Pollution revamp visions

Please add a description of your vision for what you want pollution to be. These are not considered final, but rather something we can vote on to get a direction on where we want to be heading with this revamp.

Mission Statement
To turn pollution into less of an "Oh, that's annoying" and more of a "Oh, that's actually really cool" sort of deal. Pollution as it is now is far too tedious with zero reason to be.

Key solutions

 * Make high pollution effects mostly cosmetic.
 * Maintain beneficial effects at low pollution levels. This could include:
 * Increased crop yields
 * Increased machine efficiency
 * Improvements on existing Thaumcraft nodes
 * Increased passive generation rates (i.e. solar, water tank siding)

Explanation

 * Cosmetic effects: Many of the current effects are simply painful and not really in the spirit of the pack. Why should you need to wear a hazmat suit everywhere just to look at your shiny new factory? Instead, there should be such effects as sun light levels decreasing, and other minor aesthetic changes.
 * Beneficial effects: To regain some of the results of the current punitive functionality, players should be encouraged to seek lower pollution levels with benefits involved in doing so. This can also make it more likely for a player to actually enable the mechanic rather than keeping it disabled, in order to reap the benefits. Currently, many just disable pollution due to the pure annoyance. Pollution should be a mechanic that, while you can ignore it and still have a perfectly fine playing experience, still offers something good to players with it enabled, if they are willing to put in enough effort in reducing levels.

Pollution issues atm
as of now, imho, pollution fails in two regards. on one had, the detriments it offers are horrible gameplay wise. the only tangible detriment is the crop destruction, but as crops don't produce pollution, you can always keep the two separate. on the other hand, the removal mechanics we have are pretty awful. the single block GT++ scrubbers are by far the best option for all tiers.

solutions
i think we could make pollution a lot more fun by changing the focus on the downsides from primarily the player, to primarily the players constructs. lower generator efficiencies, reduce processing speed, decrease time between maintenance issues, etc. focusing more on the large infra the player creates, not only creates a neat loop of needing to possibly generate more pollution in order to remove any, but also gives a more sizable detriment. the player themselves might not enjoy being blinded, or given nausea, but it doesn't harm your progression very much. in fact, in my opinion, it's more of a visual annoyance rather than a motivation to reduce pollution. if your machines are impacted instead of you, there's now a much larger, less easy to avoid problem. this will ensure that pollution is an effective mechanic, and dealing with it won't just be ideal, but borderline mandatory

on the reduction side, we probably don't want to keep relying on shitty single blocks for all removal. it would be nice to see the multi block scrubber given some love. possibly filtering more pollution with higher voltages, or different tiers of filters. this also gives the cool outputs we can give players from recycling the dirty filters. id suggest removing the EV+ scrubbers, and reducing the speeds on LV-HV to really only effectively work pre moon tiers. this gives a nice scaling unique infra setup to handle pollution, some possibly useful byproducts, and overall a better pollution handling system

TLDR: potion effects aren't great detriments for large scale machinery. mess with the players setups more, and ask more of them to reduce that. in contrast, give a little benefit from processing the polluted filters to give some benefit to the whole process

DvDmanDT's updated vision (July 2021)
Since Dream has made it very clear that he wants pollution to remain bad and evil, I've revised my vision to fit with his wishes, yet hopefully yield a bit more fun and interesting gameplay than it has currently. Bold parts are additions or highlights that I think are important to make it fun with these requirements.

Mission Statement
The goal is to use pollution to make more choices viable and interesting in progression. It's strictly a balancing mechanic that can be used to give a weak machine/generator with nothing going for it a little edge over its alternatives.

Key points

 * Pollution should not be destructive (as in cause damages to constructions or setups). No block changes, no mob damages, no biome alterations etc.
 * Pollution needs to be much less local, yet not global.
 * There should always be an alternative or counter to (heavy) pollution production, such as chimneys.
 * It's not about realism, it's about having a mechanic that yields fun, interesting and varied gameplay
 * It's a gameplay rework, not an optimization pass. Some performance implications may be acceptable, but reasonable care must be taken to ensure to ensure no game breaking performance degradations.

