Infinite dirt generation?

[Sigma Cypher]

Does anyone know how to keep something from creating a tile during state change while on a conveyor rail?  I'm trying to make an infinite dirt generator with fertilizer makers like this:

Spoiler

Usually the fertilizer turns into a dirt tile in the steam room but sometimes (rarely) the fertilizer reaches 125C right before the conveyor rail element sensor in the lower right, and I get the full 10kg of dirt from 10k of fertilizer (which gives more dirt out than dirt in, at the expense of some phosphorite, which is renewable).  If you have any ideas about how to do this consistently I would love to hear it.

[suxkar]

None that I know of, but someone else might be of help.
The tiles are spawned even if there is no room,i.e. they are spawned in the next non solid tile above. This can of course be used as an advantage, but the problem is that these setups are prone to create undiggable tiles. This seems to happen when you dig a tile that is, in the same moment, also spawning a new tile. This can be solved by carefully avoiding full flow, but it's very annoying. I had to discard some dirt and sand boilers precisely for this reason. I suggest you put a bridge overlapping a normal rail before the steam room so that you will, in any case, get full packet--empty--full packet--empty kind of flow, otherwise you risk on breaking the design (although a releoad solves the undiggable tile problem).

[psusi]

You don't; that's why dirt cookers don't work.  Why would you want to these days though?  Dirt doesn't have much use and you can get tons of it from an ethanol distillery.

[Neotuck]

On 5/25/2020 at 10:12 PM, Sigma Cypher said:

I get the full 10kg of dirt from 10k of fertilizer

wrong, when you dig a tile you lose half the mass

so you are getting 5kg of dirt from 10kg of fertilizer

[Sigma Cypher]

36 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

wrong, when you dig a tile you lose half the mass

so you are getting 5kg of dirt from 10kg of fertilizer

Yes senpai.  Perhaps I should have been more clear.  Most of the time, the fertilizer turns into a tile inside the steam room (in which case I get 5 kg of dirt from 10kg of fertilizer, like you say).  Rarely, the basket gets to the rail element detector in dirt form and I get the full 10kg of dirt.  I can't consistently reproduce this, thus the reason for my post.  I tried encasing it in tiles during heating to see if it would inhibit tile formation and it does like @suxkar says:  the tile forms in the nearest vertical open space. 

@psusi  Well shoot, I've been ignoring ethanol distilleries because I'm still trying to master Terra and I don't usually have access to trees unless I get lucky with a care package.  But dirt is useful for sleet wheat (for frost burgers) and mealwood (lice for the juicer) even after you are done with research. 

I think the next best option is polluted water bottling with a gym and feeding the polluted oxygen that off-gasses from it to pufts.  I wish there were an automated way to set compost orders for seeds/balm lily/etc. 

Fun fact: food items like lettuce and bristle-berry won't change form even when submerged in magma.  They "melt" at 9,727 degrees C.

[Neotuck]

Well if you want to stay on Terra, you can cook slime the same way as fertilizer.  Might not be much but it is dirt positive.

For the most part when farming dirt for sleet wheat I use the composting option and try to upscale production, I even store crops/meat in PO2 to speed up rotting.

If your lucky to get a pip from the printing pod build a GIANT natural farm of mealwood in PO2 sealed off from the dupes with sweeper arms set to rot piles (Not recommended unless you have plenty of space to work with.  If my math is right, it takes 150 wild mealwood rotting and converting to dirt to supply 1 domesticated sleet wheat)

You'd be better off making a wild sleat wheat farm

[psusi]

12 hours ago, Sigma Cypher said:

Well shoot, I've been ignoring ethanol distilleries because I'm still trying to master Terra and I don't usually have access to trees unless I get lucky with a care package.

Yep, you should be able to get a care package with an arbor acorn and another with a pip or pip eggs within the first 100 cycles.  Plant them in a room and let the pip make more acorn seeds.  Once you get 4 of them you can run an ethanol distillery to produce tons of polluted dirt, and gain polluted water when you burn the ethanol.  I normally don't even bother composting the polluted dirt and just feed it to sage hatches to get rid of it.

12 hours ago, Sigma Cypher said:

But dirt is useful for sleet wheat (for frost burgers) and mealwood (lice for the juicer) even after you are done with research. 

I've never tried bothering with the juicer so the only mealwood I grow after the early game is to feed glossy drakeos, and that only takes one or two plants.  I've also never thought it was worth the bother to grow sleet wheat and make frost burgers.  If you really want to you can have pips wild plant them so you don't need dirt or water.  I always go for fried mushrooms and later mushroom wraps.  You just can't beat only needing 5 kg of slime per cycle.

12 hours ago, Sigma Cypher said:

I think the next best option is polluted water bottling with a gym and feeding the polluted oxygen that off-gasses from it to pufts.

