Waste Disposal, Especially Water

[White Blade]

So, I'm working on the design for a Post-Scarcity Magical Utopia City. Producing resources isn't a problem - There's plenty of Everful Larders and Decanter of Endless Water, commoners have plenty of profession/crafts, and Lyres of Building provide plenty of unskilled labor But the society that serves in this fashion also needs to dispose of all of its waste and I'm wondering how to do that? I'm looking for a low-level solution that is relatively clean - Cost isn't really an issue, just that it can be made at as low of a caster level as possible. I'm especially trying to figure out how to dispose of the hundreds of gallons of water they produce about every six seconds.

[GeoffWatson]

Drain that leads to a sphere of anillation or a extra-dimensional portal.

Just dump it; now it's the neighbours' problem. You've got hugely powerful magic. Who cares if they complain?

[Coidzor]

Sewage can be treated with Purify Food and Drink, IIRC.

If you want to destroy the water itself... The spell Water to Acid from Stormwrack will permanently turn water into acid as long as you've freed it from any impurities. There are a number of ways that the acid can then be consumed, or it can be stockpiled and weaponized. I think reacting it with something basic/alkaline may even destroy it instead of reacting to create water and some form of salt.

OTOH, if it does create water and a salt, you just have to find the right substance to the acid with to give you table salt, then you could take that salt and use it to power the gp cost component of magic item creation. (On the other, other hand, if you want salt you can just have the decanters make salt water in the first place and then boil off the water.)

Alternatively, you can reduce the number of decanters of endless water in play by just having good plumbing and treating the sewage. Have a reservoir and when the reservoir is full, the decanters turn off.

They could also just use those Lyres of Building to create some canals, aqueducts, etc. and export the water. Dump it on a nearby desert, perhaps.

[Fizban]

A 10' cube (1,000 cubic feet) is 7,480 gallons according to a quick googling, vs the maximum 30 per round of a Decanter of Endless Water. Disintegrate isn't very low level, but the rest of that stuff isn't that low either. You'll have a bigger problem moving the waste to the disintegration site than disposing of it. Dispel Water (Sandstorm) is 4th (the same as the Control Water required to make the Decanter) and will destroy 1,400 cubic feet of water per casting at minimum level, but that won't handle the rest of your waste problem, nor will a permanent Wall of Fire incinerator deal with all the non-incernable stuff. If you're already using at-will every round effects (which is what the Everfull Larder is), then what's the problem with one for Disintegrate at 33,000gp? Less than the price of a single proper portal.

[Jervis]

So, I'm working on the design for a Post-Scarcity Magical Utopia City. Producing resources isn't a problem - There's plenty of Everful Larders and Decanter of Endless Water, commoners have plenty of profession/crafts, and Lyres of Building provide plenty of unskilled labor But the society that serves in this fashion also needs to dispose of all of its waste and I'm wondering how to do that? I'm looking for a low-level solution that is relatively clean - Cost isn't really an issue, just that it can be made at as low of a caster level as possible. I'm especially trying to figure out how to dispose of the hundreds of gallons of water they produce about every six seconds.

Just dump it on the ground. After a while you’ll create a artificer’s dump magical location and crafters can use it to get a 10% discount 1/month. If that’s not acceptable just make a permanent portal to the elemental plane of garbage disposal and toss it in

[White Blade]

Drain that leads to a sphere of anillation or a extra-dimensional portal.

Just dump it; now it's the neighbours' problem. You've got hugely powerful magic. Who cares if they complain?

Wide magic doesn't imply high magic, in this case, as I detail a bit further on in the post. So you'd get ganked.


Sewage can be treated with Purify Food and Drink, IIRC.
This is really promising and if anyone can remember where/if this is said, I'd be super grateful.


Alternatively, you can reduce the number of decanters of endless water in play by just having good plumbing and treating the sewage. Have a reservoir and when the reservoir is full, the decanters turn off.

They could also just use those Lyres of Building to create some canals, aqueducts, etc. and export the water. Dump it on a nearby desert, perhaps.

Yeah, I assumed they were doing this to some extent.


A 10' cube (1,000 cubic feet) is 7,480 gallons according to a quick googling, vs the maximum 30 per round of a Decanter of Endless Water. Disintegrate isn't very low level, but the rest of that stuff isn't that low either. You'll have a bigger problem moving the waste to the disintegration site than disposing of it. Dispel Water (Sandstorm) is 4th (the same as the Control Water required to make the Decanter) and will destroy 1,400 cubic feet of water per casting at minimum level, but that won't handle the rest of your waste problem, nor will a permanent Wall of Fire incinerator deal with all the non-incernable stuff. If you're already using at-will every round effects (which is what the Everfull Larder is), then what's the problem with one for Disintegrate at 33,000gp? Less than the price of a single proper portal.

