Sustainable Dirt Options?

[Manxome]

I'm currently feeding my colony with pepper bread, cooked from domesticated sleet wheat. (default starting asteroid, no DLC)

My farm consumes dirt at about 330 kg/cycle. (Some of that is for fertilizer, but fertilizer increases output more than it increases dirt usage, so this is a net savings.) I've got a bit less than 10 tons of dirt on hand, so I'm in danger of running out in about 30 cycles.

Obviously, I could switch to other foods, but none of equal quality, so I'm looking at options for producing dirt.

===Arbor Trees===
Most recommendations seem to involve using arbor trees to either ranch pips or run ethanol distillers. However, the default asteroid has no arbor trees (AFAICT) and I haven't been offered any from the printing pod. So for now, this seems to be off the table.

(I do have 2 pips from the printing pod, though.)

===Cooking Fertilizer===
The wiki suggests that the fertilizer synthesizer can be a renewable source of dirt, because fertilizer turns into dirt when heated to 125 C. However, when I searched for examples of this, I instead found a bunch of people saying it doesn't work, because the fertilizer turns into a solid dirt tile, and then you lose 50% of the mass when mining it. Since the fertilizer synthesizer uses 65g dirt to produce 120g fertilizer, losing half the mass makes the entire process net-negative.

===Balm Lilies===
Balm lilies requires no inputs to grow, even when domesticated, and their flowers can be composted into dirt.

However, it looks like this would require literally thousands of balm lily plants to produce the amount of dirt I need. This poses several challenges, but I think the biggest problem is that I'm not sure where I'll scrounge up enough chlorine. (Balm lilies don't consume chlorine, but they need to be immersed in chlorine in order to grow, and growing that many plants would mean saturating a huge area.)

The only way to produce chlorine seems to be with rust (not found on this asteroid type) or from a chlorine geyser (which I haven't found so far, although there's still a few places left to look).

===Water Sieves===
Sieving polluted water into clean water produces a little bit of polluted dirt, but only equal to 4% of the polluted water's mass, so I'd need around 330 * 25 ~= 8 tons of polluted water per cycle, which doesn't sound viable.

Boiling polluted water is even less efficient for producing dirt (1% according to wiki).

===Puft Ranching===
Polluted water -> polluted oxygen -> pufts -> slime -> heat into dirt

Best I can tell, the overall mass efficiency here is 47.5%, which is a LOT more dirt than you'd get from a water sieve. (100% pwater into po2, 95% po2 into slime, 100% slime into dirt tile, 50% of dirt preserved when digging it out)

This requires a lot of complicated infrastructure (first to get the polluted water to off-gas fast enough, then the puft ranch itself (labor-intensive), then the apparatus for cooking the slime into dirt) but would only require ~700kg/cycle of polluted water as input, which seems possible. I just found a polluted water vent; haven't analyzed its dormancy period yet, but it outputs 2800kg/cycle when not dormant, so that would probably cover it even after taking dormancy into account.

Based on numbers from the wiki I'd need around 16 pufts? And I suppose this would give me a head start at setting up oxylite production for later.

Still, not a small undertaking.

===Rocketry===
I haven't started my space program yet; I'm skeptical I could get any results soon enough to be relevant to my current issue. (I also haven't crunched the numbers to see how much dirt one could actually get this way.)

===Wild "Farm"===
I could use my 2 pips to start building a "farm" of wild sleet wheat that can grow without dirt. I haven't actually used pips before but I think I understand how to do this. Seems like it might take a quite while to equal the output of my current farm.

EDIT: I overlooked an important detail here: Wild sleet wheat takes 72 cycles to mature. Making a bigger farm improves average output but won't get the first crop any sooner. So even if I do this, I also need to do something else as an interim solution.


Am I missing anything noteworthy?

[Atrophus]

Your best bet would be pip wild planting. You just neerd four times the plants and dont have to pay anything (except cooling)

[AlexMBrennan]

so I'd need around 330 * 25 ~= 8 tons of polluted water per cycle, which doesn't sound viable.

That isn't quite correct - you need to *pollute* 8 tons of water per cycle through showers, sinks, CO2 scrubbers, etc. I think that you would need approximately 4 petroleum generators.

[Manxome]

Originally posted by Atrophus:

Your best bet would be pip wild planting. You just neerd four times the plants and dont have to pay anything (except cooling)

Unless I continue using fertilizer on the wild farm, then I actually need 8 times the plants, and around 27 times the physical space (due to pip planting limits).

