Forestry 2.0-why?

[DoctorOr]

well. you can have an orchard now, a farm especially for growing apples. the best part is that it don't cut the trees down. it will just harvest tonnes and tonnes of apples for you.

Which of course, gives you no saplings (I'd wager, a larger long term reason for tree farms than apples and wood combined) and in fact, if you put a vanilla oak tree in a Forestry farm it will convert the sapling to nonvanilla, which has a _drastically_ (almost zero) reduced apple production unless left to ripen, so you wont be getting even incidental apples from the farm

so if you want apples in addition to saplings, be prepared to build and maintain two entire multiblocks. You can't put an orchard and a sapling/wood farm on the same multiblock

 

[Bluehorazon]

Which of course, gives you no saplings (I'd wager, a larger long term reason for tree farms than apples and wood combined) and in fact, if you put a vanilla oak tree in a Forestry farm it will convert the sapling to nonvanilla, which has a _drastically_ (almost zero) reduced apple production unless left to ripen, so you wont be getting even incidental apples from the farm

so if you want apples in addition to saplings, be prepared to build and maintain two entire multiblocks. You can't put an orchard and a sapling/wood farm on the same multiblock

Well the problem was having not enough apples for the still that consumes the wheat. If you use wheat for biofuel going with an orchard is propably the better idea. Compared to Steves Carts the farms are clearly weaker in terms of maintanance but they require far less space. And they aren't that expensive. The most effective ones are 3x5x4 which just requires 120 Copper, which is reasonable for the amount of ressources they spit out. And Apatite... well I have 3 double-chests full of apatite and since I have a lot of ash too I see no reason to pretend that apatite is a bottleneck.

The new farms are a good example for reconsideration of average balance. They are still pretty fast are way better to handle and are reasonable priced. Of course they can't compete with SteveCarts, but honestly exspecially the wheat-farm is just broken. The TreeFarm at least needs coal, since the trees block the solar-engine every so often, but the wheat-farm is really hilarious. And well... there is another quite broken farming-method in GregTech, the Crop Harvester harvests crops which is another maintanance free (well up to 32 Eu/t) method for wheat-production.

 

[nethervvoid]

Since I have literally 20 stacks of appetite I don't really think about running out of fertilizer. Of course my systems stop when the item they make fills the chest. I don't let my stuff run continuously.

 

[Revemohl]

I don't think it's even possible to run out of Apatite anymore, especially if you mine them with a Fortune pick/drill/mechahand.

 

[Whovian]

I don't think it's even possible to run out of Apatite anymore, especially if you mine them with a Fortune pick/drill/mechahand.

Just use Void Pipes or a Lava Transposer, it's possible. Though very, very hard without trying.

 

[adjl]

It's also possible to run out of Apatite if you explored several kilometres from spawn in your current world before the 2.0 update came out, and are averse to or unable to use Mystcraft, since then you wouldn't have reasonable access to any of the massive new veins, and hunting down all of the existing small veins would be tedious enough to be objectionable. But that's about it (and even then the giant veins are still available, if you're up for an expedition).

 

[Airship]

Also, if you have Gregtech, Fertilizer's renewable with Saltpeter.

Could you expand on this? How? Isn't Saltpeter just as non-renewable as Apatite?

 

[DoctorOr]

Could you expand on this? How? Isn't Saltpeter just as non-renewable as Apatite?

Slendermen have a lot of saltpeter in their family pearls.

 

[Airship]

Huh. That's actually pretty neat. Math time!

So for a fully automatic fertilizer operation, I'd need to first make a ender spawner and collect a stack of enderpearls. This gives me 16 dusts which I can electrolyze for 4 potassium and nitrogen, which makes 20 saltpeter when combined with compressed air. But then I'd need tin to make the cells... I guess I could centrifuge lava cans. 32 of the forestry type since it's not nerfed by Gregtech, or 32 of the red nether cans once the nerf hits will create a surplus of 4 tin that can be used to make 16 tin cells.

...But I'm still missing cells as I need to make compressed air as well, so let's make that a stack of lava to create the tin. Magma Crucible at this point would take way too much energy, so we should look into alternatives. Sulphur from netherbees in a squeezer would work nicely since we're already using nether bees to make the refractory capsules (probably). Pulverize cobble from a cobblegen to make the sand needed.

Throw it all in the cooker, and we end up with 20 saltpeter. Unfortunatly, we still need more stuff to make the fertilizer, which requires more sand and dirt. the sand is easy, but we need to find a way to get 40 dirt as well, to create 40 fertilizer. Only way I know of making dirt is plantballs, but 40 plantballs is ...5 stacks of plants. Not impossible, A wheat farm could probably supply that easily enough though. Maybe a peat bog could supply it? Hm.

All in all... Not impossible... But I think I'll stick with the Apatite

(Fake)EDIT: Actually, we could simplify a bunch by making tin from Extra Bees, we'd only need 8 combs to make the tin we'd need, which is a lot easier than getting 64 lava from sulphur + all the other stuff... All of a sudden things are much more viable! I'll leave in what I wrote already because I'm lazy and stuff. Still, making dirt is a pain... Anyone know of a good way?

 

[Sphinx2k]

I don't know, but so far i like the new farms.
They look nicer than the old ones.
A Rubber Tree Farm with self made gravity gun rubber trees is great.
You can plant the big trees like the sequoia(don't know if written right)

I think the problem ATM is i sit at chests and chests of metals so i don't need to go mining anytime soon. A resource that gets me out in the world to get more is nice i think.