Pollution can be negative

 * Pollution pulls towards 0, that is neutral. At 0, there are no effects at all.
 * If pollution levels get high..
 * Basically current effects, but with revised levels etc.
 * I'm definitely not sure about these points anymore, but I think it would be cool to give a bonus to players going out of their way to be environment friendly.
 * If pollution drops below 0, various light buffs start to happen. Note, I'm thinking between 5% to 25% increases, nothing completely game breaking.
 * Bees yielding more output?
 * Crops growing faster or yielding more output?
 * Fish traps increased yield efficient?

Smoke stacks / pollution processing

 * Chimneys! A simple chimney can be placed on a muffler that reduces output by X percent based on how tall it is, and how high up the top is. Similarly, there can be large multiblock chimneys that can accept the pollution output from multiple machines and with optional scrubbing inserts.
 * Machines produce pollution similar to currently (but with revised numbers!), but if you place a fluid container/pipe on the muffler, a pollution fluid can be captured. This fluid can be sent to a processing thing to reduce pollution and extract resources.
 * If the fluid is not captured, or if it's voided or similar, nothing happens, but if you process it, you can bring pollution level down again.
 * (optional) There can be different processing modules with different cleaning efficiency and outputs
 * What about single blocks generators etc? Just have them generate the fluid and void if not captured?
 * Temporary producers like rockets should perhaps produce less pollution (if at all), or produce "smog" which could be some short lived entities poisoning nearby players without protection etc.
 * There can still be standalone air filters, single or multiblock, but they should be less effective in terms of energy and filter items compared to filtering the source, and mostly intended to deal with many small contributors as opposed to large and heavy producers.

Revise what produces pollution

 * At the moment, there's a lot of stuff producing pollution that has no business producing pollution, or at least nowhere near the levels of pollution they are producing. Nothing should produce ridiculous amounts of pollution just because it's powerful or late game, or because it makes sense from a "lore"/realism perspective. If it does, it should do so to discourage (not prevent!) it's use (ie, it's stupidly OP or there's a more interesting alternative). For machinery where large amounts of pollution make a lof of sense and is part of main progression, there should be counters, like the smoke stack setups.
 * It could make sense to also tie pollution levels to fuels rather than generator types. For solids, I don't think it matters too much but it could make some fluids more interesting. For example, bio diesel could cause less pollution than regular.

Other ways to reduce pollution
These are loose ideas.
 * There's been a lot of talk about having plant life reduce pollution levels. I think that make sense, but it's tricky to do well without major performance implications.
 * Perhaps a plant/tree reaching it's final state would flat out subtract a bit of pollution? Care must be taken to not encourage tree planting spam just to bring down pollution though.
 * Trying to keep track of some rough estimation of leaf blocks or whatever in each chunk and subtract by that? Wouldn't have to be super accurate, maybe you could update each loaded chunk once per minute or less and only count connected "green" blocks that see the sky or something? Very tricky from a performance perspective..
 * Perhaps some "green" machinery would just artifically drag it down, like kinetics or solars. Doesn't make any sense from a reality perspective, but again, it's about gameplay rather than realism.

Make pollution spread more

 * Pollution should be less local than currently. At the moment, it's basically chunk-local until you reach absurd levels. It needs to do a better job at covering a "base".
 * (implementation detail) My proposal is to move the pollution data storage and processing out of the chunk and into a new much coarser grid structure, maybe 4x4 chunks or coarser. Ideally I'd even like a hex grid just to spread it in more of a circular shape, but the annoyance of working with hexagons might just not be worth it. The idea is to be able to work with this grid without loading as many chunks and to need less processing. Things like getPollutionInChunk etc could be forwarded to lookup the value in the new structure instead of its own data.
 * If we do this, we definitely need to adjust pollution production levels and/or effect thresholds as a bigger pollution space would make more machines contribute to the same space. Or perhaps just a divisor.

