Frustrated by Composting change

[Entrails]

Hey I know this change happened awhile ago, but why was the change made for the Composter to make dirt instead of fertilizer? I felt like the game was pretty well balanced, but after this change it became a huge pain in the ass to get fertilizer. Am I missing something? I actually stopped playing after this change because something felt broken. But I'm jumping in to try the expressive update and thought I would ask. 

[trukogre]

7 minutes ago, Entrails said:

Hey I know this change happened awhile ago, but why was the change made for the Composter to make dirt instead of fertilizer? I felt like the game was pretty well balanced, but after this change it became a huge pain in the ass to get fertilizer. Am I missing something? I actually stopped playing after this change because something felt broken. But I'm jumping in to try the expressive update and thought I would ask. 

most things which used to require fertilizer to grow no longer do, so that's probably the simplest answer, although that's a quick description of an entire chain of changes to fertilizer makers, crops, etc.

[Coolthulhu]

It's fine. You only need fertilizer for farmer touch buff, which is optional.

Plants didn't need this nerf because they're already worse than animals, but it's not a noticeable nerf.

A much bigger nerf is that natgas maker is now actually a fertilizer maker so you don't get "free" fertilizer, you have to actually go out of your way to make it.

[Mariilyn]

And considering that Farmer's Touch double the growth speed of crops, i agree that fertilizer should need a little extra work to make.

[PhailRaptor]

50 minutes ago, Mariilyn said:

And considering that Farmer's Touch double the growth speed of crops, i agree that fertilizer should need a little extra work to make.

While I can agree with that, the implementation that we received on that concept leaves something to be desired.  Needing a stocked Drecko Stable in order to operate 1 or 2 FertSynths just makes Farming with Farmer's Touch subordinate to Ranching.  Which, in turn, makes Farming even less desirable than it already was compared to Ranching.

[trukogre]

16 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

While I can agree with that, the implementation that we received on that concept leaves something to be desired.  Needing a stocked Drecko Stable in order to operate 1 or 2 FertSynths just makes Farming with Farmer's Touch subordinate to Ranching.  Which, in turn, makes Farming even less desirable than it already was compared to Ranching.

Most worlds have enough phosphorite to run 1 farmer's station for what, a million cycles before running out?  This makes your claim that a Drecko Stable is 'needed' for Farmer's touch a little odd, given that I've never seen anyone reach even 100,000 cycles.

 

Part of the problem is that we have a word for 'sustainable', i.e. nonnegative first derivative of the resource over time, and we have a word for unsustainable, negative same first derivative, but we don't have a word for 'practically sustainable', i.e. x-intercept of resource vs time graph greater than 10,000 cycles.  If we had such a word in common usage it would be less tedious to reference the concept and I think would also become another option for people to choose for their own gameplay.  I think a lot of people are unconsciously choosing sustainable bases over practically sustainable bases simply because there's a word to describe it so it's a natural choice.

[Mariilyn]

2 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

While I can agree with that, the implementation that we received on that concept leaves something to be desired.  Needing a stocked Drecko Stable in order to operate 1 or 2 FertSynths just makes Farming with Farmer's Touch subordinate to Ranching.  Which, in turn, makes Farming even less desirable than it already was compared to Ranching.

It doesn't take much phosphorite to make fertilizer and Farmer's Touch is optional. You could easily get enough for a small farm, using only the wild dreckos on the map. But why exactly does the notion of needing a drecko stable to gain a huge increase in farming efficiency seems so much undesirable?

Just to put things into perspective, a tamed drecko stable currently produce enough phosphorite to fertilize ~73 plants or alternatively to grow 80 pincha pepper plants, a glossy drecko stable produce enough to fertilize ~66 plants or grow 72 pincha pepper plants.

(Because a fully fed tamed drecko will produce 10 kg of phosphorite per cycle and a tamed glossy drecko, 9 kg of phosphorite. One fertilizer synthesizer need 15,6 kg of phosphorite to produce 72 kg of fertilizer per cycle, enough to fertilize more than 14 plants.)

