Quote Originally Posted by One_Time View Post
I find your post a little confusing, however... Quick Synthesis with a "no HQ, Please" switch would be great.
Mod (or 'modulo') is a mathematical term, and in software it's usually written with a % -- functionally, it's the remainder when you divide something up. So having mod 3 be zero means that if you divide a stack evenly by 3, you have 0 left over. So, for instance, 9 % 3 (9 mod 3) is 0; nine divides into three sets of three with zero left over. 10 % 3, however, is 1; you can make three stacks of 3 (getting 9), but you have one left over that you can't put into a full stack.

Saying something should be zero for mod 3, mod 4, mod 5, and mod 6 means "items should automatically try to stack into amounts that will divide evenly by all those numbers". Because all crafting in the game consumes ingredients in sets of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. (Everything is 0 for mod 1, and anything that's 0 for mod 4 or 6 will of necessity also be 0 for mod 2. Technically you could omit mod 3 as well, as anything that's 0 for mod 6 is also 0 for mod 3, but this is getting side-tracked.) The practical upshot of which is that if you got a stack of something and crafted a thing using that something, you could use up the entire stack without leaving any behind.

However, that gets tricky. As an example, 60 qualifies; it's 0 for mod 3, mod 4, mod 5, and mod 6. But as soon as you start consuming that stack for any craft, you now fail to meet that condition on one or more of those. If you aren't using the entire stack, you now have a thing which potentially violates the stack restriction. For instance, craft one item that uses 6 of a thing, and you now have 54 left... which is not 0 for mod 5.

I feel like I personally would get actually more frustrated if I ended up with stacks of partially-used materials that I couldn't sell (because they didn't meet the modulo restrictions) or whatnot. Plus, as mentioned, it could become a headache code-wise to try to restrict stacks to only quantities that met that rule. If you harvest 63 of a thing, what do you do with the 3 extra that are beyond what meets that stack rule? Do you just throw them out? Etc. If I use the 60 and have the 3 left over, and I need 7 -- in order to have 10 so that I can craft two more things -- I can't just buy 7 off the marketboard because that doesn't meet the requirements. If you disable the requirements for things below a certain quantity, then people will just sell in those quantities anyway to avoid having to math things, etc.

But the 'disable HQ' switch, there's no downside to that one I can see, and wow do I often wish we had that one.