Pollution & Mitigation
Industrial activity emits pollution, tracked per region (a coarse 64×64-block grid). It builds while your machines run, decays slowly on its own — and, since 0.1.0-beta.1, can be actively cleaned up with dedicated mitigation machines. Cleanup is designed as a genuine resource sink: it costs power and materials, not just patience.
For how pollution accumulates, decays, and the (opt-in, privacy-guarded) per-player attribution, see Consequence Systems.
Scrubber
The workhorse cleaner. A powered machine that, on each operation:
- removes pollution from its own region at the full rate (
scrubberPollutionPerOp), and - removes a fraction of that rate from each of the 8 surrounding regions
(
scrubberAdjacentPermille, default 25%) — so one well-placed Scrubber softens a whole neighbourhood, but only truly cleans the region it stands in.
The Scrubber consumes Filter Cartridges (crafted from paper + iron, 4 per craft). A cartridge
absorbs a set amount of pollution (scrubberFilterCapacity) and then fouls into a Dirty
Filter — watch the cartridge visibly darken in the machine's filter bay. Dirty Filters are not
waste: run them through an Ore Processor to recover iron dust. Each operation also costs NE
(scrubberNePerOp).
Remediator
The heavy-duty option for a region you have badly poisoned. The Remediator is slotless — no
filters, no consumables — and simply works its own region's pollution down, at a deliberately steep
energy price (remediatorNePerOp, default 5× the Scrubber's, for remediatorPollutionPerOp
pollution per operation). It is gated behind Starsteel, so it arrives with the advanced tier.
Both machines are full citizens of the machine framework: they take upgrade modules, participate in the thermal system, honour side configuration, and report through the Analytics tab. Like all pollution work, their operations run on a batched interval — never per-tick.
Reading pollution numbers
The Analytics tab on each machine shows a pollution rate. Note that displayed rates are nominal — derived from the machine's configured per-operation values and its current preset — rather than a live measurement of the region.
Threshold events
When a region's pollution crosses a configurable line (pollutionEventThreshold; 0 disables),
NeroTech publishes a threshold event through Neroland Core — both when rising past it and when
recovering below it. Nothing in NeroTech reacts to these yet: the hook lies dormant until a
listener mod (planned: NeroEvents, e.g. smog events) picks them up. Events are keyed by region,
never by player.
Config keys
scrubberNePerOp, scrubberPollutionPerOp, scrubberAdjacentPermille, scrubberFilterCapacity,
remediatorNePerOp, remediatorPollutionPerOp, pollutionEventThreshold — alongside the base
pollution keys listed in Consequence Systems.