"The Dirty Secret": How to generate a ton of dirt per cycle

[Vampenguin]

Ok, so not a literal ton, but this build can generate almost 0.72 tons of dirt per cycle, or polluted dirt if you take out the compost heaps.

This appears to be the thing people are talking about this weekend, and I was inspired by M.C.'s post on the subject.

The challenges to this monstrosity were heat and CO2. I had to bolt on the steam engine / aquatuner to keep things from overheating and breaking. Also, the CO2 is just venting to space, but you could use it to feed a little over 4 full size slickster farms (33 slicksters if my calculations are correct).

Here is the build - with most of the overlays. There's really not much automation except in the cooling loop anyway.

This keeps one dupe busy most of the time. I've stress tested it over 20-30 cycles, and no issues so far. It is very slightly power positive, but that wasn't really my goal. I just wanted to prove that you could give this thing 184g/s of water and get all the dirt, pdirt or CO2 you'd ever want.

 

[Radam]

Also, Pips now drop 20kg of dirt per cycle...

[Ecu]

If you utilize pokeshell instead of the composters, you could generate sand with this setup.  With that, I believe the setup could be completely automated.  This would make the system generate pokeshell molt as well, which would be great for making steel.

[Vampenguin]

7 hours ago, Radam said:

Also, Pips now drop 20kg of dirt per cycle...

Honestly, if you want dirt, that's probably the more reasonable way to go. But where's the fun in being reasonable? 

[Segato]

@Vampenguin Or just drop Fertilizer on a mountain of Regolith, 1 ton of Fertilizer = 2 tons of Dirt.

 

Regolith from meteors have a temperature around 250, more than enought to not over cook.

[Vampenguin]

@Segato Does that still work? I can't check until later tonight, but I thought the state-change doubling bugs had been fixed. Or is the 1:2 ratio something that is intended.

[Siromatik]

31 minutes ago, Segato said:

1 ton of Fertilizer = 2 tons of Dirt.

 

5 minutes ago, Vampenguin said:

Does that still work?

Nope. 1 Ton will turn into a 1 Ton tile. Plus the fact that diggin' it you loose half mass.

[Nebbie]

10 hours ago, Ecu said:

If you utilize pokeshell instead of the composters, you could generate sand with this setup.  With that, I believe the setup could be completely automated.  This would make the system generate pokeshell molt as well, which would be great for making steel.

You get 350kg of sand and 100kg of leftover [polluted] dirt per cycle out of it that way. You get a bit more lime production if you convert that sand back into polluted dirt with a sieve running most of the time (pushes the extra polluted dirt to where it feeds a 6th pokeshell), as well. Make sure to butcher extra pokeshells as soon as they reach adulthood (you only get two molts, a small one when they grow up and a big one when they die as an adult).

[gaucho_tche]

Is this still working? Is it the better way to produce dirt? What's up with poketshells?

[Vampenguin]

On 10/25/2019 at 10:45 AM, gaucho_tche said:

Is this still working? Is it the better way to produce dirt? What's up with poketshells?

I loaded it up and ran it again this weekend for a bit. It still works. It's overly complicated, but it will net you over 700kg of dirt per cycle. You could also ranch Pips, which is probably more reasonable. This build is equivalent to the output of about 35 tame Pips. (20kg per cycle per Pip).

The Pokeshell alternative would be to create a ranch of them and feed them the polluted dirt the ethanol distillers create. That gives you sand instead of dirt, but it doesn't require a dupe to turn the compost heaps.