Best way to farm rot?

[Builder Bob]

Hey folks,

 

I haven't been able to find any of the top of the line dirt.  Instead, I'm looking to use rot to make composted soil.

 

Does anyone have recommendations on an efficient way to farm/gather material to rot?  I haven't found any so far.  I let my game meat rot but there's not a ton of that.

 

Thanks in advance!

[allstreets]

In my experience the quickest way if you're in a temperate climate is gathering berries and letting them rot in your bar and/or in a reed basket left outside. That being said it'll still take quite a while to fill a barrel with rot - the game just doesn't have a very realistic or terribly efficient way to make compost at this point.

[Windego]

Meat and berries for the early stages of the game. Like @allstreets said though, there technically isn't a set reliable way to making rot if you're in desperate need for better fertility farmland.. However, most common items you will probably have an abundance of is berries and meat.
This however comes from personal experience and it may vary for others.. But for me, I always have a large quantity of meat and berries at the ready, to even a point where I end up chucking it, Wolves for example always end up on the menu, including any stray hare or goat or boar that wanders in and isn't domesticated. And berries... Well, if you go exploring a lot to find certain resources or interesting places.. I tend to pick up a lot of berry bushes. Which are a massive income of berries by the time they all ripe, including an added income of bush-meat from raccoons.

[PhotriusPyrelus]

I think meat's probably better than berries.  Berries rot at an 8:1 ratio.  That's pretty awful.

[Kolyenka]

if you're looking for a high quantity of rot and have food to waste, meals produce a lot of rot (i just cleaned out a bunch of rotten bowls in my base and got 4 from each of them, tho idk if that's the only number you ever get or if it's a range). you might try making a porridge or soup or something, picking up all the servings, and then leaving it either outside in a reed basket or just sitting outside (whichever has faster rot time) until they're bowls of rot. and then toss 'em in water, let the rot float to the surface, and repeat.

obviously it's more labor intensive than just gathering berries/hunting, but it's how i get the majority of my rot.

[Saricane]

I use the flax grain from the flax farms. I turn them into doughs to make them rot quickly (you must have at least one mechanized quern to do that). And I collect meat from wolves or hyenas too, though this is a smaller income than flax.

[Maelstrom]

@Saricane That's a great idea.  I had stored up nearly obscene amounts of grains that I'll never use.

 

@Builder Bob Fruit spoils quickly but doesn't produce much rot when it does.  If you gather all the fruit bushes you come across, you'll come up with a huge fruit harvest; overcoming the low yield by huge volume.

[Troy]

I use eggs. They take a while to rot, but they're effortless to farm. Even a small flock of chickens will produce 5-10 eggs a day.

[maibock]

Eggs and bushmeat are perfect for rot farming, like Troy said, eggs are easy to obtain once a flock of chickens is bred up. Bushmeat is extremely easy to get since you'll bound to have fought a fair amount of wolves, or killed off raccoons threatening your farms.

[Omega Haxors]

Really your time is better spent looking for Terra Preta.
Rot isn't even remotely feasible to get in large quantities.

Edited December 1, 2021 by Omega Haxors

[Saricane]

2 hours ago, Omega Haxors said:

Really your time is better spent looking for Terra Preta.

This was true in 1.14, but since 1.15 we can use compost as an all purpose fertilizer and not only as a type of soil, it's worth producing some.

[Omega Haxors]

On 12/1/2021 at 10:18 AM, Saricane said:

This was true in 1.14, but since 1.15 we can use compost as an all purpose fertilizer and not only as a type of soil, it's worth producing some.

You can also buy it from agriculture traders too, so see if you can pass by one on the way.

[Muru]

On 11/6/2021 at 11:21 AM, Builder Bob said:

Hey folks,

 

I haven't been able to find any of the top of the line dirt.  Instead, I'm looking to use rot to make composted soil.

 

Does anyone have recommendations on an efficient way to farm/gather material to rot?  I haven't found any so far.  I let my game meat rot but there's not a ton of that.

 

Thanks in advance!

Composting isn't viable in VS unless you dedicate a certain amount of farmed crops to compost (Google "60 30 10 agriculture" for more info on how it's done in the real world). I'd think that the least labor intensive way of getting rot is through egg farming, like others in this thread have said. Though the best method in my opinion is farming pigs. Sows give birth to like 4 piglets at a time and multiply very, very, quickly. If you need a quick way of killing them, you can just aggro a few of your highest generation pigs to a secluded area, box them in, and then use pit kilns to kill the rest of your animals. After that just destroy the pit kilns and let in your high gen piggies back in. From experience I've gotten over 30 stacks of redmeat with gen 5 pigs giving birth, which is around 480 compost (240 high fertility soil) after 20d of sealing.

[Khornet]

If you really want rot, then the newly introduced fruit mash (obtained from squeezing juice out of fruit in the fruitpress) is amazing for farming rot - it spoils relatively fast, and you get 1 rot per 1 mash. You get 10 mash per 32 juiced fruit. Problem is, I have way too much wine now.
That being said, farming on medium fertility soil is efficient enough for farming IMO. However, compost itself is useful as an N fertilizer.

I am personally trying to figure out what to do with growing pumpkins that refused to mature... they take so long to spoil.

Edited February 16, 2022 by Jacob Kos