Unwinnable emission increase

[Ciliate]

So I’ve been messing around with mods and cheats in sandbox, and I was attempted to make a perfect world with an infinite budget, but I came across a strange problem/glitch.
So I found that with a world that not only has no emission but has negative emissions thanks to a hyper efficient energy system and artificial trees, my emissions still steadily went up. I try to find the cause of this, but with every progression of 5 years, my emission stat stated only negative emission production, while my total emission continued to go up. After about a 3c I released a plague that kill almost everyone, while also keeping all the artificial trees. And yet, in a world filled with trees and only 70million people, the emissions continued to climb.
How strange, the only winning move was not to play.

[Simon Love]

Originally posted by Ciliate:

So I’ve been messing around with mods and cheats in sandbox, and I was attempted to make a perfect world with an infinite budget, but I came across a strange problem/glitch.
So I found that with a world that not only has no emission but has negative emissions thanks to a hyper efficient energy system and artificial trees, my emissions still steadily went up. I try to find the cause of this, but with every progression of 5 years, my emission stat stated only negative emission production, while my total emission continued to go up. After about a 3c I released a plague that kill almost everyone, while also keeping all the artificial trees. And yet, in a world filled with trees and only 70million people, the emissions continued to climb.
How strange, the only winning move was not to play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DGNZnfKYnU

[Delnar_Ersike]

Odd, I'm usually able to get emissions to go down if I have biochar + trees + 100% renewables everywhere, as well as max'ed 3rd gen biofuels capacity to cover fuel oil for international travel. Maybe you're getting clathrate eruptions and/or have a whole bunch of wildfires happening all the time?

[Ciliate]

My best guess is wildfires as I used a lot of sulphates which of cause huge drouts. Still I've also invested a lot in weather ai and adapt to dry climate to try and reduce that, too know effect.

[Thorin]

Around 10K phantom emission happens constantly, don't know why and if there are an actual couse or just some addition (bug), but you need to go below -10K emission, to actually start to decrease the co2 level and anbd the ppm value. it can be achived if you go full renewable/fusion and do tree+biochar everywhere. If you manage to get good leveles of biofuel also, you cen even do some significant reduction too, but the zero point is suprisingly not at zero emission:)

[Delnar_Ersike]

Originally posted by Thorin:

Around 10K phantom emission happens constantly, don't know why and if there are an actual couse or just some addition (bug), but you need to go below -10K emission, to actually start to decrease the co2 level and anbd the ppm value. it can be achived if you go full renewable/fusion and do tree+biochar everywhere. If you manage to get good leveles of biofuel also, you cen even do some significant reduction too, but the zero point is suprisingly not at zero emission:)

I'm pretty sure there aren't any "phantom" emissions. "Phantom" forcing, maybe, but not emissions. Every single megaton CO2 equiv. can be accounted for, though some sources for emissions are harder to nail than others. The big sources that I've found people tend to overlook are emissions due to single-turn events (e.g. wildfires), emissions due to resource extraction (this is how tar sands and shale gas are made to be more polluting), and emissions due to fuel oil use for air travel, as air travel can never be converted to electric, and unless you have full coverage from 3rd gen biofuels, fuel oil use will generate more emissions than what would be compensated by fuel oil generation (biofuels reduce fuel oil emissions by generating negative emissions from fuel oil creation, everything else either generates no emissions or generates positive emissions from fuel oil creation).

[Thorin]

And i'm pretty sure there are phantom emission, since if in turn A have -5K emission, and in turn B -10K emission, but the end turn stuff show me that the total emission went up by 40K, that there are some emission which is not shown anywhere, maybe thee are not just added emission, but clearly not shown ones, which is hard to check.
And this is while all fossil is bannad except biofuel, also nuclear (to prevent uranium mining.)

[Ciliate]

I agree. Im in a similer situation with max banned fossil, and maxed out trees, land protection and biochar.

[Delnar_Ersike]

Hmm, yeah, the turn-by-turn CO2 equiv accounts for everything, but the turn-by-turn increase of CO2 equiv may be fudged. I unfortunately have no way of diagnosing that, given how the internal code for the game's logic is byzantine beyond comprehension (I think FotW Redux's NDA still allows me to say that).

[boomermojo]

Same thing happened to me. The algorithm may be bugged with negative values. Because aparently commerce was producing 500% emissions in all countries (100% renewables, fossils banned, electric transport etc).

[Kristen Reid 𒈠𒀯𒀯]

After cheating as well I've concluded this game is completely unwinnable, and its unwinnability is hard-coded into its very design.

