Automated farming without fertilizer?

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LittleMike

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Jul 29, 2019
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What WTFFFS said - the old machines are being retired and the new multifarms require fertilizer. It's true that the spawn and yield rates of apatite are pretty good, and they can be found and higher levels, which means easier access to them. Still, I would rather have a fully automated system because I think it's cool to be able to set and forget after putting some initial work in.
 
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Hydra

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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.

Exactly. I love designing systems that are fully self-sustaining, especially the ones that are rather complex (like creating compost from wheat,seeds>plantballs>dirt). If it's simply impossible to make a system self-sustaining I will go look for something else (SC treefarms for example). So this means that if this doesn't gets changed that I will be moving away from Forestry to do the farming and am going to rely on SC and TC to do my farming (thaumcraft is already WAY easier once you have the research).
 

jumpfight5

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That's the most annoying thing for me. TC and SC have better farms than Forestry(THE farm mod) can touch. Even Xycraft and RP2 could make good "assistant" farmers, much better than Forestry will ever be able to. What's next, losing the ability to add frames to apiaries?

Oh wait.
 

LittleMike

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That's the most annoying thing for me. TC and SC have better farms than Forestry(THE farm mod) can touch. Even Xycraft and RP2 could make good "assistant" farmers, much better than Forestry will ever be able to. What's next, losing the ability to add frames to apiaries?

Oh wait.

Wait, frames are going away? I never got into the bee stuff, but I was looking to soon after playing around more with Thaumcraft.
 

LittleMike

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Oops, I meant automatically.
Frames aren't going away, just the automation of them :p

Oh gotcha *whew* scared me for a minute there. I didn't even know you could automate them. I remember watching "Beethos" haha Ethos LP videos on trying to do everything from gates to golems and couldn't get the frames into the apiaries right. I just thought it couldn't be done, so I guess that *will* be the case instead of being the case now.
 

LittleMike

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Slightly resurrecting this thread :p

So I decided to try SC farm. I have it all set up, and I *think* it's working right. It took some manual tinkering to get it so that the cart doesn't grab saplings for fuel. However, now it's knocking back stacks of oak, and that's good. My problem now is how to I get everything out of the manager to pipe into a fermenter? I've seen a ton of different methods, but it seems they all require blutricity.
 

WTFFFS

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None of the methods I've used required blutricity, I've used a redstone pulsed filter on the manager itself with a filter in-line allowing only saplings through on the tube to the fermeter, the wood and apples were sent off to storage, I've also used a wooden pipe+autarchic gate to extract the items from the manager and a diamond pipe to send the items the way they needed to go, basically any normal "extracting" method as well as any normal sorting method in pipes\tubes will do what you want.
 

LittleMike

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None of the methods I've used required blutricity, I've used a redstone pulsed filter on the manager itself with a filter in-line allowing only saplings through on the tube to the fermeter, the wood and apples were sent off to storage, I've also used a wooden pipe+autarchic gate to extract the items from the manager and a diamond pipe to send the items the way they needed to go, basically any normal "extracting" method as well as any normal sorting method in pipes\tubes will do what you want.

Okay, cool. Looks like I have some reading to do :p My goal is to make biofuel out of the saplings and I think use the apples in a squeezer to get apple juice for the fermenter? I have to plan out exactly how that's going to work.
 

WTFFFS

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Sapling production will outstrip apple production by a considerable amount so it may be a good idea to have at least 2 fermenters running, one with apple juice (only when you have apples to process) and another with water, from my setups I know that a single fermenter is easily able to feed at least 3 stills (on water) and also can use all of the saplings from a fairly large SC tree farm (2 stacks of rails thereabouts). This produced easily enough Biofuel to fuel a 36HP boiler as well as 6 auxiliary Biogas engines.
 

LittleMike

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So one fermenter would be idle until it has enough apples and the other would be the "main production" one running water? The SC farm I made is about 16x18 (I used MilConDoin's example) Right now, the one cart can't make a single pass without cutting a bunch of stuff down, so I know oak wood production is good. Not sure how fast the saplings are produced, especially because it takes such a long time before the cart makes it to the manager to unload. I can say that the cart has 3 full stacks of wood for fuel and 3 full stacks of saplings for replanting.

Would it be better to use pneumatic tubes or BC pipes for feeding from the farm to the rest of the production line? I have no idea how to use filters and I don't like timers because I read they cause server lag, so right now I'm just using BC pipes in a test world. I had those filtered via diamond pipe to have the saplings go to the fermenter as well as apples, then wood to a barrel. You don't have any screenshots of your setup, do you? I'm having trouble visualizing how everything goes.
 

