What are the "best" alt recipes and why?

[Maehlice]

Top 1, top 10, top 50. Whatever fancies your tickle.

[Bobucles]

Top 1 and 2, diluted fuel(blender) and diluted fuel(package). Huge energy boost for reaching late game.
Top 10, heavy oil residue. Big energy.
Top 10, rocket fuel. Endgame energy.
Top 50, pure aluminum ingot. Simplifies and unclogs a very clogged production chain.
Top 50, fused wire. So. Much. Wire.

[X33STORM]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1irMkgTMQl3gV5FfmVS5_AbRoRKfg7vspZgChQ7OamNI/edit?gid=1234485472#gid=1234485472

[Vectorspace]

Recycled Plastic,
Recycled Rubber,
Residual Plastic.
These 3, combined with Diluted Fuel and Heavy Oil Residue that Bobucles mentioned, allow you to make the most Plastic/Rubber from the least Oil (at the cost of more water and power)

[GeminiEclipse]

6 inventory space x2 would be my top 2.

[kLuns]

[Solid steel ingot]
Same power consumption in the production line as the regular steel ingot but every 4th foundry is replaced by 4 smelters little bit more beltwork but you get 1,5 times the steel out of the same bunch of iron and coal.

[Encased industrial pipe]
Saves on concrete, steel ingots and power.
Despite the fact you need more assemblers you need less foundries.

[Heavy encased frame]
Saves on power and resources. It's superior to the other 2 recipes in every way.
The numbers may seem off but that's just the speed of the machine.
Look at the ratio per cycle, not per minute.

[Steel rod]
Saves on power, machine count and resources at the cost of a little coal.
48! Rods for 4 MW.

[Iron wire]
Provides the chance to get rid of a copper demand, making stitched plates out of
iron only, slightly higher power demand.

[Stitched iron plate]
Combined with iron wire you can make 5,4 reinforced iron plates out of 47 iron ingots. The ratio can be terrible but that's worth the fight. Or just overflow

[Turbo fuel] and [Turbo blend fuel]
With the resource upgrades of 1.0 I like to combine these recipes for my turbo fuel supply.
Also using the recipes allready mentioned above to get the most power out of the oil.

There is a sweet spot of 1,6.
If you make 1,6 turbo fuel it takes exactly 1 sulfur and 1 crude oil

(7/12) of the turbo fuel gets blended
(5/12) of the turbo fuel gets refined with the fuel recipe.
It requires some coal but it saves some oil.

[Caterium circuit board]
More plastic friendly than the regular one and an easy modular with the caterium computer recipe.

[Caterium Computer]
One manufacturer needs a little bit less than 270 quickwire, including the circuit board line.
You can make 3 assemblers for circuit board to feed into one manufacturer and you don't need quick belts to deal with the bulk.
Very power friendly and resource friendly.

[Insulated Oscilator]
More logistics, more different items, more oscillators per manufacturer. Worth the extra preparations.

[Pure aluminum ingot]
Goodbye quartz nodes. Even before you get sloppy alumina this allows you to get rid of bringing in raw quartz.

[Sloppy alumina]
Removes the silica output and provides more alumina solution.

Imo every recipe has a time and a place altough some may not suit how you like to play the game.

[Mihle]

Originally posted by GeminiEclipse:

6 inventory space x2 would be my top 2.

I would have said the same before dimentonal depot, now I don't care about those if I get them after dinentional depot, I did in my current save.

My favorite is everything that get rid of screws.

[NocheLuz]

*Not in particular order*

1. Automated Miner - The only way you can automate this thing. Useless if you handcrafted the Portable Miner.

2. All "Pure" recipes - More resources you can get just from combining it with Water. Eliminating the use of Silica in Pure Aluminum.

3. Sloppy Alumina - Increase yield and decrease the complexity.

4. Caterium Computer - Use Rubber instead of Plastic. But will use more Caterium.

5. Coated Iron Canister - Make the Canister out of Iron and Copper.

6. Classic Battery AND Super-State Computer - Add Sulfur (and Bauxite) to simplify the making of the Supercomputer.

7. Heat-Fused Frame - Decrease the use of Aluminum.

8. Alclad Casing - Use copper to increase the yield of Aluminum Casing.

9. Electrode Circuit Board - Make the Circuit Board using only Crude Oil.

10. Quartz Purification AND Distilled Silica - Make both Quartz Crystal and Silica from the same Raw Quartz input.

Disclaimer: Others already suggest very good recipes. So, I tried to suggest a good alternative.

[Songbird]

Most of the pure recipes are more work than they're worth unless you plan to max out your world (thousands of hours) or are trying to produce more of a resource in an environment where you can't use any of the alloy recipes. They use much more space and way more power for pretty marginal yields. The exception is wet concrete, which is actually rather efficient due to the high production per refinery. Pure caterium ingots might have some use as well if you really need to stretch out your caterium, as the other ways to stretch out caterium largely cost copper or sulfur that you may not wish to use, or require you to produce petroleum coke that you may prefer to leave out of your oil setup (and oil is not often near caterium).

For example, you can make copper alloy ingots using the huge abundance of iron in the grassy fields or dune desert to get 200% copper yield, and you need 6 foundries per 300 copper. Or you can get 250% copper yield using a whopping 20 refineries and 2.5 water extractors per 300 copper. It's such a huge mess by comparison.

