Overrun with clay

[minespatch]

So I've been putting a whole bunch of deodorizers but get a whole bunch of clay in return. Is there a way I can get my sand back or do I have to use something to get rid of the clay?

[gbudiman]

Burn your clay into ceramics using Kiln. Ceramic is a great early-to-mid game insulating materials.

[minespatch]

I would really prefer getting my sand back, but I suppose I should do that.

[tzionut]

you can grind ceramic back into sand. you loose only 25 coal. 

[Gus Smedstad]

Clay is valuable as ceramic. Sand it is effectively infinite. You can convert any kind of stone to sand with a rock granulator.

Sand has only two uses - as a filtration medium in deodorizers and sieves, and converted to glass. Once you get to the surface, you can use regolith as a filtration medium, and that is definitely infinite since it’s produced by comets.

Glass is only marginally useful. Here and there windows can help with decor. It’s also required for solar panels, which are cheap to make and provide free energy, but you don’t need much of it for those, and energy’s generally not short by the time solar panels are an option. By the end game I was burning petroleum and throwing away extra energy because I wanted the polluted water and carbon dioxide.

[beowulf2010]

Gus is right. There's not much point to converting clay back to sand, especially with as many ways as there is to get sand. 

If you've crushed all the sandstone, sedimentary rock, fossils and all but a couple storage bins of obsidian (useful to ladders near magma) on your map, maybe you could justify crushing ceramic back to sand. And even then, you probably will still have tons of igneous rock (effectively infinite from volcanoes) and granite that you could crush before ceramic. 

Heck, I'd probably feed the clay directly to hatches before grinding ceramic to sand. 

[SharraShimada]

For what in the world do you need so much sand?

Deodorizers and Sieves do work with regolith, and that is falling from the sky...

The only machine that really needs sand, sand, and nothing but sand, is the glass forge. Und for what? For glass, which you can get tons over tons from other planets.

There is no need for huge amounts of sand.

[SakuraKoi]

If you don't have sand, just use diamonds instead~

[Cookiematico]

sand can also be obtained by the rock granulator, just crush the useless raw minerals into sand.

 

{shows in QIII,so if not on QII then it will be very soon}

[Lilalaunekuh]

8 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

If you've crushed all ... obsidian

That makes me so sad, I am always short on obsidian^^

(High temperature drywalls and ladders^^)

 

8 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

Heck, I'd probably feed the clay directly to hatches before grinding ceramic to sand. 

My last base was breathing a lot of deodorizers cleaned O2, so clay seemed abundant early.

=> I only fed my hatches clay with a lower priority than my killn.

 

 

PS: For me the only use (besides the solar panel^^) for sand was/is the apothecary.

(My current base has no glass window tiles, since diamond isn´t finite and the use for glass tiles is very limited.)

 

[Stoned]

@Lilalaunekuh the gravitas monument backwall used to be obsidian. Did you strip that already? Not sure if this is still true in the latest update though.

[beowulf2010]

2 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

That makes me so sad, I am always short on obsidian^^

(High temperature drywalls and ladders^^)

I didn't mean to make you sad.  In my defense, I did say to keep a couple storage bins of obsidian. Though I did forget about the need for high temp drywall. Good point. Scratch obsidian off the rock crusher list. 

[minespatch]

3 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

Though I did forget about the need for high temp drywall.

Is obsidian good for space level drywalls?

[Gus Smedstad]

You only really need obsidian if the temperature’s getting really high. 2000 C or more. For any space application except capturing rocket exhaust, you’re fine with other materials.

Even then it’s not that important. Igneous or granite is often good enough, because the exhaust CO2 or steam generally doesn’t get above 2000 C. I expect it might if you’ve lined an entire silo with drywall to maximize how much gas you capture, but I’ve never tried that so I don’t have first hand experience.

[Lilalaunekuh]

1 hour ago, minespatch said:

5 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

Though I did forget about the need for high temp drywall.

Is obsidian good for space level drywalls?

Not 100% failsafe, but as close as you can get when it comes to drywalls.

Spoiler

Right now I´m not sure if we can build drywalls out of insulation, but if that´s viable would be an other question.^^

(But just one rocket silo for a 10+ module rocket will need so much of the good stuff ^^)

 

 

PS: Here is my "little" rocket silo and the reason I am short of obsidian^^

Spoiler

[Gurgel]

I generally just feed the clay to hatches. 

[Gus Smedstad]

I’m not really seeing how you move the gas from the silos to wherever you’re using it in that screenshot. I’ve toyed with the idea of capturing CO2 exhaust before since it’s valuable for making polluted water, but dealing with the heat scared me off.

