Sustainable dirt for sleet wheat

[Nickerooni]

As it turns out, there is plenty of dirt sources - easily enough to have your every dupe eat frost buns. Even if you pull out the wild plants.

There are a few sustainable ways to get dirt. Sustainable here is defined as using resources that are in infinite supply and uses reasonable quantities, like CO2 or water. Here is a non-exhaustive list from least to most:

* Compost the meat and some of the eggs from an otherwise sustainable critter source

* Use water to grow bristle blossoms and compost the seeds and output

* Boil PW to get 1% of its mass in dirt and 100% mass in steam

* Pass polluted water through a sieve, add regolith/sand and get 4% of its mass in dirt and 100% of its mass in 40 degree water.

* Off-gas PW to polluted oxygen, feed it to a puff to get slime. Turn the slime into algae using the algae distiller and feed the algae it to pacu. Turn the polluted dirt into dirt using a compost. This nets you ~10% of the original polluted water as dirt. You get some marginal pacu egg shells and pufts, but no other externalities.

* Same as above, but instead of turning the slime into algae and feeding pufts, you cook it to 125 degrees and have automation digging up the dirt. This nets you 25% mass of the original polluted water as dirt. It creates a lot of heat - since slime has one-fifth the specific heat capacity of dirt. Therefore, it only needs a strong heat source to kick it off. Feeding >125 degree dirt to sleet wheat is a bit tricky, but you can use that as for some heat deletion if you manage temperatures carefully.

So, how much polluter water do you need? Without considering fertilizer, you need 2.5 sleet wheat plants per dupe. That’s 12.5 kg of dirt per day. This means 37.5 kg of polluted water every day, or 62.5 g/s per dupe.

Is that a lot? It’s less polluted water than the water a dupe needs for the purposes of making oxygen in an electrolyzer. Moreover, if you don’t recycle your bathroom water in a sieve, then you can turn 40kg of water into 41.7kg of polluted water every day. Per dupe. That’s a shower, a toilet wash and a sink wash. Therefore, it’s trivial to get that much polluted water if you have an equivalent amount of clean water.

How do you then get enough polluted water to feed your other industry? Such as pincha peppernuts. That’s not so hard. A single algae terrarium produces 174 kg/day from a similar amount of water - although you’ll need to use some algae distillers on your slime to keep it running sustainable.

Doesn’t this need a lot of pufts? Each puft processes 30kg of the polluted oxygen per day, which was 1:1 with the polluted water. That means you need a little more than 1 puft per dupe - which is a bit much, but not too crazy.

I think I quite like the dirt industry balanced as is. You have to pool a lot of machinery together to get everybody fed sleet wheat. And, sleet wheat is totally optional, so it’s not a necessary industry to set up. Getting it sustainable for 2-3 of your favorite dupes is trivial. Getting it for all your dupes - as the best food source - is hard. Nice work Klei!

[Neotuck]

Just now, Nickerooni said:

* Boil PW to get 1% of its mass in dirt and 100% mass in steam

I think it's It's 0.1%

better to sieve it

[chemie]

sieve of shower/toilet gets me more dirt than I know what to do with

[GrindThisGame]

Nice guide. Don't forget that you can feed quite a few dupes just off naturally growing sleet wheat. No dirt required.

Using CO2 (via carbon skimmer) is a decent way to generate polluted water as well as the petroleum generator.

[Nickerooni]

4 minutes ago, GrindThisGame said:

Nice guide. Don't forget that you can feed quite a few dupes just off naturally growing sleet wheat. No dirt required.

Using CO2 (via carbon skimmer) is a decent way to generate polluted water as well as the petroleum generator.

7.5 naturally growing wheat per dupe is a bit much for a big colony. But, it’s perfect for the 3-4 favorite dupe approach.

