I need sand! Reliable source of sand.

[sheaker]

Dear all,

I see that to clean polluted water I need 1000g per second of sand while I am getting only 200g per second of polluted dirt. Then, I am using Pokeshells to convert polluted dirt into sand with 50% effectiveness. No wonder I am running out of sand.

Long time ago I was playing for a short while with cooking dirt directly into sand using something like this:

But I feel like it need a lot of optimization. I am not even sure  if this is correct approach.

 

So the question is if there is any reliable way to create sand?

I don't have an access to regolith (yet?)

Thanks!

[juni3227]

You can crush rocks? Or just boli p water?... Are you short on dupes? How this happened?

Run multiple steam turbine, and instead of recycling water out put them and input the right amount of p water accordingly. That would do.

[sheaker]

I am trying to achieve some kind of self sustainability and sand seems to be a problem now. I am playing with 3 duplicants on main asteroid so yes, I am short on duplicants. I would prefer an automatic system if possible. Crushing igneous rock is an option since I created very nice cooling device, but It would still require duplicant operation.

If I understand correctly Your idea is to replace water sieve with steam turbine. This is something but I would still need some sand. Boiling polluted water creates only 1 % of mass in dirt, not even polluted dirt so I can not feed pokeshells with it. I can get infinite source of dirt from sulfur geyser using grubgrubs. But then I need to still convert dirt into sand. Ehh.

[juni3227]

Cut down every usage of sand as much as possible. That is the key. Do not use seive, Do not use deoderizer and Do not use Salt Vine.

You can run your base without any sand or filteration, just, a lot harder.

But considering you have only 3 dupes, that might be a chellange.

Desalinating and filtering water by boiling? that is easy. Polluted oxygen? you have to liquify it.

And forget about Pokeshell, unless you have access to swamp biome. Which you should have if you have thermium.

If salt is what you need, you could just... desalinate salt water.

[NewWorldDan]

Long term sustainability usually involves a few production chains -

Arbor trees and pips -> dirt and lumber

Lumber -> Ethanol and polluted dirt (ethanol is usually fed to a petrol generator to produce more polluted water)

polluted dirt and pokeshells -> sand and lime

You can automate nearly all of this.  On the other hand, boiling water is totally the way to go.  

 

 

[Gurgel]

Salt water or brine desalination is the only easy way. Especially a cool salt slush geyser provides tons of sand via salt.

In my current build, I am boiling and then cooling pwater via aquatuner+tepidizer for the boiling and steam turbine for recondensation. Also a rather large counter-flow heat exchanger so I am ending up with only 5C more at the output. This is the first time I am going that way and my first design already works well. 

[sheaker]

1 hour ago, NewWorldDan said:

Long term sustainability usually involves a few production chains -

Arbor trees and pips -> dirt and lumber

Lumber -> Ethanol and polluted dirt (ethanol is usually fed to a petrol generator to produce more polluted water)

polluted dirt and pokeshells -> sand and lime

You can automate nearly all of this.  On the other hand, boiling water is totally the way to go.  

 

Ohh I forgot about polluted dirt from lumber. That will be the path most likely. However it would require duplicant operation as well. I would need to calculate efficiency of rock crush (I already tamed two minor volcanos) and lumber converter to see which one is better for my small colony.
Thank You all!

[troyandabed]

In DLC sand can be a bit tricky early on.  Long term solution for me always involves taming a volcano, igneous rock can then be crushed to sand in large amounts.  I usually set some automation to ensure that if sand drops below a specific quantity in storage a relatively high priority rock crusher becomes activated to get dupes to make more.

[WhiteWind36]

13 hours ago, sheaker said:

Ohh I forgot about polluted dirt from lumber. That will be the path most likely. However it would require duplicant operation as well. I would need to calculate efficiency of rock crush (I already tamed two minor volcanos) and lumber converter to see which one is better for my small colony.
Thank You all!

Best renewable source of sand is salt water and brine. And if you would build water boiler you would save duplicants work on desalinator and water sieve and carrying polluted dirt for pokeshell, just build one sweeper in steam chamber and ship dirt and salt from there. 100 kg salt = 95kg sand. And for polluted dirt - best to feed it for Sage hatch, because you get 1:1 conversion to coal. Which can later be used to make refined Carbon, diamonds, ceramic and steel. Also you can crush ceramic for sand, loosing 25kg of coal on each 100kg of sand.

[Coolthulhu]

2 hours ago, WhiteWind36 said:

Best renewable source of sand is salt water and brine. And if you would build water boiler you would save duplicants work on desalinator

One important note: boiling and desalinating have different water/salt ratios.

[WhiteWind36]

23 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

One important note: boiling and desalinating have different water/salt ratios.

"The Desalinator operates at 100% efficiency, generating as much salt as physical transition.

 

The Salt is stored inside the Desalinator. Once it reaches 1000 kg, the Desalinator stops working and has to be emptied by Duplicants" - from famdom wiki.

As much as I know you will get same amount of salt boiling it or desalinating.

[Jann5s]

I get sand from igneous rock from volcanos that power my geothermal turbines.

[cpy]

Arbor trees are INSANE source of dirt/sand/p.water.

If planted by pips then it's even more insane.

[sheaker]

On 12/15/2021 at 10:56 PM, Jann5s said:

I get sand from igneous rock from volcanos that power my geothermal turbines.

I am low on dupes and I would like to try to avoid using them for this purpose.

4 hours ago, cpy said:

Arbor trees are INSANE source of dirt/sand/p.water.

If planted by pips then it's even more insane.

Yes, I have farm with soon-to-be like 38 of wild arbor trees. It will hopefully cover my needs

[Pedro_L]

On 12/13/2021 at 4:01 AM, WhiteWind36 said:

Also you can crush ceramic for sand, loosing 25kg of coal on each 100kg of sand.

If you want more efficiency you can do it for free by heating clay up to ~950°C

[WhiteWind36]

43 minutes ago, Pedro_L said:

If you want more efficiency you can do it for free by heating clay up to ~950°C

By doing this you will make natural tiles of ceramic if I am not mistaken. Then you'll have to mine it, and lose half of the mass. Unless it's doable with debris...

[Pedro_L]

17 minutes ago, WhiteWind36 said:

By doing this you will make natural tiles of ceramic if I am not mistaken. Then you'll have to mine it, and lose half of the mass. Unless it's doable with debris...

Don't tiles form only if above a certain threshold of mass? The wiki says it is doable

[sheaker]

16 minutes ago, Pedro_L said:

Don't tiles form only if above a certain threshold of mass? The wiki says it is doable

I tried conveyor rail with dirt to make sand and 20 kg packages were turning into tiles. Moreover they stack one onto another in every free tile above. Heating debris of dirt resulted in the same.