WTFFFS

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No screenshots sorry I managed to corrupt that world very badly, my last backup was a while ago and I had added a few mods with worldgen (or changed worldgen) so I restarted instead of NBT editing it to work.
But yeah that is the basic idea you have one fermenter that is run on apple juice when you have an excess of apples, you can fairly easily setup the pipes\tubes to feed it first then send the excess to a second fermenter on water (though truthfully I tend to use apples for TC3 as a source of Victus so I just ran both of mine on water). Tubes vs pipes is really up to which you prefer timers can have a negative impact on lag (but in my experience it is minimal unless you absolutely spam them I had 10 or so with no negative impact, relays however....) but pipes can have a much greater impact potentially if you forget them for a while and they drop stuff all over the place. Tubes do have greater control over inventory management via Restriction Tubes\Transposers\Filters\Managers\Sorting machines but they can require some blutricity (sorting machines\managers, not much though) and they are in my experience slightly heavier on computational load than pipes (not by enough for it to matter to me but it is still there). Pipes however are much more difficult imo to setup correctly and tend to eat more space to do the same thing though they do have native support (without an intermediary block) for Logi pipes which is better in a lot of ways at management than RP2, there is also Applied Energistics a fairly new mod that is shaping up to be very very good, atm I haven't played around with it's supply functions much but it is able to interface with any of the other transport solutions with ease, so really I would say it's a case of play around in a test world with all systems (RP2\BC\AE\Logi pipes).
Circuit design (transport\storage\processing) is really to me one of the joys of modded minecraft so I wouldn't tell someone you have to use X block just play around with them and find something that works for you.
 

Domicilius

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Jul 29, 2019
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The option I prefer runs off a skeleton spawner and turtles. I usually find a couple skeleton spawners via early exploration in the overworld + twilight forest. A soul shard is pretty easy to make and I try to get at least tier 4 from the spawners. Then I build a quick grinder from the soul shard + some melee turtles to farm up bones and arrows. You can feed the bones as bonemeal to a farming turtle who sits and farms 1 patch of wheat endlessly. It produces crazy amounts of wheat just by itself, and its very easy to scale up, although past 3 farmers you might have to get another skeleton spawner. With the wheat you can make biomass incredibly easily, and quite a lot of it. One of the only drawbacks is the lack of infinite wood when compared to a SC farm, but its easy to make a turtle tree farm as well.
 

jumpfight5

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RP2 Deployer+Block breaker will do that for those who don't understand computercraft.

But the bone meal update's coming soon, so that turtle will be out of date.
 

LittleMike

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Jul 29, 2019
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RP2 Deployer+Block breaker will do that for those who don't understand computercraft.

But the bone meal update's coming soon, so that turtle will be out of date.

Yea, with the changes to bonemeal, that would be tough. The SC farm seems to create a LOT of wood. I've been experimenting in a test world, but got sidetracked by Thaumcraft. I now have all research except for Thaumic Bees and the golem upgrades that require knowledge fragments. Haha. Oh, while I'm on the subject, how do you research Thaumic Bees? Or do they not require research?
 

Icarus White

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Given my limited knowledge:

Thaumic bee research requires at least Unified Thaumic Field Theory; if you have Thaumic bees installed, you should see some bee-related research topics to the right of UTFT, even before you research them. Thaumic bees will also allow you to research some thaumium forestry-type tools, and those topics are directly above Thaumium - that is, the bee net and grafter. In particular, these tools can be enchanted with Repair.

While I don't think the 'natural mutation' type bees need research, there is an 'endgame' sort of bee that will allow you to produce crystal shards. Those bees definitely need research, since they involve an infusion altar recipe. You can also find some zany vis-using frames that way.

As well, Thaumic Bees seems to have a recipe for fertilizer - anybody found it yet?
 
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LittleMike

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Thank you. I figured out why I couldn't find anything else - apparently the Mindcrack pack doesn't have Thaumic Bees. It looks like I have everything I can get now aside from the knowledge fragment stuff.
 

Dravarden

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I have:
a steve carts farms with rails from a mineshaft, wood goes to powered furnaces and the charcoal to steam boilers, saplings to fermenters, the mulch comes from golem powered wheat farm with 2 moisteners, and that biomass goes to a max size tank, that powers 5 engines, and those engines power the furnaces of the charcoal, the fermenters and a quarry output, 3 pulverizers and 6 furnaces, the quarry is powered by the steam. Right now I have overflow of wood (my gold chest is full of charcoal), mulch (needs more saplings) and biomass (the tank is getting full and not going down)