Expanding pollution and environmentalism

[thereaverofdarkness]

I'm sure this topic has been discussed a lot, but I intend to add several original ideas. This suggestion is about adding more sources of pollution including waste products to the game, and more ways for the player to deal with pollution and waste products, giving the player the power to increase or reduce overall pollution. Then the pollution will have various effects on the environment which the player may like or dislike as they choose.


Currently existing pollution is now called air pollution, and there will be water and ground pollution as well.

Trash: assemblers would gradually produce trash, an item that remains in their trash slot until it is removed. There would be an option to automatically discard all trash. This causes the assembler to stop accumulating trash, but it causes the facility to generate ground pollution around it. Ground pollution would spread very slowly. As the ground accumulates pollution, it eventually it begins to slow player movement as well as taking on the appearance of being littered with trash. You can have inserters and belts remove all trash, or you can put it in chests, in vehicles, on trains, etc. You'll be able to designate sections of terrain as landfills. A landfill is an impassible terrain which has a capacity based on how many spaces it takes up, and allows far greater storage of trash than simply putting it in chests. A very full landfill also pollutes nearby ground much more rapidly and strongly but this spread is actually water pollution. If a landfill is large enough, you might never manage to fill it to max capacity.

You can convert items you don't want into trash, and this will reduce storage bloat. Trash stacks to 1000, and an item stack always converts into less trash comparative to storage space than what it already took up. If a storage object is destroyed, its contents are converted to trash and deployed onto the ground as ground pollution.


Ground and water pollution: Ground pollution is just trash littered on the surface. You can remove ground pollution by using inserters or logistics robots to pick it up as trash. Ground pollution will spread a little bit, but over time (very slowly) the trash amount on the ground decays using a half life function, and all trash that decays is converted into water pollution in the ground. This water pollution flows gradually through the ground and can spread much farther if you let it get out of control. Ground with high water pollution will kill trees and grass, converting grass into dirt and converting trees into their dead variants and eventually removing them altogether. The terrain will gradually absorb water pollution, and if you deteriorate the terrain from high levels of pollution, it will absorb the pollution more slowly as it is killed off. With extremely high levels of pollution, you can cause a special toxic wasteland terrain to develop which looks cool and does not absorb any pollution of any kind and instead generates a little bit of water and air pollution. Enemies cannot build bases on toxic wasteland terrain and once the terrain goes that far, it cannot recover on its own and will only be restored through player efforts.

Water pollution can also spread into water sources. Bodies of water have a much higher pollution threshold and so being near a large body of water can help keep your soil clean. Water pollution is eliminated faster in a body of water but it also spreads out much faster, evening out quickly over the whole body of water if it's not very big. If you pollute a body of water enough, it'll first kill off the fish, but then it'll start to change color and eventually you can turn the water into toxic slime. Once it gets that far, the only two ways for it to recover are either through player efforts, or if it is mixing with more distant waters that have not yet turned to slime. If the whole body of water is turned to slime, it cannot restore itself and will instead slowly generate water pollution on the nearby ground.


Stone bricks and concrete covering the ground prevent ground pollution from turning into water pollution. The trash buildup will stick around forever until you clean it up, or you can just leave it there if you just don't care.


Sludge: Facilities that work with liquids (oil refineries, chemical plants, any assembler taking in a fluid resource including water) gradually produce sludge, which is a liquid form of trash. You can opt to dump the sludge on the ground instead of dealing with it, in which case it is directly turned into water pollution. Because of how quickly this can overwhelm the soil's small water pollution threshold, you can very quickly create a small patch of toxic wasteland. The environment will last longer if you instead pipe it into a body of water. You can alternatively hold it in storage tanks or barrels. A chemical plant is capable of processing sludge into trash, or with a water input, trash into sludge. Either way you're making air pollution just because you're running the chemical plant. If you have a pipe filled with any fluid other than water, you can click the end to open up a UI frame that will allow you to dump the fluid right there. Oil products or other fluids are converted to water pollution as they flow out of the pipe.

The more polluted the water you use in industry processes, the more water is needed and the faster you'll generate sludge. Mostly you won't notice the increased water intake, but if it gets high enough you may have to hook up more pipes or pumps, or extra buffer water tanks to keep the water flowing in as fast as you need it. This is especially a problem later when you start adding speed modules and you get the facilities to run very quickly.


