Endless Dirt?

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Yeraze

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Jul 29, 2019
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So I've got a railcraft high pressure boiler running, burning planks from a Forestry Tree Farm + TE Sawmill setup, which is getting Humus from a Forestry Wheat Farm -> Compost -> Humus setup. So it's pretty much self-sustaining, except for Dirt. I need a steady supply of dirt for Compost and humus.

Anyone know a clever way to get an unlimited supply of dirt? I came up with an unlimited Sand supply using an Igneous Extruder connected to a Pulverizer, piped into my TE induction furnace.. Hoping there's something similar that results in Dirt.
 
There is one way to make 8 blocks out of 8+item, but it requires the carpenter with water, and the item is mulch.

Basically, you can make both the humus and the peat with carpenters.
If you run twice as much peat farms as you do for tree farms, it will be self sufficient, and you will even be able to burn the peat in your boiler.

As for mulch, you can either use a moistener or squeeze apples, the first solution being the most reliable.


If you don't want that, then I think the rock crusher has dirt as output somewhere, and minium stones can also help you transmute it from cobble or sand.
 
Set up a Peat Bog. It uses four dirt, four sand, and one water cell / capsule / can / bucket (you get the bucket back) to produce 8 (the bucket may be 6; I don't remember) bog earth. Each bog earth, when the peat is harvested with a Turbary, becomes one dirt. So effectively it's 4 dirt and 4 sand for 6 dirt, using the bucket recipe. The other recipes you lose the tin, but with the bucket you get the bucket back. Run the bucket into a liquid transposer hooked up to an aqueous accumulator, then back into an autocrafting table's adjacent chest.

Since you already have infinite sand, that extra cost of 4 sand isn't a big deal. So voila. Free dirt. And you get some peat while you're at it. I'd use some of that to power peat engines to run the peat bog. Just run it on its own peat :)
 
I actually tried the Mulch method (although there's still a need for dirt), but I wasn't able to automate the moistener (It was the whole reason for the Wheat farm in the first place).. Tried redpower & buildcraft, and neither seemed able to pull the Mulch out (although I hear now that it's possible, just a bit bugged and slow). SO I switched to Compost since a single wheat farm makes a ridiculous amount of wheat.

The plantball idea seems doable, maybe I'll try that.

I honestly don't even need this anymore, I just want to see if I can get it working and if a single tree farm will generate enough planks to keep my 3x3x4 High pressure boiler going. I managed to find enough spawners in the Nether to get a Tier5 blaze spawner in the overworld, and now I'm burning Blaze Rods in the furnace to great results!
 
The moistener is a little special to automate, sure, but with the wiki for what side accepts/ejects what, and clever use of gates and pipe wires, you can get it to work just fine.

Sure, it's quite a job, but you also get mycelium as a byproduct, if you are interested by it.
 
My problem with the moistener was that I used a Manager to ensure it always had 64 wheat in it, to keep it busy. But apparently after doing some research, you can only automatically pull out Mulch with Buildcraft pipes (Redpower won't pull it out at all, or at least I couldn't get it to with any combination of Managers, Retrievers, or Filters on any side) and only when all the other products are gone (which wouldn't happen as long as my Manager was running).
 
I just thought of a hilarious way around this:

The squeezer will occasionally burp up mulch if you pass in apples. You can draw out the mulch with liquid pipes pretty easily (and for bonus hilarity, use the apple juice to make biomass), then pass it into the carpenter, and so on.

Although I have no idea if your tree farm produces enough apples for that.

Also, you might be able to take advantage of an odd feature of both Redpower and Buildcraft: neither of them will fill a full inventory if there is another way through the pipes.
 
Icarus White said:
I just thought of a hilarious way around this:

The squeezer will occasionally burp up mulch if you pass in apples. You can draw out the mulch with liquid pipes pretty easily (and for bonus hilarity, use the apple juice to make biomass), then pass it into the carpenter, and so on.

Although I have no idea if your tree farm produces enough apples for that.
Click to expand...
It does not... now, but once tree breeding is a bit more polished you can breed trees to give you MUCH more apples.
 
Chrono said:
It does not... now, but once tree breeding is a bit more polished you can breed trees to give you MUCH more apples.
Click to expand...
I'm wondering: Will all the bred trees be compatible with treefarms from forestry and from steve's carts?
 
Yeraze said:
My problem with the moistener was that I used a Manager to ensure it always had 64 wheat in it, to keep it busy. But apparently after doing some research, you can only automatically pull out Mulch with Buildcraft pipes (Redpower won't pull it out at all, or at least I couldn't get it to with any combination of Managers, Retrievers, or Filters on any side) and only when all the other products are gone (which wouldn't happen as long as my Manager was running).
Click to expand...

I was wondering how you had difficulty with the moistener- I ran mine in 1.4.2 with no redpower. A simple redstone engine pulled out the mulch no problem.
 
Evil Hamster said:
I was wondering how you had difficulty with the moistener- I ran mine in 1.4.2 with no redpower. A simple redstone engine pulled out the mulch no problem.
Click to expand...
I did that in 1.2.5 as well.. But in the DW20 pack, I couldn't get it to work until I pulled out all the wheat and it finished with all the decayed stuff. Then it would finally pull it all out.
 
Plantballs can be made from a variety of materials, including wheat, so if you go that route you won't have to build any new farms.
 
Evil Hamster said:
Will bees corrupt my silverwood trees? I inadvertently set up a couple apiaries near the one in front of my house...
Click to expand...

Silverwood trees are ignored.[DOUBLEPOST=1357858963][/DOUBLEPOST]
MilConDoin said:
I'm wondering: Will all the bred trees be compatible with treefarms from forestry and from steve's carts?
Click to expand...

They won't be compatible with the old farms, only with the (not yet released) new ones.
 
Another solution if you want to completely automate it without needing the dirt would be to set up a Steve Carts tree farm. A little more complicated to set up but it's a possible solution. Or as MilconDoin mentioned, you can go the plantball -> macerator route if you'd rather stick to forestry's tree farm (not that I can blame you, I've loved Forestry since I first started using it (1.7.3? I forget how long ago it was..)
 
Sengir said:
Silverwood trees are ignored.[DOUBLEPOST=1357858963][/DOUBLEPOST]

They won't be compatible with the old farms, only with the (not yet released) new ones.
Click to expand...


That's good to know. I checked and none of the trees in the area look like they've changed (extrabiomes autumn woods biome) so it looks like you won't be modifying any other mod trees?

t would be kind of cool if you could but probably a programming nightmare. I just want my silverwood left alone because I chose my home specifically to have a view of it :)
 
Evil Hamster said:
That's good to know. I checked and none of the trees in the area look like they've changed (extrabiomes autumn woods biome) so it looks like you won't be modifying any other mod trees?

t would be kind of cool if you could but probably a programming nightmare. I just want my silverwood left alone because I chose my home specifically to have a view of it :)
Click to expand...
*warfighter67 imagines a tree which produces aura nodes, that's extremely tall, and has a 3x3 base
 
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