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---
title: Trees
date: 2026-01-23T15:30:00-05:00
---
It's time to tackle logs and tree farming.
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## Required research
I need to unlock three technologies to get trees up and running:
### Botany - Stage 1
This unlocks two things:
* The ability to process floraspolinin back into native flora; and
* The Mk1 botanical nursery building, which can carry out that process.
I don't need floraspoilinin reprocessing right now. I'm consuming native flora more than fast enough to prevent spoilage, between research and steelmaking, and my native flora cultivator has a boiler set up to consume any spoiled native flora. That system has been working well.
However, this technology is a prerequisite for wood processing, and the botanical nursery has other uses, so there's no skipping it.
### Moss - Stage 1
This technology provides:
* The Mk1 moss farm;
* Two moss cultivation recipes. One takes muddy sludge and carbon dioxide; the other adds stone and is twice as productive in exchange for that productivity.
* A starter recipe for recovering moss from stone directly.
* A recipe for synthesizing [kerogen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen) from moss.
Moss is a key intermediate in the production of logs, so I'll need to stand up a moss processing plant more or less immediately.
Kerogen is an option for fuelling burner items. It provides 2 MJ per item (versus raw coal's 1.5 MJ), and stacks to 100 (versus 50). However, making kerogen from moss requires more energy than the resulting kerogen is worth, and the carbon dioxide input for moss is itself an energy-hungry product, so it's a net loss. I suspect that the real use for kerogen will be in shale oil derivatives, unlocked later in the tech tree.
Carbon dioxide to drive the moss cycle will come from coke, initially. That'll cut into the supply of coke available for steelmaking, but I don't need a lot of steel yet, so I think I can accommodate that in the near term.
### Wood processing
This technology provides several options for producing logs:
* The Mk1 fastwood forestry building;
* The Mk1 wood processing unit;
* Recipes to grow logs from saplings;
* Recipes to produce saplings from tree seeds;
* Recipes to make tree seeds from wood;
* Recipes for extracting sap and raw fibre from the wood cycle; and
* A recipe for making trees.
Sap and raw fibre aren't immediately useful. Logs, on the other hand, are critical.
### Soil washing
This research isn't strictly necessary, but it'll streamline moss production by providing:
* The Mk1 soil washer; and
* A recipe for making muddy sludge out of water and soil.
The electrically-powered soil washers are nearly a straight upgrade to the steam-driven soil washers I've been using so far. They follow the same convention of running twice as fast in return for slightly more than twice the energy cost, so they will be marginally less energy-efficient, but in return I won't have to supply fuel or steam, or deal with ash.
## Moss
As with the previous biological products, moss farms require moss as a module to drive production, so we'll need at least some initial moss to start the process. The alternative starter recipe makes moss by washing stone - a process which has an 8% chance of producing moss each time it runs, and which cycles some of its input stone into the output.
This initial build won't upgrade cleanly into a moss farm, though. Instead, it's entirely temporary infrastructure. Since moss is stable and does not spoil, I can let it run in the background and make as much moss as I can luck my way into, to be used to fill out module slots in the final moss farm.
There are two ways to produce moss: using only muddy water and carbon dioxide, or using muddy water, carbon dioxide, and stone. However, there's a trick here: washing soil to produce stone produces muddy water as a byproduct, at precisely the stone-to-muddy-water ratio that moss production needs. The alternative is to extract soil from water and then mix that soil with water again to make muddy water (without making stone), which takes the same amount of supporting infrastructure and makes less moss.
The choice is clear. Using stone doubles the amount of moss produced for each unit of coke invested in carbon dioxide production, and coke is an expensive resource right now. The minor infrastructure costs of having to belt stone into the moss farm is more than worth it to save on coke usage.
## Wood
Cultivating logs requires tree seeds and moss to make saplings in a botanical nursery, then growing saplings with additives in a fastwood forestry to make logs. Logs can be split into wood in a wood processor, and seeds can be recovered from wood in an assembler to make more saplings.
This cycle is net-positive on wood no matter how you set it up. Each tree seed makes three saplings. Growing logs directly makes one log per sapling, while adding water to the process allows for 1.33 logs per sapling. Adding water and ash grows two logs per sapling and is, by far, the most productive option I have right now. Saplings spoil after an hour, and letting the saplings spoil on the line would still be be wood-positive, though very inefficient. I'll be using the recipe that requires ash as a fertilizer, to maximize the logs produced, mostly to keep coke consumption for the upstream moss process to a minimum.
Wood has a twist on Pyanodons' common biological motif of reusing the output as a module to drive manufacturing. Instead of using logs as modules, fastwood forestries require trees as modules. Trees can be made from saplings as an alternative to logs, in a botanical nursery, so I made ten before setting up the final wood plant.
The initial wood seeds can come from hand-crafting using the logs I've been shepherding since the start of the game, or from driftwood. Once it's up and running, it's easy to generate hundreds of additional logs, plus wood. I've manually stopped the process (hence the bent belt in the screenshot) with a full chest of logs and a full chest of wood, and I can restart it whenever I need more.
## Final situation
My platform can now make:
* Fawogae mushrooms;
* Raw coal;
* Ash;
* Electricity;
* Iron ore, iron oxide, and plates;
* Copper ore and plates, plus byproduct ores;
* Coal dust;
* Sand, stone, and bricks;
* Native flora and floraspoilinin;
* Coke;
* Glass;
* Steel;
* Moss; and
* Wood and logs.
With those supplies, I can hand-craft every building I have unlocked, though some of them are a substantial expense. I can also hand-craft automation science packs to continue through the tech tree.
However, many of these processes require manual intervention, either because of fuel needs or to supply necessary inputs from other parts of the platform. I do not make enough electricity or raw coal to power everything simultaneously for any length of time.
The crates holding aluminum, zinc, nickel, and lead ores from ash separation are a bit under half full. I can refine the aluminum if space becomes an issue, but I don't (yet) have any use for the other three ores. I took a look through the tech tree, and nickel in particular won't have any uses for a while. I'll have to invest in more storage sooner or later.
All of my [starting resources](../stranded/) have been replaced with locally-produced supplies. I'm no longer at risk of softlocking myself if I spend too many resources.
My power plant prototype has reached its limit. I rebuilt it while I was working on trees, to provide a bit of additional power and to sketch out a tileable design, but without a steady flow of raw coal it's still very limited. Running all of the process I've set up, simultaneously, burns through my available fuel much faster than my Fawogae farms can replace it, so my next project is going to have to be a more permanent power plant.
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