Luanti Mod Review: Composting

Name: Luanti Mod Review: Composting
Uploaded: 2026-08-31T00:34:08+00:00
Duration: 18 min 18 s
Channel: Minetest Videos

00:00Welcome back to another Luanti mod review. Today we are taking a look at the compost mod.

00:05This mod adds compost bins, I suppose we would call these, composting system, and then garden

00:13soil, which, you know, we can use to grow things. Yeah, so, ooh, and then just a beautiful,

00:20beautiful. So let's take a look at, I guess, the most important part, the compost bin itself.

00:27Is this considered a composter? And it doesn't really say if it's a bin or what it's specifically.

00:32So we're going to craft that with some wood. Nothing too complicated to it. You can place

00:38it on soil. You can place it, yeah, wherever you want. You break it with a pickaxe, which

00:45I thought was kind of weird. I would have thought an axe would break it, but what do I know?

00:51And once you have one of these placed, you're going to go ahead and fill it with some biomatter,

00:55which could be grass, could be flowers, could be leaves. Seeds don't work. Saplings do, in

01:02my experience. So we have some here that, of course, I've filled up a while before because

01:08these do take a while to turn the compost into compost, or I guess the biological material

01:14into compost. So these two are ready to be harvested. They have compost clods in them, so

01:19we're going to ignore those for the time being. This one needs more biomass. So I have a stack

01:25of 99 grass here, and we're just going to start punching away. And we'll see that the number

01:33of grass in my hand is going down, and it is composting away. And we were at 99, and we

01:43used up almost the whole stack. I have six left. So 93 pieces of grass went into here.

01:51These ready to be harvested, so I can't add more to them. You'll notice that the color changes

01:56of the material in it. So when they're like this full black color, you got to add more biomass,

02:01and then I'll start bringing some color back to them. And same thing there. And then these

02:09are all composting as well. So I could go ahead and add a bunch more grass to them. Now there

02:14is no... Oh, hey, this one... This one I can get compost out of, but I can also add more

02:22material too. Interesting. There is no... Oops. There's no like form spec or anything, so it's

02:29all just done visually. So you add your materials to it. The colors change, but the color doesn't

02:34necessarily mean specifically anything, I guess. There's also a param2 value that you can look at

02:42if you have the debug info showing, but I really haven't figured out what the correlation is between

02:46the two. So once you get one that says compost clad, you want to go ahead and harvest the compost,

02:50of

02:50course. And we do that with a shovel. And I forget if we... Yeah, we just punch it with a

02:57shovel.

02:59So we got two pieces of compost out of that. We got two pieces of compost out of that.

03:04These ones that still say compost in progress, I don't think... Oh, wait. I was able to grab some

03:10compost from that one. Okay. So I got a total of six out of these six. A couple of them

03:18said they

03:18had compost clods. Now, I do believe once it shows that they can keep producing more compost

03:25until they run out of biomass. So it all depends on how much biomass you put into it.

03:30The compost clods themselves are not really very useful. You have to craft them with dirt

03:36to make garden soil. Pretty simple there. And then we'll just, you know, grab our garden soil.

03:43Now garden soil. What makes garden soil so special? Well, I have a little garden prepared here

03:48for demonstration purposes. I have water at this end. And I have some water at this end. And you'll

03:53see the normal soil here if we go ahead and till it. The center two rows here aren't getting moisture

04:00from the water at the ends. So yeah, very quickly they will turn back into soil, which we can't grow

04:06anything on. We can demo that by trying to put some seeds there and they don't do anything. Now you

04:12could try to go ahead and put seeds on it right away. And the seeds will actually prevent the dirt

04:19from turning back into dirt. But they'll never grow. Like I don't think they'll ever actually

04:24do anything. Maybe it gets to first stage, but they don't grow because there's no water.

04:29So farming soil, it prevents that. So here, it's very difficult to tell, but this is wet farming soil.

04:38And these two center rows of garden soil are not wet. Again, very difficult to tell. Just the

04:43teeniest bit of, is that a saturation difference? I think it's a saturation difference. It's a little

04:50bit darker tones when it's wet versus when it's dry, quote unquote. It's not really dry. We can go ahead

04:58and

04:58we can plant on this. And I do believe this will grow just fine. Of course, we can go ahead

05:03and plant

05:04all of this as well. I should make sure I have enough seeds to at least get one full row

05:08of plants

05:09in the normal dirt as well. But now we don't necessarily want to leave this soil dry, although

05:16I do believe it'll still grow. So what we can do actually is take a bucket, or if you're using

05:21Technic,

05:21the watering can, and we can actually go collect water and then punch the garden soil with the water bucket,

05:27and that'll make it wet soil. Which then gives it all the benefits of wet soil. And if we went

05:34ahead

05:34and we dig this dirt out, we can see here we have normal soil, and now it's wet soil. Again,

05:40slight

05:41color difference. Of course, we cannot do that with these soils. If I try to get these wet with the

05:51bucket,

05:51I actually just, it tries to dig it. So that doesn't do any good. Now we've got that planted,

05:58so we're going to go ahead and leave that be. These were planted before the video started, of course.

