Factorio Forums

Had these idea when I was studying about coal fire plants.

Combined cycle plants- Idea of using heat to both turn a turbine and produce steam to run another turbine. So the idea would be to take the boiler and steam engine and combine them along with a few other odds and ends to make a more efficient power supply and still use coal.

Coal Gasification plants- Real life application of this is to use heat to break apart coal without burning it. This produces carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas. The hydrogen is burn to produce energy and little to no pollution. To be honest I don't know how to set up this building or buildings. I know that it would need water to help the gasification process.

Coal cleaning plant- Once again from real life, this building or buildings would use water to wash and clean coal to produce moderate clean coal which would cause less pollution when burned.

Weather and water- As much as I love pure clean infinite water, I think it would fit this game to have water drain from over pumping. To refill a body of water, one would have to either pump water to it or rely on weather events like rain. Since we are working with pollution we may as well have acid rain from all of the pollution that would slightly damage the buildings and player. Also thinking lightning storms which can damage buildings.

Lightning rods- Both to offer protection from lightning storms and to produce energy.

Wind Turbines- Do I really need to explain this one?

Pollution scrubbers- Expensive and bulky buildings to scrub pollution and lower the spread of it. Thinking it would need a lot of parts, power and water to function and would increase the amount of atmospheric water thus increasing chance of rain.

Dirty Bombs- They are already adding in uranium into the game, why not use some reactor waste and steel to produce a toxic radiation bomb that can be used on the spawners. Would greatly increase the pollution of the area it was detonated at.

Charcoal and trees- Well we have furnaces and wood why not use it to make charcoal and allow us to grow trees. Charcoal could be used in furnaces and filters to lower pollution.

Tesla coils- Yes I am pulling a red alert here but something so nice to use up a lot of energy just to electrocute your enemies.

electric fencing- Well we have walls why not have electric fences that damage enemies.

I understand a lot of my ideas are to limit pollution and seems odd in a game that is all about pollution production. To prevent alien attacks, I would normally shut down my base for an hour or two to let the pollution clear before restarting it. That is why I shot out these ideas to help limit it without the need for mods. Also a lot of games don't touch base on real world coal power and seem to think we just throw raw coal into a boiler when we don't. Anyways all these buildings are expected to be middle to late game research and builds.

From FFF160 Playtesting:

kovarex wrote:Finding 1 - the game contains a lot already
The game took me 46 hours to finish. I didn't hurry too much, but it is still quite a long time, considering I played the game several times from start to finish already.
(...)
The overall feeling was, that we shouldn't add much to the game content anymore or it will become too complex and big for the newcomers. This means, that when we add nuclear power, dirty mining, and a few little things, that will be it for the vanilla part of the game.

Someone should really put up a notice =/

You can add Efficiency Modules to everything and you'll produce next to no pollution. Two Efficiency Module 2's in each furnace and three Efficiency Module 1's in each Mining Drill put both at maximum efficiency (80%), as pollution is directly related to power consumption it goes down as well.

I understand not wanting to add too much but still the idea of adding a few more things is nice. After all these are just suggestions not demands.

Well they've basically said they won't do anything else (implying they're no longer taking suggestions) but okay then let's go through them...

Combined cycle plants- Steam engines are already absurdly efficient compared to reality, and nuclear power will add more complexity to this process for later in the game.

Coal Gasification plants- This would require the implementation of carbon monoxide and/or hydrogen, which means they would need to be incorporated into recipes so they don't just feel tacked on, and even then it wouldn't really bring anything to the game. It seems here you're just asking to add it for the sake of it rather than any reason, would make more sense to turn it into oil.

Coal cleaning plant- But said machines would generate pollution to work and the waste would have to go somewhere. The pollution-free energy source is solar power.

Weather and water- When you say "might as well add..." it's not like it's an hour's task to do something like that. Besides, this is just creating a new resource to manage (water) and passive damage to buildings is just tedious until it might as well not exist (see "buildings should need maintenance").

Lightning rods- Well without lightning these are going to be somewhat pointless. Besides being a totally unreliable source of power, we have solar for clean free energy.

Wind Turbines- Yes you do. There isn't wind in Factorio, so either the concept would need to be created or this would be another passive free energy source like Solar, so which do you make? They're basically identical in function.

Pollution scrubbers- Rain doesn't "scrub" pollution, it just moves it. I'm somewhat partial to the idea of a pollution scrubbing process that produces a resource that you could process back to something like sulphur and other resources which could be interesting but is more the work of a mod, we have trees already and Efficiency Modules to reduce pollution generated.

Dirty Bombs- Maybe, don't really see the point of increasing pollution as everything that was there would be dead but this is worthy of its own discussion.

Charcoal and trees- Well Factorio operates in a factor of days, not years. Trees typically don't grow in days. By the time your planted trees mature they would be no longer relevant. The idea of burning wood into charcoal has been suggested, but how? You can't put it in a Furnace as if you're powering your Furnaces with Wood and any Furnace suddenly doesn't have any Iron Ore on the belt, it will automatically pick up the Wood and start burning it into Coal (Charcoal would require doubling up on too many recipes IMO) which is then dumped on your iron feed, messing up your factory. Aside from adding a dedicated building, there isn't a way around this really. Maybe in a chemical plant?

Tesla coils- So what you're suggesting is a type of tower that consumes purely Electricity to shoot the biters. We already have this, it's the Laser Tower.

electric fencing- You'll note that it's rarely the walls that are the problem when you get attacked, typically the biters get killed long before they have a hope of breaking through but the spitters take out your towers while they're distracted with the biters.

Also if you read the READ THIS OR BE IGNORED thread, literally the first bullet point is one idea per post. How is anyone supposed to discuss this post seriously? You'd have a dozen conversations going on in the same thread, and any good ideas are going to get buried where it's not easy for the devs to find them.

Deadly-Bagel wrote:Wind Turbines- Yes you do. There isn't wind in Factorio, so either the concept would need to be created or this would be another passive free energy source like Solar, so which do you make? They're basically identical in function.

What do you think changes the direction of the steam clouds or pullution?

Hmm, it appears there is indeed a wind speed and direction property of a surface. However the point still stands, how is it different to solar other than being less reliable?

You know I will say this one more time. THESE ARE IDEAS. Normally when I post ideas don't even think 1 will be added but normally turns into food for thoughts. Yeah some how I missed that first point, don't ask me how I over looked it I just did, however it is a guideline not a law. So Deadly-bagel if all you are going to do is trash ideas, do it somewhere else.

Will defend my ideas later.

I'm not trashing them, nowhere have I said they were stupid or bad or anything, just why I don't think they would benefit the game. I didn't even mention that all of them have already been suggested to some degree and discussed in detail which you could have easily found with a search.

In fact I agree some sort of large AoE (preferably long range) bomb with a large expense and devastating result would be beneficial, though we'll probably want to wait for 0.15 to see the ins and outs of nuclear and the new combat before seriously discussing it and it would need its own topic. Pollution scrubbing techniques are also interesting but as I said more the work of a mod and again needs its own topic.

But you've just seen it as an attack, not a discussion, and while it's not a law it is a rule that you post one idea per topic which if you break your topic will be ignored, so I will honour that rule as you wish me to.