Recycler

The recycler is a building that performs inverse crafting. When an item is inserted, it looks up that item’s main recipe and automatically switches to the reverse of that recipe, returning a fraction of the ingredients. This makes it useful for dismantling products into components, especially on Fulgora, where scrap recycling is a major source of resources.

For each ingredient in the reversed recipe, the recycler returns, on average, 25% of the amount needed to craft one item of the same type. The exact output is rounded by a random factor, so repeated recycling can vary slightly, but the long-term average stays fixed. For example, recycling a processing unit always returns 5 electronic circuits, with a 50% chance to also return 1 advanced circuit. Fluid ingredients are always lost, since the recycler has no fluid output.

Without quality modules, the recycled items keep the same quality as the input item, even if that item was originally made from lower-quality ingredients. Quality modules can improve the output quality just like they do in normal recipes. The recycler has 12 internal output slots and can eject items on its own, so an inserter is not required to collect its products. If it accumulates more than one stack of an item and stack inserters have been researched, it can also output stacks onto a belt.

The recycler can only reverse recipes that are valid for assembler-type machines, although there are a number of exceptions. The electromagnetic plant counts as an assembler for recycler purposes, so its recipes are generally reversible. If an item has multiple recipes, the recycler only needs one reversible recipe to produce its output. If no valid recipe can be reversed, the recycler returns the input item 25% of the time and destroys it the other 75% of the time. The game text mentions biological spoilage, but in practice only nutrients are converted into spoilage in this way.

Some recipes are notable because they cannot be reversed even though they can be made in assemblers, including science packs, biolabs, holmium plate, landfill, superconductor, tungsten carbide, uranium fuel cells, wood processing, yumako mash, jelly, iron bacteria, and copper bacteria. On the other hand, some machine-specific products can still be recycled, such as battery, big mining drill, fusion reactor, fusion generator, railgun, railgun turret, turbo transport belt, turbo underground belt, and turbo splitter. Shared recipes like biochamber, cryogenic plant, foundry, and nutrients from spoilage are also reversible.

Scrap has a special recycling behavior: recycling it performs the scrap recycling recipe directly, since scrap itself cannot be crafted. Nutrients are also special, because recycling them yields 2.5 times as much spoilage, as if they had been made through the nutrients from spoilage recipe.

The recycling time is based on the crafting time of the item being processed. For most items, the recycler takes one sixteenth of the item’s crafting time, adjusted by the recycler’s own crafting speed. As a result, items with long crafting times, such as steel plates, can still take a noticeable amount of time to process.