Description
Fulgora Automatic Quality Upcyclers
A collection of bot-based upcyclers that automatically follows your currently unlocked quality tiers.
The blueprint detects the highest quality tier currently available, upcycles items until that tier, and then stockpiles them there. As soon as the next quality tier becomes available, it automatically starts recycling the entire stockpile and upcycling it again.
The factory consumes one stacked turbo belt of scrap and uses all of it.
How to use
- Build the blueprint.
- Add at least 2,000 logistics bots.
- Connect one stacked turbo belt of scrap.
- Connect the factory to an external power source to start the process.
- Once its internal power production starts running, the factory becomes self-powered and can be disconnected from the external power network.
Notes:
- All T3 modules can be replaced with T2 modules without changing the design.
- While the factory is being built, you may see several "Make sure to connect the Q signal" warnings. You can ignore them. They are part of an automatic test that checks whether every component receives the quality signal, so the test will fail until the blueprint is fully built.
Products
Structures
- Roboports
- Beacons
- Big electric poles
- Substations
- Accumulators
- Lightning collectors
- Recyclers
Equipment
- Personal batteries
- Personal roboports
- Mech armor
How it works
Requester chests request one iron gear of each quality. When a gear of a new quality appears, the factory knows that quality tier has been unlocked.
Since scrap produces large amounts of iron gears, a newly unlocked quality tier is normally detected in less than a minute.
Circuit logic then selects the highest unlocked quality and:
- Upcycles all lower-quality items
- Stops at the highest unlocked tier
- Stockpiles items of that quality
- Starts recycling the stockpile once the next tier is detected
Why these items?
In general, I think Vulcanus is better for large-scale quality production.
However, Fulgora scrap gives access to many intermediate items without requiring a complex production chain. This makes it useful for producing infrastructure and personal equipment early, especially mech armor, without waiting until late game or depending on random quality results.
The design is intended to be placed early and left running while you build the rest of the factory.
Scrap productivity and upgrades
The blueprint is designed to work with scrap productivity levels from 0 to 15 using normal-quality buildings.
Upgrading the buildings allows the factory to run up to 2.5 times faster. With legendary buildings, the same design can handle the maximum scrap productivity level of 31 without any other changes.
The factory monitors its input load and warns you if the recyclers cannot handle all incoming scrap, for example after increasing scrap productivity without upgrading the buildings.
Steel is the main limiting factor of this blueprint. Steel productivity, together with scrap productivity, will increase the production rate of most items.
Updates
15/8/2026 - Version 0.5
- Major rebuild: Rebuilt and reordered most of the blueprint around a new, more compact upcycler template. Also reduced the number of arithmetic combinators that always multiply by a fixed value by using blueprint parameter features instead.
- Size: Reduced the blueprint from 215×107 to 209×90 tiles, an 18% reduction in total area.
- Upcycling logic: Highest-quality ingredients are no longer used to produce end products unless the stockpile of that product is low.
- Upcyclers: Made all upcyclers more compact, reducing their height by 3 tiles.
- Upcyclers: Updated the settings of almost all upcyclers for better performance and to prevent potential deadlocks.
- Upcycling logic: All upcyclers now stockpile more items at the highest unlocked quality and do not recycle that stockpile until the next quality tier is unlocked.
- Fix: Added a missing recycler to the recycler upcycler.
- Scrap handling: Scrap requesters now request scrap of all qualities instead of only normal-quality scrap.
- Scrap handling: Moved overflow buffer chests closer to the scrap recyclers to reduce bot travel distance.
- Scrap handling: Added a note to the input display clarifying that scrap can be supplied at any quality.
- Fix: Removed a leftover splitter from the buffer area where the stone buffer was removed.
- Rocket silos: Reduced the number of rocket silos from four to three, as this factory is not intended to continuously launch large numbers of rockets.
- Layout: Moved the rocket silos to the bottom-right of the blueprint.
- Production: Removed one roboport assembler to reduce competition for steel, which remains the main limiting resource.
- Iron sticks: Reduced stored iron-stick amounts at all qualities and improved handling when too many iron sticks accumulate.
- Fix: Added a missing inserter to iron-gear disposal.
- Stone: Added a second uncommon stone-brick furnace.
- Stone: Removed normal stone-to-brick production. After the concrete recycling changes in Factorio 2.1.14, normal stone bricks are already produced in sufficient quantities.
- Concrete: Reduced the number of concrete voiders based on the updated Factorio 2.1.14 recycling rates.
- Steel: Added three additional uncommon steel furnaces.
- Steel: Added a rare steel furnace and another epic steel furnace.
- Circuits: Added production of rare and epic electronic circuits and advanced circuits when needed and when sufficient resources are available.
- Engines: Added another normal engine-unit assembler and another normal electric-engine-unit assembler.
- Flood protection: Added additional normal copper flood protection for situations where no normal copper is needed and the standard flood control is insufficient.
- Flood protection: Added additional normal iron flood protection for situations where no normal iron is needed and the standard flood control is insufficient.
- Fix: Added protection against possible holmium-plate overflow.
- Production: Added uncommon, rare, and epic superconductor production.
- Power: Increased power output.
6/8/2026 - Version 0.3
- Removed the top row of roboports. They were not needed to charge all the bots, and removing them keeps the bots closer to where they are needed. It also makes the blueprint smaller and easier to fit on an island.
- Improved the quality detector: it now uses one requester chest that requests all qualities instead of five separate requester chests.
- As steel is the main limiting factor, removed one EMP producing each of the following: big electric poles, substations, lightning rods, and lightning collectors. This splits the available steel between fewer consumers.
- Doubled the number of steel furnaces.
- Batteries are now produced only when the battery stockpile is low, allowing more iron to be used for steel.
- Added another assembler producing normal iron sticks to better meet demand.
- Reduced the stored amount of higher-quality iron sticks, as they are only needed for big electric poles.
- Added a missing limit to the uncommon iron-stick requester.
- Reduced the normal iron-gear buffer by half.
- Fixed the uncommon stone-brick furnace requesting uncommon stone bricks instead of uncommon stone.
- Removed all quality-stone buffers except normal stone. Higher-quality stone is only needed for lightning rods, so it is now turned directly into bricks and consumed.
- Added furnaces for epic and legendary stone bricks.
- Moved the normal and uncommon stone furnaces closer to where the bricks are used, reducing bot travel distance.
- Changed the modules in the rare and epic stone-brick furnaces from speed to quality modules.
- Changed many bulk inserters to fast inserters where the additional throughput was not needed, reducing power consumption.
- Changed the ice-voider recycler from speed modules to efficiency modules. It is already fast enough under the beacon effect.
6/8/2026 - Version 0.2
Initial release