06:04At the same time, mind you. And I got a full harvest out of these, whereas I got nothing from

06:10these. So

06:10we're going to go ahead, I got five seeds. Let me go ahead and put four or three there. And

06:15I'll put two

06:16here. So these three were now planted before these. We're going to leave these set for a little bit.

06:21We'll come back to them. Before we get to that though, because they need some time to do their

06:25thing, we're going to go ahead and take a look at this. There is an electric composter provided.

06:32And it's kind of hard to see it here because of all of this other stuff I have going on.

06:38So let's cover the other stuff before we cover this too much. It can be used with

06:43Technic for electricity. So I have some solar panels going over here. I got batteries,

06:49whatever, all there, giving this some power. And then it works with Pipeworks as well. I think it

06:55also is compatible with Tublib and Technic, Elepower, TechEdge, or Factory Electric, which I'm not

07:08familiar with to kind of automate things. So what I have going on here is just a

07:15a chest that I'm throwing all of my different biomaterial into. So again,

07:19different plants, flowers, leaves, chopped grasses, water lilies, etc, etc. Then over here we have,

07:27well, before we get over there, we have a node detector, which detects when the

07:34electric composter is essentially not composting. So once this stack runs out, actually I'll go ahead

07:41and pull the stack out right now, except for the last, because the last one is the one that is

07:46being processed through. When this bar makes it all the way through, the composter will become

07:55inactive, which will trigger this node detector, which will trigger the stack injector,

07:59and it'll pull another stack out of the chest and put it in. And we'll see that in just a

08:03little bit

08:04here. Thanks to Movie Magic, this will happen almost immediately. There we go. And a new stack is in.

08:12So essentially what just happened, this became inactive, fired the node detector, used the stack

08:19injector, and put our next stack of materials from there. And while that happened, it also

08:27pulled the finished compost clads from there and threw them up into this chest for us. Now,

08:34technically you could do this with a blinky plant as well. But the blinky plant actually will overflow the

08:41input here faster than you specifically want it to, which isn't necessarily very useful, because then

08:49you get pipes that are backed up and they'll break. So, uh, yeah, that's, that's why we don't have that

08:55going on here. I believe I need a pickaxe to break this. I hope a stone pickaxe can, yeah, perfect.

09:02All

09:02right. So that's been removed. Um, put some light here so we can kind of see. So this is, you

09:11know,

09:11what your electric composter looks like. And you can use it without the, the item injectors and the

09:16pipes and everything, you know, you can just, you can just fill it by hand if you want. But this

09:23of

09:23course makes it a little more efficient because you can just dump all of your different grasses and

09:27dirts in there and you don't really have to worry about it. Um, of course you can't stack different

09:33things. So like when I have just a few flowers, well, I'd have to keep going back and do one

09:37stack

09:37of flowers at a time. So this makes it a little more efficient. Um, the electric composter is only

09:42available if you're using one of the mods that provides power, uh, in a lake technic or, uh,

09:49tech edge, Ella power or factory electric. So if you don't have one of those mods also enabled,

09:54this won't even exist. It runs a little bit faster than the other composters do. Uh, and it gives you

10:00kind of a visual idea of what's going on just because of this. Although I don't believe for every

10:08single piece of input, you get a piece of output. Yeah. So I just got two here and this was

10:1699 to start with. So it looks like for two of these, I got one of those that may vary

10:20depending

10:20on the material you're putting in. I am not positive. It looks like we have some more compost available

10:27in one of these and two of these. So we can go ahead and, oh, I already have my shovel

10:35here.

10:36Go ahead and harvest that. Looks like I only had one piece in that one. All right. Just one piece

10:40in each of those. And we are waiting on this to finish growing yet. Um, we'll notice they both

10:48all, or I shouldn't say they both, they all seem to be in the same stages, which would be wheat

10:53level

10:53one. We are going to, oh, some, some weeds, some weeds grew. Yay. Those can also be composted. So that's

11:00fun. We're going to go ahead and just let this sit a little while. Um, and while that's sitting,

11:06we're going to go ahead and take a look at some of these settings that are available. All right.

11:11So here we are in the settings. We're just going to go ahead and search for compost,

11:14which will pull it up. Otherwise you could scroll through everything and find it that way.

11:17For this video, I did tweak several values because I didn't want to spend as much time,

11:21um, which I still know spending a lot of time, but composting amount per compost,

11:27uh, composting amount per composter. I changed it to 100. The defaults 200. I don't really know

11:32what that means because there's no information bubble here. So yeah, the clad cost, that's how much,

11:39um, I believe how much biomaterial will get you one clad of compost. So I put it to about half

11:46again,

11:47the time divider. This is a fun one. So there's an ideal composting, which is based on how much

11:55biomaterial is in it. And then what type of ground it's placed on. There is a tweaking that

12:02you can do and it says it all right here. So if you leave it set at 72, which is

12:07not the default,

12:08by the way, it'll take 122 hours to make you compost. And if you put it to 720 or sorry,

12:157,200, it'll take one and a quarter hours. I doubled that. So it would only take 45 minutes,

12:19which I probably should have set it a lot higher because this took way too long to do.