And AIUI, I first need to somehow create "natural" tiles in all the spaces where I want something planted (probably using a glass maker to melt algae or phosphorite, with custom piping for every tile). And then I need to gradually shift walls around for every individual seed that gets planted to make the pips plant them in the correct order (or else I need to space them even farther apart).

But yes, in terms of ongoing costs that is clearly the ideal option.

[Manxome]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

so I'd need around 330 * 25 ~= 8 tons of polluted water per cycle, which doesn't sound viable.

That isn't quite correct - you need to *pollute* 8 tons of water per cycle through showers, sinks, CO2 scrubbers, etc. I think that you would need approximately 4 petroleum generators.

If I get the petroleum via the water -> Oil Well -> Oil Refinery pathway, then by my math my combined (water + polluted water) supply would still decrease by more than 1 ton per cycle (because the oil wells use up more water than the petroleum generators produce pwater).

Also that would require 5 oil reservoirs, but the wiki says there are only 1 to 3 per world. (I've found 2 so far.)

But yes, it's true that it's not a dead loss of 8 tons of pwater.

[Atrophus]

Well I feel 90% of my asteroid always ends up empty space cause I dont need excessive builds, and having like 200 sleet wheats takes relatively little of the whole map. Also, you can easily create natural tiles with doors wedged in tiles:

TDTDT...
TDTDT...
TTTTT...

Can be built in one go, then deconstruct the doors, they will turn to natural ore tiles which pips can plant upon.
Put ladder blueprints over all tiles and then deconstruct one by one as seeds get planted (BPs block pip planting)

[Atrophus]

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/110299-pip-planting-everything-you-need-to-know/
Check out this post, one of the easiest things to do in oni

[Manxome]

Originally posted by Atrophus:

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forums/topic/110299-pip-planting-everything-you-need-to-know/
Check out this post, one of the easiest things to do in oni

Already read.

Re: deconstructing doors, I'm concerned about using up 200kg of metal ore per natural tile. I don't think I currently have enough metal ore to do the whole farm that way even if I were willing to blow my whole stockpile (which I am definitely not willing to do).

(Also, since that thread is more than a year old and the "deconstructing a door" thing sounds like a bug, I wasn't sure whether that would still work.)

[AlexMBrennan]

If I get the petroleum via the water -> Oil Well -> Oil Refinery pathway, then by my math my combined (water + polluted water) supply would still decrease by more than 1 ton per cycle

Yes, we are converting water (which can easily be obtained from geysers) into dirt (which cannot easily be obtained from geysers).

[Atrophus]

I just did the door thing today, still works. Not a bug, an application of onis physics. Like liquid airlocks.
Also sounds like you need to excavate your asteroid more, there should be several hundred tons metal ore out there 😁

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Atrophus:

I just did the door thing today, still works. Not a bug, an application of onis physics. Like liquid airlocks.

It's definitely a bug. It isn't a liquid turning into a solid, and it isn't being vomited out by a shove vole, so there's no reason it ought to turn into a tile instead of debris like it normally does when deconstructed.

[Manxome]

Originally posted by Atrophus:

Also sounds like you need to excavate your asteroid more, there should be several hundred tons metal ore out there 😁

Which implies you are suggesting that I spend perhaps 25% of all the metal in the asteroid on this one room.

(Oni Assistant say that a fully-automated wild farm with the same output as my current farm should have ~360 plants; at 200kg a pop that's 72 tons. And that's before counting all the wires and conveyor belts and doors and stuff.)

[Jarcionek]

What about steel? It can be used instead of ores and is usually renewable - lime from egg shells, refined carbon from coal from ranching hatches, iron from volcano or meteorites.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Manxome:

Which implies you are suggesting that I spend perhaps 25% of all the metal in the asteroid on this one room.

The only reason you are trying to make this room is because you refuse to use cheaper food for your dupes. If you want to give them the best you're going to need to pay for it.

[Manxome]

Metal ore is roughly as renewable as steel (meteorites drop copper ore and gold amalgam, too). The issue isn't so much the maximum amount I can ever get as the amount I have right now, and right now steel is even more limited than ore.

[Manxome]

Originally posted by gimmethegepgun:

The only reason you are trying to make this room is because you refuse to use cheaper food for your dupes. If you want to give them the best you're going to need to pay for it.

...are you moralizing at me because you didn't like my cost/benefit analysis of a video game?