Dirt production

[Technoincubus]

What is the most effective way to produce dirt? 

Latest patches made it clear that dirt will be one of the most valuable resources and due to so many things requiring it there's a danger to deplete it fast.

Aside from "dig more dirt", what are the ways to get a stable sustainable flow of dirt now? 

[Nebbie]

Dirt can be made the following ways:

1. Boil polluted water (crazy inefficient)
2. Cook slime/algae/fertilizer (doable but only slime is really in any great quantity)
3. Compost
4. Pip poop

We can write off boiling immediately since composting polluted dirt from the water sieve is way, way better. Similarly, cooking algae makes no sense as slime->algae is pretty reductionary.

This leaves us with composting, cooking slime, and cooking fertilizer. Cooking slime sounds appealing at first, but ultimately puft output is atrocious and you'd need polluted oxygen for them from somewhere, so it's probably not a very sustainable option. Composting could definitely work with the polluted dirt from ethanol distilleries, although a lot of your dirt goes to growing more trees, so it might not scale well.

Pips convert lumber into dirt at 75% conversion, which considering that domestic arbor trees require 10kg of dirt and 70kg polluted water (2.8kg of dirt produced by sieving and composting) a cycle, means they need to yield at least a bit over 16kg of lumber a cycle just to be overall dirt-neutral. I'm pretty sure they are, but it's likely a scalability nightmare.

Cooking fertilizer is a very interesting idea...it's a 100% conversion as far as I know, but only a little half of the fertilizer's input is dirt, so you're effectively converting phosphorite and polluted water into dirt and natural gas. Since phosphorite comes from dreckos that can eat balm lily, that part is basically free, which means you're basically turning polluted water into dirt at a fairly good rate. It might be very difficult to scale, and more importantly, to automate, but in theory it should work, and a cool slush geyser would thus yield dirt for days.

Ultimately, considering the puft->slime->dirt option itself relies on polluted oxygen, that either comes from polluted dirt (bad idea, can be directly turned into dirt) or polluted water, everything here is just some form of "turn polluted water into dirt" aside of a trickle of non-polluted dirt compostables. Some crazy fertilizer cooking cycle is probably by far the most efficient way to do so, and Pip ranching with tree farming should be relatively easy for early stuff.

[Coolthulhu]

3 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

Cooking fertilizer is a very interesting idea...it's a 100% conversion as far as I know, but only a little half of the fertilizer's input is dirt

Keep in mind that solid->solid conversion usually (always?) results in a tile and not an item and digging a tile halves its mass.

If you're willing to do a really tedious setup, wildfarmed lettuce can produce truly free (once set up) polluted dirt at about 0.25kg/cycle, per plant. Not the most impressive value, but I'd try that before bothering with pufts.

[Technoincubus]

Fertilizer Synth. requires dirts to produce fertilizer, so you basically. 65 dirt to produce 120 fert. Which means that after cooking it will be 60g of dirt. You are actually wasting dirt here

[mathmanican]

Through carefully planning you can get your dirt to double before digging....

This is precisely what led to liquid duplication. 

I'll step out now as I'm guessing you don't want this option.

[Nebbie]

31 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Keep in mind that solid->solid conversion usually (always?) results in a tile and not an item and digging a tile halves its mass.

If you're willing to do a really tedious setup, wildfarmed lettuce can produce truly free (once set up) polluted dirt at about 0.25kg/cycle, per plant. Not the most impressive value, but I'd try that before bothering with pufts.

The illogicality of mass-halving on digging strikes again, unless there's some insane (and easily-scaled) way to prevent tile formation (almost certainly, knowing this game's crazy physics). I suspect ethanol distillery setups win out over pip farming at scale, but it's probably close.

[mathmanican]

8 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

unless there's some insane (and easily-scaled) way to prevent tile formation (almost certainly, knowing this game's crazy physics).

I know of none. Would be happy to learn more. Hence I see doubling before digging as completely fair.

[Technoincubus]

1 hour ago, Nebbie said:

Pip poop

they ar ebroken now it seems and do not excrete anything

[abud]

1 hour ago, Nebbie said:

We can write off boiling immediately since composting polluted dirt from the water sieve is way, way better.

I didn't remember conversion ratio about this, and cannot open my game right now. Can someone remind me why using sieve is way better?

[Grimgaw]

27 minutes ago, abud said:

Can someone remind me why using sieve is way better?

