how to maximize water pollution？

[GLOAM]

let's say that i want to make all water sources （there are plenty） in a 2 mile radius around my base a beautiful green，how would i do it？
i struggle with making even the starting lake fully green on my factory，so i'm wondering if there is a way to easily and reliably pollute at maximum efficiency

[knighttemplar1960]

Haul materials in to the lakes. Set up oil refineries and coal liquefaction plants on the shores. Set up banks of steel furnaces to smelt copper, iron, and steel along the shore. Set up steam boilers burning coal for power along the shores. If that's not enough spray flaming oil along the shores with a flamethrower. The burning oil will cause pollution. If that's not enough, take all the wood from trees that you've cut down and set up 4 chests in a square that feed each other round robin with burner inserters and just dump your extra wood into the chests.

[Morsk]

Modules (other than efficiency) do this naturally, and it's a normal part of the game to end up polluting a lot more once you start using them. You can start with speed 1 in miners, and prod 1 in green/blue circuits, higher science, and labs. But ideally everything would have as many modules & beacons as can fit.

[cfteague2]

burner inserters, brilliant!

[Purpleganja]

Find many nests and build many laser turrets close enough to aggro the guardians but not enough to attack the spawners. That should up your power consumption. Power that with solid fuel made from petroleum gas made from oils from liquefied coal made on the shores of the lake. You could also just empty the content from your refining pipings to keep em working extra.

I tried the burner inserters loop and they dont seem to pollute at all even if burning fuel!

[Warlord]

Originally posted by Purpleganja:

Find many nests and build many laser turrets close enough to aggro the guardians but not enough to attack the spawners. That should up your power consumption. Power that with solid fuel made from petroleum gas made from oils from liquefied coal made on the shores of the lake. You could also just empty the content from your refining pipings to keep em working extra.

I tried the burner inserters loop and they dont seem to pollute at all even if burning fuel!

I just checked the wiki, but burner inserters do not generate pollution. So a large loop of inserters burning fuel moving items around makes zero pollution.

BTW, to everyone, water pollution is entirely dependent on how thick the air pollution is in the area. While placing a large refinery project near water pollutes it, it's not because it's near water, but mostly because pollution doesn't get absorbed into water very well, so it tends to stick around and get thicker. You see this with a busy mine that is in-land from water, the cloud can still project over water and turn it green.

[Purpleganja]

You could also set pollution absorption and spread to minimum to really make the cloud thick!

[Alex Kerman]

Kill the grass, cover it in concrete, the grass absorbs pollution

[Chindraba]

It's going to be harder than it was. Water removes pollution 5x faster than it did and all the ground types got an absorption buff of 2.5x on average. The planet is eating it faster than it did. As @Alex Kerman said, pave the planet. All the path tiles, from the simple brick to the refined concrete, absorb no pollution. They give you a speed bonus on foot and in vehicles just to make it even better - you can move from emerald lake to emerald lake quicker to see your progress.

[[Boroda] Владос]

Hello. You can craft this green water with Dectorio mod

[Fletch]

This is an old thread, but I'll just add that water pollution (the green water color) is just a visual decoration and has no affect on the gameplay at all.

If you want to pollute at maximum efficiency: I'd recommend using only boilers for power generation (30 pollution/minute per boiler), and speed modules in everything that accepts modules (especially the electric mining drills) -- and of course kill all trees and pave over everything with concrete.

Speed modules increase pollution generation two ways:

1. electricity demands skyrocket when using speed modules (and a lesser extent with productivity), so you need more of the max-polluting boilers to power the machines
   
2. pollution generation of a structure (example: electric mining drill) is directly tied to the electricity requirements of that structure -- speed modules increase the electricity requirements, hence increases the pollution generation from the structure. An electric mining drill generates 10 pollution/min -- adding speed modules to it will have it generating far more than 10 pollution/min.

This is a "what not to do" if the goal is to decrease pollution generation :) To lower pollution generation: green power (solar and/or nuclear) and efficiency modules which reduce electricity requirements (hence lower pollution generation).

EDIT: if you have higher tier modules, then use tier3 productivity modules to crank up pollution generation (they increase power demands further than tier3 speed modules, plus also have a pollution multiplier that speed modules don't have).

[Sahayak]

Build stuff

[Steve]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.