Extra Large Multifarm--Best Use?

[gusmahler]

And what's the power consumption look like? And the fertilizer consumption?

I can't find figures on power consumption. It's pretty high, though. 4 magmatic engines + 12 electric engines could not keep up with it. But power consumption is a non-issue now that my steam boiler is running. I have 8 buffer redstone cells that are completely full.

The issues to 24/7 operation are fertilzer and dirt. The fermenter actually runs through fertilizer faster than the multifarm. But I run out of dirt in about 3 hours or so. So, overnight, the mulitfarm will stop running. But that's what the iron tank is for. It's now at 610 buckets (I started the boiler at around 800 buckets and it was down to around 500 buckets by the time I got the fermenter moved to a new location.)

The setup is pretty simple. An item tesseract below the multifarm. An item tesseract hooked up to a pipe system with a diamond pipe for sorting. Trees go to one chest. Sand goes to another. Saplings go to a hopper above the fermenter. Earlier, I mentioned that the hopper had gotten full, but it's not even close to filling up now, so I don't know what was different back then.

From the fermenter it goes to 4 stills, which go to 100 bucket sized iron tank. From the iron tank, it goes to the boiler, which is hooked up to 18 industrial steam engines, which are hooked together to 8 redstone energy cells to an energy tesseract. Then I just hook up an energy tesseract next to any area that needs MJ power.

 

[netmc]

You should be able to use compost in the fermenters instead of fertilizer. Save the fertilizer for the multifarm since it can't be substituted there. Compost can be made with 4 wheat around a dirt block. To create dirt, you can use a peat bog. You can also macerate plant balls. Plant balls can come from wheat, seeds, or cane. (There are other sources as well.)

 

[brujon]

I can't find figures on power consumption. It's pretty high, though. 4 magmatic engines + 12 electric engines could not keep up with it. But power consumption is a non-issue now that my steam boiler is running. I have 8 buffer redstone cells that are completely full.

The issues to 24/7 operation are fertilzer and dirt. The fermenter actually runs through fertilizer faster than the multifarm. But I run out of dirt in about 3 hours or so. So, overnight, the mulitfarm will stop running. But that's what the iron tank is for. It's now at 610 buckets (I started the boiler at around 800 buckets and it was down to around 500 buckets by the time I got the fermenter moved to a new location.)

The setup is pretty simple. An item tesseract below the multifarm. An item tesseract hooked up to a pipe system with a diamond pipe for sorting. Trees go to one chest. Sand goes to another. Saplings go to a hopper above the fermenter. Earlier, I mentioned that the hopper had gotten full, but it's not even close to filling up now, so I don't know what was different back then.

From the fermenter it goes to 4 stills, which go to 100 bucket sized iron tank. From the iron tank, it goes to the boiler, which is hooked up to 18 industrial steam engines, which are hooked together to 8 redstone energy cells to an energy tesseract. Then I just hook up an energy tesseract next to any area that needs MJ power.

Easy way to figure out power consumption: Get a fully charged Redstone Energy Cell, get your Multifarm all ready and set to go, plop down the REC and start the timer, and stop it when the REC runs out. Divide by 20, and that's a rough estimate of how many MJ/t the machine is consuming.

Don't forget to disconnect all other sources of energy...

 

[gusmahler]

Fertilzer is so common that there's no real point in substituting it. I have 45 stacks of apatite just from finding two veins. And I get sand from the multifarm. So I'm not going to run out of fertilizer any time soon. I also don't have wheat, so I can't make compost.

BTW, I'm turning in for the night now, with 663 buckets in the tank and 6 stacks of 64 dirt in the multifarm. I expect that, when I wake up, the dirt will be gone and the multifarm will have stopped working. So it'll be interesting to see how much biofuel is left when I wake up. Since it only takes 36 buckets an hour to keep the boiler running once it's warmed up,I should be pretty close to 600 buckets left when I wake.

 

[Stanekk]

Why dont you Compress some of the saplings into plantballs that can be macerated into dirt. As you definately have some overflow it may be worth a try

 

[gusmahler]

Woke up 8 hours later, 573 buckets in the tank. No more dirt in the multifarm. And the fermenter had run out of fertilizer.

I have to figure out a way to use relays or something to get dirt in the multifarm. It will accept dirt as an input, but it's not a smart input, so if you just hook up a chest full of dirt next to it, the dirt will fill it up. But it won't stop, just keep pumping. I'm not too worried about how to get dirt, because I have turtles excavating and I'm going to start a quarry. The question is how to automate getting dirt to the multifarm.

 

[gusmahler]

I did a power test and I was really surprised. I disconnected the multifarm from all power except a single Redstone Energy Cell and I calculated how much power it used in 10 minutes. It only used 65,674 MJ. Which works out to 109 MJ per second or 5.47 per tick. This makes no sense because 12 electrical engines hooked up to a REC would get completely drained. That's 24 MJ/tick. But these calculations only show 6 MJ/tick.

I've seen that the multifarm works in bursts, taking in relatively small amounts of power, then a large amount. I guess that sometimes those bursts are longer than others.

