Quality Field Guide

01 · Planet order

Quality isn't a Nauvis-only system — Fulgora's Recycler and Quality Module 3 production are prerequisites for the loops in this guide. The order you visit the other four planets in also shapes how painful the run is.

Vulcanus → Fulgora → Gleba → Aquilo is the standard first-playthrough order. Vulcanus and Fulgora don't depend on each other, so going straight from Vulcanus to Fulgora is completely valid — in fact it's the more common path, for two reasons:

• Fulgora unlocks mech armor, which lets you fly — that makes Gleba's terrain and enemies much easier to handle once you get there.

• Fulgora has no biters, just lightning and power management — a gentler planet to learn the new mechanics on before Gleba's spoilage puzzle.

Aquilo's placement never changes — it requires science packs from Vulcanus, Fulgora, and Gleba to unlock, so it's always the last stop regardless of the middle order. Some experienced players do Gleba second on purpose, skipping mech armor for a harder challenge — that's a deliberate difficulty choice, not the default recommendation.

02 · The five tiers

Quality only changes the stats of the item itself — it doesn't change what the item does. A legendary belt is still a belt, just a faster, tougher one.

03 · How a quality roll works

Every quality module installed in a machine adds a flat quality chance to that machine. This is the probability that a single craft produces something better than its ingredients, instead of a plain copy.

When a craft does roll an upgrade, it doesn't always move up just one tier. The jump size itself is random, and each extra tier is ten times rarer than the last:

A machine can only ever output a quality that's higher than or equal to its ingredients — quality never goes down mid-craft. This is also why higher-quality ingredients matter: feeding Uncommon parts into a machine gives every output a head start.

Starting from higher-quality ingredients doesn't raise your quality chance — that percentage still comes purely from your modules. What it does is shrink the number of tier-jumps needed to hit your target, and since each extra jump is 10x rarer, that's a huge difference in practice:

Same modules, same q — crafting from Rare ingredients is 90x more likely to land Legendary in one shot than crafting from Normal. This is the real reason upcycling loops route Rare and Epic intermediates into their own matching-quality crafts instead of recycling everything back down to Normal — you bank the odds boost on every craft afterward. Try it below by changing the ingredient quality.

04 · Roll simulator

05 · The recycler loop

Rolling straight from raw ingredients to Legendary is astronomically unlikely on its own — with four Normal-quality Tier 3 modules, it takes roughly 14,400 Normal items fed through a pure recycler loop to net one Legendary item. The fix is looping rejects back through a recycler instead of throwing them away.

The recycler returns about 25% of an item's ingredients on average (no fluids), and each returned batch gets its own fresh quality roll. Route only the tiers below your target back into the recycler — anything at or above target goes straight to storage.

The Electromagnetic Plant is the strongest quality-farming machine: five module slots, and it's one of the few machines that can hold quality and productivity modules at once. Most other machines force you to pick one or the other.

06 · Build order checklist

07 · What's actually worth farming