Sewage treatment and trash recycling system

Started by Starkiller, October 07, 2013, 06:34:18 PM

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Starkiller

Thinking about life on a distant exoplanet has come to my mind that the colonists are still humans (maybe only some of them, and only temporaly) so they need a functioning sewage collection and disposal system; besides treating waste represents also an opportunity for increasing the total biomass available (which has numerous other uses aside for traditional farming), so what the community thinks about adding some sewer building? Also including a trash disposing and recycling system would be a nice touch or not?

AspenShadow

Quite a nice touch indeed, agreed. I think this idea (might actually have been you lol) has been brought up briefly a couple times on disjointed threads, but the idea of recycling the waste from the Dump Zones is something I'd really like to see.

When the hygiene system is more developed than "Carried Dirt: Sand x2" lol or more basic needs are added to colonist so they can excrete rather than just store it up somewhere in their digestive tract with a cork, I think looking into this would be really important to overall gameplay.

Sewage and animal waste being used as fertiliser is a tradition that's been around since the earliest civilizations and if you were starving on a not-very-fertile Rimworld you'd want to get the best harvest possible.

Hypolite

For me, a recycling system would be fine. Recycling debris, corpses, etc... would add to the game. But a trash system? I'm not sure a story where the main character regularly take out the trash is as interesting.

There are games that make a better use of the subject.

Spike

Yeah, I had tossed some comments out on this idea, over in the Brainstorm: Buildable Future Content thread.  I could see some limited work to the idea, although a fully functioning sewage creation & disposal system would be too much.  Heck, Dwarf Fortress doesn't even go into that detail! :P

Quote
Trash Compactor - reduces debris size, now you can fit more trash into your Dumping Area!
Recycling unit - some debris might have parts that can be re-used.  +x metal (or other resources if added).
Compost unit - organic garbage might be re-purposed as fertilizer (negative happy thoughts if pirate/colonist bodies are used, animals are ok).
Incinerator - completely remove some types of garbage (pirate bodies no prob, colonist bodies maybe cause a slight negative reaction).

Zeiph

Maybe you can use the compactor to make walls of trash (very efficient agains trash raiders)

Spike

That's not a bad idea.  Maybe use the "compacted debris" as a resource to make sandbags, instead of metal.

AspenShadow

Quote from: Spike on October 08, 2013, 12:41:10 PM
That's not a bad idea.  Maybe use the "compacted debris" as a resource to make sandbags, instead of metal.

I really don't think that's feasible with the engine and coding he's already got set-up. He'd have to either add certain trash-types to the resource bin while excluding those that aren't usable, or he'd have to make the game recognise that compacted trash can be treated as metal but remove the possibility for that metal to be added to Metal (1) in the colony stockpile and then only usable for a trash wall.

Starkiller

Sewer pipes are similar to electric conduits (already in the game), connet on one end to toilets and the other to a black water tank; so you have a simple sewage system. Add some other thing like a "Hi-Tech something purifier" for clean water reclamation and maybe a few "algae-vats" for food or biomass production ; then you have a waste disposal/recycling system. Otherwise you can simply dump it somewhere. A grey water removal system maybe is an overcomplication, so the showers (for health and morale) could be linked to the sewer.