Factorio Forums

In light of the devs adding more visible consequences of pollution, I would like to suggest weather.
Weather will affect the player and the player's environment/factories.

Regular Weather:
Sunny: Solar panels will work at their maximum in this type of weather.
Cloudy Solar panels will be crippled in this type of weather. It will also be darker than usual during the day unless the player has set up lights.
Rainy Solar panels will be knocked out. It will be darker than usual. Trees that the player has damaged will heal

Polluted Weather:
Smog Similar to Cloudy in Regular Weather, but it's darkness will depend on how densely polluted the area is.
Acid Rain Similar to Rainy in Regular Weather, but it severely damages trees and also inflicts damage to nearby biter/spitter nests, machines will take minor damage(which can be easily repaired), the player will also suffer damage too unless he is equipped with a power suit.

Polluted Weather won't affect the player or its factories too hard, but it shows the consequence of the players actions as their game progresses.
The player can hold back pollution by not shooting down every forest with a shotgun, or other ways of reducing pollution.

+1
I think this is a great idea for fleshing out pollution.

I would only suggest to make pollution producing options more attractive.
I.e. higher productivity modules, variants of machines that produce more pollution but work faster or produce more power, or whatnot.

I like it, though just like ^ said there then needs to be more ways to control your pollution output.
Right now all you can do is just go green with your energy production. Assemblers and drills still spew the stuff like crazy without any good way to combat it.

A straightforward solution would be to let pollution output of a device scale with its energy input. That way you'd have more incentive to slot in Efficiency modules instead of just cramming the machines full of +speed and +production.

Cleaner factories would then be harder to plan & take more resources to build to achieve the same material output as a dirty one.

lancar wrote:A straightforward solution would be to let pollution output of a device scale with its energy input. That way you'd have more incentive to slot in Efficiency modules instead of just cramming the machines full of +speed and +production.

This is already the case. If you drop the energy input by 60% (two effic. 1 modules in a drill), the pollution drops by 60% as well.

While placing strictly negative effects on pollution is a nice way to pressure the player as they grow, it's not a great idea to have EVERY effect be detrimental. For example pollution might be something that increases the temperature of fresh water, thus improving the efficiency of boilers. Or it might encourage meaner alien invaders that drop valuable artifacts or processable items. Or pollution might be something that draws in traffic from beyond, since clean worlds obviously don't have anything interesting going on.

If pollution only comes with bad things, you get stuck with this ugly middle ground between playing lean&green vs. going maximum production monster, because there isn't really any reason to go half way.

A new factorio world should be always sunny, and only "allows" rain once the is pollution, and more pollution leads to more rain. Kind of like the way that biters are spawned, except that there would be a lower limit so that you will not get nice sunshine after you fully pollute the area(kind of like "the lorax", actually)

But if there are going to be negative pollution affects, then there should be some building or machine that reduces the amount of pollution of the chunk that it is in

Other threads: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/sea ... mit=Search

Bumping this for attention.

I feel the next logical step to flesh out the world would be to add a weather system into the game. The more I read about introducing various disadvantages for solars, the more sense this idea makes.

Someone should make a mod for this; I know a lot of indie early-acess video games where a fan-made mod later is added to the base/stock/vannila game. Kerbal Space Program comes to mind.