Best way to make dirt?

[Ghost_Ship_Supreme]

Should i cook slime, algae, or fertilizer?

Or is there a better way?

[JasonS]

One domesticated Arbor Tree can support a full ranch of Pips with a little Lumber to spare on the side.

If you don't have polluted water to spare you can ranch 3 pips with a wild arbor tree, the pips will plant it themselves if you put them in a room with an acorn and some natural tiles on the floor.

[Anedawar]

yea pips all the way

[AlexMBrennan]

Pips only produce a minuscule amount of dirt (20kg/cycle) but require dupe labour so you are better off using the lumber to make ethanol. One ethanol distillery produces 200kg polluted dirt/cycle and can be fully automated.

[JasonS]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

Pips only produce a minuscule amount of dirt (20kg/cycle) but require dupe labour so you are better off using the lumber to make ethanol. One ethanol distillery produces 200kg polluted dirt/cycle and can be fully automated.

To support an ethanol distiller you need 4 Composts, its not exactly free of manual labour, it also only converts 33% of the Lumber into Dirt. Compared to ~75% for Pips.

Now if you want the Ethanol for something, that's great, but if you only want Dirt then I think Pips is superior.

[Xilo The Odd]

as long as you got sand, slime, arbor trees n pips, there is always dirt to be made.

in a pinch you could let some of your food rot if you have a massive surplus but i dont think thats very effective for producing dirt.

[Angelo Dante]

That or build a pwater boiler using magma. Then sweep the dirt it leaves behind, and suck up the steam for the sauna.

[Silent_Shadow]

You can compost seeds for free dirt too.

To avoid the tedious task of manually selecting each seed for composting, just collect them in a storage bin and once you get so many, exclude the seed from the bin's list of allowed goods to dump all the seeds on the floor in one pile. This way you can designate even a hundred seeds with just a few clicks. Disclaimer: I have never tried this method so I cannot guarantee it, but I have read of others doing it.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Angelo Dante:

That or build a pwater boiler using magma. Then sweep the dirt it leaves behind, and suck up the steam for the sauna.

Using a water sieve creates more pdirt from a given amount of pwater than evaporation creates dirt, which can then be composted into regular dirt.

[Orpheus]

I recently started designing a power system where you drop in polluted water on top of the magma and create steam to power steam turbines. It makes more dirt and water than I know what to do with. Problem is to produce enough polluted water. So I started using brine and salt water too. Now I got more dirt and salt than I know what to do with. System I developed works too well. I use 9 rows of 4 steam turbines to line the bottom, with a pipe outlet per fluid per row, a drop and capture chamber under pipe outlets, and cooling tanks for the output hot water with radiant pipes. Then using conveyors and auto sweepers collect the dropped goods. I'm working on a blueprint model for 1 row so I can post it.

[Shame]

In the DLC you can also get dirt by taming the sulphur geyser and for max efficiency, feed the sulphur to sweetles, then feed the excreted sucrose to grubgrubs, which excrete mud, which can be used in the Sludge Press for a little over a third dirt and the rest water. Overall you get 60kg of dirt and 90kg of water per 300kg of sulfur. You can feed sulphur directly to grubgrubs, but they excrete a lot less mud from sulfur consumption as opposed to sucrose consumption, so you're just throwing away valuable material to conserve little space and effort with the sweetles at that point.