Visible pollution from electric mining drills

[BEEFE]

What: Have electric mining drills emit dust/smoke particles.

Why: Electric mining drills are tied with pumpjacks for most pollution per megawatt of any machine, and in my experience stay the #1 or 2 source of pollution in my whole factory until I start loading up assembler 3s with tier 3 modules. However, there's no visual indication that they produce any pollution directly. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that the pollution number in the tooltip meant that even electric building produced pollution directly, rather than indirectly through burning coal in boilers.

Pollution has gotten a lot more transparent (heh) in 0.17, but it could stand to be even more obvious that electric mining drills are positively filthy.

[darkfrei]

Not exactly, but
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SmogVisualPollution

[BEEFE]

Not exactly, but
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SmogVisualPollution

I'll look into that because it does seem like a fun toy, but it doesn't help you distinguish pollution sources within a pollution cloud.

For instance, look at this screenshot I found:


The steel furnaces are obviously polluting here. The electric mining drills appear squeaky clean, even though they're probably polluting more than the furnaces are. You wouldn't notice that from the smog visualizer or looking at the pollution overlay on the map, because the mines and furnaces are part of the same pollution cloud, and probably even share some chunks there. At some point you're going to expand out of the pollution cloud from the starting area and it becomes more apparent that mines pollute on their own, but in my experience that doesn't usually happen until well after I get oil going.


I should emphasize that this is mainly for the benefit of new players, to communicate "mines=pollution". The smoke clouds in FFF #295 are gorgeous and inspiring, but they communicate something else and the whole petroleum industry pollutes differently from the metal industry anyway.

[Dragony]

Hi!

Why is the air of even the most dirty factories crystal clear and clean? I bet there are many people not even knowing about pollution, because they haven't seen the "show pollution" button in the map yet. Isn't ist a weird thing that the devs haven't visualized any pollution? Why not?

I have just found this mod and it is awesome that I can finally see the pollution. It would be much cooler though if the devs could implement some hardware shaded Smog!

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/SmogVisualPollution

[Meggal_Bozale]

Pretty sure it's for the fun aspect, why would smog be fun? Sure you get to see how much the environment cowers at your factory with this, but it would be hard to see through and bothersome, distracting you from work in the factory. I think it is best left as a mod, personally, but it's an interesting concept.

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into older topic with same suggestion
Also :
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3068
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=21214
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=51955

[Darinth]

My made it like half way through my first playthrough before I realized that the reason I was producing so much pollution was because the electric miners still produce a huge amount of pollution. Given what I know of mining, it actually makes perfect since, but with no visual indication of the pollution, it's easy to miss. There's a portion of me that likes this mimicry to reality, that sometimes your sources of pollution aren't obvious... but at the same time factorio tends to prefer to make things clear & obvious, which this definitely is not.