EDIT: Just discovered the Multimeter. Hooking it up to the multifarm shows that it peaks at 30 MJ/tick, but it's very intermittent.

 

[Berry]

Was there any other machine draining the power from the electric engines? And are they hooked up to energy conduits or conductive pipes?
I read somewhere they take from 10-20 mj/t so I set up 4 biogas engines to start with, and one portable tankful as a starter. Then I hooked up a fermenter with liquiducts to continually feed the engines. Power was never an issue and I quickly produced more biomass than needed, so I sent it to storage. I don't have the calculations on that. I'll try and figure out a way to test that in a bit. I'll also test the power consumption of strictly the apple oak and for funsies test the power consumption of the apple orchard and peat bog.

Gusmahler, you should probably hook up a squeezer to the system and not only does it product apple juice for more efficient biomass output, it produces mulch as a byproduct which will be more than enough to supply a single fermenter with fertilizer. That saves the fertilizer for the multi-farm. Trust me, you may think you have enough apatite for now, but you really don't. Especially if you expand into an orchard which eats up the fertilizer much faster. You'll have to devise a system where the fermenter uses both water and applejuice as the squeezer doesn't put out enough to keep up with sapling production and occasionally the fermenter stops producing. If you could gate it so that when it doesn't have enough applejuice then it switches to water, you'll be golden. I've tried that a little but can't quite figure it out.

Dirt has been an issue for me as well. I've been trading stuff for dirt with people as a supplement. I tried a peat bog but it runs too slow. It's decent, but not enough to keep up with dirt consumption. I tried scrapboxes, but turns out it's 1.37% not 10%, so that's no reliable. I am in the process of getting enough copper to make another multifarm for reeds to turn into plantballs to macerate into dirt. I think that will finally be my solution. I'm using xycorium soil so I don't need any water holes, so the entire thing is reeds. They also grow really fast.

I'll try and do a test on the wood/sand/sapling/apple production per hour. I know that after 6 days running, nearly continuous (maybe 15 hours it stopped) I have 35 or so barrels full of wood and 6 barrel fulls of sand, including using up a lot of that sand for fertilizer. Apples and saplings I have no idea as they are being consumed once produced, although I definitely produce way more saplings than are consumed by one fermenter. I now have three, and it's staying somewhat even, but my sapling overflow system is buggy. Poor gate design on my part.

As for refilling the multifarm with fertilizer and dirt, I suggest having the dirt in a chest two blocks away and connecting a wood pipe to the chest, a stone/cobblestone to that and the multifarm. Get 2 autoarchic gates. Set the one against the multifarm to be <96 dirt emit redstone signal. Set the one attached to the chest to be on redstone signal emit pulse. Then hook the two gates together with redstone tubing or jacketed wire. It's definitely failsafe. You can do the same thing with the fertilizer.

 

[gusmahler]

Woke up 8 hours later, 573 buckets in the tank. No more dirt in the multifarm. And the fermenter had run out of fertilizer.

It's now been two hours. Even with 36 buckets per hour going to the boiler, I have enough to feed another boiler. After 1 hour, it made 26 buckets. The second hour, it made 47 buckets. I guess it just took a while to get started again.

Amazing that I can probably feed 4 full-sized HP boilers with this setup. And it's not even optimized.

 

[Berry]

lol yea. i've produced countless buckets of biomass. converted much of that to thermal energy and have made a few stacks of uu matter in a weeks time. that's not amazing production, but considering i have few bugs to work out, it's quite consistent. because i'm sick of quarrying the nether and checking on quarry fuel supply, i'm in the process of converting to steam now. i have one full sized solid fuel hp boiler being fed by planks from sawmills with all that excess wood. looks certainly possible to have another steam boiler for solid fuel and a third one for liquid.

 

[gusmahler]

Thanks for the tips on how to feed the farm dirt. I didn't realize how much dirt it really needed. I was just out for two hours and came back and there was no more dirt. 6 stacks, gone in 2 hours. The good news is that I made 116 buckets of biofuel in that time (after the boiler took it's share). So I could easily feed another boiler with bio fuel. Haven't done more recent calculations of planks, but when I calculated before, I was making twice as much wood as would be needed to run the boiler.

 

[Ripley]

As for refilling the multifarm with fertilizer and dirt, I suggest having the dirt in a chest two blocks away and connecting a wood pipe to the chest, a stone/cobblestone to that and the multifarm. Get 2 autoarchic gates. Set the one against the multifarm to be <96 dirt emit redstone signal. Set the one attached to the chest to be on redstone signal emit pulse. Then hook the two gates together with redstone tubing or jacketed wire. It's definitely failsafe. You can do the same thing with the fertilizer.

multifarm | wooden pipe with autarchic gate set to soil < 96 | chest works too, no need for the additional gate.
Though of course you can feed both fertilizer and soil through one hatch with different pipe wire colors but I usually go the lazy way with one hatch per input item .

 

[Berry]

oh! lol i'll give that a shot. less gates means more places to use gates i'll have to look up how to work with pipe wire colors, never done that before.

