What's the point of upgrade-in-place feature?

[XANi]

It's more expensive than building machine as it costs same materials + a bunch of kits.

Building new one costs less and you can sell old one. What's the point ?

[syzara]

It costs less of the materials, and you don't have to sell your old machines. If you kill enough beasties, you'll have the machine kits anyway.

[JVC]

All upgrades cost fewer materials than just building the new better version.

[mechaboy]

Originally posted by syzara:

It costs less of the materials, and you don't have to sell your old machines. If you kill enough beasties, you'll have the machine kits anyway.

At what point do we get upgrade kits from running hazardous ruins? I haven't started running Gecko Station yet.

[syzara]

You get the kits sometimes from the 'boss' creatures in the wild, like Wild Alpha Yakmels and Boxing Jacks.

Not from hazardous ruins. Also, Gecko Station is not a Hazardous Ruin.

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

Upgrade kits are very easy to get, there are three yakmel bosses running around near your house and each one almost always drops one.

[Stupendous Man]

Here is the main reason I upgrade instead of building new ones: Refining. The higher level machine, the more rare materials it takes to refine them, and when you are searching for a particular effect like the 12% increased production output (Best one imo) it's a lot easier to just build a tier one machine and refine it using Bloodstone (which you should have tons of by then) until you get the effect you want and then upgrrade it to tier three. Yes you will still need to refine it at tier three to get it to it's max level, but it's much easier and cheaper than building it at tier 3 and refining it then.