Personal Batteries and Scrap Recycling Guide

If your armor grid keeps running dry, or you want scrap on Fulgora to turn into something useful instead of piling up, personal batteries and recycling are the systems to learn first. Batteries are a shared ingredient in several key recipes, and scrap recycling is the workhorse that feeds you a broad mix of materials from Fulgora’s scrap piles. The trick is to unlock the battery line in the right order, set up production before you expand your equipment grid, and design your recycler line around mixed outputs instead of one perfect item.

Unlock the battery chain in the order that actually opens your options

Start with Personal battery research. It requires Battery and Portable solar panel, and the research cost is Automation science pack×1 and Logistic science pack×1. That is your entry point, because it lets you make portable stored power before you move on to the higher tiers.

After that, move to Personal battery MK2. This requires Personal battery, Low density structure, and Power armor, with a cost of Automation science pack×1, Logistic science pack×1, and Chemical science pack×1.

Only then should you aim for Personal battery MK3. It needs Personal battery MK2 and Electromagnetic science pack, with Automation science pack×1, Logistic science pack×1, Chemical science pack×1, Utility science pack×1, Space science pack×1, and Electromagnetic science pack×1.

For reference, here is the core battery and recycling chain at a glance:

Set up battery production before you scale your armor grid

Build Battery Equipment first and treat it as your baseline. It crafts Personal battery from Battery×5 and Steel plate×10 in Assembling machine 1 in 10s. That means your real bottleneck is not the equipment itself, but the steady supply of battery and steel plate.

Once that is stable, upgrade to Personal battery MK2 only when you are sure you can spare Personal battery×10, Processing unit×15, and Low density structure×5 per craft. After that, Personal battery MK3 consumes Personal battery MK2×5 and Supercapacitor×10. Keep extra lower-tier batteries in storage instead of pushing every single one into upgrades immediately.

Also remember the stack size: Personal battery, Personal battery MK2, and Personal battery MK3 all stack to 20. That makes them easy to buffer in chests or logistics, but it also means they can disappear fast if you begin filling armor grids before production is established.

Use the battery line for equipment that actually benefits from on-board power. Personal battery MK3 is intended to power personal equipment such as personal lasers, exoskeletons, shields, and portable generators.

Feed scrap into recyclers and use the mixed output as your Fulgora supply

Scrap is found on Fulgora, and you need to recycle it by hand or in a Recycler to get usable products. The scrap recycling recipe runs in a Recycler in 0.2s per scrap at crafting speed 1, so once you have the line moving it can process material quickly.

Do not expect scrap to behave like a normal ore patch. The scrap piles do not get denser farther from the drop location; the densest piles are under the Fulgoran vault ruins. That is where you should prioritize collection if you are choosing where to build around.

Scrap recycling returns a broad mixed bundle of items. The key point is that the outputs are rolled independently, so one craft can produce multiple resources. A full belt of scrap will, on average, produce a belt that is 60% full, because the listed output chances add up to 60%. That means you should plan for partial throughput, not a one-to-one input-to-output line.

The important habit is this: design around the common byproducts first. Iron gear wheel, Solid fuel, Concrete, Ice, Steel plate, and Battery will show up repeatedly, while Processing unit, Low density structure, and Holmium ore are rarer. Holmium ore from recycling is part of the average scrap output, not a directly mined resource, so treat it as a bonus stream, not a guaranteed source.

Keep recycler output from clogging by planning for the common byproducts first

The Recycler can automatically eject its output, so you do not need an inserter just to empty it. That is convenient, but it also means you need to give the machine room to breathe. It has 12 internal output slots, so if those buffers fill up, your scrap line slows down quickly.

When you have stack inserters researched, the Recycler can output stacks onto a belt if it has more than one of an item. That helps a lot with common outputs, but it also means your belt and storage plan matters more than your machine count. If you let the common items back up, the recycler will spend time stuck on inventory management instead of processing scrap.

Your priority should be emptying or consuming the high-volume outputs first. Keep sinks for Iron gear wheel, Solid fuel, and Concrete ready before you worry about sorting the rare stuff. If your storage is tight, split the line early so the common materials do not choke the whole system.

Use recyclers on batteries and other reverse-compatible items when you need components back

The Recycler is not just for Scrap. It reverses most assembler-type recipes and returns, on average, 25% of the ingredients. That makes it useful when you need to recover components from items you no longer want, especially if you are cleaning up old production lines on Fulgora.

Battery is one of the items that can still be recycled, so if you have excess batteries in the wrong place, you can feed them back into the chain. Just remember that fluid ingredients are always lost, because the Recycler has no fluid output. Also, without quality modules, the recycled items keep the same quality as the input item.

Use recycling selectively. If no valid recipe can be reversed, the Recycler returns the input item 25% of the time and destroys it 75% of the time. That is a bad gamble for anything important, so only recycle when you know the item has a reversible recipe. For battery chains, recycling is a useful recovery tool, but it is not a replacement for steady production.

Your best pattern is simple: unlock Personal battery, stabilize Battery Equipment, expand into Personal battery MK2 and Personal battery MK3 only after your materials are flowing, and run scrap through recyclers with storage and sinks already prepared. If you build in that order, the battery line becomes a strength instead of a bottleneck, and Fulgora’s scrap becomes a resource stream instead of a mess.