Or perhaps worded as the most optional, grindy aspect of the game, which is required for optimization but NOT in reaching the end.

Factorio Space Age has some rather foundational changes that impact significant portions of the game. First, is that each planet has a source of infinite resources. Second, each planet offers a unique building that provides a massive inherent productivity boost. Third, quality of an object has substantial impacts on production chains.

Infinite Resources

Nauvis offers infinite water + oil. Vulcanus has infinite iron, copper, stone, and sulfuric acid. Fulgura offers everything but coal, but in random amounts. Gleba is very weird – you could argue it has every base item in infinite quantities if you can get the production chains running. Aquilo has water, oil, and unique planet-based gases.

Space, with the appropriate set up, gives you infinite iron, copper, sulfur, coal, carbon, calcite and ice.

Production Boosts

Foundries, Electromagnetic Plants, Biochambers, and Cryogenic Plants all offer absolutely insane production boosts, not only in quantity but speed. You would be insane to create green/red/blue chips in an assembler instead of an EM Plant. This drastically reduces the value of production modules.

Quality

The difference between a normal and legendary item is substantial. The item could be 500% more efficient as a result, meaning you need less of them for the same result. Every planet has space restrictions, so you need to build more compactly.

The challenge in creating quality is that you can either gamble that something gets better, or practically build with at-level material. You can hope for a rare assembler after 100 tries, or you can build a rare assembler with rare (and only rare) materials.

Enter upscaling

Upscaling

The act of brute force gambling. This is only possible due to the two other factors – infinite resources + production boosts. If the odds are 1:100, then you will do it 100 times because you can. If you want a legendary item, you would need to do it about 18,000 times.

To make this process faster, you can upscale. The concept is as follows:

The model can be applied at large (belts/trains) and small (bots) volumes. Until you unlock rare + epic research, rare is going to be amazing in its own right, and chasing legendary is a very long tail.

The builds are somewhat straightforward. You feed a set of production-boosted machines with base material. You send all the results to a set of recyclers with quality modules, which will randomly increase the quality of the output. You will only get back 25% of what you put in, but with enough iterations you’ll eventually generate legendary items.

Thankfully at later parts this isn’t a required activity for all material, but unfortunately it is for some specific items. And more importantly, this shifts the mindset from creating legendary end items to creating legendary materials.

Let’s say you want to crate legendary Quality Modules. That needs legendary superconductors. Those require plastic (easy enough), copper (strangely a byproduct from plastic), oil (quality doesn’t matter) and holmium plates (that are liquid based, therefore can’t be legendary at base). Oddly, the best approach is to build an upscaler for supercapacitors instead. If you recycle those, you get legendary batteries, green circuits, supercapacitors, and holmium plates. As you progress here, you can go from 2.5% quality to 6.2% quality in the recycler (so 10% to 24.8% as they can have 4 each).

The concept of upscaling really takes off on Fulgora, but the true end goal is only do it for base / intermediate material and actually craft as much legendary as you can.

Nauvis

• Biter Eggs need a quality upscaler. And turrets as they can spoil to bugs.
• Uranium seems to be best with ammo, and then you can dump it in a kovarex plant to make tons.

Vulcanus

• Calcite comes from upscaling on a space platform.
• Tungsten is best to upscale the raw ore. You can get bars from Mk3 belts, though not sure that’s efficient.

Fulgora

• Holmium Plates and superconductors come from a somewhat complex upscaler.

Gleba

• Gleba is easy because resources are infinite.
• Gleba is hard because no plants have quality, so you can only upcycle end items.
• Gleba is hard because you need to maintain normal quality items for science and bioflux, meaning 2 factories
• Gleba is hard because your pollution will likely double, meaning more stompers.
• Jelly + Yumako Mash needs to be upscaled. Everything depends on these 2 items.

Aquilo

• I think the devs took pity because almost everything on this planet is liquid. Lithium takes 1 Holmium plate… with 8x production modules you get 200% bonus.