Drying wood in the dryer, to produce dry wood and resin wasn’t quite as streamlined in the alpha as it is today; 900 bark and 600 wood (full dryer) would result in some wood (40 IIRC) being left over, so not quite enough to switch the stacks around. Now, however, the math is very simple.
1 bark gives a burn time of 20 seconds in the dryer.
1 wood takes 40 seconds (2 bark) to be dried.
Drying 1 wood will result in 2 dry wood and 1 resin.
15 slots in the dryer.
5 slots of wood (500) will require 10 slots of bark (1000) to be dried.
20000 seconds, or 5 hours, 33 minutes and 20 seconds to run a full batch.
This will result in 1000 dry wood and 500 resin.
1 bark per 1 dry wood.
2 bark per 1 resin.
1 dry wood and 1 resin are required to make 1 insulated wood.
2 bark is required per 1 insulated wood and 1 leftover dry wood.
Dry wood has a burn time of 48 seconds in the furnace (72 seconds with a T3+ smelter), same as oil, both being equally good as fuel, and sharing the #1 spot as the best fuel in the game.
1 dry wood produced every 20 seconds, consuming 1 bark.
3 dry wood produced every 1 minute, consuming 3 bark.
180 dry wood produced every 1 hour, consuming 180 bark.
1 resin produced every 40 seconds, consuming 2 bark.
1.5 resin produced every 1 minute, consuming 3 bark.
90 resin produced every 1 hour, consuming 180 bark.
1000 dry wood (full dryer’s worth) gives you 48000 seconds (800 minutes, or 13 hours and 20 minutes) of furnace burn time, 72000 seconds (1200 minutes, or 20 hours) with a T3+ smelter.
1000 bark (full dryer load) gives you 20000 seconds (5 hours, 33 minutes and 20 seconds) of furnace burn time, 30000 seconds (500 minutes, or 8 hours and 20 minutes) with a T3+ smelter.
500 wood (full dryer load) gives you 5000 seconds (1 hour, 23 minutes and 20 seconds) of furnace burn time, 7500 seconds (2 hours and 5 minutes) with a T3+ smelter.
In total, the materials required to produce 1000 dry wood (48000 seconds of furnace burn time) would only give you 25000 seconds of furnace burn time, so you nearly double your fuel efficiency by taking it through a dryer, also gaining resin in the process. Not that anyone would use bark as a furnace fuel anyway.
There’s some numbers concerning dry wood and drying wood. It’s a bit of a dry subject but just in case someone hadn’t bothered to look into it, there you go.
TL;DR: Put 5 stacks of wood (5x100=500) and 10 stacks of bark (10x100=1000) into a dryer and press play.
or u can go to the savana or desert areas there u will find this white dry tries, and if u hatch them they will give u dry wood ;), more easy to farm, i think the drayin is an option if u leave in zones where u cant find does trees dry like they are white ;), jope it helps
Most efficient method I’ve found is the Den. Harvest the plethora of dead trees in there with a pick for large quantities of bark, combined with the incidental dried wood from the trees, and the large amount of bark that often apart in the loot chests. Because of how densely the trees are spaced it’s not uncommon to walk out of there with 100+ wood and 200+ bark after only a few minutes. Use the wood you gained from harvesting as furnace fuel and load the bark into the drying racks with green wood.
For the purposes of fueling the furnace and for use as a cooking fuel, it is, of course, wasted effort to go harvesting dry wood, if you’ve got a water source deep enough to drop some fish traps in; just dump all the unappetizing fish into a fluid press and get hundreds of oil with almost no effort whatsoever, albeit with a decent wait for them to process. Oil and dry wood are equally good as a furnace / campfire / stove fuel, after all. The best fuel, as mentioned in the OP. Having said that, fish traps and water sources aren’t always available.
If, however, you’re after dry wood in order to make insulated wood, you’ll also need the resin, which, let’s face it, is the main reason for drying wood anyway, and while harvesting dead trees is a great source of dry wood itself, as well as bark, doing so won’t score any resin at all. That’s where the dryer comes in.
I’d say if you’re after bark, and you’ve got no water source to use fish traps in and hence no oil to use as fuel, then it makes sense to spend time harvesting dead trees, but with fish traps available, I’d personally spend the time doing something else.
While that is certainly true, there are many locations where that’s not a feasible option. For others, such as bookshelf along the wall, you can easily get hundreds of both green and dry wood with minimal travel. I find it is a better option due to both proximity to water, and due to the fact that if you place down fish traps on a server with a decent population, unless they are inside a fishing shack, will almost never yield more than a fraction of their potential harvest because players will constantly cone along and empty or destroy them either for their own purposes or to impede yours. Trees are generally a more reliable option since they are so numerous in the Highlands that is almost impossible to completely deforest, and because almost no one thinks to go into paves like the Den for resource gathering beyond thralls.
While oil and wood both burn the same, for me and quite a few others I can get dried wood about 10x faster than I could oil. Since you need so little insulated wood in comparison to hardened brick for T3, you can get enough resin just from drying wood in the racks to make enough to build quite a structure, leaving the other half for either additional using the reading gained from green wood, or more furnace fuel. The wood I get from harvesting the Den is essentially trash wood that would otherwise go to waste if not for fuel.
As of yesterday I was (barely) holding out in IceSpire Chasm. We had a wildfire nearby last night that broke our internets, so if I’m still in existence when I can log on later today I could use a more viable solution.
Currently with hard worker perk I’m getting great yields from my tools. I recently learned via hard knocks seeking branches for palisades, that there’s a really great trick up north. So I can go out for harvesting and in one unencumbered 8-minute trip gather bark, wood and branch for days. Second trip out is to sickle.
My approach has been hybrid, as you’re probably guessing. Dry the wood, build plenty of palisades, burn the branch, burn the oil. In that order. But it’s fussy and needs tending. Do either (or both of you) have any solutions?
