What I’m hoping to accomplish here is to create a composting heap for rotten foodstuffs to eventually turn them into a low-grade fertilizer for plants. My problem is that I don’t have the foggiest idea if I should start from scratch, using recipes, or create a piece of furniture like the charcoal kiln/fermenting vat to do this. (The fertilizer in question would be about 3/4ths as strong as liquid fertilizer and solid, rather than liquid.) I can handle adding the actual compost item.
Not sure if you can use only json coding for this. I think you will have to edit code. Look at the way fermentation is handled (I have no idea btw) and you are going to have to apply that to foodstuffs. And then add some conversion recipie to do rotting mass -> compost. Currently recipes accept both rotten and normal food without question. So if you want to force rotten food (not really needed imho, you can also compost good food) you will need to add code for that.