[Ab0minat0r]

12 hours ago, trukogre said:

I think a lot of people are unconsciously choosing sustainable bases over practically sustainable bases simply because there's a word to describe it so it's a natural choice.

Words to play by! Maybe even live by ...

[BlueLance]

Honestly phosphorite is the least of the problems, assuming you don't kill dreckos in the wild you pretty much have an infinite amount of the stuff.

Dirt on the other hand requires more work... sure you can just use a water sieve etc but if you don't it can be quite hard to get dirt!

[Idinyphe]

Is there a way to really produce dirt? The water sieve gives you some dirt but not enough to do something with it, how about composting something?

And how do you feed Dreckos? Only way I found was putting some lily flowers in their stable, but then there is no space for the hydrogen to let their hair grow, beside some Dreckos seem to feed on Mealwood -> needs dirt to grow.

It could not be a challenge to make some dirt, could it?

[trukogre]

46 minutes ago, Idinyphe said:

Is there a way to really produce dirt? The water sieve gives you some dirt but not enough to do something with it, how about composting something?

And how do you feed Dreckos? Only way I found was putting some lily flowers in their stable, but then there is no space for the hydrogen to let their hair grow, beside some Dreckos seem to feed on Mealwood -> needs dirt to grow.

It could not be a challenge to make some dirt, could it?

The water sieve gives polluted dirt which you compost into normal dirt.  It's kinda slow but especially if you're running 2-3 water sieves it's actually a pretty good amount over time.  Letting food rot into compost then to dirt works too, but compared to that the water sieve is easier imo.

[Abyssal]

1) Water sieving is good for dirt—or you can use the more complicated line of getting pufts to make slime, refining it into algae and then feeding pacus for polluted dirt. But the latter is not easy, nor does it give you that much dirt. So it's good to think of dirt as a semi-limited resource for practical purposes.

2) Dreckos should be kept in a segmented room. The top half should be hydrogen, and the bottom layer should be a gas that its food can grow in. Once you get glossy dreckos, you don't really need to continue feeding them mealwood, because the probability for their eggs to remain glossy is already 2/3, regardless of diet. But, that said, the dirt usage of just a couple of mealwood plants is pretty small, so it's not a high priority to switch away from mealwood, really.  

[yoakenashi]

So when did they change the Compost to a fixed output temperature, of 75 °C?

[KittenIsAGeek]

On 7/29/2018 at 2:44 PM, trukogre said:

I think a lot of people are unconsciously choosing sustainable bases over practically sustainable bases simply because there's a word to describe it so it's a natural choice.

My bases tend towards "practically sustainable."  Generally I keep an eye on my resource trends.  If I'm using a lot of a resource, then I have several options:

1. Find a way to produce more of the resource.
2. Use less of the resource
3. Find an alternative to the resource.

For example: You're running low on Algae for producing oxygen.  For the first case, you can dig into the swamp biome.  But, if you already have and you're still running out, then maybe you can turn slime into algae.  Grow more pufts, send the slime to a distiller, get algae and PW.  Perhaps even doing that, you're still running out.  Then you need case 2: find a way to use less of the resource.  Maybe use algae terrariums instead of deoxydizers.  Perhaps kill off a dupe to reduce the oxygen load.  Of course, there's always choice 3: Find an alternative resource.  Perhaps instead of using algae for oxygen, you could use water and electrolyzer. Another alternative would be to use gas permeable tiles to isolate some polluted water, letting it evaporate into polluted oxygen, and filter it through deodorizers.

This is generally the method I use for any resource, whether I'm not producing enough or producing too much.  Heat, power, coal, water, food. Doesn't matter.  Most bases become practically sustainable this way.

[PhailRaptor]

2 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

So when did they change the Compost to a fixed output temperature, of 75 °C?

As long as I've been playing, the Fertilizer it used to make was always 75 C as well.  I think it's just more annoying now, because now that it's Dirt instead of Fertilizer, Dirt has a much higher Heat Capacity.  So the Dirt will have a lot more thermal energy at that 75 C than the Fertilizer used to.

[RonEmpire]

Dirt is the big bottle neck over time.

[TLW]

Pseudosustainable?