I shifted my play style a while ago so that I could reduce pollution and drive it low enough to zero it out again. It took a while, but I got it there. I’ve made many changes to many other things, so I do not know what is causing it, but something is not making pollution counters of the different buildings add up correctly.

When I was driving down pollution, at one point, I had 36 Magnetos, 80 Calciners, 75 Quarries, 122 Mines, 64 Steamworks, and 102 Smelters. On top of that, to counteract all of that, I had 82 factories with automation enabled.

As far as I could tell then or now, those are the only things causing pollution (My biolabs are all off, and I don’t have OIl well automation on). So at the time my pollution rate was -15 (as seen by setting game.detailedPollutionInfo=true in the browser javascript console).

Now, after having reached 0 pollution a bit ago, I’ve been shuffling everything around to maximize science to buy more things. So things have not been at the above numbers of those buildings for a few weeks. Once I was done with the science stuff, I tried to re-optimize iron output and magnetos, but I have found that I cannot return to the same numbers of buildings without incurring a positive pollution rate. It does not make any sense.

In order to stay negative (including Winter), I have 34 Magnetos 68 calciners 70 Quarries 120 Mines 64 Steamworks 90 Smelters And that is with 88 Factories with automation!

Quarries and Mines could probably be returned to past values, but I had to finagle as much as possible to maximize magnetos. The big polluters (magnetos, calciners, and steamworks) are all less than their previous numbers. And I should be able to have More buildings polluting with the increased number of factories.

So, what in the world is going on? I have positive power, so it’s not one of the weird side effects of negative power. I have 420% happiness. Does BLS affect that? It’s at 47% It doesn’t make any sense.

Edit: 11 days later and still have not figured this out. I still cannot have as many Magnetos running as before. I even opened up an old save file from months ago. It doesn’t make any sense why I cannot have those Magnetos running now. I think 0 pollution actually is making things worse.