Legendary casting iron?

[Entropy]

I setup a good fast gathering legendary ores by farming by asteroid shuffling. I also stored legendary calcite for some reason. But can't use them to craft legendary iron plates in foundries as i understand? :(

So i need to produce plates,steel in electric furnaces?

[RiO]

Correct; because casting plates only takes the molten iron or copper as input.
Which is a fluid. Which does not carry any quality.
And thus the result will always be normal quality, or at best you can try to add quality modules to it, to proc it back into uncommon or rare.

If you want to directly make legendary plates, you either smelt legendary ore via electric furnaces, or you set up a recycling loop on the plates flowing from the foundries. (Iron and copper plates recycle into themselves, so you can endlessly feed them back into a quality-moduled recycler -- at 75% loss.)

[Hurkyl]

Originally posted by RiO:

(Iron and copper plates recycle into themselves, so you can endlessly feed them back into a quality-moduled recycler -- at 75% loss.)

Rather than recycling the plates, you get much better returns if you craft iron gears / copper cables and recycle those.

Not as good as using modules down the production chain... but if you are going to focus on making high quality plates from low quality plates in isolation, that's the way to do it.

Actually... for iron you probably want to do most of the work via crafting and recycling transport belts, so you can take advantage of the Foundry productivity bonus, but the details would be more complicated.

I'm guessing that at rare and below, you want to craft iron gears with productivity modules (so you have the right quality ratios) and then do the craft/recycle loop for transport belts until you have epic plates/gears. It's a tossup whether you'd want to use the belt loop or gear loop with epic ingredients. But I'm guessing.

[Premu]

Originally posted by Hurkyl:

Actually... for iron you probably want to do most of the work via crafting and recycling transport belts, so you can take advantage of the Foundry productivity bonus, but the details would be more complicated.

That - and if you add quality modules in the assemblers for the next stage you have the chance to increase the quality even further.

Also, one great source of quality items is Furolga. I added tier 3 quality modules in all miners (I brought in the large ones from Vulkanus to be able to place four). The recylcers in my main junk processing get these as well. So you'll get a significant amount of uncommon and rare materials, and once researched you might even get directly some epic stuff out of it.

You just have to be able to sort out the quality material from the common stuff, though.