Radiation for crops?

[psusi]

So I never bothered with the crop mutations because it seemed too much of a PITA on paper.  But in my current Ceres world, I got a glow stick dupe that accidentally mutated an Alevero seed, so I decided to give it a whirl.  Planting a wheeze wort in the middle of my Alevero oxygen farm resulted in plenty more mutant seeds before long, then I finally built an analyzer and have been pretty happy running 4 bountiful mutations next to the wheeze.

 

I thought the same mutation might be useful with my dasha saltvine farm, but they seem to have a higher tolerance for radiation, and don't harvest/produce seeds as often so it has been quite a bit more challenging.  I think in several hundred cycles I have only had one mutation, but was luck in that it was the bountiful one I wanted so I used the fractional seed trick to get more.  What is the better way of getting radiation to crops than using wheezeworts?  I've also never built a research reactor so I thought about giving that a go finally, but while it produces lots of radiation, you have to seal off the steam and have the crops outside so what can you use to do that that doesn't block 50% or more of the radiation?  It seems like all solid tiles block 50-60%.  Is there something lower than that range that I'm missing?  Also the crops don't require constant radiation do they?  In other words, can you pulse the reactor to get them a dose of radiation for a minute then leave it off until they are harvested?  Or at least until the next cycle?

 

[asurendra]

There are plenty of options.  You can build your farm under solar panels. They count as ceiling but do not block any space radiation. You can use rad lamps. They are cheap, easily accessible and can be stacked if necessary. You can use shine bugs. They are totally free except some frame rate issues. You can use satellites if you have any. Reactor usually is overkill, but if you really want you can too...

 

Chance of mutant seed counts only when harvesting, so  yes, you can use pulse trick with some automation. However you still need constant radiation to grow mutant plants so in most cases thats unnecessary too

[Charletrom]

You can set up a nuclear reactor so that it only runs during harvests, which yields tons of mutant seeds without wasting uranium. Basically you want to set up timer/counter automation so that a couple of kgs of enriched uranium are fed to the reactor right as the plants mature. Due to the low fuel mass this method doesn’t produce very much heat which is nice if you don’t need the power.

Another benefit of the approach is that you end up with a bunch of nuclear waste, which can be formed into highly radioactive solid tiles that provide plenty of radiation for your new mutant plant friends.

 

[gigamoi]

It is to be noted that sleet wheat and nosh sprout give many seeds pr harvest. When they mutate, the whole batch get the mutation. Plant mutation is very worth doing for those plants. 

[ghkbrew]

12 hours ago, psusi said:

what can you use to do that that doesn't block 50% or more of the radiation?  It seems like all solid tiles block 50-60%.  Is there something lower than that range that I'm missing? 

My solution has been to use a low mass natural tile to keep the heat in but let the radiation through.  You can build the radiation shielding all the way around the reactor except for a single tile at the same height as the radiation producing tile of the reactor.  That way you get a concentrated beam of radiation shining horizontally across your farm. (Bonus points for having the dupes access the plants from ladders above the plants so they don't get irradiated.)

For your radiation window you have a few options such as:

1. Easiest is 2 blobs of naptha with vacuum between them this leaves you with 2x 18% absorbing tiles and uses 3 tiles of width.
2. Aerogel (i.e. <1g glass "natural" tiles) only take 1 tile of width, will block all the heat and only absorbs 19.5%
3. My ideal solution: aerogel tiles, but instead of glass use gold (10.5% absorption) or solid nuclear waste (9% absorption).  These are the ideal materials, but they have the complication that that they will melt at the temperatures of reactor.  However, if you are able to produce <1g natural tiles they don't actually perform tile-to-tile heat conduction so they can sit next to 500C steam and never melt.  They will exchange heat with buildings though, so be careful.  

Edited July 23, 2025 by ghkbrew

[Charletrom]

Gold amalgam farm tiles also work

[psusi]

10 hours ago, asurendra said:

You can use rad lamps.

I ended up using one for a while to get the dasha saltvine to mutate, but I don't like the idea because eventually you will run out of uranium.  Also they still don't put out that much radiation compared to the 7200 I think it is that the dashas want.

10 hours ago, asurendra said:

You can use shine bugs.

Kind of a pain to keep breeding and throwing into the farm.  Also they generate only a small bit of radiation.