 

[Berry]

Oh, I forgot to post my power measurements. So the orchard is constantly demanding 75 mj/t according to the multireader. The arboretum demands 75 for short burst. Seems like 50% of the time. Peat farm is also 75, but I felt like I spent hours spam clicking for a reading. It was definitely a few minutes and it only requested energy for 3 ticks.

 

[earthmage7]

If you needed some cheep wood why did you not just build a Steve's carts tree farm? It is cheaper, requires almost no power and runs with only saplings. It ca even give itself fuel if It needs to. You can make it even larger than multifarm. I use a Steve's carts tree farm

 

[ultradolp]

I am currently running two 4*4*4 multiblock farm underground with my cross bred tree. Since I do not have a Balsa tree on hand my best choice is breed a Oak+Cherry, which gives me the trait of "fastest maturity", "small in height", "highest sappiness" and "normal yield".

I then run them on two fermenter and two squeezer with full automation (energy tesseract, item tesseract for input/output). The problem I encounter now is:

1) I have WAY more apple than I need to. I am sitting at 14k apple in hand and the number just keep increasing. I just use apple juice and mulch for my fermenter but they just cannot keep up, see point 2.

2) The sapling just cannot catch up for even one fermenter usage. Maybe oak tree sapling yields is just too low for fermenter.

3) It still burns through dirt like crazy (not so much for fertilizer). Though I am going to get maybe 4x peat farm.

Compared to my old farm of using fir tree

1) Fir sapling yields is high enough for usage. Though in 1.5 you are going to gain not much biomass off it

2) You get so many wood log to supply whatever boiler you use

3) It is light in dirt usage, but very heavy on fertilizer and energy.

The reason I abandon the fir tree farm is because I want to keep all my staff underground, and I don't want a super high room for that purpose

p.s. Apparently there is a bug between Minefactory Reloaded and Forestry sapling. My custom bred sapling get turn into unnamed sapling once in a while and start to crash me out of the game when I attempt to put them into my inventory. So I am forced use a barrel now

 

[ultradolp]

In case you want some quick dirt without needing to have a multiblock peat farm...

I introduce to you the almighty "wand of equivalent exchange" (thaumacraft) + "Bog earth combo"

Remember to enchant your wand for extra durability and increased area of effect (if you are that lucky, charging enchantment as well). Just go to your peat farm once in a while, use the wand on the darkened bog earth with your ordinary bog earth in inventory.

Good thing about the bog earth system is

1) It turns sand into dirt in 1:1 ratio (and your tree farm turns dirt into sand in 1:1 ratio)

2) You have some extra fuel for your energy usage. Unfortunately peat isn't that much better than charcoal in boiler (2k heat vs 1.6k heat) compared to using them in engine (5k MJ vs 1.6k MJ in engine). Though the engine is probably too slow to keep up with your peat production.

 

[brujon]

If you're using Fir Trees, it's best to use a single Turtle, running the Ultimate Wood Chopper program. http://www.computercraft.info/forum...ltimate-wood-chopper-selfbuildingmenueasy086/.

Extremely energy efficient, produces more fuel than it needs. Easy to build, low on resources... An excellent source of more saplings to supplement your Steve's Carts production. Requires about zero infrastructure to set up. You'll drown in logs as well, the yields are very good. Very bonemeal intensive though, i recommend a Sulfur Goo farm, since turtles can use it just like players can, as bonemeal. Make it right next to the turtle farm, transposers into the bonemeal chest, chunkload it, and forget about it.

 

[ultradolp]

If you're using Fir Trees, it's best to use a single Turtle, running the Ultimate Wood Chopper program. http://www.computercraft.info/forum...ltimate-wood-chopper-selfbuildingmenueasy086/.

Extremely energy efficient, produces more fuel than it needs. Easy to build, low on resources... An excellent source of more saplings to supplement your Steve's Carts production. Requires about zero infrastructure to set up. You'll drown in logs as well, the yields are very good. Very bonemeal intensive though, i recommend a Sulfur Goo farm, since turtles can use it just like players can, as bonemeal. Make it right next to the turtle farm, transposers into the bonemeal chest, chunkload it, and forget about it.

I forget the sulfur goo can be used as bone meal. Good to know about that. Though, I love my forestry style farming so I will stick to that. It is not the most efficient but I love the look of having a multiblock farm with resources management

 

[Ripley]

Oh, I forgot to post my power measurements. So the orchard is constantly demanding 75 mj/t according to the multireader. The arboretum demands 75 for short burst. Seems like 50% of the time. Peat farm is also 75, but I felt like I spent hours spam clicking for a reading. It was definitely a few minutes and it only requested energy for 3 ticks.

Hmm I think all farms request 75 mj/t when they need energy but they actually are very energy efficient compared to the old farms.
Orchards/Infernal Farms/Arboretums will only use energy when they need to do something(simply plop down an energy cell and you'll see it doesn't use any energy if it doesn't have anything to do).
The other farms too probably but I haven't played with them so I can't say for sure .