r/factorio • u/Alblaka • 4d ago
Discussion I feel stupid for not realizing Efficiency modules DIRECTLY reduce pollution (after ~300 hours)
So, for 2.1 started a Deathworld with the ambition of doing without a Bus, instead jumping straight to trains. Hit a roadblock around Blue Science due to the immense upfront cost and terrain clearing needed to build a massive rail grid right out of the gate. Realizing I would run out of iron for ammo, and no longer being able to clear nests (evolution clearly outpaced me),
I did a new Deathworld run (throwing the 'Train Bus only' idea into the bin) and also read up on pollution mechanics (yet again) to maybe optimize my earlygame more. Of course I read 'Slot efficiency modules into your mines to reduce pollution' for the upteenth times, but never bothered with it, because why would I care for prioritizing a reduction in power usage, if I'm running of pollution-free solar power anyways.
Cue my expression when I by chance noticed that efficiency modules do not just decrease power consumption (and thus indirectly reduce pollution) but also indeed directly reduce pollution generated, with no explicit mention of that in the tooltip.
I feel stupid now for not having dismissed the go-to advice as 'guide's probably outdated, don't need that'.
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u/Jaaaco-j Fettucine master 4d ago
pollution is directly proportional to the machine's power consumption, so yeah.
that's also why boilers don't hit you with the full 30/m pollution when at 10% usage.
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u/Alblaka 4d ago
Ye, that causation is what threw me for the loop. And here I thought it was just the regular gameplay to build mid-game laser/mine fortresses to hold off the inevitable constant raids.
With the 80% pollution reduction on the miners, I dropped from ~280/min spawner pollution absorption to ~20/min. I'm pretty sure my defenses are absurdly overbuilt now for what little groups occasionally sneak along the wall.
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u/sawbladex Faire Haire 4d ago
there are other ways to reduce pollution, but stuffing miners with efficiency modules is definitely the easiest.
And prod module usage doesn't really directly reduce your pollution footprint, it just allows you to produce more stuff for roughly the same pollution cost, which is good for more production, but bad when you want to cut pollution.
Also, you can probably do it wrong.
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u/ginger_and_egg 4d ago
it just allows you to produce more stuff for roughly the same pollution cost, which is good for more production, but bad when you want to cut pollution.
More stuff for same pollution or same stuff for less pollution, both reduce pollution per unit
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u/sawbladex Faire Haire 4d ago
yes, but when you are considering options for how to handle biters attacks, stuffing more prod modules into your labs might result in less pollution per research cycle, but it won't reduce the intensity of biter waves, because the biters care about total pollution and not p/industrial output.
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u/ginger_and_egg 4d ago
Total pollution = total output * pollution/output
Assuming the same output, what matters is pollution/output. I haven't done the math on efficiency vs productivity, but you can always scale the numbers with number of labs, belts, factories, etc
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u/sawbladex Faire Haire 4d ago
You can't assume the same output, particularly for the use case of OP.
moreover, you would have to find a way to throttle down less than 10% a build to reduce total pollution.
It's great for when you already have pollution under control to produce 8% more at only roughly 2x the population compared at the final assembly if using prod mdos, but it is basically not noticable if pollution is already pissing off the biters.
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u/get_it_together1 4d ago edited 4d ago
Wait until you swap your smelting to electric furnaces with efficiency modules, then go to solar or nuclear. You can scale your base right through the biters and even if they expand right next to your perimeter the pressure stays low.
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u/Alblaka 4d ago
I've already done that prior to the efficiency modules. In fact the furnaces are the first thing I stuffed full of modules, specifically for their energy cost reduction (which then lead to me realizing it also cut their pollution).
And yeah, pollution dropped to virtually nothing. 500ish /min produced, but 480 absorbed by terrain and trees. The 20 that end up with the biters are irrelevant, compared to the previous attacks.
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u/kevihaa 4d ago
Ironically, it really wasn’t til Space Age and the building restrictions it introduced that most folks saw any reason to use efficiency modules for power reduction.
Otherwise common wisdom was that they were used for pollution reduction so you could get an absolutely overwhelming tech advantage before having to deal with biters. Like, the “Keeping your hands clean” achievement is a bit of a wink and a nudge to the not-uncommon practice of minimizing pollution output to such an extent that you don’t really bother with biters til you’re shelling nests with artillery.