Automated miner doesn't really cost anything (it takes like a minute or two to set up pulling off some steel-based production line and doesn't use any continuous amount of resources), but it's super low-priority as just hand-crafting portable miners will cost you like a minute per several hours. You probably want it set up by the time you get into drones if you want to use a lot of them, but unless you're obsessed with throwing useless miners on nodes as you pass them or refuse to overclock your miners for some reason, you're probably not placing more than 1-2 miners an hour on average (if that).

I am amazed no one has said steel rotor yet, as it allows you to make motors off only wire and steel pipes. Copper Rotor (using Steel Screws and direct feeding each constructor into the assembler) is pretty nice early as well, but it uses significantly more copper, which becomes much more valuable than steel as you get later in the game.

Insulated crystal oscillator and plastic AI limiter allow you to use the massive amounts of plastic and rubber you're able to make off the diluted fuel > recycled rubber/plastic setup to produce very cheap and relatively easy crystal oscillators. These allow you to make super cheap and easy crystal computers, massively multiply your motor output with rigor motors, as well as just being necessary for radio control units and some other high tier items.

[TH3R4BB!T]

Maybe I went mental late time setting it up, but.... Nitro Rocket Fuel + Diluted fuel + Heavy residue oil.... it is like unlimited power. Rocket fuel is a gas, so no headlifts and pumps

[Songbird]

Originally posted by TH3R4BB!T:

Maybe I went mental late time setting it up, but.... Nitro Rocket Fuel + Diluted fuel + Heavy residue oil.... it is like unlimited power. Rocket fuel is a gas, so no headlifts and pumps

There's so much oil in the game that you can get a ton of power off this. Your limiting factor is sulfur, which is pretty limited (though not enough that you don't get enough power to finish the game several times over). You have that one huge cache near the blue crater, but it's a lot harder to come by outside of that. Nitro rocket fuel condenses an otherwise much larger setup into just a few blenders (especially if you don't bother to reprocess the compacted coal into turbofuel), but it demands even more of that sulfur.

The catch is that you need to build an absolutely massive array of fuel generators. You probably want to overclock the generators to 200 or 250% to make it more palatable.

[Evilsod]

Iron Wire, Iron Pipe and Encased Industrial Pipe.
First one lets you skip ignore copper to focus on a single resource in some builds, particularly ones like Stitched Iron Plate.
Second and third let you completely skip steel production to mass produce material for Mk4 belts. Though you will need steel beams for versatile framework eventually, there's no rush to get it up and running. Also simplifies some components like heavy mod frame.

[Grandaddypurple]

I've always hated alt recipe tier lists because when I was a new player, the wiki was full of "blablabla don't use rare ressources in alt recipes", and it actually took me away from a lot of gameplay flexibility only to realize I'd never use 20% of the rare ressources I kept preserving.

I LOVE rubber concrete. Heavy flexible frame is fantastic as well. Bolted frames ? more like BASED frames.
Caterium computer is great and blended turbofuel is fun to play with.
The new molded pipe / beam are so useful early/mid game

More recently I grew fond of the foundry and I can't wait to play around with tempered recipes (basically ingots increased with petroleum coke).

[BIT Bear]

I think the pure recipes (except aluminum) are overrated. Yes, you get more buck for your resource but you have to place refineries and use water. And I for one hate having to work with pipes! There are more than enough resources on the map for you to use so resource efficiency isn't the biggest deal. I'd rather smelt using foundries for a bigger p/min output.

[Evilsod]

Originally posted by Grandaddypurple:

I've always hated alt recipe tier lists because when I was a new player, the wiki was full of "blablabla don't use rare ressources in alt recipes", and it actually took me away from a lot of gameplay flexibility only to realize I'd never use 20% of the rare ressources I kept preserving.

There was never any context to them at all, which is why they were so useless. People trying to rate them based on mathematical formula is equally useless for 99.99% of players.

Using a rare resource also doesn't matter unless it complicates the recipe. Stuff like Nitro Rocket Fuel use more sulphur, but that's irrelevant to most players. Whereas making a product use aluminium which in of itself requires a big factory is probably not as valuable.

It almost always comes down to what you have available and how much you can simplify/alter the process.
Pure recipes are in a weird spot cos they're extremely resource efficient, but take a ton more power and space and messing about with water, but they're great to use if you just want to maximise how much you get from a specific location without having to send more in.

[Songbird]

Originally posted by Evilsod:

Iron Wire, Iron Pipe and Encased Industrial Pipe.
First one lets you skip ignore copper to focus on a single resource in some builds, particularly ones like Stitched Iron Plate.
Second and third let you completely skip steel production to mass produce material for Mk4 belts. Though you will need steel beams for versatile framework eventually, there's no rush to get it up and running. Also simplifies some components like heavy mod frame.

I'm not convinced there's any reason to want to skip steel production, though. There's many huge clusters of coal on the map, and the only uses for it until tier 9 are coal power, steel, turbofuel, and aluminum; even midgame you don't care about coal power, you barely need coal for fuel setups and get limited by sulfur instead basically every time, and you have the option for petroleum coke for aluminum. There are so many good recipes and alts that use steel pipes that just making thousands per minute and throwing them on trains seems much more reasonable than trying to do anything with iron pipes.