100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

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zOldBulldog
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100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by zOldBulldog »

I am fairly new to Factorio and impressed by the many options. It is obvious that the early stages will be unavoidably dirty.

But after a while it seems that it *should* be possible to "go green". Solar power and accumulators. Electric mining, smelting and constructing.

So I am wondering:

1) Is it even possible to go 100% green? (after dismantling initial dirty construction)

2) What is the fastest path/route/strategy to become 100% green or as much as the game allows?

3) I understand that with less (or no) pollution the bugs won't be as aggressive but they will still attack when they expand or come by your stuff. Is the difference significant? What are the practical implications? For example 1 laser turret enough vs 3-4 needed to deter attacks? Just guessing here, and I'm really asking what is the difference in the needed defense. Or do you still need to develop hefty military technology?

4) Are there any other considerations when considering "going green"?

Looking forward to your advise and opinions on the topic.

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by aka13 »

You have to consider 2 things -
1.You can never have "no pollution". You can stick efficiency modules into every machine that accepts them to reduce polution to a minimum. Having "green" energy obviously helps, since you will not be producing pollution when generating energy.

2. Biters evolve with time, without regard to your pollution, so no matter how green you are, after a long time you will still face the same biters everyone else does. Just significantly later.

Without having constant attacks caused by pollution, your life will be of course easier. You wont have to have as much defences as you would otherwise.
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nosports
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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by nosports »

You will need to push out the borders so far that the pollution will not affect biters.....

But then you will need to 'realocate' ;) the biters at the initial area so that the pollution will not reach them.

But of course this realoction will lead to somewhat speedy evolution because of it....

I did it this way when i had enough resources that i could conquer a decent large enough area, then you will only need to attend the biters which will search a new hive-location.

eitherway that could only slow down it but in the end - like others said ;)

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by Tekky »

The /evolution console command is very useful for monitoring the rate of biter evolution and for determining what is causing most of the evolution. For example, it will display something like: Evolution Factor 0.30214, 30% time, 40% pollution, 30% spawner kills.

The size of the attack force is proportional to the amount of pollution reaching a biter/spitter spawner. However, that does not mean that the size of the attack force will be proportional to the total amount of pollution. Since the ground and trees absorb a fixed amount of pollution, if you only produce a very small amount of pollution, chances are that the pollution will never reach a spawner. In that case, you will never trigger an enemy attack. See the wiki page on pollution for further information.

However, biters/spitters will still sometimes try to found new spawners and they will attack anything that they encounter on their way. If the location of the planned new spawner is inside your base, a hostile encounter will be inevitable. There is no way to make the biters peaceful if they encounter you (except by changing them in the game options to peaceful).

As far as I know, solar power is not the only power source that is green (i.e. produces no pollution). If I am not mistaken, nuclear power also produces absolutely no pollution in the game (i.e. there is no toxic waste, just recyclable material).

However, even when your power generation is 100% pollution free, your buildings will still be generating pollution. For example, an electric miner with no modules will be producing 9 pollution per second when it is active, which is quite a lot. But this can be reduced by up to 80% with green modules. You can see the amount of pollution a building is producing by hovering the mouse over the building.

In my experience, playing a game with green modules everywhere instead of speed modules drastically decreases the problems I have with biters/spitters, making the game easier. At least, it allows me to spend less time setting up base defenses and to focus more on other parts of the game. But it still does not allow me to neglect researching military technology completely, because I still need to be able to destroy spawners that are near ore or oil fields that I need to have.

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by zOldBulldog »

Thanks.

If I understood correctly:

- "Going as green as possible" from the beginning, including replacing the initial steam power plant with panels as soon as feasible and adding green modules to electric miners and other heavy pollution producers will *mainly* be a "feel good about the environment" activity.
- There will be some advantage to going as green as possible, but it is not significant. It is much better to develop good defenses like walls, laser turret banks (as they use no ammo, just electricity), and enough radars to locate the bugs. In other words, fully reasearching and making a highly productive base fast beats trying to avoid polluting (right?)
- For power, it is probably best to develop the initial 20x40 steam array, add some batteries (can't remember the exact name), then solar arrays, and go nuclear as fast as possible (which is probably when it might make sense to decomission the steam if at all).

