Drill pollution

[Pongard]

Ok, so in my latest game I try to control my pollution. I am switching to solar energy (no batteries yet), but in the end the mining drills are by far the biggest pollution factor. In the pollution graphs I can clearly see the impact of the solar panels, as they go off by night - The mining drills have a factor 5 higher impact than everything else. Sure, the coal mines go back a tiny bit when the solar panels kick in, as the boilers don't need to be fed, but only a tiny bit.

So long story short, what to do about the mining drill pollution?

[eradicator]

Pollution is energy consumption based. Use efficency modules.

[BlueTemplar]

Also, productivity modules (close to the end of the production chain !) should in theory be able to help too - by reducing the very need for the drills to mine, and therefore, pollute ?

[eradicator]

Also, productivity modules (close to the end of the production chain !) should in theory be able to help too - by reducing the very need for the drills to mine, and therefore, pollute ?

Prod modules both increse pollution directly and reduce speed. Pretty bad candidate. By the time you can mass-produce Mk2 or Mk3 you hopefully don't need to worry about pollution anymore.

Fun facts: A drill costs 28 resources, 3 Eff1 modules cost 188 resources, one Eff2 modules costs 652 resources. So for ~8 times the costs of a normal drill you can build one drill+3*Eff1, which is about half as expensive as a single Eff2.

Also besides the direct effect of reducing the drill pollution, Eff modules also indirectly reduce pollution of the power plant.

[eradicator]

Did a quick experiment with 50 miners, 3 boilers, 6 steam engines.

Without eff polution is 9.6/s, with 3Eff1 it's 1.9/s, which confirms exactly 80% reduction for both drills and boilers. If you're in an area with lots of natural absorption (trees/grass) the effect is possibly much greater because "real pollution" is pollution minus absorption, so it's theoretically possible to have a mine with 0 actual pollution if you can push the machine pollution below the absorption threshold.

Here's the command that i used to measure surface wide pollution:

Code: Select all

/c
local s = game.player.surface
local r = 0
script.on_event(defines.events.on_tick,function(e)
  r = r + s.get_total_pollution()
  s.clear_pollution() 
  if e.tick%(60*60)==0 then
    game.print(r/60)
    r=0
    end
  end)

screenshot_75359.png (2.63 MiB) Viewed 6437 times

[BlueTemplar]

Prod modules both increse pollution directly and reduce speed. Pretty bad candidate. By the time you can mass-produce Mk2 or Mk3 you hopefully don't need to worry about pollution anymore.

The very end of the production chain is usually the labs, which don't pollute directly, and don't use much power either.

[eradicator]

Prod modules both increse pollution directly and reduce speed. Pretty bad candidate. By the time you can mass-produce Mk2 or Mk3 you hopefully don't need to worry about pollution anymore.

The very end of the production chain is usually the labs, which don't pollute directly, and don't use much power either.

Ah. I thought you meant productivity modules in drills. Putting them in only in labs would work, yea. Oh my...and the speed penalty is canceled by a single levels of research speed. So it's always worth it even if one doesn't have modules in anything else and even if one doesn't care about pollution. I feel stupid for waiting for Prod3 modules now.

[jodokus31]

efficiency 1 modules in miners are very good. efficiency 2 or 3 are not worth IMO. eff2 in electric furnace could be viable at some point to get from 60% to max. 80% with 2 slots. level 3 assembler support 4 modules, so you can use 3 eff1 modules to get the max 80%.
first mining productivity research will also help to get 10% more resources without downside.
prod modules 1 in labs and expensive science packs should help, too. Also gears and green circuits are good candidate for prod 1 modules, because the crafting time is very low. At least it reduces needed resources, don't know if it actually reduces pollution. Could imagine it does.

[Pongard]

Nice, efficiency modules are doing wonders, thanks guys for all the elaborate answers!

[Serenity]

On occasion I have used efficiency modules in miners to stop attracting biters or driving up evolution. In one case the pollution cloud was spreading across a body of water I couldn't get to. You can reduce the cloud to almost nothing that way

Here is a list of the best choices for productivity modules as far as the return of investment into the modules is concerned:
https://factoriocheatsheet.com/#product ... le-payoffs
Time times are for high level modules, but the ranking should also apply to lower modules. Gears is indeed surprising, but it makes sense since they craft very fast and you need a ton of them in many recipes.

[Honktown]

efficiency 1 modules in miners are very good. efficiency 2 or 3 are not worth IMO. eff2 in electric furnace could be viable at some point to get from 60% to max. 80% with 2 slots. level 3 assembler support 4 modules, so you can use 3 eff1 modules to get the max 80%.
first mining productivity research will also help to get 10% more resources without downside.
prod modules 1 in labs and expensive science packs should help, too. Also gears and green circuits are good candidate for prod 1 modules, because the crafting time is very low. At least it reduces needed resources, don't know if it actually reduces pollution. Could imagine it does.

Productivity massively increases pollution. Pollution is based on time * power consumed * pollution factor. Productivity modules slow the machine, increase power consumed, and increase the pollution factor. The only time they reduce pollution is when you're "post-game" using beacons, because if you measure the pollution in pollution per item crafted, it ends up far less. By then you can defend yourself anyway.