Air pollution: Air pollution works basically the same as the pollution already in the game. Various facilities generate varying amounts of it, it spreads out, and enemy bases absorb it. If you generate enough air pollution, it will start to create smog, which will make the air take on a brownish hue and if it gets thick enough, can begin to obstruct your view--though this is an absurdly high amount of smog that you'll probably never reach. Once air pollution gets high enough to generate any smog, it will very slowly begin to exchange itself into the terrain as water pollution.


Sustainment colonies: Enemies will respond to pollution in a few ways. The map will start out littered with a type of enemy colony called a sustainment colony. These sustainment colonies have spawners, worms, and at least one sustainment unit which is an armored facility that absorbs water and air pollution from its terrain chunk. This replaces the existing pollution absorption feature, and you can thus disable the pollution absorption of the colony by sabotaging this unit. Larger sustainment colonies may have multiple sustainment units. Sustainment colonies initially will absorb air and groundwater pollution and will spend it as a resource toward attack forces that are then sent against the source of the pollution. If the pollution is strong enough that there is some left over after each absorption tick, the remaining pollution will act toward poisoning the colony. The thicker the remaining pollution each tick, the more poison the colony absorbs. The colony eliminates a small amount of poison but if it is being poisoned more quickly than it can handle, the poison will gradually accumulate.


Enemy poisoning: Each enemy colony starts at stage 0 poisoning. At a certain threshold, the poison buildup will cause the colony to evolve to stage 1 poisoning, which will decrease their units' movement and attack speed slightly as well as slightly reducing their regeneration rate, but will make them more aggressive--they will attack more often and in larger numbers. At stage 2 poisoning, their movement and attack speed will be decreased further along with their hit points and damage. Their respawn cycles will be delayed somewhat, their regeneration rate is greatly reduced, and they will send out distress calls to nearby enemy colonies. They will continue to attack more aggressively. This is the most dangerous stage of poisoning. At later stages they only become weaker. At stage 3 poisoning they continue to attack you relentlessly, but their stats are so weakened that they aren't so all that threatening anymore. Their hit point regeneration has completely stopped. At stage 4 poisoning, they are very weak and make pathetic attempts to attack you. At stage 5 poisoning, the units and structures begin to gradually lose hit points until they die out.

At each higher stage of poisoning, the enemies begin to take on a sickly appearance and will eliminate poison more quickly except at stage 5 in which they eliminate it at the same rate as at stage 3. It is difficult to produce pollution so rapidly as to actually kill off a colony, but it's easier if you've turned your ground into toxic wasteland.


Attack colonies: When enemies form a new colony, they would normally have a 100% chance of forming a sustainment colony but your influence in their area will make them more likely to build attack colonies. The more pollution they are dealing with, the greater their chance of building an attack colony. An attack colony contains a mix of regular and advanced spawners along with worms. Advanced spawners have more hit points and armor, and produce units at 0.25 higher evolution state. Attack colonies do not have any sustainment units and instead are more resistant to poison accumulation because they eliminate it more quickly and use this as their resource to attack you with. Attack colonies generally will send attack forces to you more commonly than sustainment colonies will.

Attack colonies are able to contain Fireworm spawners which spawn fireworm units. Fireworms have a short range fire breath attack that produces sustained damage. They are resistant to fire, laser, and explosive damage but vulnerable to physical. When killed, they explode and leave the area around them burning for several seconds. Behemoth fireworms deal fire damage to units standing next to them, and they leave a trail of flames in their wake.


Siege colonies: When any colony reaches poisoning stage 2 and begins to send out distress calls, it will often make nearby colonies send out reinforcement units (which may not be poisoned) to assist in attacking your base. But occasionally it can cause them to go create a siege colony. A siege colony will always be generated within a certain range of your base, and it will initially have one behemoth worm. This worm will absorb pollution and use it as a resource to power its very long ranged attack, which it will use to siege your base from afar. It will target whatever facilities are closest to it. Over time the colony can expand (just like any other colony) and siege colonies can develop more siege worms. In addition to siege worms, they contain spawners and regular worms. Siege colonies do not contain advanced spawners, and they never have fireworm spawners. Siege crawler spawners have to reach a higher evolution quotient than other kinds of spawners before they send out behemoth siege crawlers.