Carbon skimmer and power plants werent worth an honorable mention, in my mind, since the amount you can do sustainably is far less. They’re great temporary sources. Where “temporary” is still longer than a game of ONI lasts

[SakuraKoi]

It's worth mentioning that Terrestrial Planets should net one around 1t of dirt which is enough for 200 plants/cycles, that's 80 (Frost bun/Pepper bread) cycles worth of food for a duplicant or 160 even (and I prefer Fruitcake) if not ~50% more with Micronutrients (a cycle worth of it costs 2.71kg dirt and some more.

For Terrestrial Planets 1t of dirt if if dirt and algae which is a little bonus have the same %, more if dirt has bigger % (up to 1.33t), less if algae though mayhaps other material gets in the way a little but that'd only be Abyssalite that at the utter most could cut it to like half). One Rocket (travel time 27-30 plus refueling) cycles can provide ~3 to 9 duplicants, two would already be 6-24 for the meager cost of 14t water (~500kg a cycle, that's what a single Cool Steam Vent produces on average at least 672kg Steam per cycle if not up to 948kg which'd be enough for nearly 2 rockets).

Hence what missing here is

• Terrestrial Planets, trading 1.7-2t of Oxygen and Hydrogen each for ~1t of dirt every 30 cycles for 14t water and a duck ton of "waste products".(10t oxygen, ~1t algae, mayhaps rare material). Each rocket can cover 3-9 dupes (double for Fruitcake, +50% for Fertilizer use) and a rocket if not two are covered by Cool Steam Vents (double for other non-Steam water geysers).
• Don't forget to make Fertilizer, it does not only save water and time but also dirt (75% use)

[Neotuck]

My goal has been to have 60 sleet wheat plants divided up into 2 greenhouses

I have 2 slush geysers and 2 infected PW geysers on my map so I should have plenty of PW for sieving into dirt

my end goal is to have enough pepper bread for 27 dupes

or more

[Nickerooni]

1 hour ago, Neotuck said:

My goal has been to have 60 sleet wheat plants divided up into 2 greenhouses

I have 2 slush geysers and 2 infected PW geysers on my map so I should have plenty of PW for sieving into dirt

my end goal is to have enough pepper bread for 27 dupes

or more

Sieving enough polluted water for 60 plants: That works out to 12.5 kg/sec of polluted water! Your 4 geysers will not be able to keep up with that, sorry to say. I’m not even sure regolith drop rate keeps up with that much sieving, but I dunno what the drop rate is on it.

The reason I wrote this post is to specifically call out sieving as being insufficient for a full colony run on sleet wheat. It only gets about a fifth of the way there. Although, in your case, it probably gets you half way there.

I’d recommend the algae distiller and pacu route. It’s easier to set up and the extra egg shells for steel is nice.

[Neotuck]

6 minutes ago, Nickerooni said:

Sieving enough polluted water for 60 plants: That works out to 12.5 kg/sec of polluted water! Your 4 geysers will not be able to keep up with that,

does your calculations include fertilizer? 

8 minutes ago, Nickerooni said:

I’m not even sure regolith drop rate keeps up with that much sieving, but I dunno what the drop rate is on it.

between 7 to 10 tons per meteor shower

9 minutes ago, Nickerooni said:

I’d recommend the algae distiller and pacu route. It’s easier to set up and the extra egg shells for steel is nice.

and how many pufts would it take to support the algae distiller?

[Nickerooni]

Just now, Neotuck said:

does your calculations include fertilizer? 

between 7 to 10 tons per meteor shower

and how many pufts would it take to support the algae distiller?

Fertilizer is used to double the growth rate on plants. If you have 60 plants and make fertilizer then you need even more dirt from your polluted water. Maybe you don’t need 60 plants and can get away with 35-40? It’s still likely a hair’s more polluted water than you have. Although, I encourage you to check the geyser’s output. I could be wrong.

