Composting rotten food?

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Would be nice to have something to do with all that rotten food. Composting would make everything you couldn’t shove down your gullet in the first few days actually useful.

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2

Composting into… dirt? It’s not exactly in short supply.

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3

Into fertilizer for growing crops. Compost is a bit more useful for farming than normal dirt lol. It can be used to make bad soil useful by providing nutrients that aren’t there.

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4

I could see some fertilizer expansion. A few variants of compost could be interesting. To create actually nourishing compost you need a healthy mix of eggshell, humus, rotting material. Biochar and dung from certain animals can also be used to modify it for better results. For humus you’ll want like 50% of it to be wood that can rot. A portion of this humus can be paper or coffee filters. Most of mine ends up being coffee grounds. Generally the caffeine will break down before making any sort of useful insecticide, but it could work.

Things that cannot compost:

  • citrus
  • meat (isn’t overly nourishing to the plant and often attracts animals you won’t want like raccoons)

Compost needs to be wetted and turned semi frequently.

I think for this to work best it would need to start probably as a mod and create a compost bin object, as well as several food waste objects (coffee grounds, egg shells, plant waste) that is produced alongside regular cooking (similar to leather scraps in tailoring). The bin would have a timer and could produce certain degrees of compost based on what’s fed into it. I think we could handwave the turning and wetting for the most part.

Would make for an interesting mod!

5

One way of composting would be to chuck everything into a biogas generator. These things can be made from simple bricks and some pipes. Than you can throw in pretty much any organic material that can rot (so anything other than bone and chitin). This than generates biogas that can be used as a energy source for cooking, electicity or further refined into things like methane. You also get a slurry out of it that is exelent fertilizer.

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