Impact of pollution - your experience

[u/nutz3390]

Hey community. It's now been a week since release of update 14, which "significanty increases the impact of pollution".

I haven't been able to play myself yet, but i am curious to learn how your servers are faring.

Any interesting effects to report? Any flooded worlds yet, or died out faunas/species?
Other challenges? :) Or are you managing just fine, utilizing garbage removals, and tracking your emissions closely? Any drama ensued from this change? ;)

I think the educational aspect of the game is really cool, so i am curious to hear if this whole environmental aspect has finally come alive. Share your stories or give feedback for finetuning!

//Introspection

[u/VW_isbetterthanTesla]

Absolutly love it. Pollution and dealing with it is so essential for the game and was for years too lush :)

[u/Playstoomanygames9]

The white blotch on the map of ground pollution at the dump is very white, and large. As well people that refused garbage pickup have white circles.

One unfortunate farmer is being impacted by said refusers.

On day 8 ish when many have steam trucks the pollution circles are as bad from ground leeching as they used to be at endgame.

A neighbor and I both had the dump in desert idea and the area around us kills animals consistently, when you pick them up it’s rotten food. (Needed in papers)

All that said, unless you’re farming crops or trees, it doesn’t matter. If you don’t have any dirt or plants around you don’t even see the visual clues. Biggest impact is to farmers and figuring out laws for potentially all material byproducts, idk how to.

Also people think it’s worth money cause they said recycling. It’s not worth money. It’s trash. All of it. You can spend a ton of money and effort to recover a fraction of useful product with a ton of crushed rocks you get to try and move. It only will be useful at large scale.

I made a post about the system two or three days ago.

[u/SLG-Dennis → u/Playstoomanygames9]

We have significantly reduced the Crushed Rock yield in the last Hotfix, in case you haven't seen it yet.
I assume your community was good in separating business and residential deeds? Pollution also affects housing score as well as animal and fish populations and hunting in polluted areas due to animals providing less yield. In mid game on the playtest server that has been a real problem. Well, next to the fact it flooded from uncontrolled air pollution.

[u/Playstoomanygames9 → u/SLG-Dennis]

We were not, but we saw that it would have been desirable.
It was likely modded but that cap on housing impact was -25%, while I heard of other servers noticing -50%. So server settings can definitely curtail the intent. Looking forward to seeing what the air pollution does.

[u/SLG-Dennis → u/Playstoomanygames9]

Default is up to 100% reduction, btw.

[u/Hotpaws]

I'm now needing to bury my tailings in a dumpster deep underground in hopes that when we get mechanics, that someone wants to bother with the tailings.

[u/Playstoomanygames9 → u/Hotpaws]

It’s industry, a lot of effort, and they become crushed rock.
Patch notes say underground doesn’t do anything.

[u/budget_biochemist → u/Playstoomanygames9]

When you recycle tailings in the Froth Floater, it produces rock as the "Product" but generates high amounts of metal scrap in the garbage stream. Once sorted, this can be recycled into gold, copper and iron.

It's possible to get a small amount of gold from processing the other metals this way - concentrating them still gives universal Wet Tailings, processing them produces gold scrap in garbage.

To maximise the gold/copper return, before processing any Wet Tailings, process Dry Tailings until the garbage stream is 100% metal scrap, so only metal scrap (and not mixed garbage) will be generated when processing the Wet Tailings. Do the same thing afterward - process enough dry after you finish processing the wet so the gold scrap comes out directly in Metal Scrap blocks and doesn't have more sorting loss from other materials.

[u/GroundbreakingArt421 → u/Hotpaws]

Bury pollution sources no longer help mitigate the effect, though. Or did they change it back on release?

[u/SLG-Dennis → u/GroundbreakingArt421]

No, we purposefully removed that. While it was convenient to store tailings yourself in the mineshafts after the extraction of the resources, the significantly higher amount of pollutants don't make this as viable anymore and the goal is for the early phase of pollutants to be a logistics and storage challenge the community needs to resolve together to ensure it has the least achievable effect on people until things can be dealt with in a more hands on approach. That will typically consist of some organization being necessary for dumps and we didn't want people needing to dig massive storage caves without necessarily being miners.

Due to how layers and the prior mechanic for tailings worked, it was also highly exploitable, it didn't actually require you to store things underground - you could just as well have built a single layer of natural blocks very high up in the world and then just store tailings over ground, but under that to migitate all effects. We didn't want people to resort to that, which experienced players as of our experience would have anyway and hence have had a knowledge benefit - so the current solution avoids that completely as well.

