Recycler

Recycler

Edit

Recipe
3 + 20 + 40 + 6 + 20 → 1
Total raw
3 + 20 + 40 + 6 + 20
Map color
Health	300 390 480 570 750
Resistances	Fire: 0/80%
Stack size	20
Dimensions	4×2
Energy consumption	186 kW (electric)
Drain	6.0 kW (electric)
Crafting speed	0.5 0.65 0.8 0.95 1.25
Mining time	0.2
Pollution	2/m
Crafted only on
Module slots	4 slots
Prototype type	furnace
Internal name	recycler
Required technologies
Produced by

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Space Age expansion exclusive feature.

The recycler is a building that can convert most items into the ingredients used in their recipes, at the cost of losing 75% of said ingredients. In other words, it performs a lossy reversal of crafting.

It has 4 module slots, but it cannot use Productivity modules.

Mechanics

When an item enters a recycler, the item's main recipe is found, and the recycler is automatically set to perform its inverse.

For each type of item used as an ingredient in the recycled item's main recipe, the number of items returned by the recycler is decided by $\left\lfloor 0.25\cdot {\tfrac {i}{o}}+r\right\rfloor$, where $i$ is the number of items used as ingredients, $o$ is the number of items returned by the recipe, and $r$ is a random number that is greater than or equal to 0 but less than 1. On average, this returns exactly 25% of the items needed to craft one item of the same type as the recycled item. For example, recycling a processing unit always gives 5 electronic circuits while having a 50% chance of returning one advanced circuit.

All fluid ingredients are lost when recycling, as the recycler has no fluid output.

Without quality modules, the resulting items have the same quality as the item being recycled, even if the latter was crafted using lower-quality ingredients. Quality modules can further increase the output's quality, just like with regular non-recycling recipes.

The recycler has 12 internal slots for its output, but can only hold one stack of each item. The recycler will try to eject the contents of these slots, much like a mining drill. It is therefore not necessary to use an inserter to collect its output. Much like the big mining drill, if the recycler has more than one of an individual item type in its inventory, the recycler will output stacks of materials onto a belt if the stack inserter has been researched.

Non-recyclable items

The broad rule governing the recycler's ability to reverse a recipe is that it can only reverse recipes made in Assembling machines of some type. There are many exceptions to this, however. For the purposes of the recycler's ability to recycle items, the Electromagnetic plant counts as an "assembler". So all of its recipes count unless otherwise stated. Recipes shared by assemblers and other machines are not so clear-cut: sometimes they count as recipes for those other machines, but sometimes they count as pure assembler recipes.

Items can have multiple recipes; all that is needed for the recycler to reverse it is to find a single reversible recipe that produces that item.

If no valid recipe producing the item can be reversed, the recycler will return the same item 25% of the time (possibly with a Quality bonus if the appropriate modules are used), with the other 75% destroying the item.

Recipes which can be made in an assembler (possibly also in non-assembler buildings) which cannot be reversed:

• All science packs
• Biolab
• Holmium plate (due to only using a liquid as input)
• Landfill
• Superconductor
• Tungsten carbide
• Uranium fuel cell
• Wood processing
• Yumako mashing and Jelly.
• Iron bacteria and copper bacteria.

Recipes exclusively executed by non-assembler machines, but can still be reversed recycled:

• Battery
• Big mining drill
• Fusion reactor
• Fusion generator
• Railgun
• Railgun turret
• Turbo transport belt, Turbo underground belt, and Turbo splitter

Recipes shared by assembler/EMP and non-assembler machines which can be reversed:

• Biochamber
• Cryogenic plant
• Foundry
• Nutrients from spoilage

Unique recycling recipes

Some items have unique recycling recipes:

• Recycling scrap will perform the scrap recycling recipe, for which there is no inverse, as scrap can not be crafted. This is used to obtain most resources on Fulgora.
• Recycling one nutrients will yield 2.5x that amount of spoilage, as if they were made using the nutrients from spoilage recipe. This is useful for getting rid of excess nutrients, as they cannot be burned directly.

Stats

The recycling recipe for an item besides scrap takes time equal to 1/16th (0.0625) of the time it takes to craft that item. (Items without recipes, such as ore, are treated as having a crafting time of 0.5 seconds.) But because the recycler has a base crafting speed of 0.5, the time it takes one recycler to recycle one item is effectively 1/8th (0.125) of the item's crafting time without modules or beacons. For example, the time it takes to craft a steel plate in a stone furnace (which has a crafting speed of 1) is 16 seconds, and so recycling a steel plate takes 2 seconds. The following table provides some examples of how long it takes a recycler without modules or beacons to recycle one of that item, and the rate at which it recycles those items.

Recycler Input	Time	Rate
Steel plate	2.0s	0.5/s
Low density structure	1.875s	0.533/s
Processing unit	1.25s	0.8/s
Advanced circuit	0.75s	1.33/s
Copper plate	0.4s	2.5/s
Iron plate	0.4s	2.5/s
Iron ore	0.0625s	16/s

The scrap recycling recipe takes 0.2 seconds, meaning that it actually takes 0.4 seconds to run in a recycler, so a recycler takes in 2.5 scrap/s. The output rates are as follows:

Input	Output	Chance	Rate
Scrap	Iron gear wheel	20%	0.5/s
	Solid fuel	7%	0.175/s
	Concrete	6%	0.15/s
	Ice	5%	0.125/s
	Steel plate	4%	0.1/s
	Battery	4%	0.1/s
	Stone	4%	0.1/s
	Copper cable	3%	0.075/s
	Advanced circuit	3%	0.075/s
	Processing unit	2%	0.05/s
	Low density structure	1%	0.025/s
	Holmium ore	1%	0.025/s

In total, the recycler spits out 1.5 items/s, meaning 10 recyclers are just enough to saturate a yellow belt. The output values are increased by scrap recycling productivity research.

Technical details

Internally, the recycler uses the furnace prototype, which performs recipes that are automatically selected based on input ingredients. Every item in the game has its own "recycling" recipe, almost all of which are hidden in the Factoriopedia and can only be performed by a recycler.

Since there are hundreds of items in the game, as well as to ensure compatibility with third-party mods, most recycling recipes are not explicitly defined. Instead, recycling recipes are procedurally generated based on existing recipes. Depending on whether or not the item is deemed "recyclable", these procedurally generated recipes will either output a quarter of an item's ingredients or have a 25% chance of outputting the item itself.

The recyclabillity of most items is based on the category of their recipes, with some exceptions being explicitly filtered by the name of the recipe's prototype. Furthermore, items with multiple viable recycling recipes are made non-recyclable to avoid ambiguity, and recipes with multiple different products will fail to generate a recycling recipe, thereby making them irreversible as a default. Third-party mods can also explicitly make a recipe irreversible by setting the recipe's auto_recycle field to false.

The scrap recycling recipe is a special case, as it is the only hard-coded recipe. It is also the only recycling recipe that is not hidden from the player, and which can be performed without a recycler. (Notably, this recipe is defined by the Space Age mod rather than the Quality mod, as scrap is exclusive to the former.)

The generation of recycling recipes, as well as the filtering of non-recyclable recipes, is defined by the file recycling.lua in the quality mod's prototype folder. More specifically, the function default_can_recycle decides whether a given recipe can be recycled or not, and the function add_recipe_values does most of the configuration of recycling recipes, which includes setting the products of these recipes and how long they take to perform.

Trivia

• If the recycled item has a fluid ingredient, then the smoke emitted from the recycler matches the fluid in colour.

Gallery

History

• 2.0.7:
  • Introduced in Space Age expansion.

See also

• Quality