On occasion I have used efficiency modules in miners to stop attracting biters or driving up evolution. In one case the pollution cloud was spreading across a body of water I couldn't get to. You can reduce the cloud to almost nothing that way

Here is a list of the best choices for productivity modules as far as the return of investment into the modules is concerned:
https://factoriocheatsheet.com/#product ... le-payoffs
Time times are for high level modules, but the ranking should also apply to lower modules. Gears is indeed surprising, but it makes sense since they craft very fast and you need a ton of them in many recipes.

Efficiency 1 modules are great in pump jacks, if you can spare the research. Don't cost many red chips either. At first oil is far away, so inevitably enemies will be nearby and it will be harder to defend, and if you're just starting out you won't have laser turrets to defend.

Gears are valuable for productivity not because they're used in a lot of recipes in itself, but because they're used in a lot of non-productivity recipes, for which you can't boost the final product, which would always be the most valuable. I don't know how much that calculator took everything into account. It's also worth mentioning Productivity benefits stack multiplicatively. A 1.2 boost in copper furnaces, a 1.4 boost in wire production, a 1.4 boost for green chips, 1.4 boost in red, and 1.4 boost in blue, ends up being 4.6x more effective copper usage for blue chips. Worth mentioning is that by the time you have a lot of productivity 3's, you're probably done with the game, or chasing the numerical dragon. Add in 30% on the drills and you're at 6x more copper than you started with, before one even uses the blue chips in anything.

[torne]

Productivity massively increases pollution. Pollution is based on time * power consumed * pollution factor. Productivity modules slow the machine, increase power consumed, and increase the pollution factor. The only time they reduce pollution is when you're "post-game" using beacons, because if you measure the pollution in pollution per item crafted, it ends up far less. By then you can defend yourself anyway.

They also reduce pollution in labs, as BlueTemplar pointed out earlier - labs don't generate any pollution, so the pollution multiplier of the modules does nothing, and so you just need fewer science packs for the same research which saves a ton of pollution "upstream".
Since you can also counteract the speed penalty with lab speed research, there is effectively no downside to putting prod modules in labs and you should do it as soon as you can make even level 1 prod modules.

[Honktown]

They also reduce pollution in labs, as BlueTemplar pointed out earlier - labs don't generate any pollution, so the pollution multiplier of the modules does nothing, and so you just need fewer science packs for the same research which saves a ton of pollution "upstream".
Since you can also counteract the speed penalty with lab speed research, there is effectively no downside to putting prod modules in labs and you should do it as soon as you can make even level 1 prod modules.

True. I don't remember if there's other "pollution-free" buildings. I am using mods, and it shows pollution on labs as .0005 per minute, so I think code-wise they technically produce pollution, just an imperceptible amount the mod developer is a

bastard

. Labs are always the best to use productivity in, even if they did produce massive pollution. It's interesting to mention, that since you're getting free products, labs reduce pollution over time, by a lot. Nearly all the resources one produces goes into science. If all the labs had even productivity 1, that's about an 8% reduction in pollution and power consumption right there (and reduces space/infrastructure/defense needed if you spam more labs to keep up the pace).

[eradicator]

They also reduce pollution in labs, as BlueTemplar pointed out earlier - labs don't generate any pollution, so the pollution multiplier of the modules does nothing, and so you just need fewer science packs for the same research which saves a ton of pollution "upstream".
Since you can also counteract the speed penalty with lab speed research, there is effectively no downside to putting prod modules in labs and you should do it as soon as you can make even level 1 prod modules.

On second thought, the labs do still consume much more energy with prod modules. So pollution is still an issue if @OP is running on coal at night.

[BlueTemplar]

Eh, with 2 prod1, one unupgraded lab should go from 60 kW to 154.3... kW for the same speed, but +8% productivity... across your entire production line ! That's only an extra ~1/20 of a boiler...

[eradicator]

one unupgraded lab

Yea, but. If you only have a single lab you have other things to worry about.
Just saying that prod labs aren't as perfectly free of side effects as i initially thought.

[jodokus31]

one unupgraded lab

Yea, but. If you only have a single lab you have other things to worry about.
Just saying that prod labs aren't as perfectly free of side effects as i initially thought.

It depends, which science you are researching. Only red & green might not be better, but from blue/military it gets more profitable. Research speed and used assembler type is also a factor. Also all science packs are consumed together in one process.

I don't have done any calculations, so it's more guessing.

Other than pollution, it also has other advantages to use prodmodules. Less mining, outposts last longer. Less throughput needed for input resources. Pollution is more in the middle of the base and not at the edge, etc.

[Stimpatch]

Pollution is energy consumption based. Use efficency modules.

I did not know that, even with 500+ hours in factorio. Is that documented somewhere? How could i miss this information. I guess energy consuption == pollution is not communicated well...

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah, it could be better presented I guess ?
You can directly see the pollution output in the information card of a machine change when you add/remove efficiency modules (or speed modules, but one might assume that it's only from extra speed...)

[eradicator]

Pollution is energy consumption based. Use efficency modules.

Is that documented somewhere?

For modders it's on the wiki https://wiki.factorio.com/Types/EnergySource#emissions for players i have no clue.
It's more of an engine quirk. From a realism perspective it doesn't make sense if you think about it.