Dirt.....

[bacon]

So I currently have two Arboretums running to turn saplings into biomass/biofuel, however the biggest issue I'm having is supplying the amount of dirt needed for the humus.

I don't know much about any of the mods in the pack other than forestry/buildcraft but is there a way to actually make a surplus of dirt?

I suppose I could set up a quarry but not sure I want to marr the server with giant open pits at the moment.

 

[Lawbroken]

Mystcraft world just for quarry. It's how i can dirt/cobblestone for scrap.

Plus barrels hold 64 stacks of one item great for dirt and cobblestone storage =P

 

[bacon]

Mystcraft world just for quarry. It's how i can dirt/cobblestone for scrap.

Plus barrels hold 64 stacks of one item great for dirt and cobblestone storage =P

Yea barrels are pretty boss. Didn't know about Mystcraft. Time to learn, thanks.

 

[arkangyl]

You can Macerate a Plantball into 8 pieces of dirt. This could allow your forestry farms to generate their own dirt. Either 8 saplings, leaves, wheat, sugar cane, or seeds can be used to craft a Plantball.

 

[bacon]

You can Macerate a Plantball into 8 pieces of dirt. This could allow your forestry farms to generate their own dirt. Either 8 saplings, leaves, wheat, sugar cane, or seeds can be used to craft a Plantball.

Good to know that too, worth noting that 8 sticky resin into a centerfuge gives you plantballs and compressed plants. As well as a lot of rubber.

All the worlds I got in mystcraft were permanently drunkly spinning. After 8 ages I'm lost. I kept the symbols in a notebook, but it might be a while before I go back in there.

 

[Squigie]

Peat is another option. Farming it consumes sand for bog earth and outputs dirt. Burning peat also produces ash, which can be used to make fertilizer if you ever manage to run out of apatite. The peat bog and arboretum form a symbiotic relationship, unless you have little use for so much solid fuel.

 

[bacon]

Peat is another option. Farming it consumes sand for bog earth and outputs dirt. Burning peat also produces ash, which can be used to make fertilizer if you ever manage to run out of apatite. The peat bog and arboretum form a symbiotic relationship, unless you have little use for so much solid fuel.

I mean I suppose a peat engine but with the biomass.... the other thing is looking at it seems like you use 4 dirt per 8 bog earth still?

 

[potter]

You are essentially turning 4 sand into 4 dirt using the peat farm. Tree farms turns 8 dirt into 8 sand. Peat farms and a tree farms compliment each other well in that aspect. Add a wheat farm to that and you can make compost with wheat and dirt, negating the need for fertilizer.

 

[bacon]

I suppose using my math would've told me that more than just looking at the crafting recipe and considering what I had the most of.

 

[madaffacca]

Rubber and industrial centrifuge is my solution. The centrifuge gives you 2 plantball, 1 compressed plantball and 28 pieces of rubber every 8 piece of sticky resin you put in it. Macerate 1 plantball to get 8 blocks of dirt. You'll get 16 blocks of dirt every 8 pieces of rubber. Otherwise, just craft some plantball from other natural stuff (sugar canes is probably the best solution since you can easily automate a huge farm with almost no effort).

 

[Vauthil]

Crazy off-in-another-direction suggestion: If you have the iron, consider replacing your arboretum/logger combos with a Steve's Cart using the Wood Cutter tool, a Coal Engine, and a lot of storage. Once you've gotten one (or more) of these set up, the most difficulty you'll have in maintenance will be the logistics of ferrying over the materials for processing, as it'll run infinitum off of a small amount of the wood it harvests.

No more angsting over having to supply dirt again, although if you do the logistics right and also run a farmer (that can use a Solar Engine instead and just run during the day as wheat doesn't exactly get in the way like leaves/branches do) you can use the wheat to handle the other side of your supply chain in making biomass (wheat->plantball->(macerator)->dirt+more wheat=compost). As for all the wood... consider if you might find running some high pressure steam boilers useful, with a nice handy supply of charcoal right there. =)

Just a thought if you were interested in diverging from the Forestry method and maintenance.

(Additionally, if you didn't want to bother with the wheat farm at all, if you're using Oak you could run all the apples through the Squeezer for juice and mulch for the biomass process instead... juice produces 50% more biomass per sapling... I'm just not certain if this will have an appropriate equilibrium state doing it that way as I haven't tried it out myself yet).

 

[Gnomeo]

Forestry itself has another solution. If you set up all of Forestry's farms, they will be self-sufficient.

In this case, a Wheat Farm supplies wheat and seeds to a Moistener which produces mulch and mycelium. Mycelium is used in a Mushroom Farm to produce mushrooms with dirt as a by-product.

 

[Squigie]

Dirt can also be obtained by placing mycelium (or grass) in a Factorization grinder. Useful if you go the moistener route but don't need mushrooms.

 

[Jesp1999]

Mfr tree farm farms trees efficiently and provides sludge. Sludge may seem like some dangerous withering chemical but can be piped into a sludge boiler to produce clay, dirt, mycelium, salt, sand, soul sand, tainted soil, peat, heat sand, etc.. And as long as you power the mfr machines with eu, mj, or rf, it'll farm the trees and produce earthly byproducts like dirt!

 

[DaMueller]

Wow. Take a look at the date of the last post...

 

[Jesp1999]

Oh oops didnt notice, hard to see on mobile xD

 

[casilleroatr]

Corpses live in dirt. You can get dirt as a byproduct of farming necro posts

 

[ThatOneSlowking]

Oh oops didnt notice, hard to see on mobile xD

I can see perfectly on mobile...

 

[Strikingwolf]

I can see perfectly on mobile...

resist...or post the pic and add something meaningful to the discussion so that you can have your cake and eat it to

 

[YX33A]

I can see perfectly on mobile...

Says the man who post on his ipad as a mobile poster.