Inverted Quality

Inverted Quality

This mod let you see how Factorio can work if the Quality system is inverted.

• Quality has only negative tiers, positive tiers are removed.
• Crafting items has a 2/3 chance to degrade the quality by one tier.
• Unlike vanilla quality, long production chains tend make items worse.
• Quality modules reduce the degradation chance in crafting.
• Note that quality modules are now unaffected by quality themselves due to an engine limitation.
• Enemies spawn with degraded quality, offsetting the extra pollution inevitably produced in this mod.
• Two new entities, the Downgrade Port and the Meltdown Facility, help with gameplay.

Quality tiers

This mod used to have five quality tiers. The gameplay turned out to be problematic, thus it now has 4.

| Quality | Level | Additional notes | |-----------------|-------|-------| | Normal | 0 | | | Shoddy | -1 | | | Defective | -3 | | | Broken | -3 | Items are nonfunctional |

Getting started

This mod is generally incompatible with existing saves. For new saves, it is recommended to increase the resource map sliders and optionally to decrease the map sliders for pollution and enemies.

Space Age is optional.

New entities

Downgrade port

A 1x1 entity that can be attached to the side of assemblers. Items inserted into the port are delivered to the assembler reduced in quality by one level.

Downgrade ports mean that quality in this mod is backwards-compatible: high-quality items can be used in low-quality recipes.

Meltdown facility

Items of any quality can be melted down into 1/8 of their base materials.

These materials come out of the Meltdown facility in Normal quality.

Base materials are defined as those obtained by repeated recycling. However, note that unlike chained recyclers which give a factor 1/4 at each step, meltdown performs _all the steps at once_ with an _overall_ factor of 1/8.

Further information

• Technically, this mod works by making higher ‘quality’ items worse combined with performing a large number of prototype transformations in order to make the best quality tier equivalent to Normal.
• There are likely to be some mistakes due to e.g. missing documentation on the Factorio wiki. This can cause entities to be much too powerful (if the undo operation was missed) or too weak (if it was applied incorrectly). Please report these cases in Discussion if you notice them.

• Like in vanilla, each instance of degradation has a 10% chance to be 'upgraded' to jump extra tiers. This applies to both machine crafting and handcrafting.
• Multi-step handcrafting results in extra-degraded final products (and no junk byproducts).
• A few base game issues affect this mod.
• Science pack durability stats are misrepresented in the UI.
• Mining drill resource drain, science pack drain rate and beacon power usage are immune to quality due to API limitations.

Special Thanks

• SafTheLamb for discussions on the names of the quality tiers.
• Hurricane for their Arc Furnace graphics used for the Meltdown Facility.
• AnotherZach, protocol_1903 and Osmo for feedback and improvements.