recycled for electronic circuits, plastic bars, and copper wire.
• Low density structures can be recycled for copper plates, plastic bars, and steel plates.
• Concrete can be recycled for stone bricks and iron ore, the latter of which can be melted into iron plates.
• Batteries can be recycled for iron plates and copper plates.
• Copper wire can be recycled for copper plates.
• Iron gear wheels can be recycled for iron plates.

In addition to these, the electronic circuits from recycled processing units and advanced circuits can themselves be recycled for copper wires and iron plates.

Without direct access to iron or copper plates, some of these will have to be recycled. The simplest solution is to recycle everything down to iron plates, copper plates, steel plates, plastic bars, and stone bricks, and then remake everything when needed; That way, unused intermediates produced by scrap recycling will not cause clobbering. Processing units, advanced circuits, electronic circuits, and copper wires must be recycled in that order, as items earlier in that sequence will yield some of the later items upon recycling. Aside from these, low density structures, concrete, batteries, and iron gear wheels can all be recycled in parallel.

Note that steel can not be recycled; Although it is made using iron, it is a smelting recipe, which recyclers do not handle.

Skipping the recycling process for select items

Recycling is a wasteful process, as only 25% of ingredient items and no fluids are returned upon recycling. Furthermore, both recycling and re-crafting requires enough machines to perform these operations fast enough, and room might be limited, especially on Fulgora. Therefore, simply recycling all items, while simple, is not ideal. This is even more true for batteries and processing units, which take sulfuric acid to re-craft.

When possible, it is often preferred to simply use the items emitted by scrap recycling directly. For that, there needs to be a way for these items to skip the recycling process when they are needed. This problem has a simple solution: Right before an item gets recycled, place a splitter, and connect its second output to wherever the item is needed. Make sure to set the splitter's priority output to that new belt; That way, items only get recycled when they are in excess.

Note that being able to craft more of these items might still be a good idea. For example, imagine a factory whose sole focus is to launch rockets. Two of the ingredients used in rocket parts, specifically processing units and low density structures, are among the direct results of scrap recycling. However, to rely on these exclusively will leave most other products of scrap recycling unused, even though some of them could be used to make even more processing units and low density structures.

Getting rid of the excess

Scrap recycling will never yield the exact distribution of items that players might need. With scrap recycling, this is a problem; Unlike on Nauvis, where having enough iron will simply pause iron production and nothing else, to pause production of one scrap recycling product is to pause scrap recycling altogether. In other words, if not every item produced by scrap recycling is consumed, then the belts will clobber, and scrap recycling is stopped from producing any items at all.

Unfortunately, it is not always possible to use every item that scrap recycling produces. Some items have a limited set of applications that are not always relevant. Other times, you will need more of one item than another, causing an imbalance in what items are consumed.

When an item has no other uses, it may therefore be necessary to destroy it outright. There is a way to do this: When trying to recycle an item that has no recyclable recipe, a recycler will output the item itself with a 25% probability, leaving a 75% probability of destroying it. By looping the output of such a recycler back into itself, it is possible to completely destroy these items.

Be warned that scrap, while bountiful on some islands, is still a finite resource that can run out if wasted carelessly. And if all items produced by recycling have drains that simply destroy the items, it is possible to consume scrap even when the factory does not need it.

Efficiently trashing excess

Some items produced directly or indirectly from scrap recycling have long crafting times. Especially bad is steel, which in an unmoduled recycler takes 2 seconds to recycle one steel, or 2.66 seconds in total considering the 25% chance of not destroying it.

Some of these slow-to-recycle products can be crafted into other items at higher rates than they can be recycled. Steel can be turned into steel chests at 20 steel per second inside an unmoduled normal yellow assembler. This can then in-turn be recycled back down to steel even more quickly due to the 16x recycling speedup. Considering the recycling yield, a yellow assembler without modules can handle 15 steel per second, and a recycler 96, compared to a recycler for steel which handles 0.375 steel per second.

Some such shortcuts are (speed comparison assuming one assembler and recycler at crafting speeds 1.25 and 0.5):

• Steel to steel chest (40x speedup)
• Iron to iron chest (8x speedup)
• Concrete to hazard concrete (6.25x speedup)
• Stone to landfill (10.42x speedup), note that landfill is unrecyclable so needs to be looped back into the recycler not the assembler

Copper to copper cable is the same speed as direct recycling. Mixing in copper with steel at 2:1 to make heat pipes is a 10x speedup, as long as enough steel is trashed together with the copper.

Low-priority production

As an alternative to outright destroying the excess items, it may be possible to turn them into something that might be useful later, so that the items are not completely wasted. The point is not to make something that the player will need right away, as that is the job of the main production lines; Rather, it is to be seen as a bonus that players might want but do not need.

It should be noted that even these products will eventually fill up all storage and cause clobbering, meaning that destroying items might still become necessary in the long term.

High-quality items are a good candidate, as they take a lot of ingredients and are often nice to have without being outright necessary.

Other tips and tricks

Recycling with quality modules

The recycler does not accept productivity modules. This is to prevent a net positive of items from being created when crafting and recycling items in a loop. However, this rejection of productivity modules in recyclers also applies to scrap recycling, even though there is no way to re-craft scrap from the results of recycling. In exchange, the game offers infinite research for increasing the productivity of scrap recycling, specifically. This all means that players are free to use a different kind of module, such as quality modules, without worrying about the loss of productivity.

Players may chose to place quality modules in their scrap recyclers and sort the items by quality, sending normal items to the main factory and using higher-quality items for a head start in quality manufacturing.

However, players should keep in mind that, much like productivity, quality modules benefit from long production chains, as it increases the number of chances for item quality to be increased. Even after sorting away all normal items, only 10% of the remaining items will be rare or higher, as the probability of skipping a quality tier will always be 10% regardless of modules.

It should also be noted that uncommon or higher holmium ore is not actually better than normal holmium ore, because its sole use is to be used as an ingredient for holmium solution, which is a fluid and therefore erases the quality of the holmium ore.