Fulgora is a good place for quality. I dunno if you’re avoiding spoilers so I won’t go into why unless you ask, but it’s a great fit.
I just got to aquilo, myself, and my current quality strategy is to stick quality modules in miners and early production, hoard quality things in many many chests, then if I want to actually make something quality, I see what I have.
Bit late but also go for quality carbonic asteroids while you’re running a ship back and forth.
Quality sulfur and quality carbon from them become quality coal which becomes quality plastic which goes into a foundry to become quality low density structures.
Sure theres a thing that most people I’d think would consider an exploit, recycling those LDS, but whether you exploit or not, quality LDS for just the cost of quality plastic is a good value.
Quality oxi asteroids can get you quality calcite, too, and that’s good for making quality stone if you need some. With the lava to copper recipe, each calcite is worth 15 quality stone for bricks, which can be foundry’d right into quality concrete, saving you whatever quality iron ore you might’ve spent.
I have built something very like this and fluids are a huge pain.
Thankfully they can be filtered now, but its a mess.
Mine relies on the network, the design needs 2 roboports to get requests and contents without them intermingling. I have a Quality buffer chest and conditions to do the same thing shown here. It’s input and output, so things like gears and cables are available as soon as they’re crafted.
I then have a second buffer chest requesting all the different fluid things that are produced the more traditional way, sulfur, electric engines, and the like, and its input-only.
There’s other details, but the space is tight enough that pumping in 1000 sulfuric acid (since I’d be getting it via underground pipes) for a few blue chips isn’t worth it.
I’m sure there’s a better implementation than mine though.
Probably a habit from when they really did have bad English, but they learned, and surpassed the average american at this point.
A quick and dirty kind of way is to take the signal you wanna send, run it into the radar, but also run it into a decider combinator set to a number variable.
Like if I wanted to send 30 copper plates to station 4, I send it to a decider combinator that’s always true, and has 2 outputs, one that outputs any, so the copper plate signal will pass through, and a second output for the number_4 signal, so number_4 and copper plates have the same value.
Then at station 4, I compare every signal to number_4, and if they’re equal, I pass them through.
This has a flaw. Notably, requests with the same value. 30 iron plates to station 3 and 30 copper to station 4 will give each station iron and copper signals.
There’s ways to encode a signal that avoid those problems, but this is a very simple one that’ll still pull the right output all the time if you work around that limitation.
I mostly use it for higher end ship stuff. Cargo bays, asteroid collectors, etc.
Or, as epic and legendary get unlocked, recycle more and more of it to get those tiers.
Like, right now i’m sitting on about 16 chests of quality iron, which is the limit I built into my production system, so pretty soon I gotta get some circuitry together to recycle the uncommon stuff automatically. It’ll flow through recyclers until it all becomes epic tier, where it’ll sit more compactly in a chest waiting for legendary.
But honestly, it’s best use for me has been taking old parts of my base and bringing them up to speed.
Just like how eventually, you might upgrade from t1 crafters to t2, to t3, to t3 w/ speed modules, quality crafting machines always raises speed. Anywhere you find yourself wishing for more module slots for speed, or for more efficiency modules to go with speed, that’s a good spot for quality machines. A Rare T2 assembler is basically the same speed as a T3, after all.
For me, that was red circuit production. I built them with t2, upgraded to t3, upgraded again to t3 with speed modules because I didn’t have the room, then removed speed for prod modules and made them quality to compensate for the speed loss.