Factorio Forums

As the newest version introduced the concept of trees decaying due to heavy pollution, this could spiral out of control: trees dying because of pollution -> less pollution absorbed -> even more trees dying -> even more pollution.

What do you think about a filter, which uses an insane amount of energy and takes up a lot of space, but it removes a little bit of pollution out of the air? For balance reasons it should be very ineffective, requiring vast fields of solar farms to operate, and, of course, it would remove much less pollution than the pollution created by the boilers providing equivalent amounts of power. It should also not be able to remove all pollution, (maybe with a max limit removable by chunk), so that pollution should remain an issue even if we use these filters.

This means that aggressive players who don't care much about pollution and just fight the biters, won't need any of these filters. however, those who carefully design their factories so that the edge of the pollution just nearly reaches to the enemy, could make use of this new feature.

As this filter could make the game somewhat easier, we could add a side-effect of pollution: the effectiveness of solar panels should decrease if they are covered by a thick layer of smog.

This could motivate the players to expand, and install solar fields far away from the biggest pollution sources.

In 0.11, there was a mod that could do that.However, it was not as balanced as you'd want; three filters used very little energy and could handle the pollution of an entire production rig.

deepdriller wrote:In 0.11, there was a mod that could do that.However, it was not as balanced as you'd want; three filters used very little energy and could handle the pollution of an entire production rig.

I don't know if you were talking about my mod, but it isn't that unbalanced. The rough ratio was 1 air filtering machine on 4 mining drills. Considering you have easily over 20 on a decent sized ore patch, you might run into some challenges. Also you have to recycle your used air filters and such.

In one point, you are right: In 0.11
I will take a look at my stuff and update it, so it'll work in 0.12 aswell

I think it's more important that pollution plays some kind of beneficial role in Factorio. Right now pollution is a direct difficulty booster. The more you make, the crazier things become. That's all well and good, but there's no legitimate, helpful reason to WANT this. So players that cut down their pollution end up cutting down their difficulty for no real penalty. Don't get me wrong, productivity boosters are a viable reason to push your limits and generate more resources in the EXTREME long run. But there isn't much middle ground here. If you aren't getting the bonus from boosting resources, then pollution is only a HARMFUL thing.

I think biter evolution should be playing some role in what kind of resources you get from them. Currently tier 1 biters are just as lucrative as tier 3 biters, except the bigger guys are FAR more difficult to deal with. Artifact hunters are better off making low pollution because that lets them get all the loot for little effort. That's no good.