With -20k emissions a turn the net emissions are 40k and the temprature remains stagnant on whatever it was when you managed to get utopian technologies to decrease emissions.

[Drake]

Yep, all fake just like the "global warming" turned into "climate change" garbage.

Not to mention, when the ice ages happened, every single time, the CO2 levels were above 4,500 ppm.

[KhanIndustries]

The sad moral of the story this game taught me was to simply throw your hands in the air and say "Eff it! Even if you make a real attempt to fix it... the world appears to not want to be fixed despite what you do".

[kill_wrathy]

There are a few oddities with the display and calculations, and in particular, a couple of regions - SE Asia are one and there's another - are hardwired to have far higher emissions for commerce per robot, even when all your emission reducing technologies are deployed. The only way to win in those places is probably to try to cripple the economy, while you can run strong economies elsewhere without too much issue.

[Thorin]

"After cheating as well I've concluded this game is completely unwinnable, and its unwinnability is hard-coded into its very design."

Considering that managed to wein both tha base game and the unofficial patch version I cannot agree with this statement. It can be won and even with a few different strategy (as well as some really dystopian options like wipeing most of the humanity and such.) Yep, it is hard, very hard and that is designed (and the base version underplays the nuclear powerplants to the point that the unofficial patch cannot even trully solve the problems with them.)

[alexander.julian.erhard]

I might want to document a full run to be absolutely sure, but I suspect the emission discrepancy to come from a bug/mathematical error with Artificial Trees and to a smaller extent Subsidize Biochar.

The Problem:
The game measures your annual CO2 Emissions, and the total CO2 emissions (since 1750) and how much those changed since the last turn. But they might be calculated independantly, and this is where someone probably made an error with Artificial Trees.
Because each turn is 5 years, the change in total emissions should be 5 times your annual emissions. Maybe not exactly, maybe there is some additional increase due to arctic methane releases., which gets converted into the CO2 amount and added, I don´t know.
Based on looking on those numbers a few times before getting 1st Nano and Artificial Trees, the change in my total emissions was about 5 times my annual emissions.

For example:
+6995 annual emissions and +31.749 total emissions over 5 years.

But when I looked at this after getting Artificial Trees everywhere, that ratio was totally off.
Examples:

+3.830 annual, but +127.632 increase
-5.789 annual, but +87.053 increase

So how does this get screwed up?
Running Artificial Trees in every region is supposed to reduce emissions by 24.000 Mt, both in the vanilla game and with Delnar´s mod. Subsidize Biochar in every region should cut another 3.000 Mt. Together that equals 27.000 Mt CO2 reduction.
But are those per turn reductions or annual reductions?

According to the annual emissions, those 24.000 to 27.000 are supposed to be annual, and should decrease your total emissions by 120.000 to 135.000 over the course of 5 years.
But my suspicion is, that either:
1. The emission decrease was actually supposed to be per turn, which means that annual emissions should only be reduced by 20% of that, but are wrongfully calculated fully into annual emissions.
2. The emission decrease was supposed to be per year, but they wrongfully don´t get multiplied by 5 for the total emission change.
No matter what´s the actual error, those 24.000 to 27.000 will be both substracted from your annual emissions, and from what your total emission change would be, if you weren´t playing Artificial Trees and Subsidize Biochar.
As a result, total emission change will be 96.000 to 108.000 higher than what you´d expect from multiplying annual emissions by 5:
Using my previously mentioned two examples, I get a discrepancy of
127.632 - 5* 3.830 = 108.482
87.053 - 5 * (-5.789) = 115.998

To confirm that the error really comes from Artificial Trees instead of Arctic Methane, I went to my save with -5.789 annual emissions and +87.053 increase, cancelled all my Artificial Trees and Subsidize Biochar, went to the next turn and got
+21.106 annual emissions, (an increase of +26.895 annual emissions) and a total emission change of +106.878 (+19.825 more than in the previous turn). Which is about 5x of the annual emissions again. And definitely debunks, that those 100k+ emissions are coming from Arctic Methane alone.

Now 26.895 isn´t exactly 19.825. But it is closer to a 1:1 ratio than a 1:5 ratio.


TLDR:
Artificial Trees and Subsidize Biochar seem to be decreasing the total emission change only by 20% of what they decrease according to the annual emissions.
This causes total emissions and therefore CO2 concentrations to rise, while annual emissions are negative. The breakeven point of 0 total emission increase/turn might be around -20.000 annual emissions.
This applies to both the vanilla game and Delnar´s Mod, as far as I am aware of.