pY Pollution & Energy (Unofficial)

[esso23]

1. Well here's Pyanodon's answer on Patreon when we donated and asked for a new feature "Pollution":

Hello! Thanks and glad you´re enjoying it. Py mods aren't made to be played with biters. So I have no plans to change it anytime soon to that be allowed.

Thanks
py

After that we asked for his permission to create this mod and he gave it to us so here we are

2. Yeah, I understand, I'm trying hard not to fall into this "balancing spiral" where you change 1 thing and based on that you need to change another thing and so on, but Biomass is a pretty big system, and it's hard to balance.

I also try to be as transparent as possible about the changes I'm making so that everyone sees the changes, and most importantly that anyone can say, like, hey this is bullsh*t, this is way too much and so on.

Anyway, I'm planning on maintaining this mod long-term, so when there's any problem or something feels unbalanced I'll be glad to fix it.

[DarkyPupu]

I'm positive it can be played with biters... with a few adjustments (i'm even playing with rampant, actually). Not suitable for vanilla biters settings especially at the start, anyway. Also you need to be masochist of course.

I'll give a try with your mod, and feedback anything worthy to be said
Maybe i missed something still but why a setting for glassworks especially ?

Thanks for your work anyway

[esso23]

Rampant? :-O Okay I guess I'm a noob then
I played with biters before this mod with lowered pollution/time factors but from 100 hour game I spent like 50 hours on building "great wall of china" all around the map. It's also harder because you need so many mining bases in pY compared to vanilla or BobAngel, so there are so many places to protect - also your base is so much bigger. I got Behemoths before blue science, and at that point I started making the mod I still play with biters (can't imagine a game without them).

Well the default Glassworks fuel consumption is 27MW (now lowered, but still high), which I consider totally insane and lowered it to 1MW. The difference is so massive I decided to make it configurable (for masochists like you I guess ).

[DarkyPupu]

OK thanks for answer.

One thing i do to keep biters decent is the evolution through research mod. While they keep being pesky, it allows to keep them enabled and play at your pace still. Of course one could consider this cheating, but the no-biter option or putting them 800km away doesn't sound way better to me. Playing on maps with 200% water or something like that also allows to have excellent defense points, and avoids the "China Wall" defense (which is kinda boring and uninteresting to build, i admit ). Probably other tweaks i found over plays also, i don't think of all right now xD

It keeps decent stress and buildings don't get chewed... too much :p

I don't like much ennemies, but playing without them at all removes all the point of pollution (alongside with all the military research). So keeping them on evolution control is the less bad solution i found

[esso23]

Version 0.4.5 released

Version: 0.4.5
Date: 2020.08.01
Bugfix:

• Fixing some crashes caused by changes in new pY versions

Changes:

• Increased pollution of Atomizer to 10/m at MK01
• Reduced pollution absorbtion of Fastwood Forestry to -15/m at MK01
• Biomass fuel value is now 1MJ (this has been set by Pyanodon recently)

[esso23]

Version 0.4.7 released

Version: 0.4.7
Date: 2020.08.09
Changes:

• Reduced Coal Briquette's fuel value to 30MJ and increased it's pollution modifier to 110%
• Phytoplankton Farm's pollution modifier changed to -10/s
• Powdered Biomass, Fine Powdered Biomass and Dried Biomass now have the same pollution modifier as Biomass

[DarkyPupu]

Hi,

Some feedback:

- Steam (60°) in tailing ponds generates insane amount of pollution, which doesn't make sense to me. Cannot vent it, either.
Anything which can be done about this ? Generally speaking, tailing ponds pollution looks a bit insane whatever, regarding the rest.

- It would be interesting also to have some early-game (early in Py-standards :p ) pollution moderation buildings or such, as it makes combustion turbine unplayable with biters (especially if you are in desert and / or close to water)

- I would also slightly decrease electric miners pollution, as they seem to generate way too much pollution regarding other buildings, and just reducing mining sites to 1-2 miners isn't exactly fun as you only have to wait more, without much options to workaround this.

- One thing about tiles also, not sure if it's part of this mod, I'm more in favor of increased pollution absorption from water (not to mention that it's full of seaweed in Py...), currently when you have a mining site next to water and biters on other side, it's pretty much impossible to regulate this. I would, at least, go with Earendel / Alien Biomes settings which are: tile.pollution_absorption_per_second=0.0000075 (about +50% if I'm not mistaken)

Thanks !

[factoriogame1121]

Hi,

Some feedback:

- Steam (60°) in tailing ponds generates insane amount of pollution, which doesn't make sense to me. Cannot vent it, either.
Anything which can be done about this ? Generally speaking, tailing ponds pollution looks a bit insane whatever, regarding the rest.

- It would be interesting also to have some early-game (early in Py-standards :p ) pollution moderation buildings or such, as it makes combustion turbine unplayable with biters (especially if you are in desert and / or close to water)

- I would also slightly decrease electric miners pollution, as they seem to generate way too much pollution regarding other buildings, and just reducing mining sites to 1-2 miners isn't exactly fun as you only have to wait more, without much options to workaround this.

