Mixed feelings about this one.

On the one hand, it looks like an interesting game mechanic and I can see it being fun to chase some legendary gear.

On the other, it all feels a bit Fortnite-esque, especially with the names they currently have.

The graphics look really awkward too. All those legendary inserters don’t look at all good IMO.

The naming and graphics are presumably easier to change than the core mechanics, so hopefully things will evolve a little there before the final release.

The recycler seems like a really cool concept! No more chests filled with old-gen items laying around.

I initially hated the idea, but if it’s possible to hit crazy benchmarks without trains then it gives a new way of reaching mega base.

Also it can limit the reliance on blueprints. There is something satisfying about pasting a big block, but it gets repetitive when you are pasting your 8th green circuit block.

We haven’t seen what actual game progression will look like within the expansion, but I feel like if progression ends up looking similar to vanilla with the vast majority of resources going towards science production, the quality mechanic will not even be a large part of the game if science itself has no benefits from increased quality, so I hope that there’s more news to come on how quality will impact progression. It feels like this information about this was intentionally left out in today’s update, likely to allow diving in deeper in future updates.

I think most “casual” progression around building more “factory parts” in vanilla usually looks like a single assembler slowly churning out items to fill up a single chest (or a few slots within a single chest), and just letting that run while focusing on other active tasks. I think quality will help make that specific part of progression a little more interesting, with needing to recycle lower-quality products back into the manufacturing chain, and/or tiering your outputs and prioritizing putting the best machines in certain areas while saving the mid-tier ones for other use cases. The randomness factor is concerning on the surface, but at least based on the numbers presented, it looks like the ability to produce items of a specific quality is very much intended to be a consistent factor, and not something akin to like hunting for rare drops in an RPG that tend to be tedious.

“Nerfing” Speed Modules by cutting their quality seems a bit reactive to the traditional/overused “assembler w/ Prod3 modules surrounded by beacons with Speed3 modules” setup, and I’m not sure if this is intended to shake that up so that there isn’t a single “right answer” for every type of product being manufactured, but given that current Factorio is what a factory with all “worst” quality manufacturing would look like, this feels more like unlocking new ways to grow the factory that aren’t just scaling out the same patterns from before, so I think this might be okay.

Overall I’m pretty excited about this within the context of the expansion. I think this is a good way of producing a different and fresh new experience to building the factory, while not invalidating the way Factorio has worked before, and I expect that future FFFs will be showing more about progression within the expansion and other new mechanics that play off of quality to provide similarly different experiences from the base game.

I am happy that you can avoid quality. While this seems to be a great feature, having two or three different kinds of each item occupy separate inventory spaces would surely make the game a lot more complicated for less experienced players. I do see using it myself though, but I feel like I would need a really mature base before I try anything more than equipment.

What I didn’t get: do miners also produce higher quality ores when loaded with quality modules? And smelters?

I’m glad they said it’s optional. I don’t like this. We already have quality in tiers. Assembler 1, 2, 3. This just makes it random and harder to see. Random isn’t fun, it’s tedious. Harder to see isn’t fun, it’s just mental tax.

I was pretty skeptical when I first started reading through this, but I’m actually kind of looking forward to it now. People seem to be really turned off by the RNG, but with the recycler, you can essentially automate it away. I’m excited to play with recycling loop designs and separate production lines for high quality items/intermediates, and fast/efficient low quality production lines for science. I also think people are getting caught up in only thinking of the late game and waning to leap frog to tier 5 instead of thinking of the tiers as progression as you slowly build and iterate on your factory. I do agree that the naming for the tiers really doesn’t match Factorio though and something more industrial would fit better.