Mostly, I'm trying to keep the caster level involved as low as possible because the lower the caster level, the less necessary it is to have really obnoxiously powerful casters on hand. I think all the listed items I had are producible by a single Cleric 9 with Craft Wondrous Item and her Artificer cohort (and the Cohort is only here for the Lyres, which you don't strictly need). That's powerful but not extremely powerful - It's below the threshold of Eberron characters like Boranel and Kaius. But Dispel Water should work pretty efficiently for water disposal, with effective sewage build out, and I hadn't been aware of that. Much appreciated.

The city's still producing trash/fecal waste of course but Wall of Fire/Permanency is gettable at level eleven (with prayer beads and the right domain) which isn't too bad - Though now that I'm thinking in these terms, seems better to just grab a standard fireball or Burning Hands trap. Put them in a shaft under a Chamber of Comfort and you can just fry things and the air pollution simply vanishes.

Disintegrate is probably the perfect solution, yeah, but at ECL 13 the Wizards are really getting up there in terms of raw shenanigans.


Just dump it on the ground. After a while you’ll create a artificer’s dump magical location and crafters can use it to get a 10% discount 1/month. If that’s not acceptable just make a permanent portal to the elemental plane of garbage disposal and toss it in

Aren't permanent portals high level in addition to being expensive? At any rate, it's a utopia - a massive garbage dump is going to uglify my pretty perfect city.

[Quertus]

From a modern, scientific perspective, over an infinite timeframe, continuously adding matter to the world is a bad thing, regardless of whether it gets evaporated, fried, or dumped.

So, if you’re after a really long term, truly ecologically friendly solution, at the lowest level possible? Yeah, Dispel Water, fire + Chamber of Comfort are pretty good. Anything you can’t otherwise get rid of, though, consider creating a custom spell that uses that waste product as a component. Or turning it into such a component through mundane means (like compose + agriculture).

If, you know, you care about the *really* long term.

[Rebel7284]

From a modern, scientific perspective, over an infinite timeframe, continuously adding matter to the world is a bad thing, regardless of whether it gets evaporated, fried, or dumped.

So, if you’re after a really long term, truly ecologically friendly solution, at the lowest level possible? Yeah, Dispel Water, fire + Chamber of Comfort are pretty good. Anything you can’t otherwise get rid of, though, consider creating a custom spell that uses that waste product as a component. Or turning it into such a component through mundane means (like compose + agriculture).

If, you know, you care about the *really* long term.

Can Fabricate already do that?
Raw material: Waste
Final product: Compost

Not sure what craft check, if any, would be used for this. Since both material and final product are mundane, possibly none?

[Maat Mons]

I'm pretty sure a 7th-level Artificer can craft items that require Disintegrate. It's a 5th-level spell for Duskblades, and Artificers can craft items requiring 5th-level spells once they hit 7th level.

Another problem with Portals is that unattended items can't pass through.

I'm not sure fabricate can cause chemical changes. Using it to simulate decomposition may be out.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Blue wyrmlings can destroy 36 gallons of water per day. Purify good and drinks then use a herd of blue lizards.

[White Blade]

I'm pretty sure a 7th-level Artificer can craft items that require Disintegrate. It's a 5th-level spell for Duskblades, and Artificers can craft items requiring 5th-level spells once they hit 7th level.

I checked this but alas, an artificer's crafting requirements are based on the caster level and not the spell level and the caster level for Duskblade 5 spells is really high.

[Jervis]

Aren't permanent portals high level in addition to being expensive? At any rate, it's a utopia - a massive garbage dump is going to uglify my pretty perfect city.

IIRC they cost 50k at base and don’t require you to actually cast gate as part of crafting, so just planar bind something that has it as a SLA and ask them politely to watch for an hour while you boot up your dedicated write. Assuming chameleon floating feat standard nonsense you can make one for 10k, 15k if you want it two way. Portal master + standard crafting cost reducers do a lot for portals.

Another option is a cursed bag of holding, several probably, that spew their contents into the astral plane. Some dead gods might get sewage on them but it’s not like they can complain.

[Mechalich]

The water disposal issue only matters (excepting in the really long term, but D&D in the really long term is bizarre and can be ignored) if your city is some kind of closed system and you can't just have it flushed into the watershed like normal. And even in a closed system you still probably want some kind of localized water cycle so that you only need to turn the decanters on in order to recoup periodic losses.

The real trick here is designing a magical waste treatment system that separates out the water, purifies it for reuse (this is pretty easily done using spells), and then sends it back through the loop (a golem or two on some pumps suffices here), and either recycles or eliminates the solid waste. A combination of high energy fires (you can potentially use creatures rather than spells) and some steady crushing (golems again) will turn almost all the solid waste into ash or powder. They you pack it into boxes for disintegration, or transport to the Negative Energy Plane (which annihilates matter).

