Why is pollution consumption sinusoidal?

[FlachFritz]

I was looking at the production stats early in the game, and noticed this strange pollution absorption of the tiles:

Screenshot 2024-10-24 234551.png (119.78 KiB) Viewed 910 times

Why is the absorption sinusoidal when the production is not? Nothing else in my production oscillates at this 1 Hz frequency. Iron ore is the only other oscillating curve but it has a freuqency around 0.6 Hz.

Not that it's important, I'm just curious and a little confused.

[Balthazar]

Assuming you're new to the game, open the map and press alt to enable the pollution on your map. You'll be able to see it expand as red tiles growing from the machines producing it. Each tile absorbs pollution based on its makeup; trees, terrain type and biter nests increase absorption rate, but biters will attack after absorbing enough pollution.

[Kalanndok]

Pollution spreads to neighboring tiles.
"Infested" neighboring tiles can eat more pollution.
Neighboing tiles manage to deinfest themselves.
Pollution-dissipation goes down again.
Then tiles start spreading pollution to their neighbors again.

[BlueTemplar]

And that pollution spread to other chunks happens once per second, hence the 1 Hz.

[FasterJump]

Maybe the pollution produced by your machines happens every 1 second? Not sure

[FlachFritz]

Thank you for the explanation. Pollution spreading at 1 Hz makes sense, although in that case I would expect some kind of a step function and not a smooth sine-like wave. But it's not really important so I can live with a simplified explanation.

[MisterDoctor]

I'm not sure but I think there is a "smoothing" effect applied to the graphs. an example is if your power is cut suddenly. the graph does not draw a vertical line straight to zero; rather there will be a gradual linear slope over a few seconds or so down to zero and there will be a large diagonal line, very steep but not vertical. (this does happens normally too for things like solar or accumulators where maybe they DO decline gradually, but IIRC even if power is cut 100% the graph still does not drop to zero instantly, it slowly slides down to zero.) (I could be wrong and should test this but don't have the game running right now; but if so this would/could turn what would otherwise be a square graph into more of a sin wave graph. this should also be a lot more noticeable on the short time scales like 5s. at longer time scales you would not be able to tell and the graph would probably look vertical.)