How does that help you with dirt?  I normally do this to grow mushrooms after running out of slime on the map.

10 hours ago, Neotuck said:

For the most part when farming dirt for sleet wheat I use the composting option and try to upscale production, I even store crops/meat in PO2 to speed up rotting.

Oh my.  Composting food is ridiculous.  It's mass is so low it's not even funny.

[Sigma Cypher]

1 minute ago, psusi said:

How does that help you with dirt?  I normally do this to grow mushrooms after running out of slime on the map.

Yeah Neotuck didn't understand why I mentioned pufts either.  I need to learn to complete my sentences.  Pufts make slime and slime can be cooked into dirt at 50% efficiency (47.5kg slime per puft per cycle at a cost of 50kg of polluted oxygen yields 23.75 kg dirt per puft).

And ... I just got a pip from the pod on cycle 198 ... now weaving a tapestry of critter - crop interactions together with all the supporting machinery is obviated by limitless free food enabled by pip-planted "wild" crops.  Sigh.

I think I will play without care packages from now on and design the ultimate Fully Integrated Food Service (patent pending) that uses only water (polluted, salt and regular) to make all the food you don't really need for 35 dupes.

I think I just found my new purpose in life.

[psusi]

2 minutes ago, Sigma Cypher said:

Yeah Neotuck didn't understand why I mentioned pufts either.  I need to learn to complete my sentences.  Pufts make slime and slime can be cooked into dirt at 50% efficiency (47.5kg slime per puft per cycle at a cost of 50kg of polluted oxygen yields 23.75 kg dirt per puft).

So then you are turning water into less than half as much dirt using a complex heat machine, in order to grow sleet wheat to make frost burgers.  So for each dupe you need 1/6th of a kg of frost bun per cycle, or half a sleet wheat seed, which takes 2.5 kg of dirt and 10 kg of water to grow.  If that 2.5 kg of dirt is made from cooked slime, that's a little more than 5 kg of polluted water, so a total of 15 kg of water per dupe, per cycle.  Plus the meat and lettuce.  The lettuce takes 0.833 kg of salt water per cycle to grow.so you're at nearly 16 kg per cycle of water, per dupe.

Now compare that to mushroom wraps.  You need 6.25 kg of slime per cycle to grow the mushrooms, and 4.16 kg of salt water to grow the lettuce, for a total of only 10.41 kg of water per cycle.  Plus you still have the BBQ to eat.  And you don't need to nearly freeze the water and keep the grow room freezing cold.  When you factor in that the BBQ actually makes up 2/3rds of the calories of the frost burger, you really need to triple the above water cost for the frost burgers, putting you at 48 kg vs 10.41 kg of water per cycle per dupe.

[Edoc_]

I'm also playing without care package on rime, so no drecko and no pips, not even on a planet.

So i needed PW for the reed fiber, made a double petroleum boiler that takes 20k/s, it generates 0.66 k/s polluted dirt per second with the co2 skimming. I could get another 0.3 k/s if i was sieving the PW, but reed fiber are thirsty.

In total that would be 582 k dirt per cycle, enough for more than 115 sleath wheat grains.

So if you have enough water and wells, maybe make a simple boiler with an AT. 

[Neotuck]

@Sigma Cypher please forgive my earlier assumption.  Dirt farming is an old topic and forgetting about the 50% mass loss when digging was a common mistake most of us made.

My last two cents on the topic is using water sieves with compost piles.  There are many creative ways to produce PW depending on what your map provides.  It's a good chance to be creative.

[lee1026]

If you have care packages on, rolling a pip and an arbor tree seed is bound to happen eventually. After that, just make ethanol and burn it. There will be near infinite amounts of polluted dirt. 

[sheaker]

I agree with lee1026. For me for a long time lumber was just a side effect of ranching pips until I was forced to ranch pokeshells for sand. Pokeshells eats polluted dirt so I had to find polluted dirt generator. Here is my design that is working great now:

Entrance on the right top is not required - I had to create it because when distillers were dormant weezworths freezes pipe with clean water and damaged the system slightly. That's why there is water on the floor and exit pipe from water sieve is damaged. Then I build thermo sensor to shut off conveyor chute when below 20*C.

Electric circuit is simple.

Carbon skimmers are in closed water loop. 2kg/s of ethanol can supply petroleum generator constantly.

Automation. Two carbon skimmers (2 x 300g/s = 600 g/s) can't remove all carbon dioxide from four distillers (4 x 166.7 g/s = 666.8 g/s) so from time to time left bottom doors are opening to release some carbon dioxide and decrease pressure:

Conveyor rail. Autosweeper is loading polluted dirt on conveyor loader and it is transported to safe location:

So far temperatures did not exceed 70*C so gold is fair enough for construction. It should be filled with hydrogen due to thermal conductivity.