Factorio Forums

Hello,

I was curious about a few things about pollution. How close to the spawn does it have to be? I see that it is nearly touching the base, does the cloud of pollution have to touch the spawner, as I have not yet been attacked and the cloud must be over some of the biters around the spawner.


I was looking at the F7 mode with the map on, and the white numbers are elevated to like 26 right over the spawner. Does the actual effect of pollution occur only where the cloud is shown on the map? I would think that it might extend a bit beyond that.

Can someone tell me what the red, green and blue numbers mean? I see the white are the amount of pollution. And what are those green circles for? I thought they meant trees absorbing the pollution, but they move around too.

I think understanding that would go a long way to predicting attacks, I am kind of confused since the pollution is right on top of them, and they have not yet attacked. Also I thought the effect might spread further than the map indicates, as many of the spawners are quite far away.

thanks
jackyjoy

The attacks are not triggered by pollution merely touching the spawners.

When pollution touches a spawner, the spawner absorbs it. Which decreases the pollution in that chunk.

The absorbed pollution is accumulated (up to a certain point if there is a lot of it). When enough pollution has been accumulated by the spawner, it spawns a unit and spends a corresponding "cost" in pollution. This mechanism can only happen at a maximum rate (aka a spawner can't spawn 10 unit per tick even if there is enough pollution)

At some point, the "pollution generated group" of biters regroups and rushes towards a pollution source in the vicinity.

Also, you may have the impression your pollution doesn't touch the spawners when it actually does, but the spawners have enough absorption capacity to actually absorb all the pollution in their chunk.

the green circle indicates the biter might expand their nest into that chunck.

redder circle = less likely, greener circle = more likely

biters try to avoid expanding near other nest nor near players factory. so it isnt related to pollution.

The F5 key debug overlays show a lot of information, most of it not actually related to pollution cloud itself. If you want understand+use debug overlays I instead recommend pressing the F4 key and try each of them one by one reading it's name description each time to familiarize yourself with them.

As far as pollution goes, there's only one debug overlay that you should really care about: show-pollution-values

This overlay will show on map the actual pollution amount of each chunk and the pollution generation (or absorption) per minute per chunk. If you take a close look you will notice that pollution only spreads into adjacent chunk if the pollution amount on a chunk exceeds 15 pollution units.

So as a result these are the conditions for an attack to happen:

• The chunk a spawner is in has a non-zero (ie. slight red in the map) amount of pollution
• Any of chunks adjacent to the chunk a spawner is in have over 15 pollution units. Every second or so pollution will spread into the chunk where the spawner is in which will promptly consume it. It shows as a flickering slight red chunk in the map

Another way to verify if any spawners globally are consuming pollution is to use the production statistics (P key) and going into the Pollution tab. If a spawner shows as consumer then you have confirmation that the pollution cloud is reaching a spawner somewhere in the map.