Regolith disposal options

[Gurgel]

This is for long-term play-style only, obviously.

So, how to deal with Regolith? So far I have done the following things:

1. Shove-voles and keep 100t or so outside for regular use: Tedious, unreliable, but works in principle. Frankly, this gets on my nerves.

2. Drop everything in a hole (again, except for 100t or so): Pretty simple, but it being an obviously temporary solution insults my sense of elegance.

3. Just ignore it. Most simple, but see 2.

Are there other solutions (no, I am not going to melt the stuff and have the liquid dissipate into space....) that may be better?

 

[Zarquan]

You say you don't want to melt it, but that is the easiest solution.   Once its melted,  you can generate tons of energy or use infinite compression to store the magma.  Or vent it.

Alternatively, there is a mod that lets you destroy it by putting it in to a modified storage container.

[psusi]

I like just not getting it in the first place.  If you use a double layer of doors on top of mesh tiles set to open/close a few times every time the bunker doors above them open after a meteor shower, they destroy all of the solid tiles of regolith that fall down and only the loose debris remains and is piled up on one side.  Also if you just leave your rockets outside they destroy any that has piled up at their base every time they launch or land.

[lee1026]

Why is voles tedious? Have a vole room and just drop in any extra regolith in.

[psusi]

1 hour ago, lee1026 said:

Why is voles tedious? Have a vole room and just drop in any extra regolith in.

Extra regolith?  The trick isn't finding something to do with some extra, but rather avoiding being buried alive.  I think it's tedious to build a mass array of diggers, sweepers, loaders and 6 lines of rails to collect it all and deliver it to the vole room.

[lee1026]

Well, you are going to get regolith no matter what you do if you want to operate scanners or solar panels or launch rockets, so that part just isn't optional.

 

You need the loaders and rails no matter what disposal system you chose.

[psusi]

Just now, lee1026 said:

You need the loaders and rails no matter what disposal system you chose.

Not using my preferred method ( see above ).

[lee1026]

The debris will still stick around somewhere though, so you can just send it to vole farms.

[Gurgel]

A vole farm needs an auto-miner. That auto-miner needs cooling. And then, you cannot throw all in there, so some volume-based or time based mechanism is needed to have enough available for other uses. And then you need to get all that Regolith to the vole farm. And then some Regolith comes out the corners or the top or blocks a door. So you need more auto-miners or relocate the thing. And then something else breaks. It needs very little insight and a lot of fine-tuning. And that is very, very boring and tedious.

I think I will just let the Regolith lay on the layer below the bunker doors now. Since I now found they can be airflow-tiles (still think that is a bug), there should not be any heat-exchange (unlike the glass-tiles I used up to now), and hence very little slowdown from letting it pile up. But what is lacking is some use for all that stuff or some reliable and simple way to dispose of most of it. 

 

44 minutes ago, lee1026 said:

You need the loaders and rails no matter what disposal system you chose.

Nope. Automatic dispensers seem to be best (well, least bad), but have their own problems. To get rid of the tiles, I just use auto-miners. I have not used loaders and rails for Regolith in my last few colonies.

[psusi]

2 hours ago, lee1026 said:

The debris will still stick around somewhere though, so you can just send it to vole farms.

There is only some debris that results from one meteor smashing regolith tiles deposited by an earlier one.  All of the solid tiles that have not already been smashed are utterly destroyed by the doors, and that takes care of the vast majority of it.  What little is left I only occasionally have dupes to grab and feed the shove voles by hand when I want to breed more of them.

 

2 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I think I will just let the Regolith lay on the layer below the bunker doors now. Since I now found they can be airflow-tiles (still think that is a bug), there should not be any heat-exchange (unlike the glass-tiles I used up to now), and hence very little slowdown from letting it pile up. But what is lacking is some use for all that stuff or some reliable and simple way to dispose of most of it. 

That prevents scanners or solar from working below and if you don't have those then you may as well just use bunker tiles and not bother with doors at all.

[Gurgel]

4 hours ago, psusi said:

That prevents scanners or solar from working below and if you don't have those then you may as well just use bunker tiles and not bother with doors at all.

Well, I mine it of course, but I let the results of that lay around. So no impact to the solar below. Scanners are above.

[kbn]

There is a slightly strange regolith disposal method. This may be an exploit.

All you have to do is embed the unwanted regolith into the regolith tile with the automatic dispenser.

When you load the game, the embedded regolith will be spawned on top as new tiles.
By repeating this, the tile will eventually grow outside the MAP.
In other words, the regolith that extends outside the MAP when it loads will automatically disappear.

Spoiler

 

[psusi]

9 hours ago, kbn said:

There is a slightly strange regolith disposal method. This may be an exploit.

All you have to do is embed the unwanted regolith into the regolith tile with the automatic dispenser.

When you load the game, the embedded regolith will be spawned on top as new tiles.
By repeating this, the tile will eventually grow outside the MAP.
In other words, the regolith that extends outside the MAP when it loads will automatically disappear.

  Hide contents

 

Neat.  I used to have the tile towers randomly happen on game load back in 2018 but couldn't figure out what was causing it.

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, psusi said:

Neat.  I used to have the tile towers randomly happen on game load back in 2018 but couldn't figure out what was causing it.

I had one recently explode upwards after load (apparently some tile-forming only happens on load...).

Never though to use this effect like that either