About water treatment plant properties

[Architect_1077]

Hi.

I have a question regarding a couple of lot properties related to water treatment plants.
Basically, I'm trying to create a custom water treatment plant. Looking at the properties for the in-game water treatment plant I noticed that the "Water Treatment monthly capacity" property is at 0, while the water pollution generated is set to -300. So, if the water pollution reduction capacity is (as far as I understand) defined by the pollution generated properties of the lot set to negative numbers, then what is the "Water treatment monthly capacity" property used for??

Any takers on this subject?

I'm relatively new to creating custom SC4 content, might be a noobish question...

[Lowkee33]

I would guess that the capacity is a relic from the makers of SC4.  Instead of having a capacity, this building only offers negative pollution.  In a way, it is the same thing.  You could try making the number more than 0 and see what happens

[Architect_1077]

I've tried that... nothing seems to happen as far as I can tell. Hence why I asked here to see if any experienced modders know anything regarding that property.

Correction:

I goofed up while testing. After some proper testing I found that it is actually an important parameter. While the pollution reduction reduces the pollution within a radius of the building, the capacity parameter reduces water pollution throughout the entire network it is connected to, based on this capacity. Makes more sense I would think. Why Maxis doesn't use this parameter beats me.

Guess I answered my own question! Duh!

[Architect_1077]

I want to update some info here regarding my findings. I never got around to doing so and since I haven't been playing regularly I had set this "project" aside for some time now. I recently picked it up again.

Back in January I had begun to explore the "Water treatment monthly capacity" property which is an unused property. Not much info seems to exist out there and not many people seem to have posted anything about it. I have found one other post on these forums that did mention it, pretty much saying it is a useless property that does nothing (see this link). However, I found this to be incorrect and what I have discovered so far is somewhat interesting and strange at the same time.

Basically, the "Water treatment monthly capacity" property does in fact reduce city-wide water pollution. The strangeness in this property has to do with the water treatment capacity of the building vs the actual treatment effect it has on the city's water supply. Essentially, the higher the value the stronger the treatment effect, and this effect applies to the entire city regardless of where you locate the treatment plant. However, the values needed to actually have any reasonable impact on water pollution need to be considerably high compared to the water consumed by your city.

Using a small test city with about 1000 Sims, 650 farm tiles and 220 Heavy industry tiles, 1700 m³/month water consumption,  I have found that:

- At 25000m³/month treatment capacity the treatment effect is barely noticeable
- At 250000m³/month treatment capacity, city-wide water pollution is greatly reduced but still exists.
- Finally, at 350000m³/month treatment capacity, city-wide water pollution is practically non-existent.

An important aspect worth noting is that the treatment effect is not 100% consistent. What this means is that as time in SC4 goes by the treatment effect will be stronger on some days, weaker on others. So water pollution in the city tends to oscillate over time. This oscillation tends to be more pronounced with reduced treatment capacities.

Albeit strange, I think this is something that could be useful in creating custom water treatment facilities. My hope in reviving this thread is that someone else has also experimented with this property and he/she could share their findings as well or that this info could be of some use to other content producers.

Opinions are more than welcome. Please let me know what you think!

[whatevermind]

My guess is that it is not treating simply the water in the water system, but all of the groundwater in the city - hence why you need such a large number to have an impact. Water pollution has values even where there are not pipes/buildings - which would imply that you are polluting the groundwater. A good test might be to try a plant with this property on otherwise identical cities of different sizes, and see if the number has to be much higher (or better yet, 16x higher) on a large city to have the same effect as on a small city.

As far as the variation with time, we know from moisture that the groundwater/wetness of the city varies with time. So, if this property is acting on groundwater, it's effectiveness would be relative to the total water in the city at any given time. You could probably test this by recording the times of year when the plant is more/less effective, and exit without save, and run the same time period with a moisture data view, and see if you get any correlation.

Interested to see where this one goes...

[Architect_1077]

My guess is that it is not treating simply the water in the water system, but all of the groundwater in the city(...)

I've been thinking the same thing. I'll post updates as my testing progresses.

[Lowkee33]

Could be that the amount of water pollution created depeneds upon the occupancy of the lot?  Some months may be 50% full, some months may be greater?

[Architect_1077]

Haven't been able to fully figure it out. Obviously, the more buildings, especially dirty industrial, you have in the city the more water pollution is generated.

The interesting things are that

- as the treatment capacity limit is reached, water pollution gradually increases
- it doesn't matter where you place the treatment plant, it will treat the entire city's water supply, provided it's properly connected with pipes of course

In my cities I'm using a custom treatment plant I made using the NOB models. I'm still trying to understand what can be considered a reasonable treatment capacity. I currently have it at around 400,000 cu/m per plant, but I don't really know yet if this is too much or too little.

I'll keep you posted.