Sound about right?

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by Tekky »

Well, it is also a matter of how you want to play the game. Do you want the aliens to constantly attack you with large armies, so your defenses get challenged? Or would you prefer to play a more peaceful game and pay the price of having to use green modules instead of speed modules?

Personally, I have two games running. In one game, I use green modules most of the time, and in one game, I deliberately piss of aliens by using speed modules everywhere. Both of these games play very differently.
Last edited by Tekky on Wed Mar 21, 2018 1:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by Engimage »

zOldBulldog wrote:Thanks.

If I understood correctly:

- "Going as green as possible" from the beginning, including replacing the initial steam power plant with panels as soon as feasible and adding green modules to electric miners and other heavy pollution producers will *mainly* be a "feel good about the environment" activity.
- There will be some advantage to going as green as possible, but it is not significant. It is much better to develop good defenses like walls, laser turret banks (as they use no ammo, just electricity), and enough radars to locate the bugs. In other words, fully reasearching and making a highly productive base fast beats trying to avoid polluting (right?)
- For power, it is probably best to develop the initial 20x40 steam array, add some batteries (can't remember the exact name), then solar arrays, and go nuclear as fast as possible (which is probably when it might make sense to decomission the steam if at all).

Sound about right?
Going max green will:
  • Reduce pollution value which will decrease amount of attacks every biter nest in polluted area produces
  • Reduce pollution area size effectively decreasing amount of spawners that will make attacks at all
  • Reduce the size of power plant you need to sustain your base
  • Reduce biter evolution speed resulting in much weaker attack packs and weaker versions of biters in those packs
  • Reduce requirements for perimeter defence strength
So if you prefer slow play this is a nice way to do it. With "normal" way you have to play much more effective to catch up with required defence effectiveness.

When you get close to endgame with pretty high tech, tier 3 modules and beacons you will probably not care about biters at all cause they will be near to no issue to you. However even in endgame I prefer mining outposts with effectivity 1 modules to reduce pollution from them as they often are close to biters and I do not want them to be constantly stormed.

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by zOldBulldog »

PacifyerGrey wrote:
zOldBulldog wrote:Thanks.

If I understood correctly:

- "Going as green as possible" from the beginning, including replacing the initial steam power plant with panels as soon as feasible and adding green modules to electric miners and other heavy pollution producers will *mainly* be a "feel good about the environment" activity.
- There will be some advantage to going as green as possible, but it is not significant. It is much better to develop good defenses like walls, laser turret banks (as they use no ammo, just electricity), and enough radars to locate the bugs. In other words, fully reasearching and making a highly productive base fast beats trying to avoid polluting (right?)
- For power, it is probably best to develop the initial 20x40 steam array, add some batteries (can't remember the exact name), then solar arrays, and go nuclear as fast as possible (which is probably when it might make sense to decomission the steam if at all).

Sound about right?
Going max green will:
  • Reduce pollution value which will decrease amount of attacks every biter nest in polluted area produces
  • Reduce pollution area size effectively decreasing amount of spawners that will make attacks at all
  • Reduce the size of power plant you need to sustain your base
  • Reduce biter evolution speed resulting in much weaker attack packs and weaker versions of biters in those packs
  • Reduce requirements for perimeter defence strength
So if you prefer slow play this is a nice way to do it. With "normal" way you have to play much more effective to catch up with required defence effectiveness.
Thanks, excellent summary.

I think I will do my best to go green, not just because "it feels right" but because it fits my "slow and steady" playstyle preference.