12:23Um, but the default is 3,600, which is two and a half hours. Composting electric composter time,

12:30I didn't change. Um, soil time divider. This is the, I don't know if this relates to if there's plants

12:44on it or not, but it does degrade from garden soil back into farming soil. And this is the timer

12:51for

12:51that. So this is at 720, it's between six and 12 hours. And you could change that to, you know,

12:59any numbers you want and it'll change it. Composting soil wet points. I didn't vary this at all, but

13:06it's the same kind of a deal. Um, how long it takes before it dries out. And then the growth

13:12acceleration effect, um, that I, I changed quite a bit, um, to 0.75 and 0.25 because I wanted

13:20the

13:20plants to grow faster. So the change would be more prominent and visible. Um, but yeah,

13:25so the stuff will grow faster and you can change how much faster. Um, now this, as it says here

13:32in

13:32the tooltip should work with all florimons, which use timers for grow plants. That isn't really how you

13:39would normally say that, but, um, so this value you can change to make plants grow faster.

13:48Potentially you could go slower. I don't know why you'd ever want to do that. That seems kind of silly.

13:51Um, it might work for everything. There may be some mods out there that it doesn't work for.

13:57I'm not a hundred percent sure how it actually does the, uh, does the thing, but yeah, that's the settings

14:05for it. Uh, very easy to change them just, you know, right here in the settings menu. You don't

14:11have to mess around with any text files or anything. Um, let's jump back in and see how our plants

14:14are

14:14doing. Well, would you look at that? It was the exact perfect amount of time. That's crazy how that

14:22works. So here we are and we have, we have some plants. And now keep in mind, of course, when

14:31we

14:31planted these. This row was actually planted before these two were. And these are fully, fully ready

14:39to go and these are not. This row was planted at the same time that all of this was. And

14:45again,

14:46you'll notice this is all ready to go. This is not. Our wet soil in the middle. I'm not sure

14:52really

14:52what's going on here. Um, because this is wet soil. Or wait, did I make these wet soil? Uh, no,

15:03no, I didn't. That's why. Very interesting. So the, the soil has to be wet soil for it to grow.

15:12Same

15:13as these. So yeah, I guess I don't know what I was thinking. Oh, I know what I was saying.

15:20Doing those

15:21settings got me confused and I lost track of what I was doing. If you plant the plants on tilled

15:27soil

15:27that's not wet, it'll prevent it from turning back to normal soil, but it'll never grow. Uh,

15:32the garden soil does the same thing. So you can plant it on the, the garden soil and it'll let

15:37you

15:37plant it, but it'll never grow because it's not wet. You do need to get it wet either using the

15:41bucket

15:42or you could use a watering can from Technic or having it close enough to a water source. Um,

15:48so basically the whole, the whole reason for even doing this whole little growing demonstration

15:54is because of what we just looked at in the settings. Using this grass, grass, using the soil,

16:01your plants will grow faster. And of course, again, as previously discussed, you can change how fast that

16:06actually happens. Um, so yeah, you can, you can improve your growing by, uh, by just cheating.

16:18It's not really cheating if there's a setting for it though, right? Anyways, that is the, that's the

16:24compost mod. It'll make your plants grow faster when you use garden soil. Uh, they keep the water

16:29themselves. So if you do get them wet with a bucket, you don't necessarily have to have water nearby to

16:34keep

16:35the ground wet. Um, they do lose some wetness over time, but I don't really know how that works.

16:44Again, it's with the pram 2 values, but these are all over the place and I really can't figure out

16:49what they're doing. But yeah, you can get it wet again once it does dry out. Um, it's kind of

16:56unfortunate and I don't know if this is the case with all of the farming mods, but at least the

17:00default

17:01or farming from in my test game, it makes the selection box the full node. So you can't point

17:06at the soil underneath it while there's a plant there, which is a bit annoying because I can't,

17:12I can't water these soils without digging the plants up first. So yeah, that's kind of, it's kind of a

17:20bummer. Um, of course I could always just dig these stones out, put some water there and it would turn

17:25them into wet nodes, but you know, whatever, that's fine. We're not really worried about

17:30it too much. All right. Well, that is, that's the mod. If you're interested in it, you can get it

17:34off of

17:35the content database. You can find it there, or I'll have other links on my website, which will be linked

17:40down in the video description below if you want to grab it that way. Thanks for watching and I will

17:45see you next time. Hey, you, do you play Luanti on your phone and find your battery just doesn't

17:51have enough capacity to keep you going for the hours and hours and hours that you want? Have you

17:56considered picking up a power bank to keep your phone battery topped up so you can waste the day

18:00away playing video games? Luanti, of course. This video sponsor, Mukaya, makes, among other things,

18:06a 20,000 milliamp power bank with an integrated phone stand that'll let you play for hours and hours

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