State of Dirt Balance

[chemie]

So for 22 dups with wild wheat harvest as main source, I still need about 20 tiled wheat, in a greenhouse, for contant bread production.  This requires 3 continuous PW geysers being sieved to make dirt.  This is just about steady for dirt (and the greenhouse fertilizer).  So I am using a 0.01% seed to get those 3 geysers.

Does this sound balanced?  Does Klei just not want any wheat farming?

What are your alternative crazy designs to generate enough dirt for modest wheat farming?

3-4 rockets to the terrain planet?

Massive puff farms with slime cookers for dirt?

Do you like where the dirt balance is?

[Neotuck]

Something has changed with dirt cooking were sometimes the mass doubles when slime/algae/fertilizer is cooked into a block of dirt (possibly a bug or new feature)

you might get more dirt if you build extra fertilizer makers and cook half the fertilizer into dirt

or even use a puft farm to cook slime

If you think that's too exploity for you, then you can use all the extra water you get from the sieves to make a mass bristle berry farm in PO2 and let the crops rot for more dirt

once you make enough pepper bread to supply your whole colony, you'll never need BBQ again so you can also let the meat rot in PO2 for extra dirt

[chemie]

25 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

Something has changed with dirt cooking were sometimes the mass doubles when slime/algae/fertilizer is cooked into a block of dirt (possibly a bug or new feature)

you might get more dirt if you build extra fertilizer makers and cook half the fertilizer into dirt

or even use a puft farm to cook slime

If you think that's too exploity for you, then you can use all the extra water you get from the sieves to make a mass bristle berry farm in PO2 and let the crops rot for more dirt

once you make enough pepper bread to supply your whole colony, you'll never need BBQ again so you can also let the meat rot in PO2 for extra dirt

I forgot to mention I had 60+ berries being composted too...and venting most the sieved water to space after max pepper production

[Neotuck]

6 minutes ago, chemie said:

I forgot to mention I had 60+ berries being composted too...and venting most the sieved water to space after max pepper production

you'll need more if you have 20 wheat

[chemie]

Just now, Neotuck said:

you'll need more if you have 20 wheat

I think that was my point.....seems extreme just to make small amount of dirt

[Neotuck]

Just now, chemie said:

I think that was my point.....

dirt farming is never easy

like power production, don't rely on only one source 

[chemie]

33 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

dirt farming is never easy

like power production, don't rely on only one source 

Do you like where the dirt balance is?

[MorsDux]

It is balanced if the creators wish that feeding highest level food for your dupes should be impossible in great numbers as they are intended to serve for food to specialized dupes like astronauts.

[Sasza22]

I find it funny that dirt, that is supposed to be a low tier resource is really hard to renew and needed for high tier food. It wouldn`t hurt if dirt was available in other biomes than the starting one. Still it doesn`t solve the issue of renewability. I feel like there needs to be more ways to get dirt but i`m not sure about what it should be.

[yoakenashi]

I made a snuggestion once that we add a new recipe:

Sand + Sulfur -> Polluted Dirt

This would give us a use for late game sulfur, to make smelly sand (aka, polluted dirt).

I’m fully open to what building makes this refinement.

[Mariilyn]

Another strategy : make a lot of carbon dioxide, then use the carbon skimmer to generate some polluted water, and sieve it.

> One sieve needs 3000 kg/cycle of PW to generate 120 kg/cycle of dirt (20 sleet wheat plants needs 100 kg/cycle)

> One carbon skimmer can process 180 kg/cycle of CO2 to generate 600 kg/cycle of PW

> There are many sources of CO2 but the best one is the petroleum generator : one alone can generate as much as 1450 kg/cycle of PW (450 kg/cycle PW + 300 kg/cycle of CO2)

In a seed with very low amounts of water or pw, I would make sure to exploit the oil reservoirs - cook the crude oil to petroleum to generate PW and dirt. I think 3 oil wells are enough to sustain 5 petro gen. And the process is currently water positive.

 

Also, with 22 dupes, if you sieve the PW from the showers (22 x 30* kg = 660 kg/cycle), the PW from the lavatories (22 x 11,7 kg = 257,4 kg) and the PW generated from the CO2 they exhale (something like 88 kg), you can make a little bit more than 1005 kg/cycle of PW. 

*If showers are still 30 seconds long

 

1 hour ago, chemie said:

Do you like where the dirt balance is?

