Friday Facts #286 - Pollution cleanup

[Klonan]

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-286

[steinio]

Hello? nobody here?
20 minutes after release no comment?

[Impatient]

Well done guys!

[Impatient]

Hello? nobody here?
20 minutes after release no comment?

I wondered as well.

[SuperSandro2000]

How they think we play:
Oh man that electric furnace will save polution.
I have enough ammo in that Outpost for 20 min.
Cliffs are a interesting gameplay.
Oh damn so much polution. Do something about it.


How we play:
Those furnaces are fast, require less space, no coal, are faster.
I build a giant wall around everything and just keep the biters outside the big red whatever.
Cliffs are total garbage.
I could build a useless machine to get to 99% evolution.

Jokes aside. No one cares about polution after 10 hours. The late game needs some more interesting and challenging stuff. The mid game got really extensive lately but for late... Let me grab mods cause the game delivers not that much. Just bigger values.

[sarlok]

My first post!
Just wanted to say how much I enjoy reading the Friday Facts posts. Seeing how the processes work behind the scenes, both technically and administratively are great - the amount of insight is amazing.

Pollution changes look interesting. This will make optimizing my factory late-game much easier to plan and figure out.
I always try to build my factories with as few defenses as possible, in an attempt to co-exist with my neighbors - swooping in to save the day myself if I mess that up.

Terrific work, as always!

[adesazz]

FWIW I create v17 cliffs everywhere and if I'm not careful about pollution I get overrun even late game (lots of biter mods). I play with poor patches so turtling isnt an option. Now I dont see myself auditing my outpost ammo or anything, but this is still useful transparency into what imho was a completely opaque system. And they did it all in 3 days, just to frame expectations a little. Very very nice work devs, and really enjoyed the new format!

Edit: And regardless if pollution matters in your game, I'm surprised if anyone doesn't draw the connection between the devs' approach to this (find a bug off the tailend of a huge release, instead of just changing a number take a week and improve the entire subsystem) and why Factorio is as good as it is.

[Ghoulish]

Nice to be a fly on the wall so to speak, and read of other peoples day to day lives.

[Amarula]

Just wanted to say how much I enjoy reading the Friday Facts posts. Seeing how the processes work behind the scenes, both technically and administratively are great - the amount of insight is amazing.

I can't agree enough - it is so cool to peek inside the office to see what is going on. Thank you again for the weekly insights and the amazing game. My hours playing Factorio is about to overtake hours spent playing hack (the original text graphics version on *nix)

[Ranakastrasz]

Huh. I have to ask, How exactly did the 16x multiplier occur? I mean, they scaled pollution down 60x, which, while pronounced similarly, isn't mathematically similar enough.
16x might have been 16.66x instead, or 1/6th of 100x.

Either way, I absolutely approve of integrating pollution further into the game.
-----

Is there a reason that, when I look at the megamap (in, admittedly, my continued 0.17.12 game, from 0.17.x which I don't recall) the pollution cloud is much more sharply limited. Rather than fading to invisibility some distance, the edge is a significantly darker red. Is this to make the edge more visible, so that at 1 pollution it is like 50% opacity, instead of 1% opacity like before (or whatever it was)

[Crozzfire]

I think it's quite unclear what this means:

Spawn values for current evolution factor (0.73)
35%: Medium biter: 20 pollution
64%: Big biter: 80 pollution

Like, how do I parse that statement?
What is an evolution factor, and how/why does it change over time? How is it connected to the percentages below?
What does the percentages mean - that this thing spawns 35% medium and 64% big?
What does the pollution number after each percentage mean? That it needs to absorb 20 pollution to spawn a medium biter? I guess not because then the medium biter percentage should be higher than the big biter percentage.

Of course I guess I could get an answer to these questions by searching forums and so on, but from a perspective of a gamer maybe those statements should be a littler easier to understand.

edit: also in the blog you mention an example about estimating ammo consumption from these numbers, but how?

[GhostPirate]

I think it's quite unclear what this means:

Spawn values for current evolution factor (0.73)
35%: Medium biter: 20 pollution
64%: Big biter: 80 pollution

I think it's pretty clear:
- Evolution factor is unexplained, I agree. It also doesn't matter. It grows over time (from 0 to 1, but you don't need to know that).
- Percentages are change of spawning. This spawner has a 35% chance of spawning a medium biter, and a 64% change of spawning a big biter.
- Pollution values is how much pollution it will absorb to create those biters:
-- If it makes a medium biter (35% chance), it will absorb 20 pollution to create it.
-- If it makes a big biter (64% chance), it will absorb 80 pollution to create it.

Estimating Ammo consumption would be:
- Your electric miners generate 10 pollution per second. Let's say you have 100 miners on a patch of iron. That generates 1000 pollution per second.
- Therefore, you'll generate 50 medium biters per second, or 12 big biters per second.
- A piercing round does 8 damage by itself, and with bullet damage 3 it gets +60%, so 12.8 damage.
- A medium biter has flat 8 plus 10% damage resistance, so 12.8-8 = 4.8, 4.8 x 0.9 = 4.32 damage per bullet = 43.2 damage per magazine.
- A medium biter has 75 Hp, so it will take 1.74 magazines to kill each one.
- 50 medium biters per second will therefore require 87 Armor Piercing Round Magazines per second to clear the waves at steady-state.