Siege colonies are able to contain Siege crawler spawners which spawn siege crawler units. These are melee units which spawn in smaller numbers but have strong armor (but the same hit points) and a slow but powerful attack that pierces armor. It is an acid attack like what worms use, so it'll break through your walls pretty easily. These units have especially strong protection vs. physical and explosive damage. They have some laser resistance but it's less than what fireworms have. Laser turrets, flamethrowers, and poison capsules can take them out but tank cannon shells are actually the best thing to use against them. If a cannon turret is added, it will be very good for protecting against siege crawlers. Behemoth siege crawlers are massively armored and take very little damage from most attacks. They will charge your base with enough power to knock down a wall segment outright, and their basic attack is more than half the damage needed to take out a wall. Cannon shells will be important in taking these down. Perhaps more advanced late-game weaponry should be added to provide the player more options for dealing with these. Alternatively, you could choke out the siege colony with poison.


Enemy colonies cannot be built on trashy ground or toxic wasteland. Trashy ground will refuse to spread onto enemy facilities and instead will spread in other directions. If toxic wasteland spreads into an enemy colony, it will probably kill the colony by poisoning it.


Recycling: There will be options for making use of your waste products if you're not satisfied with dumping or storing them. Assemblers can convert trash into plates of reclaimed metal which can be used in place of iron plates in most (not all) recipes but cannot be converted into steel. You don't get a whole lot of metal out of this process, and you have to hook up a water pipe to the assembler as well, which causes a small amount of sludge to be generated. The sludge is far less than the trash you're processing through, and you can process the sludge into trash and send it right back in if you want. As stated above, chemical plants can process sludge into trash.

Inserters and logistic robots can remove trash from a landfill to inventory when you want to use it for recycling, or if you just wanted to stop polluting that land. Trash stored in chests doesn't degrade and pollute. Productivity modules reduce sludge and trash generation per cycle. There will be a Green Assembler you can research which works at the same rate as the blue assembler (yes, it's green in color) and it generates much less trash and air pollution but costs more energy to run.


Green technology: In addition to the green assembler, there are various other techs you can research to provide yourself with ways to avoid polluting the land. The green mining drill is an electric mining drill with greatly reduced pollution output. The electric furnace produces almost no pollution. The green oil refinery and green chemical plant produce much less pollution but work more slowly instead of costing more energy to run. Inserters and transport belts already produce zero pollution, so they are a good way to avoid pollution. Solar panels are a good way to get energy without polluting.

Some techs will be aimed at reducing the pollution you already have. Groundwater pumps will be placed and operated like mining drills or pumpjacks, and will extract water pollution from the ground and convert it to sludge. Offshore filtration units will perform the same role, but are placed on the shoreline. They operate much faster and produce sludge much faster, but if the pollution is embedded deep in the soil, cleaning the nearby water may not help much. Air cleaners are facilities that require a water input and gradually reduce the air pollution in the area, converting it into sludge. It takes a very large amount of air pollution to generate only a small amount of sludge, so several of these facilities may take a long time to fill up a sludge tank.

Trash cans are placed like storage chests, but they hold a grand 64 slots--however they can only hold trash. If you place items in them, those items are automatically converted into trash. Logistics robots will automatically pick trash off the ground and put it in available trash cans.


