Factorio Forums

It would be useful to be able to set a default pollution for an assembly machine, which can be overridden by individual recipes.

For instance, smelting copper from native copper with coal could be moderate pollution, but smelting copper from chalcocite could be heavy pollution.

It would also be useful if this extra pollution setting could be set to be disregarded based on whether a fluid output is possible from the assembly machine or not.

For instance, the copper smelting from chalcocite above could be normal or even low pollution in the event that there is a pipe taking the sulfur dioxide away, presumably for use elsewhere.

Even the first suggestion alone would open up extra options for recipes - for instance, the difference between evaporating oxygen, and evaporating chlorine gas or sulfur dioxide.

You can 'kinda' get these results by modifying the recipes already. The pollution is tied to the energy consumption of the assembler, so a longer time means more pollution. Make the chalcocite take a longer time to smelt.

You can output a liquid as part of another recipe that runs faster, so it essentially pollutes less.

I know this isn't exactly what you are looking for though, just some currently usable alternatives.

Unfortunately this will not be viable for me, as the time efficiency is another important aspect of the mod Im working on. Cheers for the tip though!

You can sort of do this by tying the recipes to a new structure. If you want a low pollution recipe, link up with a clean assembler. If you need a very polluting recipe, use a grisly assembler.

I have considered this but it will not work with the mod paradigm I am developing. In particular it will not be appropriate for several of the furnaces, which I intend to already have a reasonably large selection of; Adding more of them will make things more confusing. Having two versions of the building depending whether the recipe should be polluting or not does not match the recipe unfortunately.

I agree its a useful stopgap measure in general, just not that it is applicable to my position.

I agree, I've often wanted to do things where the pollution generated would want to be dependant on the recipe.

One of these examples is gas venting, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere would actually help to reduce pollution, rather than create it, where releasing things chlorine might be highly polluting.

same could be said for a liquid releasing pump of some kind. Releasing water shouldn't be polluting, where releasing oils or acids should be.

I'm interested in this, as well. I like the choosing a recipe to change the outputs. Thanks for the tip.