Not going all-green but all-tech to remove pollution is also a way that i'm willing to accept.
Pollution can be actively removed with a machine, over time with a considerable cost of energy and lots of disposable air-water filters.
You can also use palladium catalysts to reduce pollution output of whichever machine.
Be advised: going through every machine and adding a bunch of custom pollution logic for individual machines is NOT ON THE TABLE. Blood won't do it. Greg won't do it. I won't do it. Rules are necessary, and that means some machines are going to be affected similar to other machines in ways that aren't 100% logical, and the user just has to deal with it.
We're defining rules, but affecting all machines for the sake of affecting them just "because pollution" is nonsense that should be avoided imo.
If you want to affect it, better justify with a good logical reason other than just balance.
Thats why we initially defined that only blocks that use water, air or soil are affected.
Thus only a small pack (except that it includes most generators...) of blocks are affected by pollution.
Should you be stupid enough to pollution go insane, it will start going through all blocks, except special acid-proof blocks and bedrock (or other invincible blocks).
Further implications of pollution: Everyone knows well that wires, pipes and all those non-electric blocks can run open in the sky, right? Well, not if pollution is high enough.
Acid rain will corrode (destroy) any metal block that is out in the open. (See rain explosion function and change it to block destroyal turning into scrap metal block)
The BBF doesn't make sense in the first place (bronze melting point compared to steel) but that aside, it is something that does burn (char)coal/coke to produce steel, requiring oxygen in its process.
Thus, it would be affected by slowing down the process OR requiring more (char)coal/coke per steel ingot.
EBF is not affected because it does not use air and when you need to reduce something, you use fluid oxygen inputted on a hatch.
Chemical reactors are not affected unless its a recipe that uses air or water. Same goes for distillery, electrolyzers, ore washers, autoclaves and whatever more might use air and/or water.
Now about pollution control:
Check for crops (IC2 crops), plants (tree leaves mostly) and sum them up.
That one value would increase the rate that pollution is dissipated.
That one value is updated once every one or two MC days (20-40 min) to prevent lag. This also might be good to have for any pollution triggered event.
Edit: My idea of Early implementation of pollution: An universal value that will affect everything, air, water and soil, all at once.
Later on those might be separated, with the addition of a 4th variant, radiation.
Edit2: About soil pollution:
Pollution should change biome to a "polluted wasteland" that is equal to a desert (worst biome for IC2 crops, having a negative bonus), effectively damaging your IC2 crops growth or even killing them.
Prevent any kind of crop to grow or even be planted (like harvestcraft prevents you to plant rice seeds if not water or something weird of the sort, you plant, it drops back as seed again).
If you can get everyone to agree that quadrupling the speed of each machine per tier is kosher I'll do that. (You won't :p)
I'd be the first to be against that 
an IV machine being 256 times faster than a LV one (and not cost an extra EU per item processed) seems a bit tad powerful.
I'm fine with something around 8 to 36 times faster though.
You can't change the already existing water inside other blocks, but you can pretend they're dirty.
The pollutedwater block inworld is just for flavor to make your world look ugly, hazardous and well... hostile.
I can't directly solve your tin issue, but I might recommend getting Tine (and other metal) crops.
Preferably high stat ones, but I'll warn you beforehand that its a very tedious way.
On paper that sounds lovely, in practice its open to a lot of speculation, and the result isn't necessarily going to make Bear happy.
Those unhappy with the defaults can always use the config though.
The default should cater to the majority (semi-hardcore players) that would like pollution to affect things, but not drastically and any consequences should be remediable with a cost.
Also the default can always be discussed and finetuned should most people still be unhappy with it.
Also² the default can be what you and bloody think its best, we're here just to give ideas and opinions, not force anyone to do what we want.
Then its up to NC to use wildcard and accept any damage reactor component, right?
Explain "a balanced way to set things on or off" please? I'm not sure what you're requesting here.
The notion of making it configurable is the only way to make it balanced for a "whole community". Since the hardcore players want stuff like lava nerfed into the ground, and other players want it completely left alone. Is balance finding the middle ground, or trying to give everyone a truly positive experience?
For what its worth, I'm open to leaving it in an extremely friendly configuration by default, and letting people crank up the difficulty themselves if they want to.
I'm also open to looking into different overall "modes", similar to Forestry, so that you can just change one thing to make a big swathe of changes. But that would be a later change.
Balance would be having all energy sources (that apply) be affected equally by pollution and slightly inequally based on realism (for example a diesel generator being a bit more pollutant than a gas generator, but not that much more).
The heavy differences (nerfing lava to ground or left alone or even making a certain energy source pollution free) should be done by players (modpack makers) themselves via configs.