I guess regolith is in no short supply. It’s close though. A sieve processing 10kg/s needs 600kg of filtration medium a day! And the meteor showers are once every 10 days, right? So, that’s 700-1000kg per day. Plus, you lose some regolith if it stacks funny. That’s tight. But, not so much if you get down to 40 plants.

Oh. Puft count. Damn  . Forgot about that. The premise behind my 25% recommendation is it’s “a bit high on the puft count”. You’d need nearly 3 pufts per dupe if you go the pacu route!! That’s not reasonable. I guess I still recommend the cooking option

[Neotuck]

3 minutes ago, Nickerooni said:

Fertilizer is used to double the growth rate on plants. If you have 60 plants and make fertilizer then you need even more dirt from your polluted water.

It actually brings down the overall cost of dirt for sleet wheat by about 25% average, if you include automation to stop your farms when all your refrigerators are full of grain 

6 minutes ago, Nickerooni said:

It’s still likely a hair’s more polluted water than you have. Although, I encourage you to check the geyser’s output. I could be wrong.

First slush geyser calculated average: 2584.40g/s

Second slush geyser calculated average: 1808.29g/s

First infected PW geyser calculated average: 2337.22g/s

Second infected PW geyser calculated average: 2242.64g/s

total PW 8972.55g/s

while I realize this isn't enough alone I do have lots of other PW sources that can easily bring the total over 10kg/s able to keep 2 sieves running nonstop

I also compost meat, raw eggs, and LOTS of bristle berries (all that extra clean water needs to go somewhere) 

15 minutes ago, Nickerooni said:

And the meteor showers are once every 10 days, right?

there is a downtime that can last about 10 cycles yes, however during the active periods there is a meteor shower almost every cycle

16 minutes ago, Nickerooni said:

Oh. Puft count. Damn  . Forgot about that. The premise behind my 25% recommendation is it’s “a bit high on the puft count”. You’d need nearly 3 pufts per dupe if you go the pacu route!! That’s not reasonable. I guess I still recommend the cooking option

if you keep the pacu wild you don't need to feed them algae, and still get plenty of eggshells and meat from them to make it worthwhile 

[JDL]

I've been running the numbers on these methods to help me decide which is best.

 

Method 1: Composting

How much return do you get on composting food into dirt? Is it kilo for kilo?

If it is, then by my calculation, feeding composters with bristle berries and raw eggs would net 1kg of dirt per 75kg of water to grow a bristle berry, and a happy hatch produces one egg each 6 cycles, so 3,600kg of raw mineral per 1kg of dirt.

I don't see a more efficient way to boost this ratio, so I'd call this one too inefficient to consider given sleet wheat costs 12.5kg of dirt per meal.produced. Devoting the entire output of 2 steam vents to composting bristle berries returns just 20kg of dirt per cycle. It seems to mostly just be a method to dispose of excess water and get a marginal return.

 

Method 2: Water Sieve

Mostly seems to be limited by access to renewable water, and costs 5kg of sand for every 1kg of polluted dirt produced. 

I've assumed a lower end scenario map with a bare bones number of geysers for this purpose

Two cool steam vents at 1.25kg/s each (total 1,500kg per cycle)

One natural gas geyser at 90 g/s

1 oil reservoir

If you run natural gas generators from your geyser, converting the gas to energy, polluted water and carbon dioxide, then cycle the carbon dioxide through a carbon skimmer for even more polluted water, you could ideally get an average return of 142.5g/s polluted water from 90g/s of natural gas. That's 85.5kg of polluted water per cycle, returning 3.4kg of polluted dirt per cycle.

We also a total of 1,500kg of water per cycle from our steam vents that isn't used yet. How can we use this clean water per cycle to most efficiently produce more dirt? What if we pumped it into an oil well?

Since an oil well can accept a maximum of 600kg of water per cycle, and we're assuming we only have one on our map, we trade 600kg of our water for 2,000kg of crude oil and 20 kg of natural gas. Heat the crude oil directly into petroleum, giving 2,000kg per cycle of petroleum.

