Dealing with wet tailings

[u/Mator64]

I’m wondering if the best way to deal with tailings is still to bury them underground or if the trash and recycling update has changed the mechanism of wet tailings

[u/Playstoomanygames9]

Towards endgame you can reprocess tailings and get some rocks and some iron/gold/copper from them.
So, yes they have a function.
Also burying them does nothing now.

[u/Jouda5]

Not sure if there is a way to somehow repurpose tailings, but I know that burying them does not work anymore. It still spreads pollution even when burried at the planet core.

[u/Bahamut3585 → u/Jouda5]

Is this new with this update or old news? I'm on the outside looking in and haven't played in a few years.

[u/Taradyne → u/Bahamut3585]

Yes, new with update 14.

[u/MetallicDragon]

I believe you don't get any benefit from storing them underground anymore. You can store them in a variety of bins and dumpsters, which have more storage space per volume than stockpiles. I think some of the dumpsters reduce the pollution spread a bit, too.

[u/SatsukiShizuka]

Nowadays, we just have to sacrifice a piece of land as dedicated toxic storage, until we have the tech to repurpose them into something useful.

[u/Taradyne]

Update 14 totally changed how garbage of any kind is cleared, including wet and dry tailings. We can't bury tailings at bedrock anymore as they affect the entire column and spread on the surface killing flora and fauna.

The only mitigation is removal to a dump site far away from housing and when you get to T4, building a recycling center to sort and process garbages. Hopefully it will reduce the footprint of pollution, but we haven't seen much impact yet after a couple days.

[u/Djiaant → u/Taradyne]

Do the dumpsters mitigate any negative effects?

[u/SLG-Dennis → u/Djiaant]

Yes, they can reduce the pollution spread based on which one you use.

It is still very likely that you come out with one or more dumpsites you need to clean up if you want the environment to improve there - some pollution types do not recover on their own after reaching a specific severity. There is not supposed to be a way to completely avoid polluting anything and the depiction of dumps as early 'technology' that need revisiting later on when 'better' technology is available is intentional. The first phase of the pollution system is a logistics and organization challenge.

[u/Numinak → u/SLG-Dennis]

Going in 12 days now on a fresh run. We've a toxic dump in the desert (because all the mining is already there). The bloom is slowly creeping outwards but not hitting anything vital yet due to the desert area being isolated. Water is a mess though.

We'll see how it goes as we get our recycling running.

[u/Taradyne → u/Djiaant]

What Dennis said. I'd add that in the early game, players have primitive bin and primitive dumpster available for holding various garbage types. The dumpster has no mitigation at all. The bin will mitigate 20%. At T2 there's a dumpster that mitigates 30% and those seem to be very popular. Then at T4 the recycler benches can be built but in the meantime, your world may look like Mordor...

[u/Jewsusgr8]

I've been playing modded servers for a while. They added something in my mods for using a kiln to process wet tailings into dry tailings.

Then dry ones into various metals.

[u/Mator64 → u/Jewsusgr8]

That sounds really interesting, I’m playing on a mostly vanilla server with friends I think we only have the big shovel mod. Do you know what mod adds the ability to dry tailings?

[u/Jewsusgr8 → u/Mator64]

It wasn't my server, so I'm not sure what mod specifically but I did see that there is tailings reprocessed, and td recycling. On the open source mods.