- One thing about tiles also, not sure if it's part of this mod, I'm more in favor of increased pollution absorption from water (not to mention that it's full of seaweed in Py...), currently when you have a mining site next to water and biters on other side, it's pretty much impossible to regulate this. I would, at least, go with Earendel / Alien Biomes settings which are: tile.pollution_absorption_per_second=0.0000075 (about +50% if I'm not mistaken)

Thanks !

Hello. Are you referring to the waste storage facility and the steam discharged into it from the gas turbine system? (I communicate through a translator. Maybe I will not understand something). If yes, then I think this is such a convention, until you explore the cooling tower - after that the steam is discharged there.
Otherwise, removing the insane contamination from waste storage facilities could potentially significantly reduce the need for cooling towers. But overall, this area of ​​the game seems a little hasty to me. Unfinished. Or there is simply no other way left.

I myself always play with biters, and it seems to me that the most optimal thing at the moment is to expose them to a small concentration and a large spread. It's just that they are there and it's worth remembering them, so that the elements of defense and cleaning up the territory are not completely thrown out of the game.

I turn off the evolution in time and pollution, leaving only the evolution in murders. In this case, pollution plays only the role of provoking them. And the evolution of murders makes you think where it is more optimal to clean up, and where not to touch their bases yet.

In general, of course, I would like this part of the game to be worked out in the style of Py. I think they would do it cool too)

[esso23]

Hi,

Some feedback:

- Steam (60°) in tailing ponds generates insane amount of pollution, which doesn't make sense to me. Cannot vent it, either.
Anything which can be done about this ? Generally speaking, tailing ponds pollution looks a bit insane whatever, regarding the rest.

- It would be interesting also to have some early-game (early in Py-standards :p ) pollution moderation buildings or such, as it makes combustion turbine unplayable with biters (especially if you are in desert and / or close to water)

- I would also slightly decrease electric miners pollution, as they seem to generate way too much pollution regarding other buildings, and just reducing mining sites to 1-2 miners isn't exactly fun as you only have to wait more, without much options to workaround this.

- One thing about tiles also, not sure if it's part of this mod, I'm more in favor of increased pollution absorption from water (not to mention that it's full of seaweed in Py...), currently when you have a mining site next to water and biters on other side, it's pretty much impossible to regulate this. I would, at least, go with Earendel / Alien Biomes settings which are: tile.pollution_absorption_per_second=0.0000075 (about +50% if I'm not mistaken)

Thanks !

Hi, sorry for late answer.
- Tailings Pond's pollution is, i think, scripted (it's not based on fluid/gas pollution modifier), so nothing I can do about that. But it does not make any sense to use Tailings Pond to vent gases since you get PyVent right at the beginning of the game (no research required). So just don't ever use Tailings Pond with gases and your problems are solved

- You can use Seaweed/Sap/Moss and other stuff (also go electric asap and don't overproduce). Adjust your starting area and/or trees and other map settings. I tried many ways, but it's pretty impossible to balance both early game and mid game with pollution modifiers, it has to be balanced with map settings - we use larger starting area and increased absorption modifier - check our map presets ingame. This works pretty well in early game and also mid-late game where you generate insane amounts of pollution.
If you make early game easier, you just make mid game totally trivial (you can just build tons of some cheap early game pollution-absorption buildings and be done with pollution for the rest of the game).
In my latest saves I play with no expansion, 133% biter frequency, 133% biter base size, 200% starting area and 125% absorption modifier and it's completely fine.

- In base game, most of your pollution comes from miners and your production and energy generation is pretty much insignificant. In pY, most of the pollution comes from energy-generation and also your production produces significant levels of pollution. Miners are still significant, but in my games it's less than third of my pollution - which sounds pretty OK to me. Maybe you mine too much?

- I guess this is just a matter of preference - I like the water as it is, it makes it challenging and also it feels kinda realistic.

[BlueTemplar]

Thank you a lot for this mod !

I see that you've tried to rebalance power house / combustion mixture / combustion turbine.
Yeah, they were not worth it (at least in red/green science part of the game) in 0.16 already... (before even the 0.17 vanilla change that divided all pollution values by ~60 across the board !)

But I'm not sure that you succeeded : there are a lot of recipes, but I'm going to use the red science syngas (minimum 80 red science) as an example :

First, with a power house / combustion mixture / combustion turbine :
(minimum 110 red science, though you're going to want to also get :
- storage tanks for +70 red science to be able to easily mix the cold steam with hot steam to consume in a steam engine
- and/or cooling towers for +390 red science to turn cold steam back to water)

Screenshot from 2021-02-17 22-51-05.png (137.33 KiB) Viewed 6004 times

The above is actually for 1 GW (helmod base time 1s) :
84% × [ (550-15)°C × 2235 L + (500-15)°C × 85.11 L ] × 1 kJ/L = 1039 MJ , remove the 39 MJ/s consumed by all the buildings.
Helmod says 1.5 GW because it automatically assumes that the combustion turbine is consuming the highest temperature combustion mixture,
which is 750 °C for the mk1 one.

