Forestry basic concepts (complete noob warning)

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TheLittlei

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Warning: the following content may drive experienced foresters crazy with my absolutely noob Forestry knowledge. If you can control your temper please continue reading and help me out. Thanks a lot! :D

Really need to put that warning here as I know nothing - I mean absolutely nothing about Forestry. Anyway, how I started this mod is I found a quest tab titled bees and trees in agrarian skies 2 and I am very interested to check that out. I did a little bit of research, watching wiki and stuff, while learning through the quest book and me figuring things out. As a result, things is a lot more complicated than I originally expected. And I am quite lost now.

I got a centrifuge, squeezer and carpenter set up, connected to my lava generator. I got an artificial hive after covering it with seed oil, which I couldn't figure out what it was doing. Then I got an apiary with a meadow princess and a meadow drone in it (I got a beelizer and some hives which I could scoop). I provided some flowers for the bees to do their work. That's all I have done.

A few questions here:
1. What does the artificial hive from Ex Nihlo do? I can't figure it out by any means.
2. How do you get combs? There is something that looks like a screen for the combs to go to in my quest book, I would assume you need them to get combs (it kinda makes sense in real life)

Thanks!
 

Pyure

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1) In "normal" modded minecraft + forestry, hives are found naturally throughout the world as part of worldgen. The "artificial" hives simply allow players to enjoy bees in a skyblock map or any other map that doesn't naturally produce bees. To use it, place it into seed oil, then place the scented block on the ground for a while.

Break the resulting hive with a scoop and you'll get bees (and possibly combs). low-level scoops are typically just sticks and wool I believe.

According to http://ftbwiki.org/Scented_Artificial_Hive it can also revert back to an Artificial hive, at which point you'd need to re-immerse it in seed oil.

2) For the most part, by breeding bees and allowing the queens to (slowly) produce their outputs. You can also get them from breaking hives occassionally (see above). You can also make them in the escritoire by playing the silly mini-game (wiki it)
 

KingTriaxx

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The screen thing is called a frame. They make the bees work longer or faster. I've never been quite sure. But certain ones will kill them faster so you can breed better bees quicker. Forestry does have a wiki, but A) it's a little out of date, and B) your mod pack makes some changes. It's still a useful guide to getting started.
 

GreenZombie

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Beginners Guide to Forestry
Forestry has basically 3 branches that you can go into without worrying about the others:
* Automatic Farms - for the automatic production of vanilla crops / modded crops.
* Bees - to get an infinite supply of certain end game materials.
* Trees - to get an variety of decorative wood textures.
These three are built on a core of a few RF generators and crafting machines.

About Bees
The bees (And trees) in forestry have genes that determine their properties: Their operating range, temperature and humidity tolerance etc, and what kind of flowers they like. One of the genes determines the species - which defines the visual appearance, the unique output, what further species mutations are available, the preferred humidity and climate, as well as a set of default genes that are applied when the species is first mutated.

By mixing different species - as a princess and drones - in the same hive, you can cause the species gene to mutate, yielding additional species, and this is the core gameplay mechanic of this branch of Forestry - trying to mutate the species until you attain a species that has the required output.

Forestry uses mendelian genetics, where the drones and princesses each carry 2 sets of genes, a primary set and a recessive set. Drones with identical primary and recessive sets will stack, which will play a big part in all your efforts to breed different gene lines. Princesses and queens never stack. As a queen represents a mated princess, she actually represents 4 sets of genes - a visible set belonging to the princess, and a hidden set from the male she was bred with, and all the bees she produces will be a random mix (as per Mendel) of her, and the drones genes.

This all sounds very complicated, because it is.

That said - the only way to learn how all this actually applies is to get started. To start Forestry you need to make enough machines to start producing seed oil, that will be used in the Carpenter to make other Forestry things. "Plain" Forestry is not possible in skyblocks as Forestry typically relies on worldgen in biomes and villages for players to find the starting "tier 0" or Hive bees: Meadow, Plains, Jungle etc.

Place scented hives in the world, and if the conditions are right (biomes and things near the hive) it may (eventually) transform into a Forestry worldgen hive - that you will harvest with a scoop.

NB: To make things extra grindy, some of the princesses you get are called "ignoble" (and others "pristine"). The ignoble princesses have a property in that they will eventually produce no princess amongst their offspring. I normally keep these just to trade to villagers, in a skyblock I would just dispose of them, put them in decorative "bee houses", or carefully use them for some non critical production.