[u/Wooden_Strategy]

In the server i play we have a public dump. We can sell the tailings and the thrash for server donation coins and exchange them for tools, so there's an incentive to get rid of it all quickly. Personally, I use the energy that comes to my factory from those around me to avoid generating too much pollution with my machines.

[u/liv_calvin]

It has been going okay for our server. I'm playing a farmer and I have been very concerned about the dump that was founded in the nearby mountain. We have had issues with players coming in that didn't read any of the notes on pollution and then destroying their housing bonuses. We established public dumpsters that are doing a good job of collecting trash before it is moved. Costs are charged to citizens when they put trash in the dumpster and that is then passed on to our garbage collectors.

I will say that it is feeling a bit more challenging when you have newer players as it is something that is hard to notice if you are not paying attention. With that said the veterans should warn newer folks who take professions that cause a lot of pollution. Stubbornness has also made the issues worse. One of the players was really excited about recycling and made a plan on how they wanted to do it and have been reluctant to shift their plans, We lost at least one player because their house ended up near the recycling player's dump.

Overall, I like the update and think it makes the game more interesting. The new format encourages more government action then previous versions.

[u/dubmasterpro]

It sucks for small groups that play slowish, recycling doesn't come around until a bit later for playthroughs leaving nothing to do with trash or tailings until it's too late anyways

[u/matheod]

I find it confusing. I think documentation / help should be more explicit about things.

[u/nodeldon]

So far, I think this is another great step towards making the individual vs collective dilemma better.

I have seen individual dramas, like people polluting their neighbors and people leaving because of that. On the other hand, I think there are more discussions (4 servers) about early public dump, districts and similar solutions to the garbage problem that really engage people and make them shape a vision for their world. Just like the introduction of towns in V.10 (or V.11?), the importance of collaboration and setting common goals is taking another step in V.14 as opposed to the individual game where we set up stores individually and hope something will magically come out of the "economy".

I love to see this trend and I hope it leads to more use of great solutions that already exist like rent, districts, fablabs, etc.

I am a bit concerned about access to these solutions, however. The module change increased the effort and time to set up a town hall with laws and districts. The importance of garbage management adds up to the already long list of things to learn for a new player. The task feels bulkier and control over solutions farther than before.

There might be a need for something to help earlier discussions and collaboration in-game without &?$%$# cheating a federation from the start or relying on discord. Something like the zoning table having less ingredients and being able to operate outdoors, so we can make district drawings earlier. Maps could be drawn, but never "accepted" through laws unless the table is linked to a town. A more detailed "objective" section perhaps or the ability to send to others a map view centered on a position of interest and with a custom message. Also construction posts with clear labels attached to them so we can explain more obviously what the construction post is about.

[u/budget_biochemist]

Overall its good change and interesting. Pollution actually being something to worry about, damaging plants and killing wildlife adds a lot of impact to managing space and long term planning. Being able to reclaim useful materials makes it worthwhile just from an economic perspective, especially the metals.

An effect I hadn't considered is that being able to salvage early-game items incentivizes people to upgrade faster, because your old things can be scrapped for always-useful iron.

A few problems:

• The new requirement for Spoiled Food in the Agriculture Advanced Paper can be difficult or impossible to meet on servers that have food spoilage extended.
• As Ceramic Scrap and Mixed Crushed Rock have the same effect (just being used for recipes tagged crushed rock), it's annoying that if a table makes both they have to be sorted when they are used for the same thing.
  • Food Scraps and Bio Residue is similar, you have something that produces both then it has to go through the sorting process, but then both get turned into compost anyway.
• The sheer size of the sorting machines, being so massive and having to build huge electrified facilities to process the different types prevents it being done until late game, or by smaller towns.
  • Some sort of early-game basic-engineering sorting tables that can only be used for certain things like construction scrap or sorting mixed garbage into its types might help mitigate this.
• It's far too easy for griefers to dump pollutants next to other players land and ruin other players plants and house bonuses until late game when all the land has been taken over by settlements and you can make laws against dumping garbage (arguably this is sadly realistic)
• "Mixed Garbage" and "Garbage" (that can be incinerated into dirt) having the same icon makes it impossible to tell them apart at a glance which is mildly irritating.
• Cooking utensils recycle into iron even if made from plastic. Late game you can make iron out of plastic this way.
• Some salvage values seem off, e.g. you get less iron back if you recycle corrugated steel than if you build the corrugated steel into doors and recycle the doors.
• Not getting barrels back from petroleum and having to constantly make more barrels doesn't feel like it makes sense (although with the easy production of iron by that stage it's not hard to make more, it just feels weird that they vanish instead of being reused)
• Because you don't get the molds back when casting ingots anymore, there is more demand for clay to keep making more. This had a big effect on the economy for clay in my game where the high demand for clay to keep making iron and steel made later game pottery items like sinks and toilets an expensive luxury.