4% vs 1%

[Radam]

29 minutes ago, abud said:

I didn't remember conversion ratio about this, and cannot open my game right now. Can someone remind me why using sieve is way better?

No filtraton medium used.

[lunazone]

The Ethanol Refinery produces heaps upon heaps of Polluted Dirt, which can be converted into Normal Dirt

[Lurve]

Dirt has long been one of the most valuable commodities.  Most everything else you can get by with a few tons here or there, but dirt is a one-way trip right into dupe mouths.  I'd been hoping the forest biome was going to add a dirt-heavy strategy that's short on something else, since you start with so little water.

I am exceptionally lazy, and pre-LU the only dirt production scheme I'd bother with was making and filtering lots of CO2.  One sieve working full time makes enough polluted dirt for two compost heaps.  A little supplemental coal generation can keep that smog level up even when you've switch to better power methods.

In the new update, like Squeegee says, ethanol distillation makes tons of dirt, and you can burn the ethanol for CO2 to filter and PW to sieve for a bit more.

[Nickerooni]

I hadn’t ever run the numbers before. I had no idea that CO2 converted to dirt via sieve and skimmer is 10:15:3 - CO2:sand/regolith:dirt. No wonder many people used this as their main dirt source! That’s 13% dirt from CO2.

Puts all the many CO2 producers in a new light for me! Even silly ones like igneous rock (hatch) -> coal -> CO2 means that you can convert regolith and volcano matter into 0.13% dirt.

[Nebbie]

11 hours ago, Technoincubus said:

they ar ebroken now it seems and do not excrete anything

Well that's pretty crappy.

[jmf35]

Is there anything that requires fertilizer now?

[natanstarke]

2 hours ago, jmf35 said:

Is there anything that requires fertilizer now?

Every plant can be buffed by it peppers and and trees endup using less water if you give fertilizer to them im more sure about pinchas than the trees " i saw it via food calculator".

[Lilalaunekuh]

We can think of 5kg fertilizer like 1 additional cycle of growth time:

 

5kg fertilizer (~1,6kg polluted water; 2,7kg dirt and 1,1kg phosphorite) replace the daily consumption of a plant.

 

=> For an arbor tree that mean trading 5k fertilizer against 70kg polluted water and 10kg dirt.

[JohnFrancis]

Once you hit space you can build a liquid carbon sink and harvest CO2 from meteors. The below design produces produces 2.1 kg/s of CO2 enough to run about 20 dupes on sleet wheat. Down sides are it's power expensive and eats a huge chunk of sky. The carbon capture was a side effect to the primary purpose so it could be made a lot more efficient/cheaper with modifications targets towards carbon capture. The new ethanol loop may still be a better option, will have to see where they finally end up with the numbers.

Youtube is not time stamping for me at the moment so just skip to 32:20

Spoiler

 

 

[bobucles]

16 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Keep in mind that solid->solid conversion usually (always?) results in a tile and not an item and digging a tile halves its mass.

What about cooking fertilizer through the conveyor system?

[Sigma Cypher]

It's kind of disgusting but any rot pile can be composted, which includes spoiled food of any kind and dead pets, I mean critters.  

[Junksteel]

Ethanol Distillers - with 4 of them you'll run ~14 composters (plenty of dirt!!!) plus a generator full time.

I actually have no idea what to do with almost 900 t of dirt I pilled.

[Nickerooni]

45 minutes ago, Junksteel said:

Ethanol Distillers - with 4 of them you'll run ~14 composters (plenty of dirt!!!) plus a generator full time.

I actually have no idea what to do with almost 900 t of dirt I pilled.

Feed to hatches? Don’t sage hatches turn it into coal at a 1:1?

[Radam]

5 hours ago, Nickerooni said:

Feed to hatches? Don’t sage hatches turn it into coal at a 1:1?

Wait can sage hatches eat polluted dirt? Oh yeas they can. 

A running distillery(240w) thus makes 200w worth of coal. 

[Neotuck]

23 hours ago, abud said:

I didn't remember conversion ratio about this, and cannot open my game right now. Can someone remind me why using sieve is way better?

sieve gives about 40g per 1kg water sieved, and compost turns it into dirt at 1:1 ratio 

boiling gives about 1g per 1kg

so it's about 40 times better

 

22 hours ago, Grimgaw said:

4% vs 1%

Isn't it 0.1% ? 

Unless the game changed last I checked