 

[Omicron]

Something to keep in mind for those who consider the multiblock farms too expensive, by the way:

If you activate the square layout in the Forestry config (as opposed to the default diamond layout), you will get a lot more farmland out of your farms. A 3x3 (minimum size) farm will suddenly have as much farmland as a 5x5 (maximum size) farm does on default settings, allowing you to get the same output with 36 farm blocks instead of 100.

The farm's resource need will go up accordingly, of course - every action still needs water, fertilizer and energy, and with more farmland the farm will have to execute a lot more actions. However, the initial investment into the multiblock structure is much smaller. Also, the max size farm gains an additional 50% farmland as well, allowing you to construct something with 50% more output than the best farm in diamond config can offer.

Oh, and another advantage of the new farms that I noticed while testing: they only consume energy when they are doing something. The old farms would constantly eat however much energy you gave them while idle-scanning for grown plants. The new ones just spend 1 MJ every 3-4 seconds scanning, and only if something needs doing they start drawing energy. This makes them a lot more energy-efficient to run.

 

[whythisname]

You actually missed an option. you can use a redpower frame machine to harvest trees. the hard part is detecting when to harvest.

I intend to go that route in the future, though I've got to come up with a good design and most of all, build it.

Tree growth isn't that hard to detect btw, a sapling doesn't transfer redstone signals, wood blocks do. So you can easily send a signal into a sapling with a repeater and try to catch it on another side, as soon as the tree grows the signal will pass through.
Also in Redpower you have the light detector, you can easily place that next to a tree to detect its growth (the sapling will let light pass through, a log won't). Simply have a light on 1 side of the sapling and the light detector on the other, as soon as a tree grows the light level should drop and give you a signal you can use to start harvesting.

Those are the best 2 I can come up with, but the good'ol BUD switch will also do the job and there are probably other ways as well.

For the smaller plants it's harder though as they won't really block light like a piece of wood does, nor do they allow redstone current to pass through. You can probably just use a timer for those however, make it use bonemeal or come up with something entirely different.

 

[Poppycocks]

Huh. That's actually pretty neat. Math time!

So for a fully automatic fertilizer operation, I'd need to first make a ender spawner and collect a stack of enderpearls. This gives me 16 dusts which I can electrolyze for 4 potassium and nitrogen, which makes 20 saltpeter when combined with compressed air. But then I'd need tin to make the cells... I guess I could centrifuge lava cans. 32 of the forestry type since it's not nerfed by Gregtech, or 32 of the red nether cans once the nerf hits will create a surplus of 4 tin that can be used to make 16 tin cells.

...But I'm still missing cells as I need to make compressed air as well, so let's make that a stack of lava to create the tin. Magma Crucible at this point would take way too much energy, so we should look into alternatives. Sulphur from netherbees in a squeezer would work nicely since we're already using nether bees to make the refractory capsules (probably). Pulverize cobble from a cobblegen to make the sand needed.

Throw it all in the cooker, and we end up with 20 saltpeter. Unfortunatly, we still need more stuff to make the fertilizer, which requires more sand and dirt. the sand is easy, but we need to find a way to get 40 dirt as well, to create 40 fertilizer. Only way I know of making dirt is plantballs, but 40 plantballs is ...5 stacks of plants. Not impossible, A wheat farm could probably supply that easily enough though. Maybe a peat bog could supply it? Hm.

All in all... Not impossible... But I think I'll stick with the Apatite

(Fake)EDIT: Actually, we could simplify a bunch by making tin from Extra Bees, we'd only need 8 combs to make the tin we'd need, which is a lot easier than getting 64 lava from sulphur + all the other stuff... All of a sudden things are much more viable! I'll leave in what I wrote already because I'm lazy and stuff. Still, making dirt is a pain... Anyone know of a good way?

An Electric Crafting Bench doesn't consume the cells.

 

[Airship]

An Electric Crafting Bench doesn't consume the cells.

Ah! I did not know that... Well then! All we need to automate it is the enderpearls and some dirt then? That's pretty good, and I'll probably have that as a sort of an end goal.

 

[Poppycocks]

All you need is one electrolyzer for the nitrogen and potassium, and one compressor for compressed air. The only logistical challenge you have to overcome is getting rid/emptying of the one extra Nitrogen cell / balancing the inputs. Which can be solved beautifully with a single buffer... and some other things .

 

[Zjarek_S]

You actually missed an option. you can use a redpower frame machine to harvest trees. the hard part is detecting when to harvest.

Detecting when to harvest isn't hard, because wood is solid block and sapling is not. Here is my quick setup, works without problems:

Edit: for small plants seed bags in deployer work great, harvesting can be done using water streams. However you have to manually fill seedbags every 24 harvests (assuming you plant 24 seeds in one go, it is optimal for 10x10 farm with water dispensers in the corners and 4 transposers in the middle).

 

[Feydaway]

I built a multifarm immediately when they upgraded...and one multi with all 4 sides doing apple/oak saplings produced WAY more apples and saplings than my squeezer and fermenter could keep up with. I soon had more biomass than I could use.

But, NOW?? The same farm doesn't create enough saplings to ferment enough biomass to run 6 bio-engines well. And, apples? Forget it. I actually have to forget about the juice and mulch. Not enough apples here for anything.

Why did they nerf it so hard?

 

[Zjarek_S]

Sengir didn't nerf multifarms, he fixed them because they were simply duping saplings and apples. If you want more saplings, try upgrading your trees. Getting saplings drop rate from balsa to other tree with more leaves can help a lot with biomass production.