6 hours ago, Charletrom said:

Another benefit of the approach is that you end up with a bunch of nuclear waste, which can be formed into highly radioactive solid tiles that provide plenty of radiation for your new mutant plant friends.

You have to compress it and then cool it and keep it cool.  It also only puts out 165 rads/cycle according to the wiki, so that isn't even enough to grow a mutant plant.

5 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

Aerogel (i.e. <1g glass "natural" tiles) only take 1 tile of width, will block all the heat and only absorbs 19.5%

How the heck do you get such a small natural tile to form?

Oh yea, and without thermium is the only way to pump the nuclear waste with the naptha drop trick to make a pump suck up nearby liquid in a vacuum that it isn't in contact with so that it doesn't overheat?  That seems like you are constantly going to be dealing with the problem of the pool of waste getting lower as you pump some out, and moving out of the range of the tricked pump.  That kind of sucks.

 

[Charletrom]

30 minutes ago, psusi said:

You have to compress it and then cool it and keep it cool.  It also only puts out 165 rads/cycle according to the wiki, so that isn't even enough to grow a plant.

I think you may be basing your math off of the mass of a liquid tile, but to form a solid tile you need to compress two tiles into one, so the rads are doubled. It’s definitely enough, even with farm tiles over top.

 

[goboking]

I use a bank of radiation lamps and a motion sensor since the radiation is only measured when seeds are harvested.  A farming station means more harvests, which means more chances at the particular mutated seeds I'm after.  I keep a stockpile of rad pills to help my farmer deal with the radiation. 

[ghkbrew]

9 hours ago, psusi said:

14 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

 

How the heck do you get such a small natural tile to form?

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/138002-introducing-aerogel-making-low-mass-natural-tiles-that-are-perfect-insulators/

[asurendra]

14 hours ago, psusi said:

I ended up using one for a while to get the dasha saltvine to mutate, but I don't like the idea because eventually you will run out of uranium.  Also they still don't put out that much radiation compared to the 7200 I think it is that the dashas want.

Its only 10 kg per cycle. Naturally generated rad biome can last for hundreds cycles. How many mutated seeds do you want?  And you always can mine some more in space

Edited July 24, 2025 by asurendra

[Tranoze]

On 7/24/2025 at 2:30 AM, psusi said:

without thermium is the only way to pump the nuclear waste with the naptha drop trick

If you are willing to do exploits, tricks, there are more ways to pump 10kg/s.

And without exploit, you can just use  and dupe manually deliver nuclear waste to  

[psusi]

On 7/23/2025 at 5:10 AM, asurendra said:

You can build your farm under solar panels. They count as ceiling but do not block any space radiation

That's really weird that they don't block any radiation, but they do block light and space exposure.  So much for using one as the roof over my mission control station.

[blakemw]

8 hours ago, psusi said:

That's really weird that they don't block any radiation, but they do block light and space exposure.  So much for using one as the roof over my mission control station.

It is weird. It's because they have no material cells. They are roughly the same as how Airflow tiles magically block liquid movement despite having no material cell, they are simply flagged to block liquids. Solar panel floor tiles are flagged to block both gas and liquid movement. It's strange they would do this rather than just having glass cells in the floor. It might be solely so that the player can run heavi-watt wire behind the solar panel, if they had actual cells the player would have to use normal or conductive wire.

[gigamoi]

On 7/27/2025 at 2:38 AM, psusi said:

That's really weird that they don't block any radiation, but they do block light and space exposure.  So much for using one as the roof over my mission control station.

I use that trick all the time to supplement the pip planted wheezewort radbolt source I use to power the interplanetary launchers on my automated resource extraction outposts. I just place them right under the solar panels powering the whole thing. You have to be careful though. Last time I checked, top corners leak.

[cyberwarlord]

I don't think it would block much even if they did. May be a simplified way of having it.

 

Wait, you can run heavy wire behind solar panels??!!

[psusi]

On 7/31/2025 at 12:35 AM, cyberwarlord said:

Wait, you can run heavy wire behind solar panels??!!

Who uses heavy wire? Transformer flippers for the win.

 

[cyberwarlord]

On 8/3/2025 at 7:57 PM, psusi said:

Who uses heavy wire? Transformer flippers for the win.

 

I do when I'm slapping down temporary designs. How did I never try using heavy wire, guess I just assumed it was a solid tile..

 

Ahhhhhh!!!!