That's me too, OCD to the max (lol) so I'll def give Binnie a change to "redeem himself" (since I was so negative about him in my prev post)! I always loved bees more than anything in the game. I didn't know his machines will do tree species now, that is very interesting indeed. I've done all the trees by hand in Direwolf 1.6 modpack, having machines will be a blessing. And if he's actually finished up Butterflies too, like he suggested he was going to do at the start of the summer... wow. Well done Binnie!! Now I can't wait to go test it out. Thanks for that update Miguk!
Binnie has a decent video. It doesn't explain everything, like how the heck your get larvae (you get that from Forestry itself), or all the intermediate products and liquids required, but it does show the basics of the machines.
And, on the positive side, his machines no longer require massive amount of power. They require relatively little power now. However, what they *do* require now is time and relatively large quantities of vanilla resources. You will need large quantities of the following:
- water
- wheat
- sugar
- bonemeal
- drones to make bee DNA
...and smaller, but still reliable quantities of:
- gold
- redstone
- glowstone
- blaze powder (IIRC)
- flowers or something else to make dyes
None of the steps are a huge deal and none of the machines are that hard to make. It's rather the collection of the whole that's long/complicated. But, it's a really fun learning process, i.e. a great journey. Bee trait breeding makes a lot more *logical* sense now.
Also note that you still need to use other methods to actually mutate new species. I used MagicBees Metabolic Frames in Apiaries and they worked great. Uranium in a Alveary would probably work even better, but that's more complicated than what's actually needed, especially when you consider the biome-specific breeding required.
Re: trees
Yes !! This is the biggest benefit of the machines. I've also done tree trait breeding by hand and it takes a really, really, really long time. There is no Oblivion or Necrotic frame to cause trees to instantly die and instantly mutate. You just have to wait.
Fortunately, there's only about 15 or so tree species that you need to get the best traits from to make a great sapling. That doesn't take *that* long to do if you have enough bees to pollinate. Then, once you have the species, you bonemeal enough to get enough saplings, and then run the saplings through the machines to isolate the traits you want, and then combine them back into a 'pollen' of your choice.
For trees, you use 'pollen' to imprint traits onto. For bees, you use 'larvae'.
You're going to need about 6 to 8 pollen to ensure you can purify a tree. To actually make the finished sapling, you have to take the finish pollen from the machines, and right-click on a leaf block from a tree. Then, graft that leaf block to get the sapling. Re-plant, bonemeal, and repeat until purified.