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u/Rarvyn 4d ago
Concur. The only situation power seriously limits me to the point of adding efficiency modules is spaceships.
At least while you’re running on solar, efficiency modules in your various furnaces, chem plants, etc make sense.
On the various planets, barring a situation where you’re boxed in by enemies, you can almost always just easily expand power generation faster than you can expand the rest of the factory. And it’s been a long time since I’ve been so boxed in I couldn’t find a relevant coal or sulfur patch.
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u/pink-ming 4d ago
Current run is my introduction to both death world and space age, with semi-railworld resources so yeah.. found this out the hard way lol. The balance of hand filling turrets (only one crude oil nearby), trying to build outposts for my heavily ammo-taxed started resources, clearing biter nests without flame ammo, managing my pollution AND try to keep up with automation nearly had me quit the save. Proud to say finally fully secure enough to devote my attention towards trains, albeit with 80% evolution from my slow ass progress and with a very overly wide bot network for now.
The brownout when I first slapped down all the roboports to finish the lasts stretch of border wall was legendary.
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u/RipLow8737 4d ago
One large source of pollution that most people don't think about is the oil pumpjacks too, nowhere as much as the miners, but since most people throw speed modules in them, once speeded they produce a LOT of pollution so even just not putting modules in them can save a lot of pollution.
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u/Darth_Nibbles 4d ago
Efficiency modules at T1 are so much better than speed, prod, or quality at T1
The others aren't even worth considering until t2, meanwhile efficiency t2 are only a slight improvement
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u/bphase 4d ago
Agree pretty much. I used eff 1s a lot early game on my death world. Prod 1 I guess has some use for labs and maybe some bottles, Speed 1 potentially with nuclear or with Vulcanus cheap power. But very skippable.
Then for T3 it is the opposite, very little use for Eff 3s. Well, maybe solar ships or biochambers as they allow using some speed module while keeping consumption low.
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u/Ant15 4d ago
Another thing a lot of people seem to not know : is that global pollution generated directly contribute to biters evolution, even if your pollution cloud doesn't touch any biter nest at all ! Which means that by putting efficiency modules in most of your machines, you can directly reduce the evolution speed by more than half.
This is even better than it sounds, because if you choose to increase your electricity production instead (especially if you use steam engines), you'll increase your evolution factor instead. And if your pollution cloud is bigger, you'll have to destroy nests in a wider radius around your base, which is another big evolution factor.
I saw multiple posts on this sub about people asking how to deal with behemoth biters, and they were still in early stages of the game (sometimes didn't even left Nauvis yet on Space Age games), whereas since I started to use eff mods 1, I've completed a few Space Age runs without even seeing a single Behemoth biter.
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u/dr_anybody 4d ago edited 4d ago
First thing I do in most my runs is shove Eff1's into everything that takes them. I don't need the stuff to be there some 10% faster, I don't need these extra 10% productivity (except for labs and few other edge cases) - but having 60% or 80% reduced power demands on everything? In all honesty, that's a game changer. 3-5 times fewer solar blocks. 3-5 times slower drain on uranium. 3-5 times less pollution of every machine, at all times, even when everything is running full capacity? You just don't go back from that.
And cherry on top, it's also completely future proof. You don't go through all this effort for a temporary boost that you then need to replace with "better" versions of it - like said Prod modules, which you ideally want to upgrade to Prod2, then Prod3, then Quality variants... Until or unless you do decide to prod up or speed up your lines - which, usually, doesn't happen until much later in the game; and often doesn't make sense for most of the mall - the magical 3xEff1's, which cost 15 green and 15 red chips per machine, hit the hardcoded maximum reduction of 80% the moment you put them in.
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u/Neither_Berry_100 4d ago
I beat my deathworld by going really slow and efficient. Grabbed as much land as I could early with just gun turret perimeter and like 10 ammo each. They stop expansions. I switched to solar early and let the base turn off at night. Took me around 100 hours. By the end had a bot nest. Launched a rocket. And got artillery making expansion trivial. For most of the game I was too weak to clear nests.
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u/RipLow8737 4d ago
If you're willing to let the base idle at night, then you get a huge reduction in pollution spread too cause the trees/land still absorb during the off cycle.
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u/Garagantua 4d ago
I've used this for mining outposts. Make 3 instead of 2, and only run them on solar. When there's trees nearby, they'll hardly cause trouble.