[Fizban]

Wall of Fire/Permanency is gettable at level eleven (with prayer beads and the right domain) which isn't too bad - Though now that I'm thinking in these terms, seems better to just grab a standard fireball or Burning Hands trap. Put them in a shaft under a Chamber of Comfort and you can just fry things and the air pollution simply vanishes.
Burning Hands is at best marginally better than setting something on fire with a torch, and even infinite fireballs is only a mild step up from the simple permanent Wall of Fire. Particularly if you cast it with metamagic.


Disintegrate is probably the perfect solution, yeah, but at ECL 13 the Wizards are really getting up there in terms of raw shenanigans.
Disintegrate is 6th so your target is 11th.


Aren't permanent portals high level in addition to being expensive? At any rate, it's a utopia - a massive garbage dump is going to uglify my pretty perfect city.
Very much so, they require Gate or Teleportation Circle, 9th either way. With the right books you can limit the function and cost down to surprisingly cheap (though if you want it to transport unattended matter it gets more expensive instead), but you can't cheat the caster level. The best mass transportation item I've figured out short of the Greater Platform of Jaunting would be a Platform of Wind Walk.

[Maat Mons]

Oh, sorry, I should have checked the Artificer class instead of trying to go from memory.

Well, a Divine Crusader who picks the Destruction domain becomes able to cast Disintegrate when his caster level is only 7. Maybe this can still be salvaged.

[White Blade]

Oh, sorry, I should have checked the Artificer class instead of trying to go from memory.

Well, a Divine Crusader who picks the Destruction domain becomes able to cast Disintegrate when his caster level is only 7. Maybe this can still be salvaged.

It's all good.

Wow, hadn't even thought of Divine Crusader. Divine Crusader to get low caster level - Divine Crusader (Luck) 9 gives you Miracle, use an artificer to make a command-word Miracle wondrous item for 113400 GP (or 145800, unclear) and you're basically guaranteed to succeed at your UMD check.... Boom, every spell 7th level and under is now four seconds away - Every meal a hero's feast, instead of houses conjured mansions, simulacrums of angels, formians, and archons toiling for you, distilled joy faster than you can spend it, Hallowed land with every viable spell effect... *sighs happily* Tippy, eat your heart out. Okay, yeah, probably shouldn't let that work.

[Fouredged Sword]

I checked this but alas, an artificer's crafting requirements are based on the caster level and not the spell level and the caster level for Duskblade 5 spells is really high.

You use the fact that it's a 5th level spell on any arcane casting list. That means it shows up on the Chameleon's spell list. A Chameleon can cast 5th level spells at CL 14. That shaves off 3 character levels.

Fabricate can also be accessed very early by artificers. It's a 3rd level trapsmith spell, and it can be cast at CL 5.

[mabriss lethe]

While Dust of Dryness is CL 11 to create, it can be a lot of fun. Convert water 100 gallons at a time into a ball the size of a marble. On impact the water is released. It says nothing in the description about water quality one way or the other, so it either absorbs only the water, which will leave dry waste that can be composted, incinerated as waste, or even used as mundane fuel for fires. Or it absorbs the waste water with all its dissolved awfulness and the problem is safely contained until it can be used or disposed of in some other way.

[Milodiah]

Some very basic math suggests that a Portable Hole can hold about 2,109 gallons of water. If you were to purify said wastewater, then pump it into those Portable Holes, you've got yourself a beautiful commodity. Send 'em on a caravan to a desert civilization, or a drought-struck farmland, or to the quartermasters of armies on the march. Hell, send them with a runner, they're literally handkerchiefs when folded up as per the item description. If you're worried about them being lost, just use teleportation magic. If you collected back the empty Portable Holes through an exchange program, like what happens with the big jugs for office water coolers, you're not going to be out the price of the Portable Holes either. Now you're profiting off something you were originally going to have to pay to get rid of. I'd imagine you'd have a problem with loss prevention since Portable Holes are pretty damn valuable, but I suppose that could be covered by a deposit. Unlike Dust of Dryness, the Hole isn't consumed each time, just a percent of shrinkage due to theft, accident, and that one ******* with a Bag of Holding who wants to try that thing he heard about.

Business!

[Jervis]

It's all good.

Wow, hadn't even thought of Divine Crusader. Divine Crusader to get low caster level - Divine Crusader (Luck) 9 gives you Miracle, use an artificer to make a command-word Miracle wondrous item for 113400 GP (or 145800, unclear) and you're basically guaranteed to succeed at your UMD check.... Boom, every spell 7th level and under is now four seconds away - Every meal a hero's feast, instead of houses conjured mansions, simulacrums of angels, formians, and archons toiling for you, distilled joy faster than you can spend it, Hallowed land with every viable spell effect... *sighs happily* Tippy, eat your heart out. Okay, yeah, probably shouldn't let that work.

