Automated farming without fertilizer?

[Zjarek_S]

RP2 auto farm isn't really as possible unless you have a steady supply of bonemeal

Planting with seedbags and harvesting with water from dispenser is a way to go. Setup cost is really small, so you can do it early game, you don't even need to add redstone control, 3 button pushes are a lot faster than running around collecting drops, however I suggest some gates to get a few harvests without maintenance (you need to refill seed bags in deployers, but they can last up to about 200 cycles).

About apatite, you can get 24 stacks of fertilizer from one stack of apatite (normal forestry difficulty), using thaumic bees recipe and ash. One stack of fertilizer gives me about 80 stacks of saplings in multifarm (oak trees with triple saplings), so I don't think this is a huge problem. Also in newer railcraft saltpeter is renewable, but I haven't really tested this mechanics.

 

[jumpfight5]

Saltpeter can be made by pulverizing sandstone. You can get this by pulverizing cobblestone and putting the product (sand) in a Factorization packager. Then pulverize that and send that excess sand back into the packager.

 

[Zjarek_S]

@jumpfight: this was removed from TE not to make fertilizer easily renewable. You only get niter, which can't be further processed to saltpeter or used to make fertilizer (even if it is the same thing).

 

[jumpfight5]

Whut?!

Isn't there a way to use Ender Pearl dust and centrifuge it and turn that into Fertilizer?

 

[LittleMike]

I think you can still centrifuge ender pearl dust, but that requires you to have a lot of ender pearls. I have yet to find a single one, though I have to go hunting in a desert biome yet, like suggested earlier.

 

[Hydra]

This just shows that the farms only being able to use fertilizer probably wasn't a good decision. People are now moving to other means of producing fuel.

 

[jumpfight5]

That's a good point to bring up. In a multi-mod setting, why would people use a way that they must keep mining? I can see early game, but no matter how common anything is, it automatically gets a warning in my book that I'll run out eventually.
Would I like to run my Magma Crucibles on Netherrack? Yes, of course, it's great. Would I like to have to keep mining Netherrack, even if I set up a quarry and I am technically good for two weeks? No. Same thing with Forestry. I can go send my galo drill to level 60 and mine all I needed. But it will run out eventually.


Eventually.

 

[Captain Neckbeard]

Assuming no server resets.

 

[Adonis0]

But server resets make all your machines and creations mute too, so it's not really worth having a reset to get all the resource back, if the infrastructure you were wanting to use them for is gone too.

 

[Captain Neckbeard]

In some circles server resets are a regular, scheduled thing. My community starts with a fresh map every three months.

 

[Adonis0]

Interesting, That'd be very annoying for me
but anyhow, each to their own

 

[LittleMike]

This just shows that the farms only being able to use fertilizer probably wasn't a good decision. People are now moving to other means of producing fuel.

I agree with this. If part of the game is to set up infrastructure and automation (isn't that part of the fun? Working hard and that's the payoff?) then having something that is going to require non-renewable resources is just not appealing to me. That's why I made this post to ask if there's another way. It looks like either SC tree farm or using golems is the only option available to me. And it looks like that's either a lot of Thaumcraft research or a lot of grinding for resources, so not something you can necessarily do right off, but not too far in either. That's good. My point still stands, though - completely eliminating the ability to automate is a bad idea, and that's what's happened to Forestry. Sengir's dislike for magic crayola blocks aside, I think this was a bad idea.

 

[Zjarek_S]

Automation have nothing with being completely renewable. Now you can still fully automate this process, it only needs an external resource. I was personally really happy about this change, because it gave apatite more unique use, up to this point it was just something cluttering up the storage.

 

[LittleMike]

Automation have nothing with being completely renewable. Now you can still fully automate this process, it only needs an external resource. I was personally really happy about this change, because it gave apatite more unique use, up to this point it was just something cluttering up the storage.

I respectfully disagree with you 100%. If it's not renewable, then it's not automated by definition. Automated means hands-off. If you have to keep farming apatite and manually feeding it in - that's the key word right there, "manually."

With that said, I agree it gives apatite a better purpose, but if apatite were removed entirely, it would solve the problem.

 

[Zjarek_S]

You can make hands-off process of using apatite to make a lot of different things. Also, I don't think that automatically means "generating things from thin air".

 

[LittleMike]

You can make hands-off process of using apatite to make a lot of different things. Also, I don't think that automatically means "generating things from thin air".

I don't mean generating from thin air, I mean completely hands-off. So an SC farm, for example. You start it off manually, and then it does everything else automatically (plants saplings, chops trees, uses what it gathers for fuel, etc.) To me, that's fully automated. If I have to mine for apatite and then drop it in a chest to get pumped into the system, that's mostly automated, but not fully. I'm looking for a fully automated solution. I hope that's clearer.

 

[Adonis0]

The thing you're missing here though is that although yes apatite makes a lot of humus
Compost can be used to make humus too

All compost requires is a wheat farm, and those with a kick-start of seeds and dirt, are fully automatic from the get-go.

So, you can set up a system to centrifuge wood, then macerate plant-balls for dirt, combine those with four wheat, get more dirt, put humus back into farm. And then repeat

 

[LittleMike]

The thing you're missing here though is that although yes apatite makes a lot of humus
Compost can be used to make humus too

All compost requires is a wheat farm, and those with a kick-start of seeds and dirt, are fully automatic from the get-go.

So, you can set up a system to centrifuge wood, then macerate plant-balls for dirt, combine those with four wheat, get more dirt, put humus back into farm. And then repeat

Multifarms require fertilizer. You cannot use compost or mulch.

 

[Adonis0]

Multifarms require fertilizer. You cannot use compost or mulch.

What is that?
I was posting with the thought of the arboretum + logger set-up of forestry

 

[WTFFFS]

Arboretum+Logger is deprecated content Forestry version 2.0.0.x has multiblock farms which require fertilizer to run you cannot even craft the old style farms as of version 2.0.0.8 I think it was. Though the amount of apatite you gain from a single new style spawn at >60 is rather extensive. I mined out a single spawn and got 7 and a half stacks of apatite (this was without fortune I believe it does affect the drop rate) haven't played around with multifarms much yet (new world) but I suspect that amount of apatite will provide a decent amount of fertilizer to run the farm for a good while.