Drill pollution

[BlueTemplar]

Well, it does make sense when you start by considering burner furnaces, and especially if you remember that the crafting time is named energy_required internally...
(Now what doesn't make sense is how boiler efficiency does NOT change pollution wrt its power output !)

[eradicator]

Well, it does make sense when you start by considering burner furnaces

Except the topic is about electric mining drills...

[Honktown]

Pollution is energy consumption based. Use efficency modules.

Is that documented somewhere?

For modders it's on the wiki https://wiki.factorio.com/Types/EnergySource#emissions for players i have no clue.
It's more of an engine quirk. From a realism perspective it doesn't make sense if you think about it.

Pollution should be sort of a two-part calculation. machine dirtiness per crafting speed * crafting speed + machine power pollution * power consumption (which could probably be cut right out since pollution should be generated from the generator, not on use). I kinda wish efficiency modules were more like actual efficiency controllers: a fixed power requirement for the device, a reduction in power of the machine from optimizing power use, and a slight increase in speed from better using the machine's capabilities (like a car can get better mileage, more power, and lower emissions with a good controller).

Well, it does make sense when you start by considering burner furnaces, and especially if you remember that the crafting time is named energy_required internally...
(Now what doesn't make sense is how boiler efficiency does NOT change pollution wrt its power output !)

Boiler pollution does scale with power consumed as far as I know. Run a dozen boilers and an inactive inserter (400W drain), and compare it to a dozen boilers and all the radars (radars are lovely for throwing away energy without needing to craft). That's all if you meant it doesn't scale across it's power delivery (i.e. being wasteful at low fuel use but more efficient at higher power.)

I wonder if you could add an "overdrivable" burner source, something that's one pollution up to a threshold, and then pollutes like crazy above it, in exchange for bursts of energy (possibly damaging the burner in scale of how much it was overdriven).

[BlueTemplar]

Oh, that's a great idea ! (Signal-controlled ?)

I was referring to this :

[...]
I though that a more inefficient boiler would pollute more.
Which is NOT the case !
(At least not directly - you still get the pollution from producing that fuel...)

For instance [in 0.16.51] the vanilla boiler pollutes at the rate of :
energy_consumption x emissions
1.8 MW x (0.1/6.5) PU/s/kW = 27.69230769 PU/s
(note how energy_consumption could be misleading because the actual consumption is divided by effectivity = 0.5, resulting in the 1.8 MW / 0.5 = 3.6 MW Energy consumption that you see displayed in the game.)

Note how effectivity is not being used in the pollution calculation !
[...]

(Admittedly, you'll only notice it while modding.)

[Honktown]

Oh, that's a great idea ! (Signal-controlled ?)

I was referring to this :

[...]
I though that a more inefficient boiler would pollute more.
Which is NOT the case !
(At least not directly - you still get the pollution from producing that fuel...)

For instance [in 0.16.51] the vanilla boiler pollutes at the rate of :
energy_consumption x emissions
1.8 MW x (0.1/6.5) PU/s/kW = 27.69230769 PU/s
(note how energy_consumption could be misleading because the actual consumption is divided by effectivity = 0.5, resulting in the 1.8 MW / 0.5 = 3.6 MW Energy consumption that you see displayed in the game.)

Note how effectivity is not being used in the pollution calculation !
[...]

(Admittedly, you'll only notice it while modding.)

Oh I see. That really doesn't make sense, since pollution should be based on how much fuel you use, at a minimum. Going a little further, higher efficiency should lower pollution from a respective fuel, and in fact, pollution generation should be spread across fuels AND burners (a clean fuel in a dirty burner vs a dirty fuel in a clean burner should come out the same).

[Cribbit]

Modules are in a weird state IMO. They boil down to three use cases:

1. Eff1 to reduce pollution, primarily on pumpjacks and miners. It's not cost effective to use anything higher, just a question of 2 vs 3 (since the last one is only partially effective due to the 80% cap)
2. Eff1 to reduce electricity use. This depends on where you're getting power from - if it's solar, a good number of things are cheaper to put eff1's in than to build more solar. If you're on boilers it can tie back to #1 to reduce power generation pollution.
3. Prod3 with speed3 beacons. There are some weird mid game cases to use lower tiers while waiting to build higher tiers but you always need to get as much speed module onto your prod modules as possible, and beacons are expensive enough to push this to t3.

Edge case: Speed modules on pumpjacks.

It would be nice to see more uses of eff2/3 and prod/speed 1/2.

For eff, if the power reduction multiplied with prod/speed rather than stacked when beaconed it would be more interesting, especially if higher tiers added more pollution reduction. Or simply make eff modules a lower % but multiplicative. Another tweak would be having beacon range be determined by the module type - speed modules stay as is, efficiency modules get a much higher range. It doesn't help that the gap from eff2 to eff3 is much smaller than the speed/prod 2 -> 3 gap.


Prod/speed 1/2 are in a purgatory of their higher tiers being just better, and the beacon requirement giving too high a barrier to entry without just spending more. Maybe a 5/7.5/10 instead of 4/6/10 for productivity?

[BlueTemplar]

Eff2 are kind of useful in Electric Furnaces.
By the point that you get beacons, you'll also often have nuclear power, so plenty of almost pollution-free power - at which point the resource/benefit of T3 modules might be low enough to keep using T2 modules in most situations for a while...

Oh I see. That really doesn't make sense, since pollution should be based on how much fuel you use, at a minimum. Going a little further, higher efficiency should lower pollution from a respective fuel, and in fact, pollution generation should be spread across fuels AND burners (a clean fuel in a dirty burner vs a dirty fuel in a clean burner should come out the same).

Mods use fuels that give a bonus/malus to emitted pollution to great effect !

[Koub]

Pollution is energy consumption based. Use efficency modules.

I did not know that, even with 500+ hours in factorio. Is that documented somewhere? How could i miss this information. I guess energy consuption == pollution is not communicated well...

It can be guessed with this formula :
https://wiki.factorio.com/Pollution#Modules
But it could be more explicit, I agree. I think I remember an ancient time where it was written, but my fading memories might be wrong.