Compost Bin

The Compost Bin turns the least appealing thing on the parcel into what the fields want. Twenty dung and a large bag make ten plain fertiliser in thirty-five hours, at any level, and plain fertiliser feeds a field and changes nothing else — the kind a new player needs.

Since October 2026 the bin also makes the kinds that move a vineyard's soil, and they are the Farmer's to sell, because a Brewer cannot make them. Each comes ten to a batch, packed in a large bag: garden lime (twenty dung and twenty chalk, from the chalk pit) lifts the pH half a point and sulphur mulch (twenty dung and twenty sulphur, left behind by the Smelter) lowers it, both from Farmer level 2; wood ash (three oak scraps, an hour, two ash) from level 3, which is what the fine garden lime and fine sulphur mulch need to move the pH a fifth, from level 4; and rich compost (thirty dung and twenty reed, seventy hours) from level 5, which feeds and holds the pH still for three days. Coarse overshoots a vine that is nearly in band; fine nudges it — the overshoot is the skill.

Do the arithmetic before you commit: a hundred dung and five large bags is fifty plain fertiliser and a little over a week of continuous running. Farmers bank the recipes and earn crafting experience for them; anyone else can still run the bin by entering the ingredients by hand.

One warning: dung has a second buyer. The leather tanner needs one per hide, so if somebody in the colony is working leather, you are both reaching into the same pile.