Coal technology: If you don't mind polluting more (or if you actually want to!) then there are technologies that can give you certain advantages at the cost of needing coal (or wood, solid fuel, etc.) and producing more pollution. The Burner assembler works at the pace of the yellow assembler and not only is it available earlier in the game, but it does not require electricity to run. Instead, it requires a water hookup and burns coal rapidly, and it produces a large amount of trash, sludge, and air pollution. The burner assembler has only two module slots. The advanced burner mining drill has attributes like the electric mining drill (it's 3x3 and mines a 5x5 area) but it runs on coal and produces a high amount of air pollution. It runs slightly faster than the electric drill but produces more pollution for the amount mined than the first burner mining drills. The high-power oil refinery and chemical plant require coal in addition to the normal inputs (they do require power), and they operate more rapidly but produce a lot of sludge and air pollution. The oil furnace smelts faster than the steel or electric furnace but requires an input of light oil and produces a very large amount of air pollution. The advanced steam engine requires a larger boiler input as well as an input of lubricant, but it can generate a lot more power at the cost of producing more air pollution and some sludge. The advanced boiler requires an input of light oil instead of coal, and can much better meet the heating demands of the advanced steam engine but it generates a lot more air pollution. The advanced steam engines can allow the passage of sludge from one to another adjacent engines in a line, and they have two pipe hookups instead of the one pipe hookup that regular steam engines have.


All this sludge production and extra piping needs makes me think that assemblers should have four pipe fittings when they are running fluids through, to allow both the resource fluid and the sludge to be piped through, using the assembler as a multipipe in addition to its primary function.

[aka13]

I think you have some brilliant ideas there, but it seems that the enemies will sadly stay off the dev's radar for quite a while... Or at least, thats how it is right now.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Maybe after full release, they could eventually do a pollution-centered expansion pack.

[ssilk]

I've added this suggestion to viewtopic.php?f=80&t=3440 What do biters do in their spare time? (Pheromone pathfind)
cause if we have the basic model for pheromones this can also be implemented in a simple way.

[thereaverofdarkness]

Thanks!

That's a really neat topic, and it'll give me some ideas for adjusting this one a bit!

[realcyberleon]

I like the idea of multiple pollutions, but it FEELS like this is already in the Vanilla game (I'm not saying it is in it, it just feels like it: Faster spread over oceans, water turning greenish with time, bit slower over land etc.). What could spice things up would be wind blowing the part of the pollution that is "air" several tiles into one direction, while water bodies would transport "sea" pollution to another.

One thing I'm wondering about is why nuklear missiles dont generate pollution, then again maybe I just havent launched enough of them yet *angry biter noises in the background* ...

As to pullution sources maybe it also could make sense to differentiate between the pollution types:
- rubbish/litter pollution (your landfill idea is nice here),
- chemical pollution (draining pipes of anything else than water, unclean waste handling, expiring batteries when they are several days and nights on the conveyor belt instead inside a chest ...),
- biological pollution (in case we get bio weapons versus the biters in the future - fighting one bio weapon with another),
- radiation pollution (no radioactivity from nukes? Well, gonna see if I need to shoot a minimum amount of these ... *even more angry biter noises*),
- noise pollution (drills would generate just a bit of air pollution, but make much noise),
- light pollution (At night only, some higher tier buildings could be highly illuminated at night, but these ever-burning city lights could attract biters from afar).
- frequency/radio pollution (Maybe the swarm communication being disturbed by us using more and more radio-controlled bots would anger the biters.)

[ssilk]

Pollution is already spread into the wind direction.

[Koub]

Pollution is already spread into the wind direction.

Are you sure ? I'm almost sure wind is only cosmetic in vanilla, there is no word on the influence of the wind on the wiki page about pollution : https://wiki.factorio.com/Pollution#Pollution_spread.

[aka13]

Pollution is already spread into the wind direction.

Are you sure ? I'm almost sure wind is only cosmetic in vanilla, there is no word on the influence of the wind on the wiki page about pollution : https://wiki.factorio.com/Pollution#Pollution_spread.

I'd also say that wind is cosmetic only

[ssilk]

Strange. I was 100% sure it is. It must come from the very early versions and how the wind blows the smoke from the steam engines; and some falsely interpreted measurement by myself, you can see myself arguing with it, but nobody understands:

I moved this to balancing and change the title a bit.

My opinioin: It is possible, that the wrong - or right - wind (direction, speed) influences a game really strong. And I think, that the wind is currently changing too fast/too often to see any (big) effect. This underlines the OP.

What I also think is, that wind should be more or less predictable. But that is another suggestion.
See also viewtopic.php?f=80&t=342#p133677

So I’ll merge this into that post and move it back to suggestions.
At least there is an api for the wind, so it can be tested/modded.

Edit: in the end I didn’t merge and forgot to delete the announcement.