Tutorial:Scrap recycling strategies

Unlike with most other resources, processing scrap yields a variety of items, which is the most reliable source of obtaining most resources on Fulgora (aside from importing goods from other planets via the space platform). So it is important to understand how to use scrap on Fulgora to build a factory capable of crafting Electromagnetic science packs and launching them into space.

Recycling Fundamentals

Scrap can be gathered from Fulgoran ruins or by mining patches of scrap scattered throughout Fulgora. Scrap can be recycled by hand or with the Recycler. But before this can be done, the player will need to mine a Fulgoran vault ruin by hand to unlock the recycling recipe and the Recycler. Mining scrap with mining drills and recycling them with the Recycler is the most effective means of building a factory on Fulgora. The Recycler has an output; it can output its products directly onto a belt or into other entities, like the Active provider chest or even other Recyclers. Strategies for dealing with excess products is discussed later in this tutorial.

What is each recycled product used for?

Recycling scrap produces 12 different items, with Holmium ore and Low density structure being the most rare product, and Iron gear wheel being the most common. Of the 12 different items, three of them serve a singular purpose:

• Ice is melted into water
• Solid fuel is combined with light oil to make rocket fuel.
• Holmium ore is combined with water and stone to make holmium solution.

Water has various uses but it should be relatively easy to move around with pipes. Rocket Fuel is mainly used to craft Rocket parts, but it can be used as fuel for your trains on Fulgora or burnt to provide power. Light oil is needed to produce rocket fuel, which is cracked from heavy oil and water. Heavy oil is a limitless resource on Fulgora and it is pumped from the Oil ocean by using an offshore pump.

The remaining 9 items produced by scrap recycling are used as ingredients for other products, as crafting components for rocket parts, or further recycled into their respective ingredients; some items can only be obtained this way. While each item can be recycled, only the necessary recyclable items for building a factory capable of crafting science packs on Fulgora are mentioned below.

• Processing units are used as rocket parts, as ingredients for the Recycler and Electromagnetic plant, and it can be recycled into electronic circuits.
• Advanced circuits can be recycled for electronic circuits and plastic bars.
• Low density structures are used as rocket parts and can be recycled for copper plates and plastic bars.
• Concrete is mostly used to craft Refined concrete, but it is also used to craft the Recycler. Concrete can be recycled into stone bricks. The only purpose of stone bricks is to craft the Lightning rod.
• Batteries are used to craft Accumulators and Supercapacitors. It can be recycled down to copper plates and iron plates.
• Copper cable can be recycled for copper plates.
• Iron gear wheels can be recycled for iron plates.
• Steel is mostly used to craft Refined concrete, but it is also used to craft the Recycler and Electromagnetic plant.
• Stone is used to craft holmium solution and Electrolyte.

Other necessary ingredients

Electronic circuits, plastic bars, copper plates, iron plates, and stone bricks are are only obtained by recycling a recycled scrap.

• Electronic circuits are most easily obtained from processing units, but obtaining them from advance circuits is also a viable way since advance circuits are slightly more common and don't serve any purpose other than to being recycled. Electronic circuits are mainly used for crafting Supercapacitors.
• Plastic bars are most easily obtained from low density structures, but advance circuits is also a good source for the same reasons listed in the above point. Plastic bars are mainly used to craft Superconductors.
• Copper plates are most easily obtained from low density structures, but being one of the most rare scrap product, it may be better to recycle any of the three circuits down to copper plates (with electronic circuits having the best yields), or by recycling batteries or copper cable.
• Iron plates are best obtained from recycling iron gear wheels simply because iron gear wheels are so abundant.
• Stone bricks are only obtained from concrete and only are needed for crafting lightning rods.

With these items, the player has everything needed to craft all the necessary intermediate products in order to craft Fulgora's science pack and launch it into space!

Getting rid of excess ingredients

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 backup, 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
• Bricks to walls (5x speedup)

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. For example, instead of recycling all excess steel, the player could instead craft steel chests for additional storage, or Substations to expand the electric grid at a later point. 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 backups in the production line, meaning that destroying items might still become necessary in the long term.

Inserting quality modules into Recyclers is another way to manage excess ingredients while also obtaining higher quality items without simply recycling items to destruction. Producing higher quality items can consume 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.