There's also an extra 9363 L of 60°C steam being produced, which after merging with >100 °C steam could be consumed by a steam engine to get back an extra 100 % × 9363 L × (60-15) °C × 200 J/L = 84.27 MJ, which is not negligible, but a PITA to balance so as to the steam engine doesn't get blocked by <100°C steam.

(I haven't bothered with inserter power or dealing with flue gas, should be negligible ?)

In comparison, if you were to just directly burn that coal in a boiler :

Screenshot from 2021-02-17 22-55-10.png (21.4 KiB) Viewed 6004 times

[EDIT : Whoops, I messed up somewhere, and the coal value is only 96% of the previous one. Probably when scaling up to account for energy consumed by buildings. My bad.]

That's 100% × 92.83 kg × 4 MJ/kg = 371.32 MJ
(I have to do it by hand because Helmod gives a wrong power answer here too, with Py 500°C accepting steam engines.)

So for the same amount of coal that's 2.7 times less power [EDIT : 2.6 times with 1/96% more coal] for 4.4 times [EDIT : 4.2 times] less pollution.
So, depending how you get that coal, like in 0.16 the combustion turbine might *still* not be worth it !

----

Let's compare it now with burning syngas (and extra coal gas) from the same amount of coal in a oil burner :
(Forget about burning the combustion mixture there, it's only 100 kJ/L.)

Screenshot from 2021-02-17 23-13-58.png (93.08 KiB) Viewed 6004 times

That makes for an exact 2kL of syngas –
(wow, what are the chances ?!? is this *really* just a coincidence, or maybe comes from balancing ?)
– which can be directly burned for 100% × 2000 L × 400 kJ/L = 800 MJ,
but we now *also* get 55.7 kg of extra unused coke,
which can be burned for 100% × 55.7 kg × 5 MJ/kg = 278.5 MJ
In total : 800 + 278.5 - 42.2 = 1036.3 MJ,
which is only 1.04 times more [EDIT : 1.08 times more] energy than the combustion turbine recipe, but with only 62% [EDIT : 64%] of its pollution !

----

P.S.: I then realized/remembered that it would be fairer to remove coal gas to combustion completely, and to account for the lack of coke with a negative energy and pollution, but the numbers should be roughly the same ?

Screenshot from 2021-02-17 23-29-49.png (117.28 KiB) Viewed 6004 times

----

Now, the oil burner is quite a bit farther in the tech tree, requiring at the minimum 725 red science. (But it's only 270 red science away from rushing Iron Processing 1, which I assume pretty much everyone does, considering how *expensive* steel is ?)

But on top of that, using oil burners is much less of a brainer than combustion mixtures : liquid fuel comes in, 165°C steam comes out.
(Though I guess that they also need water, while a power house can work in a closed cycle, I guess might be an interesting option for outposts far away from water where you can just bring a few kL of water in barrels ? Basic syngas recipe needs water though.)

As for capex :
1.) Combustion turbine recipe comes at 102k basic plates (copper, iron, lead, aluminum)
2.) Boiler + Steam Engine comes at 14k basic plates (!) (for 2.7 times less power though).
3.) Oil Burner recipe (not forgetting steam engines and boilers for extra coke) comes at 340k basic plates (!!!). I guess there *is* some balance after all, to pay for that lower pollution...)

Well, with that capex, I guess that it's actually better balanced than I expected, despite the ravenous hunger for coke by power houses ! Nice job balancing it !

Still, IMHO it would be better, considering its setup complexity, if combustion mixture was rebalanced to be both better and more capex expensive than oil burners, but also moved later in the tech tree, say to green science ?

[esso23]

...

Thank you for the kind words sir ( Also pretty nice analysis )
TBH I haven't played pY mods in a while so I guess there might be some things that changed and the balance might be a little off.
That being said, we didn't try to *perfectly* balance it, 'cause that's a lot of spreadsheets and math. We just wanted to make some improvements and make it playable with biters.
Anyway, next time I play pY I'll keep your suggestions in mind and will try to make some changes

[BlueTemplar]

I found quite the depolluter !

pYAL_ralesia_mk2_prodmodded_depollution.png (4.77 MiB) Viewed 4293 times

Compare with :

pYAL_CO2_Absorber.png (4.9 MiB) Viewed 4293 times

(Seems to be much cheaper to operate too, but then there's a lot of other options like that, see the sap trees I'm also using...)
P.S.: Never mind, forgot about the power usage : the CO2 Absorber is still (directly) 5.6 times more efficient...

[esso23]

Mod has been marked as deprecated. It's not compatible with v2.x release of pY.

[BlueTemplar]

Thanks for the great mod !

So, what is the state of Factorio 0.17+ pollution support (and biter support ??) in pY 2 ?