How does this and the pollution settings to trees offered by the default game combine?

Like I barely get my base up and running with only handful of miners and burners and I'm already seeing a bunch of trees die. Do they stack? Does this one overwrite the default settings?

What are some recommended settings to make it harder to kill trees, but still make pollution management somewhat important?

The vanilla mechanic does not actually destroy (remove) the trees it just changes their sprite to look dead. What my mod setting does on top of that is actually destroy the tree over time in multiple stages. First of it is actually turned into one of the permanently dead sprites (fallen over trees as example) and after a while if pollution persists will completely remove those too. So no these settings do not stack per-se since they act on different things that happen to occur somewhat at the same time (Though vanilla trees start looking dead at around 4500 pollution while my defaults kick in at around 7000 pollution per chunk).

My defaults are somewhat balanced around a normal play through where loosing large swats of forest due to pollution isn't a big deal. If you want make tree deaths more dramatic you can lower the Noxys_Trees-deaths-by-pollution-bias number to something below 7000 and trees will die and be removed much quicker from pollution.

Another thing you could do to make pollution management harder is to reduce the max amount of trees per chunk (Noxys_Trees-maximum-trees-per-chunk) to something lower or even much lower than the default of 256. This will effectively make forest less dense over time even the ones that where generated very dense and regrowth will not be as strong against pollution. With my default settings forests tend to spread out over time quite a bit thus increasing their pollution absorption capacity. Reducing the mentioned setting will calm this absorption quite a bit.

Hope this answers some of your questions ;)

Thanks. I wanted to opposite to happen. Haha. Playing with Pyanodons and you need wood manually for about the first 5 hours, but I found the trees dying too fast.

Ha ha, okay well the opposite of my recommendations will make it easier then.

You may have to look at your actual pollution levels (F5 and in the F4 menu show-pollution-values) and balance Noxys_Trees-deaths-by-pollution-bias around the numbers you are seeing there (the first number being the amount of pollution in that chunk and the second number being the pollution gain per minute).

If you want even more trees you can set Noxys_Trees-maximum-trees-per-chunk to something like 512 or higher if you want to go more silly but you'll probably also need to reduce Noxys_Trees-minimum-distance-between-tree to allow trees to grow closer to each other (0.4 is probably good for 512 trees per chunk).

My mod also allows you to mess with how much pollution is eaten by the trees but most people actually forget or skip this setting as it is a startup setting, so check the startup settings too if you haven't ;)