Mission Statement
The goal is to use pollution to make more choices viable and interesting in progression. It's strictly a balancing mechanic that can be used to give a weak machine/generator with nothing going for it a little edge over its alternatives.

Key points

 * Pollution should not be destructive (as in cause damages to constructions or setups). No block changes, no mob damages, no biome alterations etc.
 * There should always be an alternative or counter to (heavy) pollution production
 * All numbers should be revised. Some things that are currently producing should perhaps not and vice versa.
 * It's not about realism, it's about having a mechanic that yields fun, interesting and varied gameplay
 * It's a gameplay rework, not an optimization pass. Some performance implications may be acceptable, but reasonable care must be taken to ensure to ensure no game breaking performance degradations.

Pollution can be negative

 * Pollution pulls towards 0, that is neutral. At 0, there are no effects at all.
 * If pollution drops below 0, various light buffs start to happen. Note, I'm thinking between 5% to 25% increases, nothing completely game breaking.
 * Bees yielding more output?
 * Crops growing faster or yielding more output?
 * Fish traps increased yield efficient?
 * If pollution levels get high..
 * Visually indicate this somehow. Maybe the current smog effect but capped and significantly scaled back? Maybe do some light "graying" fullscreen effect to make the world feel a bit sad? But again, minor effects, nothing too crazy.
 * Could block update (not sure about the technical term, but the thing that turns dirt into grass) rates be slightly reduced in heavily polluted areas?

Smoke stacks / pollution processing

 * Machines produce pollution similar to currently (but with revised numbers!), but if you place a fluid container/pipe on the muffler, a pollution fluid can be captured. This fluid can be sent to a processing thing to reduce pollution and extract resources.
 * If the fluid is not captured, or if it's voided or similar, nothing happens, but if you process it, you can bring pollution level down again.
 * (optional) There can be different processing modules with different cleaning efficiency and outputs
 * What about single blocks generators etc? Just have them generate the fluid and void if not captured?
 * Temporary producers like rockets should perhaps produce less pollution (if at all), or produce "smog" which could be some short lived entities poisoning nearby players without protection etc.

Revise what produces pollution

 * At the moment, there's a lot of stuff producing pollution that has no business producing pollution, or at least nowhere near the levels of pollution they are producing. Nothing should produce ridiculous amounts of pollution just because it's powerful or late game, or because it makes sense from a "lore"/realism perspective. If it does, it should do so to discourage (not prevent!) it's use (ie, it's stupidly OP or there's a more interesting alternative). For machinery where large amounts of pollution make a lof of sense and is part of main progression, there should be counters, like the smoke stack setups.
 * It could make sense to also tie pollution levels to fuels rather than generator types. For solids, I don't think it matters too much but it could make some fluids more interesting.

Other ways to reduce pollution
These are loose ideas.
 * There's been a lot of talk about having plant life reduce pollution levels. I think that make sense, but it's tricky to do well without major performance implications.
 * Perhaps a plant/tree reaching it's final state would flat out subtract a bit of pollution? Care must be taken to not encourage tree planting spam just to bring down pollution though.
 * Trying to keep track of some rough estimation of leaf blocks or whatever in each chunk and subtract by that? Wouldn't have to be super accurate, maybe you could update each loaded chunk once per minute or less and only count connected "green" blocks that see the sky or something? Very tricky from a performance perspective..
 * Perhaps some "green" machinery would just artifically drag it down, like kinetics or solars. Doesn't make any sense from a reality perspective, but again, it's about gameplay rather than realism.

Make pollution spread more

 * Pollution should be less local than currently. At the moment, it's basically chunk-local until you reach absurd levels. It needs to do a better job at covering a "base".
 * (implementation detail) My proposal is to move the pollution data storage and processing out of the chunk and into a new much coarser grid structure, maybe 4x4 chunks or coarser. Ideally I'd even like a hex grid just to spread it in more of a circular shape, but the annoyance of working with hexagons might just not be worth it. The idea is to be able to work with this grid without loading as many chunks and to need less processing. Things like getPollutionInChunk etc could be forwarded to lookup the value in the new structure instead of its own data.