From here, pump the petroleum into petroleum generators to create 500kg of carbon dioxide and 750kg of polluted water per cycle. Recycling the carbon dioxide through carbon skimmers creates an extra 1,666.6kg of polluted water. The total output of 2,416.6kg of polluted water per cycle could be sieved to produce a theoretical 96.6kg of dirt, and adds 750kg of clean water per cycle to our total.

So consuming the outputs of both a natural gas geyser and one oil well to produce 100% power, dirt and clean water, we would produce exactly 100kg of dirt per cycle.

Lastly, we have an excess of 1735.5kg of clean water after taking away 600kg for our oil pump, and 20kg per cycle of natural gas from the oil pump too. Directly feeding 100% of this water into bristle blossom production at 75kg of water per 1kg of composted dirt returns 23.14kg of dirt per cycle. And finally, the squirt of natural gas from the oil pump, fed through our natural gas generators, returns an extra 1.26kg of dirt.

So all together, we achieve a production of 124.4kg of dirt per day. That's 0.6kg per day short of feeding 10 duplicants on 100% sleet wheat.

 

tl;dr - Two cool steam vents, one natural gas geyser and one oil reservoir can provide enough dirt to support nearly 10 duplicants' worth of sleet wheat.

[yoakenashi]

Hi all. I haven’t crunched the numbers, but I made a very large sleet wheat farm in the the last world I played. The only way I could produce enough dirt was to sieve for polluted dirt and then compost that. I normally had 2-3 sieves running constant. It was very sustainable as my regolith stores kept increasing. I was running that way for a few hundred cycles - though they started to adjust regolith numbers at that time.

The problem I started running into was limits on my water. I was consuming so much water in my electrolyzers and sleet wheat hydroponic tiles, that I started taking some of the excess polluted dirt and offgassing it to polluted oxygen and making clean LOX to lessen the burden on my electrolyzers.

Unfortunately I did crunch some numbers for the sieve-offgas-LOX combination and I would need an absurd number of sieves to cover my current oxygen needs. In my current world I have water shortages just keeping up with my electrolyzers - so no hydroponic tiles for me

[Coolthulhu]

6 hours ago, Neotuck said:

total PW 8972.55g/s

That's incredibly good RNG, like that time when I had 4 metal volcanos. Vast majority of games will not have anywhere near that much, meaning that your build can't be replicated without shenanigans.

[Iriswaters]

14 hours ago, Nickerooni said:

  Carbon skimmer and power plants werent worth an honorable mention, in my mind, since the amount you can do sustainably is far less. They’re great temporary sources. Where “temporary” is still longer than a game of ONI lasts

They get more sustainable, and have greater output, as the game goes on.

In late game it becomes possible to pump water into an oil well(1kg/s),for crude oil(3.3kg/s), then cook that into sour gas, and cool it back into methane/natural gas.  3kg/s of natural gas is enough to run 30 natural gas generators.  A single natural gas generator produces 22.5g/s CO2 which translates to 75 g/s, or 45 kg/day polluted water from the carbon skimmer.    Per natural gas generator.  Just tapping the 2 free geysers on most maps will get you ~2 generators running constantly.   
 
Just from the geysers you get enough to cover 2 dupes using off-gasing->puft->slime cooking.  Not a lot, but when you are running 10 sustainably the carbon skimmers are a bit more noticeable.

Of course it's all moot if you have even one cool slush or polluted water geyser.

