I made a pollution spreadsheet

[cellularmitosis]

I felt like the in-game HUD didn't tell the whole story about pollution, and I've mostly just seen rules of thumb online when looking for pollution-optimization advice.

So I set up an experiment and measured pollution per item crafted, and put it all in a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

The widest span of polluting setups appears to be:

• from assembler 3 with three level-1 efficiency modules
• to assembler 3 with four level-3 productivity modules

which is a difference of 74x (7400%) pollution per item crafted.

Setup:

First, disable pollution spread and absorption:

Code: Select all

/c game.map_settings.pollution.ageing = 0
/c game.map_settings.pollution.diffusion_ratio = 0

Then:

• set up some configuration of assemblers, beacons and modules
• craft one item
• check global pollution

  Code: Select all

  /c game.player.print(game.player.surface.get_total_pollution())

• reset global pollution

  Code: Select all

  /c local s = game.player.surface; for c in s.get_chunks() do s.pollute({c.x*32, c.y*32},-1000000) end

• GOTO 1

I picked steel barrels as the item to craft, as it has a recipe of 1 plate and a crafting time of 1 second, making it the "hydrogen atom" of the Factorio periodic table of crafting.

I then calculated pollution per barrel and energy per barrel, and also added columns for effective production rate, infrastructure cost, etc.

A few notes on reading the spreadsheet:

• "asm1" is an assembler 1
• Modules are in parenthesis, e.g. "(e3, e3)" is two efficiency module 3's
• Columns which are derived from other columns are indicated with a slight grey background
• The first three columns are in units of "% of assembler 1", which is an attempt to make the numbers easier to understand.
• There are some rounding errors due to the in-game HUD only using two decimal places

Commentary:

If you are chasing after lowest pollution, a relatively cheap upgrade sequence would be:

• asm1
• asm2 (e1, e1)
• asm3 (e1, e1, e1)

Also worth noting is that if you are optimizing for max productivity, the lowest pollution route is asm3 + prod mods + max beacons with speed modules.

Note however that "asm3 (p3, p3, p3, p3) + 12 beacons (s3, s3)" costs over 78,000 ore to set up!

All of the above assumes your electricity is zero-pollution.