Best way to replenish dirt in multi farm

[griffin0991]

So I have 2 of the new multiblock forestry farms going for saplings/apples and i'm running into an issue with supplying enough dirt. I've probably gone through 8 barrels of dirt in the last couple days.

I looked around and saw that Peat farms give dirt but after some testing it looks like it takes 2 peat farms to keep up with 1 tree farm.

Are there any other good ways to create dirt other than Peat farms/quarry?

 

[trunksbomb]

Look into plant balls from IC2, there are several ways to get those. A slime shard being a notably easy and fast way to do so.

 

[Whovian]

If you're in DW20, an Autocrafting Table with a Minium Stone (or a Philosopher's Stone if you're in Creative) in both the table and an adjacent chest let you convert Sand into Dirt. Sand's pretty easy to get, just Macerate/Pulverize Cobble.

 

[griffin0991]

I'm using the mindcrack pack. I had looked at plant balls but didn't think id be able to make enough of them to keep up with the demand for dirt, but i'll do some testing and see what happens.

 

[Whovian]

Well, if you don't have any other use for your Saplings, that should be 4 saplings / dirt, so if the kind of trees you're farming produce at least 5 saplings per tree, you're good.

Though, looking at the OP, you want Saplings. Which means you'll need some fairly sapling-producing Trees to produce enough Dirt. Or some other kind of farm, a Slime Shard should be enough.

 

[trunksbomb]

You'll more than be able to keep up with a higher tier slime shard.

 

[griffin0991]

Alright I think I've figured out what i'm going to do. I"ll continue to run my two multi-block farms for wood/saplings/apples. But, on the side i'll have a fir tree farm (harvested by a filler) just for saplings, and ill use these for to create 2x plant balls for every 8 fir saplings. I did run into a slight problem of restarting the filler after a new tree has grown but I found that you can pump out the first glass block in the "clear" recipe out the top of filler and then loop it back in to restart it. Now, there was a slight issue with that in that the glass would stack, so I enchanted the first glass block with a book on an anvil and that kept it from stacking onto the other 8 glass blocks.

I'm missing out on the wood from the fir tree by going this route but i've been getting way more than I need from the other 2 farms.

 

[b0bst3r]

It doesn't take 2 peat bog farms to keep up with 1 arboretum, maybe what you don't know is on the peat bog farm you don't need all the default water holes. One water hole covers a 5x5 area (2 all around the water hole), so fill in appropriately and the farm will then take over, the best layout I found is attached on the screenshot below and that's for a max size peat farm.



By filling in the extra un-needed holes you increase output.

 

[griffin0991]

When I tested it I had about 65 sand from the tree farm and only 27 dirt from the peat farm, so unless filling the extra water holes makes 2x the difference I don't think 1 peat farm could supply enough dirt. I could be wrong, this is my first go at the multi-block farms so if there's something else I should try please let me know.