Is wide filtering just filtering but better? If so why does auto-mode default to the bad one?
There’s some very rare use cases where basic filtering is better, such as gas burn mixing, but otherwise wide filtering is more effective for actually clearing out waste gasses from a room.
Wide filtering is indeed better than regular filtering. On an Air alarm, setting the mode to Filtering (Wide) will enable WideNet mode on all linked air scrubbers.
Air scrubbers on WideNet node will expend the work they do to the 4 tiles surrounding them, effectively quadrupling the amount of work they do. The reason why this isn’t the default option is likely to save on performance.
I’ve attached a screenshot of the Air Scrubber page out of the Engineering Guidebook Megaupdate I’m currently working on (finals be damned) if you want a more formal explanation.