Cooking dirt without digging

[M.C.]

Is there a way to cook organic stuff into dirt without allowing it to form a tile that I have to dig up later? The reason I am asking is, of course, the 50% mass loss you get when you dig up a tile. I need dirt for my sleet wheat farm and I simply cannot afford losing 50% of it every time it's cooked.

(NB: yes, I am aware there's a glitch that doubles the amount of mass produced while digging up a tile. It seems to be working for larger amounts only. My cooker has just made 53 kg of dirt from a 116 kg chunk of slime. I'd rather not build my designs around something so inconsistent.)

 

[Oozinator]

heat slime >125°C where ever it is..
I never use sleet wheat farm in pots, i always catch what they drop when harvest ready, not even harvesting..
Cold biomes are nice to keep for sw..

[Neotuck]

2 hours ago, M.C. said:

Is there a way to cook organic stuff into dirt without allowing it to form a tile that I have to dig up later? 

[lee1026]

For infinite (not actually infinite, but pretty close) amount of dirt, launch petroleum rockets and capture the exhaust. Scrub it for about 300 kilos of dirt per launch. 

 

Each petrol rocket farming the first planets will generate about 100 kilos per cycle. 

[mathmanican]

27 minutes ago, lee1026 said:

For infinite

Matter convert whatever gas you have an excess of into CO2. Then setup sieve/skimmer loops to process the CO2 as fast as you want. The only  slow down will be the compost piles.

30 minutes ago, lee1026 said:

launch petroleum rockets and capture the exhaust

Much better plan, if you want to avoid unintended exploits.  

[M.C.]

1 hour ago, lee1026 said:

For infinite (not actually infinite, but pretty close) amount of dirt, launch petroleum rockets and capture the exhaust. Scrub it for about 300 kilos of dirt per launch. 

 

Each petrol rocket farming the first planets will generate about 100 kilos per cycle. 

That implies about 2250 kgs CO2 per launch. Do petroleum rockets really generate that much CO2? That's far more than the mass of fuel they use.

[lee1026]

You can just scrub the Co2 in the silo itself by putting the co2 scrubber in the silo itself. There is so much pwater->water circulating that it offers decent cooling on its own.

 

And of course, the heat gets deleted right with the co2. 

[M.C.]

1 hour ago, nakomaru said:

Of course, you should do with the heat and resources as you like.

I highly recommend making a fertilizer loop though. You can make hundreds of tons of dirt easily. I've never seen it generate half of the actual mass. The tiles it produces are doubled, and halved when dug, leading to no change. Same with coal to refined carbon.

The doubling of tiles is the exact bug I was talking about in the original post, and I don't feel very good about using it because it's a bug and it's unreliable. I've made a cooker for dirt and algae, and its output varies quite a bit. Sometimes the tiles it makes are doubled, sometimes they aren't and I lose half the output. I wish they'd fix that... or at least made it so that tiles don't form in the first place.

As far as a fertilizer loop goes, it's not sustainable because phosphorite isn't. Sure, it will probably last for some time, but I want a fully sustainable design that I can build once and forget it exists.

[M.C.]

3 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Made hundreds of tons of both refined carbon and dirt, never seen it not conserve mass. I believe it's an intentional mechanic to avoid violation of conservation of mass with digging.

Phosporite requires zero input resources with balm lilies to generate infinite phosporite. The only real consumption is pwater.

I have my setup running in the background, right now, behaving unpredictably. Just because you haven't seen it yourself doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

As far as phosphorite goes... try and calculate the number of dreckos it takes to feed, say, 8 dupes with sleet grain. You'll see what I mean.

[Neotuck]

20 minutes ago, M.C. said:

As far as phosphorite goes... try and calculate the number of dreckos it takes to feed, say, 8 dupes with sleet grain. You'll see what I mean.

I'm a little confused by your statement, can you please elaborate? 

[M.C.]

1 hour ago, nakomaru said:

Apparently they produce 5kg of the stuff a day, and you need 100kg of dirt for 8 dupes of wheet.

Rough calculations, every time you double your dirt, you need less than half of that dirt in phosporite. Double about 100kg of dirt every day with about 45kg of phosporite and consume 100kg for wheet.

So about 45 wild dreckos which are self sustaining, or a ranch of about 9 tended dreckos.

Huh. So what you are saying is... the numbers from ONI Biology are off by an order of magnitude, possibly more. The food consumption table gives much lower numbers for dreckos.

[Neotuck]

4 minutes ago, M.C. said:

Huh. So what you are saying is... the numbers from ONI Biology are off by an order of magnitude, possibly more.

that's an outdated thread

[M.C.]