Yes. But I always welcome the implementation of different pathways to make the same ressource. Some of the critters are what's unbalanced ( pufts and pacus).

[chemie]

Just now, Mariilyn said:

Another strategy : make a lot of carbon dioxide, then use the carbon skimmer to generate some polluted water, and sieve it.

> One sieve needs 3000 kg/cycle of PW to generate 120 kg/cycle of dirt (20 sleet wheat plants needs 100 kg/cycle)

> One carbon skimmer can process 180 kg/cycle of CO2 to generate 600 kg/cycle of PW

> There are many sources of CO2 but the best one is the petroleum generator : one alone can generate as much as 1450 kg/cycle of PW (450 kg/cycle PW + 300 kg/cycle of CO2)

In a seed with very low amounts of water or pw, I would make sure to exploit the oil reservoirs - cook the crude oil to petroleum to generate PW and dirt. I think 3 oil wells are enough to sustain 5 petro gen. And the process is currently water positive.

 

Also, with 22 dupes, if you sieve the PW from the showers (22 x 30* kg = 660 kg/cycle), the PW from the lavatories (22 x 11,7 kg = 257,4 kg) and the PW generated from the CO2 they exhale (something like 88 kg), you can make a little bit more than 1005 kg/cycle of PW. 

*If showers are still 30 seconds long

 

Yes. But I always welcome the implementation of different pathways to make the same ressource. Some of the critters are what's unbalanced ( pufts and pacus).

My showers/toilets go to pepper farms.

Yes, all CO2 is being sieved too; closed loop.

[Neotuck]

2 hours ago, chemie said:

Do you like where the dirt balance is?

that's a difficult question to answer my playstyle usually adapts to every update

I enjoy challenges

so you could say the more difficult the problem is the more I enjoy finding solutions

[Grimgaw]

Get your dirt or fertilizer from welfare pod.

[blash365]

I agree that it is currently a bit hard to get dirt. Especially if you require alot of it.

Luckily i only require very few, so i am using a dirt cooker, which cooks up all the slime my 2 puft-ranches (one tame, the other wild) produce. But this hardly amounts to anything. I am also using composts for all the excess seeds that i grow (and rotten food, pDirt), but that's not a massive boost either.

I think the problem is that the mass has to come from somewhere. If you cook slime, it is basically a 1:1 ratio. But the slime has to be produced as well and since it is made from pOxygen, there is not much mass that it can have.

The same applies to sieves. If you'd increase the pDirt output from sieves, you'd either generate additional mass (=bad) or lose water in the conversion (=bad).

So unless you find a good source for all the dirt to come from, we dont have a good solution for it, i am afraid.

[JohnFrancis]

4 hours ago, chemie said:

I forgot to mention I had 60+ berries being composted too...and venting most the sieved water to space after max pepper production

That water you are dumping could be turned into an awful lot of dirt.

The organic mass only has two solid objects excluding unique resources. Slime and Algae, so even if you get unlucky you should be getting 80% of your cargo as slime and algae. Its in the 50k range and just using a petroleum rocket, 2 cargo wagons and assuming you boil the petroleum from your oil wells it would work out at roughly 0.25kg of water a second to run a single continuous mission. Yielding  106 kg of slime/algae a cycle. So assuming you stopped the berries and took that 2kg/s of water and diverted it to rocket missions you could run 8 continuous missions yielding roughly 848 kg of slime/algae a cycle. I am including the cost of the water you have to pump into the oil well to get the crude oil. Bonus it would only cost you 1.43 kg/s of oil from one oil well also lots of left over hydrogen for hydrogen rocket missions.

I'm have 6 rockets that auto launch on round trips with no input from me and it only takes 2 AND gates per rocket, you should give mass rockets a try just stockpile about 100 tons of steel first.

[yoakenashi]

2 hours ago, Mariilyn said:

In a seed with very low amounts of water or pw, I would make sure to exploit the oil reservoirs - cook the crude oil to petroleum to generate PW and dirt. I think 3 oil wells are enough to sustain 5 petro gen. And the process is currently water positive.

According to some old calculations I have (which still look good) you can make more pH2O by heating the petrol to sour gas and then condensing to natural gas. While you still lose some mass to sulfur, you should still generate more pH2O by burning the nautrual gas and converting its CO2 than you do for petrol generators (not to mention about 6x the power).

[chemie]

39 minutes ago, JohnFrancis said:

That water you are dumping could be turned into an awful lot of dirt.

