Automated cherry farm ideas?

[GaseousSnake]

I'm looking for a way to automatically obtain cherries from Hill Cherry trees. My first thought was a quick program for a chopping turtle, but how would the turtle know whether the cherries are actually ripe or not? A Forestry multiblock farm might or might not get the cherries, but it would be a lot of resources to set up and you'd still have to pump it with fertilizer manually, so it's not the answer.

My end goal here is to create a completely automated and self-sustaining liquid boiler running off of biofuel...and one of the cheapest high-yield sources of a catalyst for the Fermenter that I've seen is squeezing cherries (plus, the seed oil is nice too). I just need a way to make this process 100% hands-off when I'm done with it so that my boiler doesn't run out of fuel and stop while I'm offline. I have a Steve's Cart treefarm set up, but since it can't operate with forestry trees, all it might be good for is apples.

Could anyone offer me some help?

 

[Runo]

The forestry multi farm is your best bet, and fertilizer is a non-issue. A single apatite node will last you a week. A max sized chestnut farm will yield far more seed oil, however.

You can't use a turtle unless you set a significant delay in the chopping operation, which costs a lot of efficiency. The fruit takes time to ripen, which is indicated by the texture of the leaves. The multi farm auto harvests and replaces the leaves so its well worth the cost.

You can get 192 fertilizer from a single apatite ore block with silk touch and an industrial grinder, but even the lowest yield is something like 32-64. Fertilizer scares away the lazy, but its trivial.

 

[Bibble]

Yeah, as far as I know, the multifarm is the only thing that is able to "pick" only the ripe trees. Anything else and you'd need to use timings and chance.

If you want a fully-renewable farm, then you could do SC2 and a holding track on a long timer. That'd not cost you anything, but it would be incredibly low output. Multifarms are a very good "conversion" between the seed oil and apatite, particularly if you have any kind of large-scale mining going on.

 

[DoctorOr]

I'm looking for a way to automatically obtain cherries from Hill Cherry trees. My first thought was a quick program for a chopping turtle, but how would the turtle know whether the cherries are actually ripe or not? A Forestry multiblock farm might or might not get the cherries, but it would be a lot of resources to set up and you'd still have to pump it with fertilizer manually, so it's not the answer.

It wouldn't know. Use a timer and accept that it will either chop while some leaves aren't ripe, or will let ripe ones sit for awhile.

My end goal here is to create a completely automated and self-sustaining liquid boiler running off of biofuel

Then you should use the MFR bio reactor instead.

...and one of the cheapest high-yield sources of a catalyst for the Fermenter

You must mean the mulch, and the easiest, cheapest method to generate it is in a moisturizer. If you're intent on using trees for the mulch, lemons and papayas have a much higher return for mulch and give you fruit juice as well.

If you're stuck in 1.4.7, even apples provide mulch at a higher rate than cherries.

 

[GaseousSnake]

The forestry multi farm is your best bet, and fertilizer is a non-issue. A single apatite node will last you a week.

My biggest problem with fertilizer is that I'm playing on a friend's server where world size has been limited and Mystcraft has been disabled. Once we find all the Apatite in the world, that's it.

​

“My end goal here is to create a completely automated and self-sustaining liquid boiler running off of biofuel

Then you should use the MFR bio reactor instead.

“...and one of the cheapest high-yield sources of a catalyst for the Fermenter

You must mean the mulch, and the easiest, cheapest method to generate it is in a moisturizer. If you're intent on using trees for the mulch, lemons and papayas have a much higher return for mulch and give you fruit juice as well.

If you're stuck in 1.4.7, even apples provide mulch at a higher rate than cherries.

We don't have MFR either, or Thaumcraft. I'm really not sold on the cherry idea, so if there's a better way, I'd love to hear it. Using a moistener would still require a wheat farm, which I don't know how to 100% automate without golems or Forestry farms (which brings me back to the apatite problem). Lemons or papayas would be fine, but I'd have the same problems harvesting them as I would with cherries.

 

[Runo]

my point is that there is no reasonable solution beyond apatite. size limits is a horrible excuse for avoiding it as one hilly biome will provide you in excess of 100,000 fertilizer. i have three full sized farms running and I've only used 2,000 fertilizer in a week.

the only reason to a avoid apatitie is server resources, and the only methods of farming fruit without a multifarm are far more server resource intensive than a multifarm as they rely on redstone logic systems. Somethings gotta give.