Your first breeding:
The very first bees you want to obtain are meadows and forest.
Place a princess and a drone from each species in an Apiary, and you will get a "Queen". If you let her sit in the Apiary for long enough, and the conditions are correct (view of sky, daytime, not raining, biome temperature and humidity, available nearby flowers are typical problems) she will produce some combs, and then die, producing a princess and drones. This princess and these drones will probably not stack as their genes will be a chaotic mess, which is going to be super annoying: If you are lucky, the mix of meadows and forest caused some of the bees to spawn with a mutates species gene as "Common Species". Some of the meadows / forest drones might actually have common, but as a recessive trait.
Place (your best guess) as to your best common bees in an Apiary and breed those, and repeat this process - breeding the commons together - until you start getting drones that stack. Stacking drones after a breeding cycle indicate the drones and princess have the same genes, and you now have a stable population of common bees.

Success.

You now want to breed common with meadows/forest to produce Cultivated, Cultivated with Common to produce Noble and Industrious, and those again with cultivated to produce the bees in the Noble and Industrious bee lines.

And, as you get these bees, automate them (using stacks of drones in Apiaries and pipes to pull all the bees (And produce) out and put the bees back in), to get the combs and honey, pollen and royal jelly that you need in the production of Alveary components.
By spinning the honey combs in a Centrifuge you are also getting Bees wax and honey drops. Honey drops can be used in your beealyzer that will show you the dominant and recessive genes of your bees (but not the hidden "drone" genes your queens carry).

Some Advances
Don't bother with the frames in Apiaries. If you are going to use bees for production, you are going to upgrade to Alvearies, which is a 3x3x3 "hive" that has 10x the output of an Apiary.

Get out of this as fast as possible. Every mod pack with Forestry typically adds mods like "Genetics" that add machines that allow deterministic breeding of bees, and the "capture" of and direct application of beneficial genes.

These mods take "base forestry genetics" that will literally consume months of your life and turn it into something that you can make progress on in mere hours and sometimes tens of minutes!

"Shortest Lifespan" is a good gene to have to breed into species as it allows for a quick turn around when breeding mutations if you don't have "murder" frames available.
"Longest Lifespan" on the other hand is good for production bees where you don't really want to spend all your time binning excess drones.
 
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Pyure

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Jeez GZ, info spam :)
I just wanna touch on a couple items you mentioned here.

Trees aren't just for decoration. They're (more?) commonly used to produce trees of varying productivity in various categories (e.g., more sappiness, more saplings, more logs). For instance, in some packs, its not possible to make a net-positive-energy treefarm with vanilla trees. You need to breed higher-productivity trees so that you can actually earn more energy than you spend.

Frames in Apiaries: this is subjective to everyone's preference. I always use frames in apiaries, especially for particularly useful products. And Alvearies honestly aren't that amazing unless you have Extra Bees installed, which isn't always the case.

More importantly: Frames in apiaries are essentially critical when you're still cross-breeding for new breeds (unless, again, you have Alvearies and Extra bees. Alvearies are total crap for breeding w/o Extra Bees)
 
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GreenZombie

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That got out of hand.
I had to stop.
Re the frames in apiaries - I really left that out as skyblock beginners will have no access to the "murder bees quickly" frames that are so, very, useful - but require looting of stronghold libraries for early game variants (not available in skyblock) or end game bee species products (by which time the player no longer needs to heed "beginners" advice on whats useful or not :p). In a failed effort to keep my very long post as short as possible, I made a number of inaccurate statements, but that are accurate for beginners.
Oh well.
 

KingTriaxx

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Um... all you really need are cocoa beans and the ability to make more to create chocolate frames, which are the basic DIE QUICKLY, frames. That much I do remember.

I've never actually used an Alveary, simply because I've never needed it. If I need more production, I just put down more Apiaries. It might be more useful in a space restricted Skyblock though.
 

GreenZombie

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Um... all you really need are cocoa beans and the ability to make more to create chocolate frames, which are the basic DIE QUICKLY, frames. That much I do remember.

I've never actually used an Alveary, simply because I've never needed it. If I need more production, I just put down more Apiaries. It might be more useful in a space restricted Skyblock though.

I must be thinking of the die quickly frames from the "other" addon. So many damn frames, so little documentation.

I had the same attitude about Alvearys - until I first built one.
 

KingTriaxx

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The other problem is I've never gotten to the bees I need to produce the royal jelly stuff.

Necrotic and Oblivion Frames are the two ultra-fast kill frames. Oblivion is one tick kill I think, but are very deep into Thaumcraft research for magic bees stuff.
 
T

TheLittlei

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The other problem is I've never gotten to the bees I need to produce the royal jelly stuff.

Necrotic and Oblivion Frames are the two ultra-fast kill frames. Oblivion is one tick kill I think, but are very deep into Thaumcraft research for magic bees stuff.
I just looked at the quest book, I can get 2 oblivion frames when I craft a 2nd tier frame. lmao that will help.

Thanks everyone for the help, I will experiment with it and (hopefully) figure some advanced stuff out.
 
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asb3pe

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for the basics, just watch Generikb's "BEEcadamy" videos on youtube. Even with the videos now at 2+ years old, the Forestry bee basics haven't changed.