Dirt production

[Leonard_]

Hello everyone, first post here.

I bought this game back in october of 2018 and stopped playing around the first quality of life update.

You will see how this is relevant as my post goes on.

 

As a player, my goal was always to reach full sustainability of my colony while having my duplicants' standard of living be as high as possible. I really couldn't see any other point in playing honestly. And by full sustainability, I of course mean that I can just hit play and my colony would survive forever/as long as I desire without intervention. That way, I could essentially just do whatever I please and perhaps even terraform the entire asteroid. I've seen some screenshots of people doing just that with the entire asteroid being dug out.

Anyways, my specific goals meant that I would have to sustainably produce a high quality food (to increase morale) forever. At the time the highest were BBQ and pepper bread. I decided to go for pepper bread as I really wanted to avoid having to come up with a satisfying way to produce meat. Farming sleet wheat meant that I required water (not a problem given water geysers) and dirt.

And here the problems start.

I started looking at the options to sustainably produce dirt.

On 7/19/2019 at 7:43 AM, Nebbie said:

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

Those were the only options at the time.

Boiling polluted water indeed seemed very inefficient to me. I also would have needed to find/set up a sustainable source of a lot of polluted water.

I hated compost. Specifically because it required dupe time. When and how much specifically dupe time was required was also unclear to me. Once a day per compost? And to top it off, 1 compost was enough for 3 sleet wheats which was enough for.. a bit more than 1 dupe. Would I need to make 1 compost for each dupes? Where do I even get a sustainable and big enough source of material to compost for that?

Hence composting didn't feel like a satisfying/fun solution to me, so I turned to cooking slime.

I chose slime over fertilizer because of the half mass yield from digging tiles which was unavoidable with the way changing solid states seems to work.

The only way to produce slime seemed to use pufts with polluted oxygen, and as such I needed a renewable and big enough source of polluted oxygen.

Morbs. The only way to get morbs was to go back to outhouses and come up with some hacky cycle of door openings and what not to build up a certain amount. This is when I started to feel burned out. At that point it kind of felt like working against the mechanics of the game to succeed in producing slime.

Then came the problem of cooking the slime itself. I had come up with a design for a dirt cooker and was sort of proud of it because I came up with a way to use rail systems despite how difficult it seemed to be to work with them.

https://imgur.com/a/nQj5PN2

IIRC, there are 3 stages to this thing. First, the disabled sweeper delivers slime to the system (it is disabled for the purpose of stopping the loop). Then (2nd stage) the slime is cooked into dirt. I had to come up with a way to stop the dirt in the metal tile until it was succesfully cooked. Solving this problem further contributed to the feeling of being burned out and working against the game. There are valves/shutoffs for every piping system except for the rail system. To top it off, the cycle/rail loop below was a huge hassle to get working. Its purpose is to simply block slime and then clear the used metal tile spots of empty item containers. It just kept glitching and exhibiting erratic behavior until I came up with the current iteration (2 sweepers with an intermediate container). The sweepers did not want to deliver directly from receptacle to loader (despite much messing around with priorities) and even after fixing this would sometimes just randomly stop working for no apparent reason, breaking the automation loop.

After the dirt is succesfully cooked, I had to find a proper way to trigger the third and final stage which was to simply get the dirt back (eventually  cooling it back down) and loop the rail system below to clear the metal tiles and get the whole thing ready for another use again and begin the first stage. However the dirt would randomly duplicate when being formed which complicated this problem. This meant that the amount of yield was completely random and that I had no control over it. As such, I couldn't simply check for a

[mathmanican]

5 hours ago, Leonard_ said:

However the dirt would randomly duplicate when being formed which complicated this problem.

Another instance where matter duplication destroys a build.  This bug shows up all the time, mostly when players want to get fancy (sour gas boiling, dirt cookers, anything involving state changes).  Then it ruins the experience and makes planning frustrating.

Please devs, look into this someday. 

FYI, if you want help avoiding the bug, feel free to message me your design, or put it here, and I'll try to highlight spots where the bug occurs, so you can avoid it. 

[Leonard_]

I apologize, I accidentally hit space with no selection which immediately posted everything and apparently I'm under moderation so I couldn't and still can't even edit my post, let alone begin another until approbation.