Edit: LOL, tried to start going electric by making an accumulator to buffer the highs and lows of demand. Looks like an accumulator requires batteries, batteries require sulfuric acid, sulfuric acid, sulfuric acid requires sulfur, which is made with water and petroleum gas. Looks like I need oil to "go green" :shock:

I think this game has a hidden value: IRL it is easy to consider oneself green because we make little efforts. But to significantly help the environment we really need to understand all the complex interactions. This game, in a small way, teaches us and makes us think about those issues.

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by Tekky »

zOldBulldog wrote:This game, in a small way, teaches us and makes us think about those issues.
I agree.

However, in the case of nuclear power, it does not do a good job, because nuclear power causes nearly no pollution in the game, only the mining and refining of uranium causes pollution. In reality, nuclear power produces very toxic waste products.

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by zOldBulldog »

Tekky wrote:
zOldBulldog wrote:This game, in a small way, teaches us and makes us think about those issues.
I agree.

However, in the case of nuclear power, it does not do a good job, because nuclear power causes nearly no pollution in the game, only the mining and refining of uranium causes pollution. In reality, nuclear power produces very toxic waste products.
True, for now. I trust they'll address that in a future release. They seem to be doing a good job evolving the game.

It wouldn't surprise me if they came up with a digger of some sort that will require developing some kind of defenses for nuclear facilities against underground attacks. If I were an alien species that hates pollution, I'd probably have a digger subspecies attracted by toxic waste :D That is... unless the toxic waste could get fired by rocket or railgun into orbit, and have space bots to pull them out of orbit and send them towards the sun. Oh man, my imagination is running wild today, LOL

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by dood »

You can practically eliminate pollution by putting tier 1 efficiency modules into everything and stopping to burn coal.
That will almost put an end to biter attacks.

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by Tekky »

dood wrote:You can practically eliminate pollution by putting tier 1 efficiency modules into everything [...]
Some buildings, such as oil pumpjacks and centrifuges, only have 2 module slots. In those, I normally put in tier 2 efficiency modules, because tier 1 efficiency modules are not enough to get the electricity consumption and pollution down to 20%. You need 3 module slots to reach that hard cap with tier 1 efficiency modules. With only 2 slots of tier 1 modules, you can get the electricity consumption/pollution only down to 40%, which is double as much as the minimum value (hard cap).
dood wrote:You can practically eliminate pollution by [...] and stopping to burn coal.
Burning solid fuel creates the same amount of pollution as burning coal. I guess you are referring to solar and nuclear power.

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by Frightning »

For your late game production, I suggest, in Assembly machine 3s, using 1x Speed module 3 and 3x Efficiency module 3s for +50% speed while still having the minimum possible 20% energy consumption (this means energy consumed per item is even better than a 2x Efficiency module 2 setup in an Assembly machine 2 or 3). Of course, the downside is the high fixed cost of such a setup due to the expense of tier 3 modules.

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by Engimage »

zOldBulldog wrote:I think this game has a hidden value: IRL it is easy to consider oneself green because we make little efforts. But to significantly help the environment we really need to understand all the complex interactions. This game, in a small way, teaches us and makes us think about those issues.
If you want to experience complex interactions with the environment I dare you try out game called "Eco". This is where you will be really shocked by consequences of not caring about environment.

In Factorio environment is only your enemy in all its faces. You can experience it everywhere. There is almost no stream or youtube video without meme "your worst enemy: trees". Solar power is considered best just out of performance reasons. And there is less than 1% of endgame bases using Efficiency modules anywhere except miners.

I am not a green fan at all but I tried proposing some terraforming and tree growing options but they met no support whatsoever. I do not count treehouses producing wood anything like it as they do not grow trees in the world.

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Re: 100% Green evolution possible? Quickest path to it?

Post by dood »

Tekky wrote:Burning solid fuel creates the same amount of pollution as burning coal. I guess you are referring to solar and nuclear power.
I'm mostly referring to smelters.
Those things create tons of pollution with no way to reduce it.

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