Edit: Hooray for page 100!
Not as core mechanic. That would kill every servers tps and also can only differ beween ok and dead, nothing between. It could work later on, when the other effects allready made it impossible to life there it could be the final irreservible destruction. Or maybe something only to fix with the terraformer.
Even if the check to replace water is done once every a great while and do small work?
You don't have to replace all water with dirty water instantly as pollution reaches threshold. It can be done progressively, slowly, over a great time, can't it?
It could also happen simultaneously with the event of pollution spread to adjacent chunks, couldn't it?
Dirty water would be reversed back to water if pollution lowers down to a minimum level too. Also gradually.
Ohh, we got 100 pages on this thread.
About the water: Replacing water blocks in world with dirty water is not possible from coding side. Only effecting interaction with water and the look. Water looks muddy in some biomes, this should be possible by pollution too.
But pumping dirty water would be impossible to balace due to mod interaction. So the only "safe" way to implement dirty water is the machine recipes and looks.
Can't make pollution spread like thaumcraft taint? Except that what sustains it is pollution, not magic. Polluted biomes instead of tainted land biome.
If pollution can spread to other chunks and affect machines why can't it replace blocks? I mean how TC spawns and replaces blocks just because you got a tainted biome.
Ok but its the other half I can't think of a way to do. Can you imagine if your lake was full of dirty water blocks, and you tried to pick them up with a BC pump? An enderio pump? A simple bucket or bottle?
(the bottle would almost certainly just transform it into pure water btw)
I could probably make the GT pump work with it, but that is a nasty, nasty, horrible hack.
Dirty water would be a different water fluid block, not regular water blocks. That way any mod can pump it.
Dirty water bucket and bottles would have to be added by GT too to prevent those problems.
Regular water blocks would be replaced with dirty water blocks if pollution rises enough.
I personally feel a basic burners create pollution, and need vented away from or built away from machines, is a good place to start. implementation can be done in stages,
To put this into both flavor and functional:
Burners emit pollution that gets into chunk (functional part) AND a smog fluid block that works like thaumcraft taint (semi fluid-like block that floats side-upwards and can accumulate), if you're within it, you suffocate (flavor part). Once that smog block reaches sky (y=256), it disappears and turns into more pollution to the functional part.
This smog block has to be vented by keeping a way for it to flow upwards, which is easy unless you're living deep underground.
Muffler hatches and anything that could possibly pollute the air would do this.
Palladium catalysts would reduce the amount of smog blocks created.
Said smog blocks can also be destroyed with a scrubber machine should you require a self sustained enclosed system (for space stations and deep underground bases).
We can possibly do the oxygen thing if someone explains why it makes tons of sense, and why it adds gameplay value. I don't mind it as a pollution workaround because acquiring the oxygen generates its own problems.
The idea itself also has a minor design conflict that would need to be resolved: the plasma turbine accepts various chemical liquids for reactions. Currently Oxygen is NOT one of those inputs. If we implemented this, either
a) we could never use oxygen in a reaction, or
b) we would have to exclude the Plasma variant from the "large turbines that need liquid oxygen" scheme.
or c) we'd have to design a new hatch, or a method to flag a hatch as the oxygen hatch
(b) would be the best option, but "exceptions to the rule" should always be a last resort in game design.
Plasma is fusion tier tech, they shouldn't be affected by pollution and don't make sense to use oxygen either because plasma energy generation doesn't look like to be a chemical reaction in the first place. You're not burning plasma with oxygen to produce heat or anything of the sort
---something that is not relevant to pollution---
Isn't plasma just a very hot fluid, which should be the job of a large plasma heat exchanger? (because plasma is too hot and would burn down the regular LHE into ashes)
Fun how we'd go back to steam... or another fluid should be created that expands like steam when its hot, which I don't know.
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Oxygen would be an optional fluid input, not necessary for the operation, but grants 100% efficiency if present, nullifying the pollution problem at the cost of another one, obtaining oxygen.
Pollution is what decreases the oxygen quality in the air (which is used to burn things).
You know that things burn because theres oxygen in the air and if you pump oxygen in, things burn faster, stronger and more efficient (no partial combustion is done [C + 1/2O = CO]).
This is done in some kinds of blast furnaces nowadays.
THIS is what I mean by a "can do" implementation of dirty water. It works. If there's a pollution factor nearby, machines can't use normal water anymore. Keep it on the board.
NEGATIVES: It totally lacks Axle's flavour. Its only 10% in the fun direction whereas I'd prefer to take it further: where real, dirty water is actually a thing.
