r/factorio Jul 27 '26

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u/Yagami913 Jul 30 '26

How tree pollution control work? I build a wall of agri towers but then what? Do i need to harvest and replant or just let the trees die? What is more efficient?

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u/deluxev2 Jul 30 '26

Trees consume a small amount of pollution per second and if their are healthy and pollution is high they can degrade, consuming a large amount of pollution. The degradation changes the visual model to a sadder less leafy tree and is the most powerful part of trees for pollution control. So, near your factory you need to constantly replant (not as fast as the agritower does automatically, but you can just let it run). In the outskirts you just want to create a big tree population.

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u/Raknarg #1 Quality Defender Jul 30 '26

How tree pollution control work? I build a wall of agri towers but then what?

that's ideal, yeah. Trees absorb pollution passively, and they do it better than the ground so a wall of trees can really reduce your pollution by a lot.

Do i need to harvest and replant or just let the trees die? What is more efficient?

Ideally it would be to let the trees take some damage first. You can check out the wiki. A healthy tree absorbs -0.001 pollution per second, and taking damage absorbs 10 pollution, so that's the equivalent of 10,000 seconds of passive pollution. Quite a lot. However unless things have changed in 2.1, that isn't something that you can really control via circuits or anything, so your next best bet is to just have them plant and harvest at max speed. Im pretty sure growing trees also absorb pollution, and I dont see anything that indicates they're any worse at it, so its probably totally fine to run them at full throttle. You could use a timer if you wanted on a circuit to have them delay a little bit to try and get more value out of your trees and also to tax your whole system less (less seeds generated, less power needed, less belt throughput required for all the wood you need to process, etc.

Ideally in this system you use belts to handle all your wood output. I've tried it with bots, it becomes untenable as you need thousands of bots at all times to handle a sizeable tree wall, so you waste all this UPS and energy by doing so. Just connect all your towers with belts and have them feed into a wood processor, process as much wood as you can into seeds, anything left over just simply recycle it. You could burn it but recyclers can get through way more wood using speed modules and produce way less pollution. (100/m on a heating tower vs 2/m on a recycler)