2 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

that's an outdated thread

Good to know. Where can I find the most up-to-date numbers for critters?

[M.C.]

I followed one of my glossies for an entire cycle. It ate twice, 1000 kcal per meal, excreting about 4500 g each time. That's 9 kg per cycle, which means I only need 8 glossies and 3 fertilizer synths to produce enough dirt for 8 dupes. Way, way lower than my original calculations. There will be a bit of phosphorite left over to grow some peppers, too.

Welp. TIL.

BRB, making a fertilizer setup.

[Neotuck]

Feeding mealwood to dreckos to produce phosphorite seems inefficient 

you are using dirt to make dirt

why not use balm lillies?

[M.C.]

3 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

I assume it was mealwood, right?

Meal lice has very low caloric density at 0.6 kcalories per gram. Dreckos need 3.3 kg of it per day. Glossy dreckos actually have a lower conversion rate - 300%. If you feed ordinary dreckos mealwood, they should produce 16.5kg per day.

Nope, bristle berries.

It's true that glossies have a lower conversion rate, but they also consume 50% more food, so they only make 10% less phosphorite compared to regular dreckos.

[M.C.]

20 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Made hundreds of tons of both refined carbon and dirt, never seen it not conserve mass. I believe it's an intentional mechanic to avoid violation of conservation of mass with digging.

Here's a quick build that demonstrates the issue for you @nakomaru:

Fertilizer is shipped to the heating chamber (200C+ petroleum), where it becomes dirt and is shipped right back.

In this setup converts 10kg packets of fertilizer into 20kg tiles of dirt, which are then excavated to produce 10kg of dirt.

If you delete the insulation tile under the receptacle in the petroleum chamber, 10kg packets of fertilizer will become 10kg tiles of dirt instead, so you lose 50% mass.

That's not the end of it, unfortunately. Depending on the timing of inbound fertilizer packets, some of the packets randomly become 10kg tiles of dirt. It doesn't happen if you construct all three fertilizer synths at the exact same time in debug mode, but if they are constructed (or at least start working) at different times, you'll see 5kg dirt shipped back eventually.

The bottom line is, something is definitely fishy with cooking materials into tiles, which really sucks.

[M.C.]

3 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

That seems like a bug indeed with tile generation.

My solution isn't as elegant, but I just drop 60 tons of fert at a time in hot oil and come back in.. maybe 50 cycles for the rewards. So it has lots of room to generate tiles and isn't inside of any walls.

When the mass doubles, it also sucks a huge amount of heat out of the pit which may be another bug or just unidirectional conservation of energy.

Hmmm. I suppose I could make a dropper in a room above the cooker and then open a door once every N cycles to drop it all at once. Hopefully it will work better than my first survival-build slime cooker: a simple storage bin, manually delivered, inside a volcano-heated steam room that still managed to produce 20t tiles of dirt from 20t of slime.

I hate bugs.

[goatt]

18 hours ago, Neotuck said:

why not use balm lillies?

How to use balm lilies?

[Neotuck]

1 minute ago, goatt said:

How to use balm lilies?

feed them to dreckos

free infinite phosporite supply

[goatt]

1 hour ago, Neotuck said:

feed them to dreckos

free infinite phosporite supply

oh of course..

[Gus Smedstad]

I'm suffering from another dirt crisis, so I'm reading this thread, wondering how it actually works. 10kg of fertilizer requires 5.4kg of dirt and 3.2 kg of polluted water. If you mine it with a robo miner, can you reliably expect 10kg of dirt back or not?

[M.C.]

16 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I'm suffering from another dirt crisis, so I'm reading this thread, wondering how it actually works. 10kg of fertilizer requires 5.4kg of dirt and 3.2 kg of polluted water. If you mine it with a robo miner, can you reliably expect 10kg of dirt back or not?

I'm trying to do just that. I'll post in this thread once I am successful (or not).

[Neotuck]

8 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I'm suffering from another dirt crisis, so I'm reading this thread, wondering how it actually works. 10kg of fertilizer requires 5.4kg of dirt and 3.2 kg of polluted water. If you mine it with a robo miner, can you reliably expect 10kg of dirt back or not?

Robo-miners delete half mass, same as normal mining 

[biopon]

12 hours ago, M.C. said:

Depending on the timing of inbound fertilizer packets, some of the packets randomly become 10kg tiles of dirt.

I don't think this has a lot to do with timing. I played around with it a lot, temperature matters more than anything else to make mass doubling consistent. I have a bug report and an artificial test save here: