Help with garbage utility + tutorial or guide

[0rion79]

Hello,

waiting for RTMT 3.6, I've discovered a 50% working plug-in of mine. It is this tetrabrick recycling plant that you can see attached here.
In its original form, this plant was too powerful (almost a cheat) because not only it was almost 100% clean, but aslo had no cost and, instead, provided a fat money boost for city treasury. So, I've tried to edit it turning its boost into an effective and heavy cost (1.200 §) but now I've seen that I have to pay for it only for the first month, and then its cost is reduced to zero. It is not a "ghost" effect, where the monthly budget is reduced to 0% from 100%! It is just the basic cost that does change and I can't guess why.

Can you take a look to it? I would like it to be a clean recycler & incinerator and I have no idea if this is causing some conflict or not. If anybody wants to take a look, the file is here: http://www.savefile.com/files/2133948

Also, I've edited other garbage utilities,they are working very well but I've seen that everything is more or less fine but some of them only work if there is AT LEAST one resident in the whole area. Else, they don't recicle anything. Basically, only incinerators will be effective if there are no residents in that map square. It is like that they are triggered by garbage produced by residents and they don't start working if there are only industries and/or commercial areas (including offices). It is very strange. Can you provide a guide to this, please?

Thanks a lot for your help.

[Andreas]

Recycling centers don't "burn" (remove) any garbage, but actually lower the garbage production by a certain percentage based on the city population. So they are completely useless in industrial/commercial cities without any residents.

[0rion79]

Yep, but if you build just 1 house, they will be able to recycle even industrial leftovers
Anyway, any clue about that budged problem described above??

[RippleJet]

I would recommend that you try to create a simple recycling plant out of it first, based on how the in-game recycling plant is modded.
In other words, leave out the Waste to Energy Power plant properties completely, as well as all IHT jobs. The plant currently has both IHT and civic jobs...

If you manage to create a working recycling centre, then create a separate waste-to-energy plant out of it.
Once you have both of them properly operating, try merging the building exemplars and see if such a combination even would work...

You probably should create a custom query for it as well though,
including both the recycled amount and efficiency as well as the power plant efficiency, slider and other properties.

[0rion79]

Yes, you've hit the point. The author has created an recycling and burning plant together while they can be only of one kind.
It is from yesterday that I've removed the recycling plant (so that it can work in industrial & commercial areas too) and there is no longer that weird budged trouble. Still, some things are not that intuitive.

[cogeo]

I think you should not mix garbage disposal types, as this might cause problems. The Occupant Groups and the properties that enable the various garbage disposal operations are different. It may work but may also not work.

And as RippleJet said, if you make a mixed-type utility, you should certainly make a custom query too, as the "efficiency" icons have different IDs for each type. Ie you should have two "efficiency" indicators, one for the recycler and one for burner part. Now if you find that one of these doesn't work...

Still, in the best case you are going to have two different utility types in one. I doubt if capacities will add-up. I also doubt if making it a burner or something can make it accept industrial waste (recycling centres reduce the garbage produced by a certain population).

So I think the best way to make a correctly functioning garbage disposal utility is to take a Maxis one and mod yours in a similar manner, ie scale it up or down. Plop and maintenance costs shouldn't necessarily be scaled linearly. In general (and this is the case in reality too) the larger the capacity, the higher the construction cost and the lower the production cost per capacity unit. In simcity terms, a utility with the double capacity of a Maxis one should rather cost more than double to plop, and somewhat less than the double to operate (maintain). You may also trade maintenance cost for pollution (if you wish to make a "clean" one it should be much more expensive too).

I had made some research with garbage disposal in the past, and the costs are as follows:
- Recycling Centres: ca $20/ton
- Landfills: $3.3/ton
- Waste to Energy: $0.5-$1.5/ton, depending on your valuing of pollution and electricity.
- Incinerator: $1/ton (this is a non-power-generating burner I have released on the STEX; it's fully functional and this is by Maxis, though they didn't include such a lot in simcity, I just "unearthed" it).

In other words:
- The recycling centre as modded by Maxis is just a money waster. In simcity 3000 the recycling centre did make sense to use, its cost was $350/mo but served 50,000 of pop and the garbage reduction percentrage was 30% (or 33% with some ordinances), that is the cost was some $7/ton, an expensive but viable alternative, if you want a clean city. I had considered BATting a large recycling centre, and modding it like that (with doubled stats, ie 100,000 pop and $700/mo maint), but never made it.
- Landfills are actually much more expensive compared to other garbage disposal types, as you can see. But due to a bug in cost calculation, deals are signed at much lower prices, ie cities with landfills import garbage at a price much lower than the actual cost. The cost of landfills is calculated correctly only when are almost 100% full, but then they are unusable.

Download my incinerator from the STEX, it also contains a modified version of GraphMod, showing incinerated garbage as well. It could prove useful, as you can see what quantities of garbage were processed by each utility type (see how your hybrid utility works and fares).

Also keep in mind that the game distributes garbage to the various utility types in the following order:
1. Recycling Centres
2. W2E/Incinerators
3. Landfills
(not sure about deals)
That is your landfills will receive garbage only if the capacity of your Recycling Centres and W2E/Incinerators is exceeded.

Hope this helps

[0rion79]

Well, this has been very intersting.
In my game I have a lot of garbage facilities that work in different ways and I've set all of them with different prices and capacity. Also, some are cleaner than others. The one for which I was asking advice is the Tetrabrick recycling plant, that is NOT mine: I've not made it, but just wished to change it into something that was fairly expensive (while the original one was a reward-like, that was giving money BACK to the city). I just liked its shape and wished to have it working normally. I've made it very clean, but more expensive than a waste2energy (1.200§ x month) but that doesn't give energy back and uses a lot of power and energy. I've called it "universal separator"
About basic recycling plants, I've seen that they are a nice idea in cities with residents to reduce the total garbage output BEFORE exporting them, while the landfil and the W2Energy are still good solutions for other kind of cities as  manufactiring or dirty industrial areas, where pollution is not a problem and that may import garbage from other cities.
Effectively, the basic recycling plant is a bit too expensive from what it does, but I would not know how to give it a better price. I will take a look to your graph for sure...