Drones, pipes, apiaries and cloning

[kunglaopt]

Hello. This is one for you bee automation enthusiasts. I've upgraded forestry to 2.0.0.9 and there's one small change (actually in 2.0.0.3) that broke my princess cloning machine : Alvearies and apiaries now accept the full stack of drones when piping into them.

I relied on apiarist pipes to distribute the drone offspring from apiary #1 (source princess) through #4, since pipes wouldn't insert a drone if one was already there. Obviously, this is now kaput.

Any thoughts on how to do this now ?

Cheers.

 

[Abdiel]

Routers is the first not completely overengineered thing that comes to my mind. As a bonus it will be much easier to add new apiaries.

 

[kunglaopt]

Yes, routers are great, I use them for a lot of stuff, and they were the first I tried for solving this. But they don't work in this case, because they can't guarantee one drone on the source apiary, if the number of offspring is fewer than the number of apiaries.

Essentially I've decided my problem has two parts : 1) guarantee one drone on the source apiary, so the princess can keep breeding; 2) distribute the remaining drones. Routers are perfect for 2 but I can't quite solve 1.

Thanks for the reply, though.

 

[Damoklesz]

I haven't done bees yet, but can't you get a redstone signal somehow when a queen dies? You could transform that into a pulse that could go to a transposer, pulling a single drone from a adjacent chest.

I do this with a filter to always supply my gregtech machines with the exact number of items needed for a cycle.

 

[kunglaopt]

Yes, that could work. I was trying to use only BC pipes, but I guess a little redpower can help. I'm going to test some builds, thanks

 

[Hydra]

Buildcraft gates can give a redstone signal if the apiary is missing a queen / princess in the upper slot.

 

[WTFFFS]

Could Emerald pipes work? I haven't played with them but from the writeup they have the ability to route a certain number of items in each direction I vaguely recall reading.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

As long as you have more than 1 drone produced each generation, you'll eventually have a full stack in the first alveary/apiary- and then your cloning machine will work as normal.

Just wait and let it run for a while.​

 

[b0bst3r]

Not related but Sengir updated forestry to 2.0.0.10 yesterday

FTB is so far behind .... come on get with it... updates are not quick enough...

 

[Zjarek_S]

The new changes require different approach. Currently I'm just having separate automatic apiaries and when I want to clone a bee, I just take some drones that are in source apiary and put them with new princess in next segment, taking about 20 seem to be enough to completely clone the bee. If you want more cloning you just need to make more source queens.

 

[Hydra]

Still. I don't get why he made this change. Would be nice if there would be a reasoning behind it since to me it gives no benefits and it breaks automatic cloning setups.

 

[Abdiel]

Would a regulator work?

 

[Larroke]

Hello. This is one for you bee automation enthusiasts. I've upgraded forestry to 2.0.0.9 and there's one small change (actually in 2.0.0.3) that broke my princess cloning machine : Alvearies and apiaries now accept the full stack of drones when piping into them.

I relied on apiarist pipes to distribute the drone offspring from apiary #1 (source princess) through #4, since pipes wouldn't insert a drone if one was already there. Obviously, this is now kaput.

Any thoughts on how to do this now ?

Cheers.

Consider just mass producing drones with standard apiaries, so your current set up just keeps a full stack in each machine, rather then a single drone?

Or, collect all your drones from all the cells into a chest, and then when the first one dies, distrubute all the drones in this one chest with a router. use a gate on the first cell to trigger the router to turn on with a redstone signal (RS on is router off).

 

[vineet]

Um I guess you could send of the drones to separate inventory and use mangers to make only one drone go to the alvearies. I thought drones didn't stack (judging from direwolf's smp)

 

[Larroke]

Um I guess you could send of the drones to separate inventory and use mangers to make only one drone go to the alvearies. I thought drones didn't stack (judging from direwolf's smp)

drones will stack until you identify them with the analyzer, in case you store in barrels generikB found a bug where pulling a stack out of a barrel just caused them to disappear...

 

[vineet]

Then how will the aviaries have a stack of unknown drones?

 

[WTFFFS]

Identical drones do stack, such as the ones you get from many generations running in an automated Apiary, truthfully I don't see what the real problem is, with the requirement for frames in Apiaries and the inability to automate them you HAVE to access the Apiary GUI regularly so just jump some drones around then. Fair enough about Alveary but by the time you can make one of those you most likely won't need to run a clone line anyway, you will have enough drones with the traits you want built up to manually breed up your clones in a couple generations and if you are looking at running a clone line of Alvearies my god man get a life (says someone who just built 4 matterfabs in single player legit...... lol).

 

[kunglaopt]

Still. I don't get why he made this change. Would be nice if there would be a reasoning behind it since to me it gives no benefits and it breaks automatic cloning setups.

Yes, that irks me. I can't see any reason for it.

Anyway, after experimenting a bit, I settled on a semi-auto solution. I split my line in 2, A) drone producing line and B) princess cloning line. When I have enough drones from A I just put them along with some princesses into a chest on B. From there, apiarist pipes insert princesses in apiaries, and a router distributes the drones. It's working quite well, and I'll start thinking about bridging the two systems. It's still slower than it was though (it's serial vs parallel).

 

[Sengir]

Honestly, I fixed a few issues the insertion code had with stacks and while I was at it saw no reason not to "fix" the slot only accepting a single drone from pipes. I may still change it back if enough people are interested.

 

[Hydra]

Honestly, I fixed a few issues the insertion code had with stacks and while I was at it saw no reason not to "fix" the slot only accepting a single drone from pipes. I may still change it back if enough people are interested.

Would be really nice Sengir. As said: sofar I don't really see a benefit and it breaks those nice automatic cloning setups.

And while I have your attention: the new farms only using fertilizer and not compost or mulch; is that final? I personally really like my automated composting setup.