Factorio Forums

Hello! I just started playing Factorio a few days ago and I already love how active/social the mods and devs are on the forums, and the developers are probably closer to the community that with any other game I've seen. Anyways, one suggestion I had on my mind of a while now is pollution clouds, but I decided to expand on that when I realized how well this would go with actual ingame weather.

TL;DR: Lightning either fries or just damages your structures, rain fall is random and different in every world, acid rain damages unprotected players, otherwise you take no damage from it and it simply corrodes armor.

Simply put, it would be really cool (and kind of depressing) if a pollution haze appeared in polluted areas. It would start out as a small cloud passing by occasionally, but it could get worse to the point where the Sun becomes blocked out, limiting the effect of solar panels and making lights more important. To go along with pollution clouds, I'm also suggesting weather. Primarily, rain and lightning. The amount of rain would be randomly generated with the world, and in highly polluted areas, the rain would turn into acid rain. Acid rain would harm you if you have no armor on. However, if you do have armor on, you will take no damage but the acid would slowly reduce the durability of your armor. Lightning would be affected by large amounts of pollution. In a non-polluted world, it would be pretty rare, and in a heavily polluted area, it would be very frequent. Due to the high amounts of metal, lightning bolts would often be attracted to the player's factory. The player would be able to construct Lightning rods out of iron sticks which would attract the lightning to itself instead, protecting your other stuff as well as generating a large amount of electricity whenever a lightning bolt hits a lightning rod. If a structure gets hit by lightning, one of two things may happen. If it is not an electrical object, it would simply take damage. If it produces or uses electricity, it would become overloaded with electricity, in which case you'd need to use a repair kit to be able to use it again.

Hi and welcome on this forum.
Tbh, I don't think it would add much to the gameplay value. You'd just end adding a lightening rod and some kind of protection from rain on every building as soos as you have the technology, which should be very early, so why not include the rod and the protection directly to each building upon craft ? And once you're there ... you just forget about lightnings and acid/corroding rain.

Maybe the weather/pollution effects don't have an actual gameplay effect but have a thematic thing, like a little bit of vapor/steam/whatever coming off of points impacted by rain. Lightning could always just happen to miss buildings.

Added to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=342&p=133677#p133677 Events (Environmental disasters)

Koub wrote:Hi and welcome on this forum.
Tbh, I don't think it would add much to the gameplay value. You'd just end adding a lightening rod and some kind of protection from rain on every building as soos as you have the technology, which should be very early, so why not include the rod and the protection directly to each building upon craft ? And once you're there ... you just forget about lightnings and acid/corroding rain.

Yeah, I guess I sort of agree. The weather idea was sort of just to improve on what I already had in my mind, although the main part I wanted to see get added was the pollution clouds to add a cool visual to highly polluted areas.

I can agree with this, but not to the point where gameplay is negatively affected - to the point where you hardly can see a thing.

Koub wrote:I can agree with this, but not to the point where gameplay is negatively affected - to the point where you hardly can see a thing.

Maybe instead of that, maybe the sky would just darken to a certain point or something.

Actually, the palette is already quite dark imho. Not to the point it is a discomfort, it's adding something to the atmosphere of the game, but darkening it more could become it.
Still always my own opinion .

Are more pollution effects planned than just attracting biters and increasing their evolution? Like the water getting dirty, dying fish, trees losing their leaves, smog etc, acid rain? Also I would love to see more smoking chimneys. This would make the pollution mechanic even more interesting.