Regardless. As I was saying I couldn't check for a set amount of dirt in a smart storage bin so I had to settle with weight plates everywhere (I can't just begin the rail loop cycle immediately as I could potentially leave some slime uncooked).

In hindsight, I started this whole build because I noticed dirt tiles would pile upwards infinitely and would even skip anything in their paths. But perhaps a fully vertical dirt cooker is possible despite this?

Regardless, this whole area of the game simply seemed way too buggy for me, and I set it down at this point.

I still very much love this game but I just decided to wait out until Klei would decide to release, simply hoping that they would eventually iron out all these problems from the game until then.

 

 

I have been looking forward to play again ever since the release was announced, trying out the new content and starting a new colony sounds very exciting to me.

I was very happy to see that my wish was granted regarding dirt production, the new forest biome introduces pips and lumber, a completely new source of dirt.

Until it was nerfed to require dirt as fertilization.

On 7/19/2019 at 7:43 AM, Nebbie said:

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.

From what I can tell, the highest tier food was changed to be burger, which still require sleet wheat. So I will still need dirt.

Perhaps I could simply rely on pips' ability to plant wild seeds? But even that is not clear as it has been changed/nerfed a couple times by now.

I thought I might even try out ranching after all, it seems a lot of stuff I would need now could be done with ranching. Specifically food and dirt production. Producing phosphorite (to fertilize the lumber before the nerf) with dreckos didn't seem hard and seemed like a clear first step to take in ranching.

I guess all I'm really trying to say is, I really just hope that Klei looks into and solves these parts of the game.

I don't mind if producing is hard, I just don't want it to be unnecessarily tedious and hacky. To me, purposefully filling outhouses to obtain morbs to be able to produce dirt very much feels exploity. It's fine if we only get a renewable source of slime and are still left with the fun challenge to cook it into dirt ourselves, just as long as cooking any elements is fixed altogether.

• The rail system felt very hard to work with as well as the sweepers, perhaps that area could take a second look? Or have they been fixed a bunch while I was gone?
• I have seen some people on this forum say that they wish puft were buffed and/or worked better, perhaps a better way to produce polluted oxygen, dirt or slime needs to be added? Hopefully, a renewable one.
• I have also seen a bunch of people say that they wish the duplication bug would be fixed, I think it's commonly referred to as the liquid duplication bug here?
• Solid to solid conversions are also very hard to work with. It always converts into a tile (or two) even if within a rail and even leaves an empty container. And to top it off, the tiles seem to pile up infinitely. Maybe that part of the game needs a second look as well?

That's all I had to say. I'm sorry if my posts seemed huge, I simply wanted to say my 2 cents about the game before it goes to release. It's an excellent game but there's still some issues left to fix as I described, and dirt was kind of a big issue to me in the sense that it left me burned out of the game before.

[Lurve]

If long-term sustainability is your goal, the current setup of wild-planting via pips should make you quite happy.  They can plant trees as densely as they'll grow, and plant anything else with about 40% tile usage.  You don't get the throughput that domestication would bring you, but the plants are exempt from fertilization so it's free food.  The down side is needing to garden; schlepping pips around like pollinators and properly structuring the plant placement.

[goatt]

Lily Flowers are compostable now from today's update notes. So that'll be one easy way.

[Giltirn]

6 minutes ago, goatt said:

Lily Flowers are compostable now from today's update notes. So that'll be one easy way.

Important question is how much dirt is produced per lily? As lilies are free I would enjoy making a nice big lily farm for dirt production provided the amount of dirt is worthwhile.

[Technoincubus]

I don't think that composting a lylly will earn you much, And building huge installation just for that...may be not worth it

[DemainaNyx]

On 7/19/2019 at 11:21 AM, Nickerooni said:

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.

You can also add in stuff like harvesting CO2 off meteor and recollecting the emission from a petrol rocket.  Might be a PITA but, hey, free dirt.

[Radam]

Pips have been updated, they now drop 20kg of dirt per cycle...

 

 

[Christophlette]

1 hour ago, Radam said:

Pips have been updated, they now drop 20kg of dirt per cycle...

In my opinion, it's like... 2 times too much per pip.