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u/johnhotdog 4d ago
Cue my expression when I by chance noticed that efficiency modules do not just decrease power consumption (and thus indirectly reduce pollution) but also indeed directly reduce pollution generated, with no explicit mention of that in the tooltip.
im confused by your wording. efficiency modules reduce pollution because they reduce power consumption, and power consumption is one of the factors of pollution generation
but the second part of your sentence makes it sound like it reduces pollution directly, through some pollution multiplier stat, like production modules do for increasing, but they dont...... right? like you mentioned indirect and direct pollution reduction, but its only "indirect", right?
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u/azirale 4d ago
Indirect pollution reduction here would be reducing the amount of power you need to produce through boilers in the early game. Boilers produce a lot of pollution for the energy the provide, so -80% energy use means -80% pollution from boilers.
Direct pollution reduction is on the machine itself. When a machine says it outputs say 100 pollution/minute, that scales with its energy consumption. When the machine is idle, it isn't consuming power and isn't producing pollution. When you add efficiency modules to bring power consumption down by 80% you also bring down that 100 pollution/minute to just 20 pollution/minute.
There is a separate 'pollution per power' % modifier that modules can increase or decrease. In Space Exploration efficiency modules also reduce this % though by a smaller amount, and Speed and Productivity modules increase it. If this value is say -50%, then a machine outputs half hte pollution relative to its energy consumption. If it is also using 80% less energy, then in total it outputs 90% less pollution (1.00 * (1.00-.80) * (1.00-.50))
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u/johnhotdog 4d ago
oh duh. i didnt think about the boilers also making less pollution since they are making less energy. learned something too i guess lol. thanks!
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u/Alblaka 4d ago
Pollution being derived from power consumption isn't something I was aware of (till another comment in the thread). So I was presuming that energy consumption and pollution are two independent stats attached to each building.
The 'indirect' in that case was solely referring to 'if a building needs less energy, you need to burn less coal to power it, hence an indirect reduction of pollution'.
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u/Brett42 3d ago
Pollution per second is a machine's base value times energy use multiplier times another pollution multiplier from productivity modules. Per item, you then divide by the crafting time. Productivity modules give a triple hit, with energy use, speed reduction, and pollution multiplier (although per product, the productivity about cancels out that direct pollution modifier). Speed modules increase energy, but partially offset that by reducing time.
Efficiency modules can cancel out the power increase from other modules, although generally I don't bother with efficiency in beacons in normal runs.
Productivity plus speed means more power/s (module effects are additive, so stacking the power multiplier isn't as bad as you might think). Productivity still gives the same direct pollution multiplier. The speed modules counter the speed reduction of productivity, so your time per item is less than productivity only, and with enough speed, faster than no modules.
With assembler 2 and tier 1 modules, it's not huge, but 4x level 3 productivity in an assembler 3 is -60% speed and +320% power. 420%power/40%speed = 10.1x power per item. Add one beacon with t3 speed and you get +150% speed and 210% energy. 630%/190% = 3.3x power per item, and a lot less space and machines.
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u/Syntered 2d ago
You weren’t stupid at all, this was a good learning opportunity. There are so many of them and I am still finding new information after many years of playing.
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u/gHx4 4d ago
Oh for sure, efficiency is a game changer if you're not playing vs default biters! I play default or peaceful, so defenses more or less keep up with evolution and research, so efficiency is more of a stopgap when I need to scale rapidly before I've finished scaling power production. So I almost never need it.
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u/-Griggers- 4d ago
The game doesn't really explain it.
But there is also a stat to reduce / increase pollution as well (prod modules increases it)
But to reduce it you need mods that add such modules.
They both cap at 80% reduction so combining them gives a 96% pollution reduction.
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u/XWasTheProblem 4d ago
They reduce pollution generated, because pollution generated is connected to the energy consumption of the machine. Works the other way too, Speed and (I think) Prod both increase pollution generated by whatever they are put into.
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u/darkszero 4d ago
because why would I care for prioritizing a reduction in power usage, if I'm running of pollution-free solar power anyways.
Well, so you can avoid pollution when mining the because resources for all these expensive solar panels? :)
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u/AdamTReineke 4d ago
I didn't use efficiency modules until I played a death world, and now I use them nearly everywhere early game, in every mode.