A legendary farming space platform runs a simple concept. Recycle chunks with quality mods for a percentage chance to upgrade them. Each recycle has an 80% success rate, and they can take 2x mods. Regular Mk3 mods are 2.5%. Epic are 6.2%. So double that per attempt.

You do it for regular, uncommon, rare, and epic. Then you crush it for an output. This assumes you have the type you want and don’t need to recycle the legendary chunk.

Compound math is both simple and not intuitive. If I ask the odds of flipping a coin, simple 50% chance. If I ask the odds of flipping heads 5 times in a row, it’s 0.5^5 or closer to 3%.

So let’s look at the difference between regular quality mods and legendary mods in this setup.

• The first stage has an 80% chance to get something, and of that result, 5%/12.4% are upgraded.
• The result is 4% and 9.9%
• This happens 4 times.
• Regular odds: 0.0003%.
• Legendary odds: 0.01%

There are 2 zeros between those odds. Or put differently, you should get 3 per 1 million chunks for regular and 1 per 10 thousand for legendary. No need to explain why that is a great improvement.

The challenge is getting legendary quality mods. It is more of a time sink than seems at first as you need a lot of blue chips. Way more than you think.

Real World

Compound interest applies in the real world, mostly with banking and credit. I won’t delve into the ethics of credit, but the math is super interesting. Let’s pretend you have a $500,000 mortgage, with a 25 year amortization (total duration)

• At 5%, and monthly payments you would pay $34,800 annually. After 5 years, you’ll have brought the debt down by $57,000. $117,000 in interest.
• At 6%, and monthly payments you would pay $38,400 annually. After 5 years, you’ll have brought the debt down by $50,800. $141,200 in interest.

A 1% change increases your payments by nearly $4,000 a year (so $20k over the 5 years), but end up reducing your debt by $6,800 less. That’s $26,800 gone due to 1%… not what you may instinctively think as being $5,000 (1% of $500,000).

Option 1 – Farm Materials

• Build a legendary farm space platform to collect iron/copper/coal
• Get LDS research to 15.
• Use coal to make legendary plastic, iron + copper to make legendary blue chips
• Make 4 legendary Mk3 productivity chips first, put them in a foundry. That gives 300% productivity.
• Make LDS from 5 legendary plastic and molten (free) metal. Get 5 legendary plastic + 5 legendary steel + 5 legendary copper.
  • You can do this step before LDS research at 15, you’ll just lose plastic. Which may or not be a big deal depending on how much legendary coal you can get, and investment in plastic research.
• The copper (recycled) can be used to craft blue chips.

Option 2 – Upcycle Materials

• Get blue chip research to lvl 13.
• Build blue chips on Vulcanus (materials are free here). Start with normal Mk3 productivity chips. Upgrade to legendary when you can to give 300% and no-loss recycling.
  • As above, you can do this before research 13, you’ll just lose materials.
• Recycle the material with recyclers + quality mods.
• Use those results to build uncommon chips, and recycle those
• Same with rare, and epic.
• You now have mats for legendary materials.
• This process improves the more you research blue chip production. At level 14, you technically could recycle legendary blue chips for more mats than you put in.

Option 1 is where you will end up eventually. Option 2 may be faster, it’s significantly less research but it’s also on Fulgora. Research there takes up material you’re going to want to use for other things. Option 1 can be done 100% on Vulcanus. Next up, legendary production.