What to do with so much gravel?

My fellow survivors,

I seem to have a gravel storage problem. I recently was able to make a large mining ship, and it works quite well. The only issue so far is all of the gravel I get while attempting to get to the good stuff. I normally grind my way in so that I am close to the targeted resource, but I find I still manage to get myself an ungodly amount of gravel.

So my question for you fine men and women is this: What do you do with your excess gravel?

I have tried to simply flush my gravel away but at this point I have 2 large containers filled with the stuff and I can't spend all day putting the stuff into a connector to be thrown out.

 

I'm not positive and could very well be misremembering a previous thread I read about the same subject, but you may want to ask in the "In-Game Programming Discussion" area. I believe someone stated that with using programmable blocks you could either have your drills ignore stone after you have a certain amount or have the stone automatically go to your connector and eject while keeping the other items. As I said my memory is foggy on the exact wording or even the thread name.

If you want to use mods then from what I've seen this one will work for you "https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=321588701&searchtext=inventory+sorting". This one is pretty neat, and I can see it being made part of vanilla eventually (though that's just a guess).

An inelegant short term work around would be to put all your trash in 1 or 2 cargo containers, go into your control panel and shut of the conveyor system for the cargo containers that have items you want to keep, set your connector to collect all and throw out, then walk away from your computer for several hours or just do it before you go to bed so it'll be done by the time you wake up.


EDIT: Maybe not something you want to do, but when experimenting with making a gravity gun I noticed that using 9 connectors (3x3 rows) it does not take very long to empty 2 cargo containers full of stone. Although for my computer (which is old) there was some noticeable lag when 2 large cargo containers full of stone where floating in space, although that could have been the physics calculations of the gravity generators keeping all that stone in one place.

 

With thrash removal on, fill up the largest container you can build, detach it, and send it towards the sun. For a surprise, grind the container once you get it to coasting speed .

EDIT: ninja'd by the edit.

 

Or do what Maegil says but point it towards another player's ship first

 

GRIEFER! :rof:

 

I eventually just installed these two mods and now build portions of my asteroid base out of concrete blocks.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=303959338
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=309015149

 

Fill a secondary ship with all stone and or gravel, aim its connector at the sun and eject all.

Otherwise you could build a large cargo on your base with a conveyor and connector, fill it with rocks, grind down the conveyor tube to insulate it from the main network and eject all. Rebuild the conveyor tube when necessary.

 

weaponisation, put small ship medium cargo bay in torpedo and fill with stacks of 100 kg gravel

torpedo break, medium cargo bay break, enemy ship break more

 

There is also a nice mod that add two more refiners... both can further rework the gravel (i.e. creating minerals out of it). Output isn't very high (which is good, otherwise it would be a balancing issue), but so you can use up the gravel in a useful and industrial way. I'm currently at work though, can't say for sure how the mod is named...

 

If it's the one I'm thinking of, I've been using a locally modded version of it myself. Fewer blocks, changed models and halved output.

'Obsidian Furance' or something like that. Definately was Obsidian something...

 

I've had fun building gravity cannons, which fire large amount of rocks/gravel.. but I am wondering the same thing.

Is there an actual use for stone/gravel engineering wise? (ignoring the fact that engineers like to blow stuff up)

And indeed.. there are several scripts rotating, which should do some cargo management (so you could eject all unwanted materials automatically)

 

I've been holding off on concrete block modes hoping that the next weekly update will have them in the core game. That's my #1 feature request, just because there isn't a single SE player who isn't bogged down with gravel right now and your only two options are gravity cannons and dumping.

Seems strange that the most common material in the game doesn't have some sort of production block attached to it. It shouldn't compete with steel in performance, but it doesn't have to be useful.

 

I also hope for concrete (armor) blocks in the vanilla game. Until then, OP can add an array of ejectors to a small cargo ship. Load the ship with stone/gravel and set the ejectors to [Collect All] and [Throw Out]. Dumping speed is proportional to the number of ejectors.

 

Thank you for the valuable suggestions, my fellow survivors.

I went ahead with one suggested and downloaded that code for disposal of stone via connectors. I would like to thank that person in particular for this guidance, I might have to look into using more coding.

 

I tend to build a separate storage container at my bases which isn't connected to the conveyor system and has some sort of ejection system combined with gravity to get rid of the stone.

As I fly in with the mining ship I make a quick stop at this container, dump the stone, and then hook up to the main system. That way I avoid wasting any uranium on actually refining the stuff, and you can leave the ejectors firing pretty much non-stop.

 

Gravel->Concrete mod is something I'd definitely like to see become vanilla some time soon. Seems like a great way to build durable bases, if nothing else.

Otherwise, there's ...

 

I wouldn't mind adding a gravel component to the blast door blocks. They don't exactly look to be made out of solid steel plates anyway.

As for what to use it for now? I really don't know... make some crunchy candies maybe?

 

Reactor components.