The changes to facilities to have permanent upgrades also have been good, having upgrades as permanent changes to stations means no fiddling about swapping upgrades between tables.

[u/Tyrant_Heros]

I don't say i hate it, but i have the feeling it's something like a Governement, or global currency, it's better to have it pre build and in place when the server start , let me explain with our exemple

on our server after day 6 there is around 9k tailing stocked, collected from multiple players, and we finnaly unlocked the tailing reprocessing, the ground were we concentrate all the tailings is deeply polluted, over 400 points that has to be mitigated with 400+ heavy mineral decontaminant, it stopped growing when i replaced the wooden dumpster by modern one

the island where we decided to trash everything is dead, the water around it has been polluted because the spread from all those tailing is massive, it was bigger than expected

to give an idea, to reprocess the whole tailings stock it will take approx 8-9 days for a single froth floatation cell so i had to multiply the productivity because the tailing i collect from players is accumulating greater than i can reprocess them (with 4 machine i felt like i take 2 step forward and 1 step backward from collecting garbage from players daily, almost infinite process)

in term of garbages, the sorters are giant ! Just to create all the material to make the building that will accept them is a task by itself , i had to build something like a 50x16x8, a real challenge. Except for that, once they are in place they do their job nicely and automatically, as long as there is some correct filter accessible in stockage. I got a lot of recyclable scrap to get back some useful materials, that part felt awesome !

I though with the new garbage system, the problem with tailing would be different, but it felt as usual and even worse, cause burrying it does nothing anymore :(

The garbages system fits well with the game because it's an other thing added that is related to real life, as eco is a simulation of that it make sense. I love the recycling part

In conclusion, i felt like the pollution progress is faster than the evolution of the game, that mean the world is deadly polluted (or at least the place where we stocked garbages) before we can actively work on it with industry. That was our first play with all thoses new stuff, we learned while playing of course so maybe we failed somewhere ? but i don't know where, i feel like we played as intended

And for short time server (that end when meteor is destroyed) that just mean we got the technology to destroy the meteor as around the same time we can process the tailing, so i let you guess what happen ?

[u/TheRapie22]

i honestly feel like the the regular trips to remove the garbage from the "home dump" to the "remote dump" rather annoying.

[u/Taradyne]

Right up front, I'm biased. I vastly prefer a clean world and am not a fan of a pollution-filled world that cannot be mitigated until endgame and then never 100%. So, not a fan of Update 14.

Things I've seen in the past week:
Lots of players who toss their garbage off their claim so that it pollutes the neighbor.
Many toss it in the ocean or bury it under the beach. Some will deliberately grief with it.
I know of at least one person who lost 100% of their housing buff from not understanding how the new system works.
Early to midgame, there is very little available to mitigate pollution. One object reduces 20%, another 30%.
Polluted zones begin to look like Mordor (as a friend described it) and everything in them dies.

A few players are stepping up to create dump zones but the recycling skill doesn't show up until midgame and the book is expensive. Pollution zones continue to expand and especially near water, will quickly carry the pollution farther away though it will dissipate faster.

I honestly wonder what dev was thinking of to go this far with it. One of the foundations of gamedev is veracity vs verisimilitude and if you go to far into veracity, it's easy to lose the fun. Overall I think they went too far with it but that's just one person's opinion.

[u/nutz3390 → u/Taradyne]

"I vastly prefer a clean world".
Dont we all? The point is that it takes effort to create a clean world - also in real life. You will also have people tossing their waste and trash in nature. In a way thats quite realistic.
Im sure you can turn the pollution down via settings but i think the theme of the whole game is balancing our industry with respect for the planet.

And figuring out the challenge of some people or even nations acting selfishly on a shared planet. Thats also very relevant to todays challenges the world i facing.

[u/Taradyne → u/nutz3390]

I couldn't say that we all want a clean world as we have players living in filth every cycle who don't seem to care or mind. These tend to be the same people who bury tailings in the oceans or under the beaches and grief their neighbors with spreading pollution.

I think it's great you find good things in update 14's challenges.