The organic mass only has two solid objects excluding unique resources. Slime and Algae, so even if you get unlucky you should be getting 80% of your cargo as slime and algae. Its in the 50k range and just using a petroleum rocket, 2 cargo wagons and assuming you boil the petroleum from your oil wells it would work out at roughly 0.25kg of water a second to run a single continuous mission. Yielding  106 kg of slime/algae a cycle. So assuming you stopped the berries and took that 2kg/s of water and diverted it to rocket missions you could run 8 continuous missions yielding roughly 848 kg of slime/algae a cycle. I am including the cost of the water you have to pump into the oil well to get the crude oil. Bonus it would only cost you 1.43 kg/s of oil from one oil well also lots of left over hydrogen for hydrogen rocket missions.

I'm have 6 rockets that auto launch on round trips with no input from me and it only takes 2 AND gates per rocket, you should give mass rockets a try just stockpile about 100 tons of steel first.

6 is a lot.  I am running 2.  again, it feels off balance to need 6 rockets for 20 wheat

[Mariilyn]

22 minutes ago, yoakenashi said:

According to some old calculations I have (which still look good) you can make more pH2O by heating the petrol to sour gas and then condensing to natural gas. While you still lose some mass to sulfur, you should still generate more pH2O by burning the nautrual gas and converting its CO2 than you do for petrol generators (not to mention about 6x the power).

The net water gain is higher from the conversion to natural gas but using the petroleum generators will result in more pH2O because of the CO2 conversion through the carbon skimmer.

That said, building something that will convert 10kg/s of crude oil to natural gas (if someone wanted to use all 3 oil reservoirs in the oil biome) is very advanced compared to a petroleum cooker with the same capacity. And most people won't know what to do with all that extra power. (I'm also tempted to argue that the practical ratio between the two is really 1 to 4 since 3 oil wells can sustain 5 petroleum generators which can be easily buffed with Engie's Tune-Up...  or ~74 natural gas generators which cannot be easily buffed.)

 

[JohnFrancis]

28 minutes ago, chemie said:

6 is a lot.  I am running 2.  again, it feels off balance to need 6 rockets for 20 wheat

You only need 5kg of dirt per cycle for sleet wheat. If you cook 106 kg of slime/algae you get half back as dirt after mining it so rounding down you get 50kg of dirt per rocket per cycle. Two rockets should support 20 sleet wheat all for the cost of 0.5kg/s of water. I'm not saying this is balanced, BBQ is so much easier I'm swimming in meat and have to compost the excess regularly. Why not go with BBQ? Takes less water, less effort and the only down side is the -2 athletics.

[ChickenMadness]

I think it's balanced.

There are so many sources of food in the game and you're trying to feed your entire colony with only sleet wheat. Sleet wheat is for making the god tier food (pepper bread). You don't need to feed your entire colony with it.

It shouldn't be easy to feed your entire colony with god tier food. It would render every other food source in the game obsolete.


I've managed to feed colonies of up to 28 dupes sustainably without running out of dirt but pepperbread is reserved for the aristocracy.

[Gurgel]

Nobody says that you must be able to feed 22 dupes with pepper bread on every map. 

[avc15]

what are the prospects for doing space missions to bring dirt back to your base?

I don't know if it's worth it, never tried, that's why I ask. Because like you say, manufacturing dirt is a pretty inefficient task.

[biopon]

One continuously running sieve produces 200g/sec dirt through the compost, or 120 kg/cycle, enough for 24 wheat plants.

You need 5 carbon skimmers, or 1500g/sec CO2, to pollute enough water for one sieve.

This can be produced by is 66.66 natgas gens running continuously. These also output 4500g/sec pwater as a bonus, which you can sieve to feed another 22 plants.

I know it sounds kind of crazy (you need almost 3 wells worth of sour gas to do all this), but:

a) What else is there to do late game?

b) Farming wheat - I think - is a rightfully difficult thing to do in a sustainable way. 

If you just want plentiful late game food, ranch voles instead. If my math is not off, 6 groomed voles can feed about as many dupes as 40 wheat plants can.

[avc15]

I don't understand, you're condensing sour gas to make NG, so you can produce enough CO2? (I won't rehash the rest of the chain, it's pretty torturous :p)

One other alternative is you could just bake petroleum from your oil wells and use petroleum generators as your mainstay. Petroleum generators produce a lot more waste per joule than NG generator, and a larger portion of it is directly Pwater.