Pollution Revamp

This page describes various separate ideas and philosophies. See Pollution revamp visions for a list of more complete visions combining many of the thoughts below into more complete pictures.

Make it something primarily cosmetic
Remove gameplay impact and change it so that pollution has mostly graphical effects. For example, high pollution levels cause taint spread, which is generally cosmetic. ''I think it should be a soft mechanic which links your actions with the area around you, in mostly a visual way. As a form of immersion and to make the game a bit more believable.''

''I think that this should NOT come with big downsides. It should be "oh that's neat", not "oh no"''

I also think pollution shouldn't be on things you are forced to use, so it is tied more to your choices than simply your progression.

So someone could say "ooh I bet this person uses steam power, you can see the [effects of] pollution from it"

Change the effects to be less annoying and use it as an incentive to use certain progression paths
My own take is that pollution should be used as a gameplay mechanic to offer the player the choice of easy paths or cleaner paths, where the cleaner path would probably be more expensive or less powerful, but come with the advantage of higher efficiency of passive/renewable energy and resource generation, such as bees, crops, plants.

Use pollution to incentivize more TPS friendly building strategies
There's been some talk about trying to use pollution as a mechanic that steers people into more TPS friendly builds, or at least away from unfriendly builds.


 * Maybe make translocators and laggy AE shit produce a "spacetime distortion" type of pollution that causes mobs to have a chance to randomly teleport when walking at high levels? Rohen Tahir (talk) 09:41, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Keep but adjust values
Pretty straight forward. We keep the current technical solution but adjust producer amounts and the levels where effects occur.

Attempt to change the expectation, make having pollution normal/expected, but give bonuses for going green
Currently not entirely sure how this would be implemented, but the main idea is to stop punishing people for polluting and instead reward them for picking greener options and/or doing green things.

Have pollution effect machine efficiency or increase maintenance needs
It has been suggested that pollution could affect machine efficiency and/or maintenance needs for multiblocks.

Have pollution spawn/attract mobs attacking pollution producers ala Factorio
A number of people have called for a Factorio like mechanic where pollution increases the danger from mobs.

Drop pollution as a mechanic completely
Some people want to just disable pollution completely, possibly changing it to be more of a resource that can be processed instead of a punishment.

Pollution processing
Have mufflers output pollution as a fluid and allow processing of it. This can be to recover resources or to reduce pollution.

Benefits instead of punishments
Reward players for staying at low pollution levels instead of punishing players for high levels.

This could include:


 * Increased crop stats
 * Increasing Thaumcraft node aspect amounts, regeneration speed
 * Spawning good Thaumcraft nodes
 * 'Purifying' poor Thaumcraft nodes (i.e. changing their type to Pure, Bright)
 * Increased machine efficiency
 * Increased machine yields
 * Increased water tank generation