Factorio Forums

When you build a refinery at the start of a new map majority of players just put steam engines to dump light oil and heavy oil.How about this you can make a drain to dump liquids in water and pollute it.
You can have the option to build an water pump jack to extract oil under the water (and it needs to exist oil under water).

It is already possible to store oil (and other liquids) in storage tanks. Also, it is possible to store crude oil in barrels (in the future version 0.15 also other liquids) and store these barrels in chests. Therefore, as far as I can tell, the only advantage the player would gain from your suggestion is that he would be able to store massive amounts of liquids at a very low cost. I don't think that this small advantage would be worth the effort, because it would be a lot of programming work to implement a completely new kind of pollution inside the game.

However, I do agree with you that dumping large amounts of oil instead of storing them properly should create large amounts of pollution, making biters angry and provoking attacks by them.

On second thought, I think I may have misunderstood you. I thought you were suggesting that the player should be able to dump oil into water and then, at a later time, collect that oil again using a pumpjack, effectively allowing the player to use a water lake as oil storage, but causing pollution as long as the lake is contaminated with oil. However, after reading your PM, I now believe you were making the following two completely separate suggestions:

1. That it should be possible to dump oil not using steam engines, but by building a drain instead. And this drain causes pollution, when used.
2. That there should not only be oil sources on land, but also under water, and that it should be possible to build pumpjacks on them, too.

The second suggestion would require that the player be also able to move on water, for example by building a boat. I'm quite sure that this has been suggested before.

The first suggestion would only be meaningful if the current possibility for the player to dump oil using steam engines were removed, because that method currently allows him to do dump oil without causing any pollution. It would also be necessary to prevent the player from tearing down a storage tank with oil in it, or, at least make it cause a lot of pollution if the player does so.