Alien pollution absorber

[PaszaVonPomiot]

Hello I was testing this idea to use spawners to assimilate pollution. It would work like that:

Find a spot where they can't get you and build most polluting devices there:


Watch as they clear our most of the pollution from 30 boilers:


Watch as they get angry


Would it be possible to do it in real game? I'd like to have one spawner colony to absorb most of my boiler's pollution and have spawners under control at the same time. The energy cost of killing those biters would have to be much less than energy gained from boilers. Anyone tried to calculate that? Also is ther a way to dig so that I can dig water around spawners?

[ManaUser]

There are mods that let you create water, it's not possible in the standard game. (Mainly because creating indestructible walls is kinda cheesy.)

Also you'd have to make sure your moat, be it natural or otherwise, was wider than spitting distance.

[FactorioParadox]

You could achieve this by surrounding a biter colony with walls and gun turrets far enough away that the turrets only activate when biters attack, though it would be better to surround your base instead if it's smaller than the area used to contain the biter colony. Note that you need inserters to feed the turrets ammo, machines to produce the ammunition, and miner to mine the resources as well as centrifuges and sulfuric acid production if you plan on using uranium rounds.

For reducing the energy costs, I would actually use stack inserters but only turn them on ever five to ten seconds - depending on the maximum stack size for the stack inserters - for just long enough to load some ammo, which should only use 26.6 to 13.3 kW respectively per second per turret on average. Also, I would assemble ammo on site and have the ammo feeding into a buffer chest so that when the belt feeding the turrets gets full, ammo starts to pile up in the chest, allowing the circuit network to detect that the belt (preferably just one site. is saturated and turn off the machines that are making ammo. Finally, I would set up an isolated power network for this and use accumulators as a buffer and have combinators turn off power to the main network if the accumulators get too low so that if your boilers go offline you have ample time to react before the biters destroy their containment unit.

You know, it's too bad alien artifacts were removed because this would probably be a great way to set up a grinder for them.