Garbage & Recycling
Nearly everything you craft now leaves waste behind. Garbage piles up as physical blocks, pollutes the ground by type while it stays mixed, and can be sorted back into useful materials. This guide explains where garbage comes from, how sorting works, and how to get someone else to haul it away.
Where garbage comes from
- Crafting waste. Every ingredient an item consumes carries a salvage value; a fraction of that value leaks out of each craft as garbage. On this server that fraction is 8%. 1090 recipes on this server emit garbage — each recipe page lists its byproducts.
- Process waste. Some recipes additionally declare their own waste (tailings from ore concentration, trash from research), independent of what went in.
- Recycling & demolition. Recycling an item returns its full salvage value as materials; explosions and demolished constructions can dump their salvage value on the ground as mixed garbage.
Recipes that take a category ingredient show approximate (≈) garbage — the real amount depends on the item actually consumed.
Garbage is physical
Waste doesn't vanish into a void — it becomes blocks in the world. Mixed garbage stacks up to four layers per tile before overflowing to a full block, and each mixed block remembers its exact composition (which materials, in what fractions), so downstream sorting stays exact. Store it in bins and dumpsters, cart it to a dump, or feed it to sorters — leaving it on the ground poisons the soil under it.
Holzcontainer · Primitive Dump · Moderne Mülltonne · Moderner Papierkorb · Moderner Kompostbehälter
The sorting ladder
Sorting narrows a mix step by step; the block a mix produces upgrades automatically as it purifies:
- Gemischter Müll — raw unsorted waste: materials from many families.
- Family mixes (Gemischter Metallschrott, Gemischte Bioabfälle, Gemischter Bauschutt) — a level-1 sorter groups everything of one family; the block still carries its exact sub-mix.
- Pure materials — specialized sorters split a family mix into single materials (iron scrap, plastic, compost…), ready to reuse.
- Mixed Residuals — terminal leftovers (pollutants, compost, trash) — sorting inefficiency byproducts. They never decide what block a mix becomes; only the Residuals Sorter splits them apart.
Sorters can require a catalyst item to process certain materials, and imperfect sorting degrades a slice of the input into residuals — see the table below.
Müllsortierer · Metallschrott-Sortierer · Bioabfall-Sortierer · Bauschutt-Sortierer · Industrieabfall-Sortierer · Residual Waste Sorter · Recycler · Verbrennungsanlage
The materials
"Sources" counts the items whose salvage value yields this material — each material's item page lists them.
Pollution, by type
Ground pollution now comes in four kinds, each tracked in its own layer of the world: Soil (biowaste and general garbage), Heavy Mineral (tailings), Chemical (industrial waste), and Acid Rain (fallout from air pollution). A mixed garbage block pollutes for every polluting material still inside it — sorting a material OUT removes its share, which is the point of the whole system. Sorted outputs are clean; only the residual blocks keep polluting. Full pollution guide →
Getting it hauled: pickup bounties
Any storage can offer a per-item bounty that lets non-owners collect its contents for pay — the intended loop for waste: a crafter puts a bounty on their garbage bin, a hauler empties it into their truck and gets paid per unit, then sells the sorted materials or dumps the residue. Bounties can also run in reverse (the collector pays the owner) for storages holding something valuable.
Truck Garbage Collector · Steam Truck Garbage Collector
More Update 14 guides
- Upgrade Module — The reworked module system: Basic / Advanced / Modern / Specialty slots, star costs, and what every module does.
- Verschmutzung — The four kinds of ground pollution, every block that emits them, and how sorting cleans them up.