[Neotuck]

5 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

Unfortunately I did crunch some numbers for the sieve-offgas-LOX combination and I would need an absurd number of sieves to cover my current oxygen needs. In my current world I have water shortages just keeping up with my electrolyzers - so no hydroponic tiles for me

Pdirt off-gases very little PO2

if you have access to regolith better to switch to PW bottles as they off-gas at least 10 times faster than Pdirt, use deodorizers instead of a LOX machine to save power

[Neotuck]

7 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

That's incredibly good RNG, like that time when I had 4 metal volcanos. Vast majority of games will not have anywhere near that much, meaning that your build can't be replicated without shenanigans.

admittedly it's the best map I have found so far, in addition to all the free PW I also have a gold volcano, chlorine vent, water geyser in the oil biome, and 2 NG vents

also over a third of the map is ice biomes and found almost 40 wheezeworts

[fishoutofwater]

anyone wants to share how to cool down the dirt for sleet wheat?

[Bedna]

I just build 1 or 2 greenhouses around the areas with most wild sleet and don't disturb the biome so I wont have to hustle with cooling and delivering anything other than fertelizer.
I never ever run out of pepper bread with only one extra room for pepper plants where I also house dreckos. Hydroponic farms that are "phosporized" with an automatic arm thingie from above.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

I am suprised nobody mentioned the elephant in the room: you can cook fertilizer into dirt.

So that means an input of 65g of dirt, some polluted water and phosphorite, and getting 120g of dirt in return after boiling it to 125°C. 39g of polluted water and 26g of phosporite therefore net you 55g of dirt (and 10g of natural gas).

[Sasza22]

6 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

So that means an input of 65g of dirt, some polluted water and phosphorite, and getting 120g of dirr in return.

That forms a tile which you have to dig out granting you 60g in the end. It was discussed many times. It`s not worth.

3 hours ago, fishoutofwater said:

anyone wants to share how to cool down the dirt for sleet wheat?

Best cooling method for dirt is stroing it in cool water. Requires you to have a cold water pool but since you are cooling the water already you might as well store excess in a pool.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

7 minutes ago, Sasza22 said:

That forms a tile which you have to dig out granting you 60g in the end. It was discussed many times. It`s not worth.

Best cooling method for dirt is stroing it in cool water. Requires you to have a cold water pool but since you are cooling the water already you might as well store excess in a pool.

We have autominers now. Yes, it does require a dig errand from time to time, but I think concerning efficiency of resources, this is worth it. Even when halving it.

 

Btw, can't we force state changes inside compactors?

 

EDIT: I made a mistake in my calculation. The net benefit does not half, it's the total yield. So if it would turn into a tile it would only net -5g. So that's indeed low yield. Question remains though if we can force the state change inside a compactor, therefore keeping it from becoming a tile.

[Sasza22]

2 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

this is worth it. Even when halving it.

65g dirt changes into 60g of dirt. I`m not sure how is this worth anything unless i`m missing something. Autominers delete half of the mass while mining as well iirc.

4 minutes ago, ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy said:

can't we force state changes inside compactors?

Actually i`m not sure what happens when it changes to dirt in a compactor. Guess i`ll need to test that.

[chemie]

I think dirt should come back from space but they still need to address the issue that you only get 3 cargo containers which yields nothing.  Fix sustainable for:

wolframite ( for tungsten)

steel (retrieve fossils)

dirt (sustainable wheat)

I also think a PW/slush geyser should be mandatory; I would gladly swap a NG geyser for PW geyser.  Dups shower/toilet do not even produce enough PW for cover peppers for food espresso so PW sustainability would be nice too.

[ToiDiaeRaRIsuOy]

1 minute ago, chemie said:

I think dirt should come back from space.  They still need to address the issue that you only get 3 cargo containers which yields nothing but lack of sustainable:

wolframite ( for tungsten)

steel (retrieve fossils)

dirt (sustainable wheat)

I also think a PW/slush geyser should be mandatory; I would gladly swap a NG geyser for PW geyser.  Dups shower/toilet do not even produce enough PW for cover peppers for food espresso so PW sustainability would be nice too.

Yes. A single slush geyser ups your sustainability by a huuuge lot. Water is the single most important resource; a slush geyser gives that plus extroadinary cooling. I'd also like to see atleast one slush geyser mandatory.