The same math can be done for Big Biters, then use a weighted average between the two requirements to determine your actual bullet use rate.

Cheers!

[abregado]

It should probably read "Spawn chance at current evolution factor". I mean, Kovarex did make this change in 3 days basically by himself so we have to give it some time.

Also... I broke the Introduction so it is not able to be completed due to 1000's of bugs when you have no turrets. A hotfix is on the way.

[Selvek]

"...pollution was increasing evolution 16.6 times faster than it should..."

So glad I spent a few hours in my new death world last night... daaaammmnn those biters are growing fast!!!

[Selvek]

Also... I broke the Introduction so it is not able to be completed due to 1000's of bugs when you have no turrets. A hotfix is on the way.

Is this new? The first time I went through the intro, I got massively overrun by 1000's of bugs because I had virtually no turrets

[Crozzfire]

I think it's quite unclear what this means:

Spawn values for current evolution factor (0.73)
35%: Medium biter: 20 pollution
64%: Big biter: 80 pollution

I think it's pretty clear:
- Evolution factor is unexplained, I agree. It also doesn't matter. It grows over time (from 0 to 1, but you don't need to know that).
- Percentages are change of spawning. This spawner has a 35% chance of spawning a medium biter, and a 64% change of spawning a big biter.
- Pollution values is how much pollution it will absorb to create those biters:
-- If it makes a medium biter (35% chance), it will absorb 20 pollution to create it.
-- If it makes a big biter (64% chance), it will absorb 80 pollution to create it.

That makes it quite a bit clearer.
Maybe it should spell it out just a tad more, like pretty much exactly what you said. Especially the part about absorbtion on creation.

[abregado]

Is this new? The first time I went through the intro, I got massively overrun by 1000's of bugs because I had virtually no turrets

THAT was on purpose

Now it happens when I dont want it to, right when the player has a pistol and has not finished researching turrets.

[Ranakastrasz]

I think it's pretty clear:
- Evolution factor is unexplained, I agree. It also doesn't matter. It grows over time (from 0 to 1, but you don't need to know that).
- Percentages are change of spawning. This spawner has a 35% chance of spawning a medium biter, and a 64% change of spawning a big biter.
- Pollution values is how much pollution it will absorb to create those biters:
-- If it makes a medium biter (35% chance), it will absorb 20 pollution to create it.
-- If it makes a big biter (64% chance), it will absorb 80 pollution to create it.

Estimating Ammo consumption would be:
- Your electric miners generate 10 pollution per second. Let's say you have 100 miners on a patch of iron. That generates 1000 pollution per second.
- Therefore, you'll generate 50 medium biters per second, or 12 big biters per second.
- A piercing round does 8 damage by itself, and with bullet damage 3 it gets +60%, so 12.8 damage.
- A medium biter has flat 8 plus 10% damage resistance, so 12.8-8 = 4.8, 4.8 x 0.9 = 4.32 damage per bullet = 43.2 damage per magazine.
- A medium biter has 75 Hp, so it will take 1.74 magazines to kill each one.
- 50 medium biters per second will therefore require 87 Armor Piercing Round Magazines per second to clear the waves at steady-state.

The same math can be done for Big Biters, then use a weighted average between the two requirements to determine your actual bullet use rate.

Cheers!

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comme ... s_to_kill/
Going to see what I can do with this spreadsheet related to pollution. It does have a huge number of variables, but way better than doing it myself from scratch.
Main issue is that the research has changed, and also the resistances don't match the wiki, and I don't think they match the game either.

But, well, you can lookup the intersect between ammo type, research, and biter type, and once you know shots to kill, you can plug it into your formula, and determine approximate required ammunition.

That said, bases clearly spawn biters without being polluted first, so I really don't know the rules there. How much free pollution-worth do they get?

Edit:
Oh, and given that you only get 50 iron/second from 100 iron mines, or rather 50 ore/sec, and piercing ammo costs 15 raw ore. (And ignoring all processing pollution) I think that results in 3 piercing magazines. Which is a tiny bit smaller than 87. Even with a lot of pollution being eaten by terrain and other natural dissipation, I can only assume a mathematical error occurred somewhere.

And when did medium biters get 8 armor? I thought it was 4, so it went 0->4->8->12.

[leadraven]

1. "emissions_per_tick_per_watt" and "pollution_absorption_per_second ".
   Why ticks and seconds within the same context?
2. "..._per_tick_per_watt"
   Why not "..._per_joule"?

[5thHorseman]

I think it's quite unclear what this means:

Spawn values for current evolution factor (0.73)
35%: Medium biter: 20 pollution
64%: Big biter: 80 pollution

I think it's pretty clear:
- Evolution factor is unexplained, I agree. It also doesn't matter. It grows over time (from 0 to 1, but you don't need to know that).
- Percentages are change of spawning. This spawner has a 35% chance of spawning a medium biter, and a 64% change of spawning a big biter.
- Pollution values is how much pollution it will absorb to create those biters:
-- If it makes a medium biter (35% chance), it will absorb 20 pollution to create it.
-- If it makes a big biter (64% chance), it will absorb 80 pollution to create it.

That makes it quite a bit clearer.
Maybe it should spell it out just a tad more, like pretty much exactly what you said. Especially the part about absorbtion on creation.

That would be a lot of text for that box. Maybe a help button to go to a bigger explanation.