What are the "best" alt recipes and why?

[Maehlice]

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

[Ray Garraty]

Iron pipe + Encased industrial pipe

[Evilsod]

Publicado originalmente por Mihle:

I agree that iron pipe are nice if you don't have coal cluse to the iron, but if I do have that, I much prefer not using it because it's so not efficient. Especially if you compare to combining Solid Steel, and molded pipe. And optionally Iron Alloy.

I want to remove screws from everything. But cast screws is nice untill that is done.

It is, but there's a lot of extra buildings/complexity in there. If you want to absolutely maximise your resource efficiency and you have coal nearby, then potentially Alloy/Pure into Solid Steel is great.
The thing about Molded Beam/Pipe is that it uses a ton of concrete, which likely means Wet Concrete refineries, and yet more construction/power/space.

All great recipes though!

Publicado originalmente por kLuns:

I still use the combination of steel rod, regular screw and copper rotor on a big scale. Indeed with "stupid screw blueprints" but it's as much of a clockwork as any other factory.

Or without copper 2 machines making cast screws dedicated to one assembler isn't that bad for an iron only setup.

For any other items than rotor the screw always looses from the alternate imo.

The original screw recipe feels like it should be the alt tbh.
Creating screws directly from iron ingots should be the default. It serves absolutely no purpose forcing you to make them from iron rods at the very start, basically encouraging any experienced player to rush the Casted Screws recipe.
Whereas the default recipe from Iron Rods seems more like a niche recipe for use with late game alts to create rods from aluminium/steel.