Factorio Forums

A machine says it puts out 30 pollution a minute.

If my evolution PF is set to 10, does that mean i do 10 * 30, or 10 * 1800? the game doesn't actually say. The wiki suggest by the minute, which would be nice since i don't have to convert any numbers then.

Maybe this part of the wiki is what you are looking for : https://wiki.factorio.com/Enemies#Evolution

I think if you increase the evolution => pollution settings, you are telling the game to make the biters react faster to the pollution, evolving and attacking more often. Pollution being one of the factor that increases "evolution". I think your words refer to that setting which makes pollution increase "evolution" faster.

It doesn't change the pollution produced per machine the same way modules would do i think.

For when the pollution of a machine is changing , even though it may say how much pollution a machine produces per minute, i think the game counts the pollution for every tick, which is 1/60 of a second. This in case you have a machine that turns on and off very fast. If during a minute the machine is running half of the time only, it will produce around half of the pollution. If during a second the machine is running only half of that second, same thing. I'm not sure though because it says the pollution cloud is updated every 64 ticks there https://wiki.factorio.com/Pollution. I believe the update of the cloud is the sum of the pollution produced during the last 64 ticks where each tick the machine produces more or less pollution if it's running or not.

For the sake of precision, the "drain" is always active consuming energy, and i think producing pollution. Most the pollution though comes from when the machine is running. I guess the pollution per minute figure is the max amount when the machine is always producing (aka "at full power"). If the machine is connected to electricity but not producing at all i think the pollution can be calculated with :
[drain/max consumption]*[pollution per tick]*[number of tick]. where for a minute you have 60 second and also 60 tick per second.
Or [pollution per minute * number of minute] or [pollution per second * number of second] which as you noted require conversion of units.


The game counts time in ticks, the electricity uses Joules and Watts, which require using second, and it's easier for pollution to think in minutes or hours. There is no way around unit conversion for precision, but maybe you don't need to be super precise to gauge pollution,i guess that's why on the wiki they just say the pollution per minute for machines

mmmPI wrote: Sun Mar 19, 2023 3:55 am I think if you increase the evolution => pollution settings, you are telling the game to make the biters react faster to the pollution, evolving and attacking more often.

As far as I know the effect is only to scale the how much each unit of pollution increases evolution. The Wiki says attacks are "every 1 to 10 minutes (random)" and I don't think there is any option to change this.

For the sake of precision, the "drain" is always active consuming energy, and i think producing pollution.

Drain doesn't create pollution directly, but it is still power consumption so if power production creates pollution (eg boilers and mining drills), then it creates pollution indirectly.

The pollution produced by a building per minute, which contributes to both evolution (according to the pollution evolution factor) and the chunk pollution value, is the given pollution rate for the machine (possibly different from the "base" value due to module effects) multiplied by the proportion of time it is active.

SoShootMe wrote: Sun Mar 19, 2023 7:14 am As far as I know the effect is only to scale the how much each unit of pollution increases evolution. The Wiki says attacks are "every 1 to 10 minutes (random)" and I don't think there is any option to change this.

I found this on the wiki : https://wiki.factorio.com/Enemies#Spawn ... ion_factor

Besides choosing what kind of biter will be spawned, the evolution factor also influences the spawning interval. This interval (spawning_cooldown in the enemy-spawner definition) is interpolated between 360 (0 evolution) and 150 (1 evolution) game ticks (= 6 to 2.5 seconds).

That's why i said that it makes them attack faster but maybe i was wrong in thinking it represent a higher frequency of attack maybe it's just larger waves with the same interval of time between attacks.

SoShootMe wrote: Sun Mar 19, 2023 7:14 am Drain doesn't create pollution directly, but it is still power consumption so if power production creates pollution (eg boilers and mining drills), then it creates pollution indirectly.

I thought it did but only from my game experience, which is error-prone i may have wrongfully assumed it does and need to test ingame.

Layarion wrote: Fri Mar 17, 2023 10:11 pm A machine says it puts out 30 pollution a minute.

If my evolution PF is set to 10, does that mean i do 10 * 30, or 10 * 1800? the game doesn't actually say. The wiki suggest by the minute, which would be nice since i don't have to convert any numbers then.

I think the answers here went off on a tangent. To answer the question, it would be per unit. I think the place you got minutes from in the wiki is the example. If you pay attention it has minutes in both the numerator and denominator which cancel out, so the PF is per unit of pollution.

As you can see from the wiki, the way it translates into an actual evolution factor is quite complicated.