Ur-preist can do the same thing. Not for disintegrate unfortunately but miracle definitely, though the mechanics of a Ur-Peist casting that are weird.

[Wintermoot]

I may be stuck thinking in Pathfinder, but isn't create/destroy water a cantrip? Seems like a repeating trap of destroy water should be doable by this spellocracy.

Or better yet, curse a couple of the decanters to make them recanters of endless water and close the loop in the sewer dump offs.

[Rebel7284]

Ur-preist can do the same thing. Not for disintegrate unfortunately but miracle definitely, though the mechanics of a Ur-Peist casting that are weird.

There are definitely ways to get Disintegrate on an Ur-Priest if you want. Planar Touchstone -> Catalogues of Enlightenment -> Destruction Domain comes to mind, although that does increase it to 7th level.

[Jervis]

There are definitely ways to get Disintegrate on an Ur-Priest if you want. Planar Touchstone -> Catalogues of Enlightenment -> Destruction Domain comes to mind, although that does increase it to 7th level.

Does CoL give domain spells? I thought it was just granted powers. Don’t have my books handy

[Rebel7284]

Does CoL give domain spells? I thought it was just granted powers. Don’t have my books handy

I think you have to visit the location to get the spells and can only use them a few times before needing to recharge

[Elkad]

Lots and lots of Otyughs.

Send the water to the farms. Farms always need more water (well, at some point they might have to convert from wheat to rice, but after that it just covers more and more cropland)

[Maat Mons]

If you're feeding everyone with Everfull Larders, you only need croplands to grow raw materials for crafting/fabricating. Cotton, linen, hemp, wood, bamboo, and rubber, for example. Oh, and I guess there's stuff like tobacco, spices, tea, and incense.

[AvatarVecna]

Mostly, I'm trying to keep the caster level involved as low as possible because the lower the caster level, the less necessary it is to have really obnoxiously powerful casters on hand. I think all the listed items I had are producible by a single Cleric 9 with Craft Wondrous Item and her Artificer cohort (and the Cohort is only here for the Lyres, which you don't strictly need). That's powerful but not extremely powerful - It's below the threshold of Eberron characters like Boranel and Kaius. But Dispel Water should work pretty efficiently for water disposal, with effective sewage build out, and I hadn't been aware of that. Much appreciated.

If caster level is the issue, then Artificer can definitely do the Disintegrate thing.

A Bard 1/Wizard 9/Sublime Chord X can link their Sublime Chord CL to their Bard CL. Now they'll cast 4th/5th lvl spells at minimum CL 2, 6th lvl at CL 4, 7th lvl at CL 6, 8th lvl at CL 8, and 9th lvl at CL 10. This gets quick access to spells lvl 4+ from the bard/sorcerer/wizard lists.

(There's similar tricks with Ur-Priest for the cleric spells, and Divine Crusader for all domain spells. Haven't found a trick for the druid list yet.)

Anyway, Fizban quoted 33k - presumably that would be 6 x 11 x 500 for some kind of at-will stationary disintegrate? Let's change that to CL 4 (the lowest minimum), so now it costs 12000 gp - or even less, if you're using the "restricted to skill/class/alignment" market price reducers. The damage is lower in case somebody accidentally falls in, but it still disintegrates a full 10 ft cube without any trouble. Plus, because the CL is so low, an Artificer 2 could make it (...provided they had the item creation feat for whatever they were making, anyway).

Of course, really, you have options. If you've got a cleric 9 with an artificer cohort, that's probably...what, Artificer 7? Artificer counts their CL as lvl +2 for the purposes of qualifying to make an item, even if the item's effect won't actually be that strong (so like...an artificer 1 can pretty explicitly make a lvl 2 spell scroll that costs CL 3 but has an effect like CL 1). That means you can have up to CL 9, which is enough for 8th lvl bard/sorcerer/wizard spells, and 9th lvl cleric/domain spells. Gate is a 9th lvl domain spell (and cleric spell for that matter) - you could just have a gate-sized pit where you dump all the trash, and then when the item works its magic, the gate opens and all that stuff falls into the astral. Momentum will be maintained, and there's no gravity, so it'll be long gone by the time you do your next gate-dump.

[White Blade]

If you're feeding everyone with Everfull Larders, you only need croplands to grow raw materials for crafting/fabricating. Cotton, linen, hemp, wood, bamboo, and rubber, for example. Oh, and I guess there's stuff like tobacco, spices, tea, and incense.

Yeah, but we vastly exceed demand IRL and continue to build out foodstuffs. Even if we allowed a trick like "at-will Heroes' Feast" or similar, there would likely still be demand for other foods, even if just for variety.