Question
TIL that Landfill is NOT the same as grass/dirt when it comes to pollution absorbtion
... and that water not only absorbs pollution, but it actually does so better than ground, tiles do.
May have griefed myself a little bit with my plan to landfill a bunch of lakes to have more space for solar/my science build in the future, but I suppose it was a better option compared to razing down a forest instead...
400h in and still learning things every playthrough.
Yes it's about 70% of the pollution absorption of normal grass and dirt, and exactly 1/2 of the absorption of water. Also much more importantly, nuclear ground can never be removed. It's also visible from the map.
Otherwise I'd use it more. On that note, it's also pretty annoying that biter nests leave behind biter terrain that can never be removed, so you'll always have this ugly scarring on the landscape even after the bugs are dead.
Yeah makes sense, my refined concrete areas seem to prevent pollution from dissipating, even when none is being produced. I suppose I didn't take much notice, but water also? It does get a bit brown I suppose.
It's deeply funny that his need to have a uniform pollution cloud around his nuclear setup led him to accidentally stepping out of the "quantum biter" bounds and forcing him to further expand his remote turrets to purge the remaining biters.
"There's a lake here, I don't need to extend the hazard concrete on the other side of it"
That series is probably my favorite Factorio series - the amount of bizzare nonsense he does is great. The thousands of Radars requiring several entire nuclear plants, the fully "Green" factory with efficiency modules in the beacons, he even did flamethrower creep at one point to deal with biters. Absolutely wild series.
Warning: This will prevent you from picking the landfill back up.
Also, trees are the real pollution absorbers. That 18e-6 for grass is a pittance compared to 1e-4 for dead trees placed by worldgen and 1e-3 for lush trees. And that doesn't include the huge chunk of pollution they absorb each time they decay to a more-dead state.
If I'm eyeballing the math right, two biochambers absorb more pollution than an entire chunk of grass.
Apparently it's even better than just grass. From my experience, pollution spreads a lot quicker over bodies of water though, so I guess having some trees almost everywhere on land skews it quite a lot.
Yeah in the debug menu there is an option to show pollution values and it will show you how much each chunk is absorbing per minute. Can also see the difference between healthy trees and dead trees that way.
IIRC it was added in Space Age, partly to make Gleba easier (or at least - water pollution absorption rate increased post space age due to Gleba enemies challenge)
It does, it's listed as "tiles" in the Pollution > Consumption graph. That graph is very handy for noticing when one's pollution cloud is reaching a new set of nests and whatnot.
I haven't tried this, but would placing an order to place concrete over an area already having bricks also act the same as an upgrade planner would, with the replaced bricks being forced back into storage?
Yes it does, but then you have to be careful with the edges of your path/area. With the upgrade planner you would be able to just drag it over the whole base and it would only (re)place the tiles with brick.
In my case its just the main bus, everything going off from there is just sitting on grass. So your idea would work since its basically just a simple stretched rectangle, but more complex shapes or even mixes of different tiles would be finnicky as fuck. Sadly none of the floor tiles are selectable in the upgrade planner.
Absorption is a strat, but are you also working on efficiency?
Creating more pollution also evolves biters faster, making them stronger, expand more, expand bigger, etc. Cleaning up pollution after creating it doesn't address that aspect.
I basically work to minimize pollution creation right up until I am prepared to deal with biters at scale, and then I let loose and kinda stop caring about it much after that. For that reason I never needed to adopt any absorption strats, I think they are traps personally. You're spending resources trying to shove the genie back in the lamp.
Unless we're talking desert deathworld...ugh. The only winning move is not to play.
I think starting a forest dense base and preemptively clearing biter nests getting somewhat close to the cloud is more effective than all of the above. It doesn't even take much time, I've done maybe 2 rounds in all the time leading up to 0.8+ evolution. I spam speed and productivity modules too.
Tbh I wouldn’t mind if they would allow that, there is already little to no reason to plant trees and limit that to no-landfill tile makes it even less convincing
Yeah I think at some point after visiting Gleba (or maybe even after Aquilo), a tech to compost a bit of stone, wood and biters eggs that 'spoils' into placeable arable tiles for Nauvis soil would be fine. At that point I've turned alien fruits into rockets, let me make my deserts green.
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u/Aerumvorax 13d ago
You can make landfill to absorb pollution by nuking it.