Quality Casino: The House Always Wins

🎰 Quality Casino — The House Always Wins

The return of the "space casinos". Quality Casino replaces the exploit with the real thing: an intentional, balanced, neon-drenched gambling district you build right into your factory. Feed items in, stake casino chips, and gamble for higher quality tiers. Reels spin, neon chases, nearby players hear the jackpot siren, and the whole force gets an alert.

The loop

1. Mint chips from the surplus materials you're already drowning in: copper, steel, plastic, depleted uranium. Three tiers: copper, steel, and the purple-rimmed VIP chip, minted with depleted uranium or, on Vulcanus, straight from tungsten plates and carbon. Chips are pure currency; they have no other use.
2. Stake a plain item plates, circuits, modules, machines go into a Slot Machine or Grand Casino, alongside a stack of chips.
3. Spin. Every few seconds the house consumes chips and rolls the odds. Win and your item climbs the quality ladder. Lose and it just sits there for the next spin.
4. Your item is mostly never lost and never downgraded. The house edge lives entirely in the chips, which are always consumed and get pricier the higher your item's quality climbs. The All-in machine changes this and you CAN lose items.

Better chips shift the odds your way. Better materials in, better odds out.

Baseline odds

These tables show the base weights before the default item-value adjustment; cheap stakes get a small boost while expensive stakes get a small penalty.

Slot Machine (fast, cheap, one item per spin):

| Result | Copper | Steel | VIP | |---|---:|---:|---:| | No change | 74% | 60% | 45% | | +1 tier | 24% | 33% | 40% | | +2 tiers | 1.8% | 6% | 12% | | 💰 JACKPOT (max tier) | 0.2% | 1% | 3% |

Grand Casino (better ceiling, High Roller mode):

| Result | Copper | Steel | VIP | |---|---:|---:|---:| | No change | 68% | 52% | 35% | | +1 tier | 28% | 36% | 42% | | +2 tiers | 3.5% | 9% | 17% | | 💰 JACKPOT (max tier) | 0.5% | 3% | 6% |

Jackpot vaults an item straight to max quality, refunds 2× the spin's chips, and if alerts are on pings the whole server. High Roller mode rolls up to 10 units at once on a better odds column, for 4× the per-item cost. Startup settings tune the house edge, quality cost escalation, value weighting, spin interval, pity threshold, Golden Tank and Golden Locomotive chances, and ambient machine sounds; map settings toggle jackpot alerts and win sounds mid-save, no restart needed.

It's a real material sink, not a legendary printer

Spin prices escalate steeply with your item's current quality, so gambling stays a real material sink instead of a free legendary factory. The rare low-tier jackpot that skips the expensive steps is the dream that keeps cheap spins exciting. Cheap items even gamble slightly better humble stakes get an odds nudge, so "gamble plates, craft up the results" is a genuine strategy.

Fully automatable

Nothing here needs a human between spins. Inserters feed chips and stakes from any side; inserters pull results from any side. Wire a filter inserter to recycle sub-max-quality outputs back into the stake input and walk away; a belt of iron plates converges into legendary iron plates while you're off building the mall. Machines learn their stake from the first inserter you point at them, and once you research Bot delivery (space science) a toggle in each window lets logistic robots keep its chips topped up like a requester chest.

The rest of the floor

• The Casino Cage - the cashier's window. Feed it items of uncommon quality or better and it pays casino chips into its output, priced by quality and value at a fraction of what the upgrade cost. The house still wins, but your uncommon junk finally has a buyer. Normal items pass straight through.
• The All-In Table - the hardcore cabinet. Every spin bets your whole stack at half price per item. Win and every item upgrades; lose and the house destroys a slice of them. The only place in the mod your items are on the line, and it says so in red.
• THE POT - a force-wide progressive. Every losing spin on your floor rakes into it; when it fills (at most once an hour), the next jackpot anywhere also pays out ten random legendary copies of things you've gambled plus a sack of VIP chips.
• Golden trophies - roughly one jackpot in two thousand also pays out the Golden Tank, a solid-gold tank with vanilla firepower; one in twenty thousand pays the Golden Locomotive. Both are uncraftable and stay gold whatever colour you paint them.
• Space Age (with the expansion active): Fulgora's Scrap Chips technology mints chips straight from scrap, Vulcanus's VIP Minting mints VIP chips directly from tungsten plates and carbon with no lower-tier chips needed, and Gleba's Fresh Bets lets spoilable items gamble with their freshness intact - twice as fast, because a fresh item is worth more.

The circuit network is first-class:

• Outputs: tiers gained last spin, lifetime jackpots, current loss streak, live per-tier chip counts, and a staked-item presence signal kept in sync as chips and stakes move, not just when a spin completes.
• Inputs: wire the machine to directly drive signal-C ≥ 1 to stop the casino (stop-loss after a jackpot or an 8-loss streak; it spins by default) and signal-H to force High Roller. Card-counting combinator builds are the Factorio-native version of gambling skill. Two sample automation layouts ship in the README.