 

[danidas]

Do you have greg tech? If so then you can manufacture forestry fertilizer which works in the the multi farms by grinding down ender pearls.

Also be aware that forestry trees only drop things if the leaves are broken by a player or decay naturally and the only exception to this is the multifarms. In other words the only way to automate things with out a multifarm is to remove the logs with a turtle or other means while allowing the leaves to naturally decay and using a item collection system to gather the drops. Which is far more trouble then it is worth for both you and the server compared to the multi farms.

 

[DoctorOr]

I'm really not sold on the cherry idea, so if there's a better way, I'd love to hear it. Using a moistener would still require a wheat farm, which I don't know how to 100% automate without golems or Forestry farms

Steve's Carts will do wheat. They will not do forestry trees, under any circumstances.

 

[Bibble]

My biggest problem with fertilizer is that I'm playing on a friend's server where world size has been limited and Mystcraft has been disabled. Once we find all the Apatite in the world, that's it.

​

We don't have MFR either, or Thaumcraft. I'm really not sold on the cherry idea, so if there's a better way, I'd love to hear it. Using a moistener would still require a wheat farm, which I don't know how to 100% automate without golems or Forestry farms (which brings me back to the apatite problem). Lemons or papayas would be fine, but I'd have the same problems harvesting them as I would with cherries.

If you're on 1.4.7, and are in need of biofuel, I'd probably recommend standard oak trees and an SC2 farm. It won't exactly be plentiful in apples, but I've found that a farm just inside the border of a chunk is more than enough to provide for 2 fermenters (1 on apple juice, and 2 on water, catalyzed by the mulch from squeezing the apples), and 3 stills (the bottleneck), which provides enough biofuel to sustain a 36HP liquid boiler, with masses of saplings and wood left over (no apples, though). I usually put the processing machinery on the inside of the chunk and get the fuel transported to my base, but there's no reason that you can't put the entire system in 1 chunk, outputting about 100MJ/tick via tesseract, running off a single spot loader.

 

[GaseousSnake]

If you're on 1.4.7, and are in need of biofuel, I'd probably recommend standard oak trees and an SC2 farm. It won't exactly be plentiful in apples, but I've found that a farm just inside the border of a chunk is more than enough to provide for 2 fermenters (1 on apple juice, and 2 on water, catalyzed by the mulch from squeezing the apples), and 3 stills (the bottleneck), which provides enough biofuel to sustain a 36HP liquid boiler, with masses of saplings and wood left over (no apples, though). I usually put the processing machinery on the inside of the chunk and get the fuel transported to my base, but there's no reason that you can't put the entire system in 1 chunk, outputting about 100MJ/tick via tesseract, running off a single spot loader.

This sounds like the best option. Since I already have a small SC2 treefarm, I may just expand it and use apples at your and DoctorOr's suggestion. Thank you very much for the ideas!

 

[ThemsAllTook]

If apatite is an issue, fertilizer can be made with saltpeter instead. From the perspective of 1.4.7 Ultimate, I know of 5 different ways to get renewable saltpeter:

- Find yourself a saltpeter spawner block, and set up a system for converting sand into it. Very tricky from what I understand, haven't tried it myself.
- Use an industrial electrolyzer on ender pearl dust to get nitrogen and potassium cells, then combine them with compressed air cells in an electric crafting table to get saltpeter dust.
- Use an MFR sludge boiler to produce soul sand and cracked sand, which go into an industrial centrifuge to produce saltpeter dust.
- Breed spirit/soul bees, and turn their products into soul sand. Centrifuge it, same as above. Bonus: Soul sand also gives you oil cells!
- Use scrapboxes for a small chance at soul sand. Probably impractical, but if you have a large scrapbox manufacturer/unpacker already, might give you a bit of extra to supplement your supply.

 

[Golrith]

Server owner of that limited world space server could setup a trade system (forestry block for that I believe) so you can exchange one resource for apatite.

 

[b0bst3r]

Steve's Carts will do wheat. They will not do forestry trees, under any circumstances.

They will in 1.5 - exotic upgrade