Before We Leave

I started a new game with custom settings for this specific achievement. As stated in the description, you can not change the default settings for the two pollution options, but you can change others to make this easier.

I changed peep expectations to max, start resources to extra, resource deposit size to double, building cost to quarter, and weather to off.

Your starting planet only has 3 main islands. You can ignore all the tiny islands and the crystal island for this achievement. You only need to research up to Steel on the tech tree. Steel Smelters give you the best pollution output at 4 bars of pollution as well as a large pollution radius.

I started off by clustering my houses, food, and water together. You want to leave this area untouched by pollution until you have spread pollution everywhere else on the main island plus the other two islands. When peeps are hungry, they do not work. We need them to work. Pollution on a food tile slows down food production on that tile. A population of 50 is probably as big as you want on each island. You can go bigger for a bigger workforce, but you have to house and feed them. It might be worth it, but I kept my populations small: 47, 34, and 18. I lucked out and the game spawned me 3 relatively small islands.

You need to focus on the production of steel. So get your industry set up to make it: iron mines, iron smelters, a tool maker, several woodcutters, wood generators. When you get oil production, you can change to oil generators.

Some important tips. Trees help reduce pollution. So demolish all trees on an island that are not being used by woodcutters. You need to build multiple warehouses to store mainly steel but also some for iron bars and oil. When warehouses get full, build more. You need to keep dirty production buildings producing all the time to spread pollution faster.

Instead of building enough steel smelters to cover most of the island, I worked in sections, building 3 steel smelters close enough together where they had some overlap. When you build a structure that cause pollution, the pollution radius is outlined in purple. Once they had polluted all the tiles in their radius, I demolished the buildings and moved them to cover new areas. I repeated this process, getting closer and closer to where my peeps lived until that was all that remained unpolluted. Then I moved into that area.

For this achievement to pop, every tile on the 3 islands has to be polluted. The level of pollution does not matter. Levels of pollution are as follows: slightly polluted, polluted, highly polluted, and very highly polluted. In order to see how much pollution a tile has you can click on it, and the blue box that pops up will tell you.

You can also get a pollution overlay for an island by pressing the right bumper on your controller. Arrow down to the second line and over to the 3rd box. Then choose the last box with a picture of a tile. This shows you the current polluted state of the tile as well as how much pollution it is actively receiving.