Do both then. Dirty water on environment that poisons (or even kills if the water is too polluted) any entity that comes in contact with and blockage of "regular" water on recipes.
Environmental water is very dirty if compared to regular water, but both are polluted enough that they can't be used for recipes.
Dirty water can be purified into distilled water via filtering-distilling process (dirty water + Tcentrifuge = distilled water + sulfur and other crap).
"Regular" water can be distilled with already existing processes.
This way we get both flavour and functional dirty water.
I'm just discussing ideas, if they're implementable, nice. If not, detail a bit why they can't. We might be able to get to something if we talk enough about it.
I don't want you or anyone to fully implement the dreams or whatever of everyone in one go. You're human and you can only do so much with your time on your hands.
By now I am far too used to how "slow" is GT and IC2 development are, I don't expect you to be any faster, not at all. Afaik you also have a job too, so even less time.
I'm still against simplistic pollution though, its better if people have a more flavorful experience, even if that takes more time to be developed.
"A bad game is always bad, a delayed one will eventually be good"
charcoal,Lava,oil,gas issue: Make their generators burn less efficiently as pollution rises (lower oxygen quality).
LHE doesn't suffer from this, big boilers and large turbines can accept fluid oxygen to boost efficiency back to max.
About solar and water pollution: solar produce less or refuse to work if pollution too high.
Water-based recipes refuse to work if pollution is too high, requiring distilled water (there are alternate recipes that use them, you can add something to block the regular water recipe I believe?)
Also blood. You're implementing oil deposits based on chunks, right?
What about geothermal spots that follow the same line? Those would be indefinetely extracted and would allow to have realistic geothermal green energy.
PS: ideas are just like opinions, you may not like them.
Or just prevent sapling placement/growth, environment too hostile.
All tree sapling blocks are destroyed every once in awhile (thus greatly reducing or even impossibiliting tree farms)
Going around the mechanic by having pollution elsewhere is still a big logistics problem and is one of the two options (deal with the problem directly or push it elsewhere).
Unless you have cheaty item/fluid/energy teleporation devices, that is.
You can also make pollution be produced by processing machines, not only energy generators.
Also, having a heavily polluted region must be made ugly, to not look pretty and dangerous.
Abuse it enough and you might not even be able to get close to it until everything goes to a halt, and bad choice if its an infinitely sustaining system.
So the majority agrees that pollution hindering you tech wise is bad. It is unrealistic, too simplistic for GT gameplay and uninteresting, its flat out boring.
Does that simplistic pollution mechanism inspire you to improve?
Yes it does, but not in a good way, since it doesn't feel you're beating an actual obstacle but a mere game rule that you must follow or you'll be penalized.
Making pollution harm stuff and make environment hazardous is not pure flavor. It is an - interesting - obstacle that has serious consequences if not dealt properly.
Want to spam low tech lava boilers? Let people go crazy with it, however they'll face problems that will not stop most of his/her factory from running, but will definetely prevent him/her from living there.
That means he/she is forced to control the pollution or will be literally locked out of the region, somewhat similar to how chernobyl and fukushima does, except that we can remedy the situation.
----
Ideas for a farther future, reproduction of chernobyl and fukushima in GT.
Exploding reactors will contaminate chunks with radiation pollution making it extremely hazardous, sometimes so much that not even a hazmat suit will be enough to protect you.
Yes, but I removed it and the problem persisted. The first time I loaded the volcano chunk it displayed properly, but when I came back later to mine it, the bug was there and no amount of reloading or relaunching would fix it (until I switched to 1.21).
This description is also on par with the bug we had on kiraratest on overworld (GC dimensions were just flat out bugged), you load chunks, leave them, come back to them and see stuff are missing. Invisible.
While OC mechanics are fine as is, they heavily discourage you to upgrade.
Everyone sticks to LV machines if they're not blocked by a recipe. Especially fusion recipes.
I'd say overclocking mechanics should be changed indeed.
Machine recipes unaltered, just the "overclocking" formula. To be smoother.
Like a MV machine doing a LV recipe would be just about 20% faster and 10% higher energy cost.
Then add overclockers that just do what it did on GT4, and make them stackable.
Each overclocker would increase speed by 100%, increase EU per operation cost by 100%, increase amperage acceptance by 100%. No maximum.
Also an efficiency upgrade, which does the opposite, reduces EU per operation cost by 95% and decrease speed by 90%, reduces amperage acceptance by 100%. Max of 5.
This would be a hell of expensive upgrade aswell, available only when you're on EV tier.
Another agreement with axlegear, not everyone can code. I've been handing out suggestions to those who can for over 3 years.
If I had the will to learn I'd do that all by myself, but here you see me, talking about ideas.
