Suggestion: Organic Matter Synthesizer

    Description: What is the most common and most useless block in the game?


    Dirt...


    If your someone like me you just horde it up for filling in creeper holes and building temporary scaffolding.
    But why can't there be other uses for the mass quantities of dirt that are easily available? Dirt is after all mostly
    dead organic matter. With the high technology made available to us through Industrial Craft, I'd like to see a
    machine that can turn this dead, useless matter into other more useful organic materials. With a new machine,
    the Organic Matter Synthesizer, we could use dirt to make copies of organic items, such as mushrooms, wool, wood,
    bones, saplings, coal, and pork chops (no more pig hunting! :D ) Just throw the item you want a copy of in the machine,
    and a piece of dirt, add an ample supply of electricity, and voila! more useful items.


    I guess it might be good to be able to turn one organic item into another as well, but why waste a piece of wood turning
    it into a pork chop when you could just grab a piece of dirt. But hey, you never know.


    Recipe:


    Organic Matter Synthesizer:
    _M_
    DQD
    AEA


    _ = Nothing
    M = Macerator
    D = Diamond
    Q = Advanced Machine
    A = Advanced Circuit
    E = Extractor


    FInal Notes: I realize that this has the potential of being very imbalanced, hence the high cost of creating it.
    Other solutions could be needing to extract bio matter from dirt with the extractor or compressing dirt in the
    compressor and then extracting bio matter or something. Just thought it would be neat to have a use for dirt
    for a change, and a way to get more wood without having to chop endless trees and constantly hunt pigs.

    Three words: YES YES YES O.O Free Fertilizer! :D


    One thing I can never seem to rectify: Having to find and kill skeletons for bones and fertilizer, and yet dealing with creepers that spawn inside my workshops/bases. The anti-creeper side of me always wins, seeing as I'd rather NOT lose half my base to a TNT-sized explosion.


    This would definitely help in that issue. Also, making carpets out of wool would also become much easier.

    I would definitely have to say that I like the idea of a cheaper machine but more steps to preparing the dirt to bio-matter than I do the opposite. I can see this becoming a early priority when someone is starting on a new world also.

    Quote from Cubic Meter

    I would definitely have to say that I like the idea of a cheaper machine but more steps to preparing the dirt to bio-matter than I do the opposite. I can see this becoming a early priority when someone is starting on a new world also.

    I've always been a fan of the "do more now so i can do less later" philosophy. I'd actually rather have more expensive machines with less upkeep, but I suppose your right.
    Having more steps in the process would more adhere to Alblaka's set precedent. Industrial diamonds require more time in taking the steps to make them than they do
    in material costs, balancing it out quite nicely. I'd rather have an advanced uber-compressor that costs 50 diamonds, 27 obsidian, and 238 stone that compresses one coal
    to one diamond though. (not actually asking for that, just an exaggerated example :D )

    One of the things that I always liked about IC was that it created uses for otherwise useless materials that heaped up in standard minecraft (saplings -> biofuel, lapis -> ACs). So a better use for dirt (better than recycler) would probably be in the spirit of the game. However a more complicated process is probably needed to balance the benefits. Creating biomatter blocks with a compressor (8/9 dirt -> one block) and then extracting and converting the biomatter to a sample would probably be more balanced.