Also, why so many gantries? Sure, it looks good, but you generally only need them for the command capsule and solid oxidizer modules. They’re so darned power hungry at 1200 watts each I’d never splurge on that many.

[minespatch]

3 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I generally just feed the clay to hatches. 

That's a good idea, thanks man.

[Gus Smedstad]

Don’t feed clay to hatches. You’ll regret it later. Hatches will eat anything, and you’ve got lots and lots and lots of junk stone. Igneous more than anything else in the late game.

The thing is that ceramic is your #2 insulation material. It’s something like 3x better than igneous rock, which is your #3 insulator. #1 of course is the space material “insulation” (man I wish it had a better name), which is a perfect insulator. In practice, though, you’ll make almost anything where you really care about insulation out of ceramic, because you’ll never have enough of the space insulation.

It matters for things like pipes carrying anything really hot or really cold, like liquid oxygen, steam, hot oil in a petroleum boiler, etc. And because you’ll always be making insulated tiles or insulated pipes with it, it’s 400kg a segment. It runs out fast.

[Lilalaunekuh]

43 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I’m not really seeing how you move the gas from the silos to wherever you’re using it in that screenshot. I’ve toyed with the idea of capturing CO2 exhaust before since it’s valuable for making polluted water, but dealing with the heat scared me off.

Also, why so many gantries?

Right now: Just let the CO2 flood the whole "open" space.

Spoiler

There is not huge gas leak into outer space, just my 2 simple mechanized airlocks for duplicant travel.

I have a  carbon skimmer at the bottom of my map and a couple pitcher pumps where most of the water is settling.

That just works since my duplicant wear suits all the time and I don´t need a breathable and tempered atmosphere outside of my living area.

 

I use the whole map as heat sink to condense my water and duplicant work to bring it to a central pump(ingstation).

=> Does it´s job in supplementing my water/dirt supply

The gantries are just for convenience, since I change my rockets to often I prefer the additional power cost over changing the gantries aswell.

(I have surplus power anyways, so why not. If my memory serves me right a gantry just uses <4kj to change state.)

 

 

Back to your topic:

I like to build closed modules (ab)using wild hatches (they need no constant food supply and no duplicant interaction) which convert clay to ceramic.

150kg clay in -> 100kg ceramic out

(It´s simple, it works without duplicants and the killn can be run in a selfcooling manner using the input coal(hatch produced).)

 

[Gus Smedstad]

Honestly, it’s the wiring for gantries that bugs me more than the power use. Since they don’t extend / retract that often, the total energy they use is always going to be small. No, it’s that each one requires its own 2kw line. Or, at least, that’s what I thought you pretty much had to do - obviously you’re not, since that would create a lot more wiring than I’m seeing.

You’re doing, what, running them all on the same line, and relying on a transformer to prevent any wire overload damage? Does that work? Are the gantries really slow to retract if you’re doing that, presumably only one operating at a time?

[Lilalaunekuh]

4 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

You’re doing, what, running them all on the same line, and relying on a transformer to prevent any wire overload damage? Does that work? Are the gantries really slow to retract if you’re doing that, presumably only one operating at a time?

Each rocket has it´s own row of gantries with a 2kw conductive wire attached.

Since a gantry needs just 3s to change state, all 13 gantries could change state in <40s.

But I use 5 s delay since I like how the animation plays and it results in a total delay of 60s (turning the switch till the last gantry starts to move).

 

But I always gone for gantries everywhere, if you can spare the steel it´s faster to change/rebuild the automation wires to just operate the gantries you need instead of rebuilding the gantry and/or power wire. (Lower mass to supply and faster build times^^)

[Gurgel]

3 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Don’t feed clay to hatches. You’ll regret it later.

Last game I had about 200t of clay. No shortage and no problems producing more.

[Neotuck]

5 hours ago, Gus Smedstad said:

Don’t feed clay to hatches. You’ll regret it later.

You say that as if clay was limited ...

[Gus Smedstad]

I’m just talking from my personal experience. I ran out of clay, and I didn’t have a clay factory. I gather some people make oxygen via Polluted Water -> Polluted Oxygen -> Oxygen.+ Clay. I never did that because, among other things, my sources of polluted water were limited to generators and carbon dioxide, and I was using all of it to make dirt. I didn’t have any to spare for clay.

I guess the balance changers if you have a polluted water geyser or polluted slush geyser, but I didn’t have those.

So, yes, for me, clay was finite.