Factorio Forums

I suggest that energy consumption and pollution should depend on recipe. I know that there are about million devs, modders and players who resist it but I invented a way to make it easily and without disturbing others. If there was energy and pollution coefficients with default value of 1.0 in recipes, nothing would change in the existing games or mods but modders could change it if they wanted. Energy consumption and pollution varies very much between products in real life an in my opinion it should be taken into account in Factorio.

I think you'll find most modders are actually for this sort of suggestion, and most of the players either don't care, or don't understand that it can't be done already.

But I have suggested things before about detaching pollution from energy consumption, mostly in line for modules and stuff...

My suggestion was to have 3 sources of pollution:
1. As it is now, based on power consumption
2. Based on the machine running, but detached from the energy consumption, so if you used modules that change the power consumption, it doesn't change the pollution generated.
3. Based on the recipe.

So, a result of these changes would mean that certain things like boilers could run as they are now, where simply running them causes pollution, because they burn fuel. Other things like assembling machines would likely just do a flat amount of pollution as they run. And then certain polluting recipes would also generate their own pollution as they run too, but more critically for modders, allow certain pollution cleaning recipes too.

I gave some specific examples when I posted too, such as my gas venting pump. Releasing oxygen or nitrogen should deal either no pollution, or have a cleaning effect, where releasing Chlorine, or sulfur dioxide would have a high pollution rate.