Making natural tiles by cooking coal?

[lee1026]

Before I try this, I want to see if other people have reasons to think that it won't work.

 

Basically, the goal is to create natural tiles for pips. Slime and algae are eternally in short supply for me thanks to my deep love of Pacus, and I am willing to go to somewhat extreme extents to preserve algae supplies to guard against some mishaps killing most of my pacus so that I can recover.

 

As I understand it, the way that cooking solids work is that if a solid is on a rail and it transforms, a new block will be generated. Looking through the list of elements, it looks like coal->refined carbon is the best bet. 276.85 is well within the range of a steel aquatuner to generate.

 

My plan is to create a neat rows of coal on rails where I want the natural tiles to be. Vacuum out the room, dump in water, spin up the aquatuner, get the steam to 280 degrees or so, and cook all the coal into natural refined carbon. Use a steam turbine (or three) to get the water back out, and then refill the room with the desired atmosphere.

 

For a large room, it seems easier than most of the other natural tile ways that people described.

 

Thoughts?

 

(Obviously, for sleet wheat, just freezing a few rows of water is a lot easier; but there isn't anything easy to freeze for arbor trees)

[Gurgel]

I think you are optimizing in the wrong place here. You can make natural tiles from Algae with as little as 5kg per tile. You can also create natural metal tiles by the "deconstruct a door" trick:

 

[SackMaggie]

2 hours ago, lee1026 said:

if a solid is on a rail and it transforms, a new block will be generated.

Debris also work, And you can generate a lot of heat using glass forge and drip to the target.

[qqqqqqqqqqqq]

or use this mod 
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1840755803&searchtext=tile

[sheaker]

I think from dirt You can create sand tile. This happens all the time in my copper geyser cooled with polluted water.

[psusi]

It's also easier to melt phosporite and pump it into the target location, then cool it back down.

[lee1026]

You need a lot of phosphorus to make that work, literally hundreds of tons. 

[psusi]

56 minutes ago, lee1026 said:

You need a lot of phosphorus to make that work, literally hundreds of tons. 

No, you only need 5kg per tile.

 

[DonDegow]

5kg = hundreds of tons

you lose 

[Lacost]

18 hours ago, lee1026 said:

For a large room, it seems easier than most of the other natural tile ways that people described.

The glass forge mehtod is suprisingly quick and easy to set up. If you want to geht the fastest and easiest way to get natural tiles, then go for that.

 

Your method still has the disadvantage that you can't retireve the materials for your rails. You can deconstruct them but the metal will be stuck in the natural tile.

 

But in the end I would go for what looks best. I made my sleet wheat farm out of 800 kg ice tiles for 150 plants. Inefficient but stylish. Having refined carbon as natural tiles is surely novel.

[lee1026]

2 hours ago, psusi said:

No, you only need 5kg per tile.

 

Just tested this; anything smaller than about 200 kg becomes debris, not a tile. For the size of the things that I am thinking of, yeah, it will take hundreds of tons.

[kbn]

I think it's a little-known glitch, You can generate 0.1g glass tiles using the behavior when loading the game.
A single move of the glass forge produces 25 kg of molten glass, which can be calculated to produce 250,000 tiles.
You don't really need even 1/1000 of that, but you can generate enough tiles anyway.
This is a very useful technique only for those who can tolerate glitches and those who do not feel pain in save & load time.

Spoiler

1.mp4

It is early to watch the video, but the theory is as follows.
Drop 0.1 g of molten glass that has been cooled sufficiently below the freezing point.
Pause just before 0.1g of molten glass appears on the floor and disappears.
Save and load as it is.
The molten glass below the freezing point solidifies and tiles due to the operation during game loading.

[Lacost]

13 hours ago, lee1026 said:

Just tested this; anything smaller than about 200 kg becomes debris, not a tile. For the size of the things that I am thinking of, yeah, it will take hundreds of tons.

Did you test it with algae + molten glass to make dirt tiles or did you use coal instead of the algae?

[lee1026]

I tested melting phosporite. 

[psusi]

That's weird.  I guess I've never tried it myself but everything I've ever read has said that as long as you have at least 5 kg it will form a solid tile instead of debris.

[lee1026]

Nah, for liquids forming tiles, you need a minimum that is per element. You are thinking of solid transformations, which do work that way.

[0xFADE]

Shows how overpriced farming most things are when most solutions involve natural farming.

[Gurgel]

42 minutes ago, 0xFADE said:

Shows how overpriced farming most things are when most solutions involve natural farming.

Yes, it does. Many things grown domesticated would require a huge industry, while wild growing is not a problem or needs a little cooling or heating at most.