[Forestry] Farm Efficieny

[Zerro]

Greetings,

I'm getting ready to set up some automated farms but I was wondering if it'd be more efficient for me to make a couple of the 5x5 farms or make many of the smaller sized farms.

Now for automation, I noticed you're suppose to pipe items into the top. How does that actually work when all of your crops and stuff would be blocking the path for the pipes?

Thanks

 

[casilleroatr]

You can pipe in from the sides too. I supply peat into the side of a multifarm with no issues. The only thing I do know for sure is that a hatch will auto eject on the down face. I don't know about efficiencies.

 

[KowKrisis]

With multifarm hatches they can take items in from the sides and are fairly smart about where the items need to go. The hatch is also able to auto eject the farms output into a pipe directly below it, no wooden pipe with redstone engine needed.

As far as efficiency goes, I am not sure.

 

[Teddy Bear]

the best farms currently are MFR farms, a harvester ans a planter. It kind of OP if you ask me. its at least 5x faster then a foresrty farm

 

[MigukNamja]

In terms of material cost building efficiency, 3x5 is the most efficient. It has the highest ratio of farmland to multifarm blocks. For early-to-mid game, those multifarm blocks are expensive.

In terms of operating efficiency, I have no idea. They consume so little power, water, dirt, and fertilizer, that I don't notice or don't really care. Note that in Unleashed, you can convert MFR brown Fertlizer from a Composter into Forestry blue Fertilizer at a 1:1 ratio using normal crafting. I have a 2 MJ/t cyclic assembler to immediately convert MFR brown to Forestry blue and than I can use that everywhere. The MFR fertilizer, Forestry MultiFarm, and Forestry Fermenter all take the blue.

Mid-to-late game, it's easier to craft and setup 5x5 farms. Most of the work (time spent) is in the building and piping. Might as well go max. size when copper, tin, redstone, and gold are no longer an issue.

As far as top hatches go, I go 5x5 and put 2 hatches in the middle 3x3 area of the top. I plop an Item Tesseract straight down on them and have never had a problem with crops trying to occupy the same space. I use 1 Tesseract channel for fertilizer and the other for dirt. You will have "head of line" blocking as I discovered if you try to share a single Tesseract or Tesseract channel for dirt + fertilizer.

Once I have my farms setup, they are mostly "set and forget". The biggest ongoing concern is server load. I try not to build more than 3 and have been trying to "get by" with just 1 these days just for the challenge of it.

 

[namae]

the best farms currently are MFR farms, a harvester ans a planter. It kind of OP if you ask me. its at least 5x faster then a foresrty farm

MFR is good when all you need is wood and rubber, otherwise forestry farms are better at getting sapling/biomass and fruits as they make their own saplings and you can breed better trees.

 

[MigukNamja]

the best farms currently are MFR farms, a harvester ans a planter. It kind of OP if you ask me. its at least 5x faster then a foresrty farm

They are indeed OP. I used one of those my last playthrough and it was just insane the amount of Oak I was getting. The way it plants and grows the trees directly adjacent is completely unrealistic. Very "gamey". And, that was without a fertilizer ! It wasn't quite to the squid rancher level of lolz, but it was pretty bad.

I might do MFR Oak again for lolz with a fertilizer for even more lolz.

What I love about the Forestry tree farms is the progression. Oak + Apples + Saplings is a great starter. Then, with some constant tree breeding alongside bee breeding, you can get lemon and eventually Mahoe. I'm at basic Mahoe now and working on improving the genomes, i.e. the stats. I mainly want faster maturity and more saplings per Mahoe would be nice as well. The fermentation difference between a single Oak sapling and a single Mahoe sapling is worth it. 1 Fermenter with Mahoe saplings from a 5x5 can easily keep 8x Stills full.

 

[Omicron]

Powercrystal's Mods as a whole have never really been the poster child for "balanced and sensible", if you know what I mean

If you feel like Forestry multifarms aren't worth the price, however, there's something you can do. In the main Forestry config file (common.conf? I forget) you can set the farmland layout from diamond (default) to square, like the old farms were. The result is that the multifarm fills in the corners of the diamond shape as well, offering significant amounts of extra farmland for the same multiblock size.

 

[MigukNamja]

Powercrystal's Mods as a whole have never really been the poster child for "balanced and sensible", if you know what I mean

Heh, yeah. I hadn't realized that's who did MFR. I like MFR as whole. Great work by Powercrystal and so many useful things for almost any build, even if some stuff is a bit over the top.

If you feel like Forestry multifarms aren't worth the price, however, there's something you can do. In the main Forestry config file (common.conf? I forget) you can set the farmland layout from diamond (default) to square, like the old farms were. The result is that the multifarm fills in the corners of the diamond shape as well, offering significant amounts of extra farmland for the same multiblock size.

Oh, I love, love Forestry, even for its cumbersome Carpenter and Thermionic Fabricator. Those add...flavor. I think Forestry as a whole is well-balanced and the configs are indeed very nice. Tons of room to tweak. I hadn't noticed the MultiFarm layout shape on the configs, though.

That's what I love about these forums. I learn something new every day !

That is nice to know and I'll have to give it a try. I might have to dial back some of the other numbers to compensate. As it is, I feel Forestry is neither OP nor under-powered, IMHO.

 

[Zerro]

what is MFR?

 

[casilleroatr]

what is MFR?

Minefactory Reloaded

 

[netmc]

There are several bees which have nice effects that should be able to speed the production from forestry farms. The fruity bee has a ripening effect that bone meals the leaves which are good for orchards, and i believe there is another that works with regular plants and trees.

 

[MigukNamja]

Oooh...nice. I hadn't thought of looking for those bees. After looking here:

http://wiki.feed-the-beast.com/Effect

...my favorite is the Blooming Bee. I'll try to breed that one tonight and see if that increases my biofuel (ethanol) production. I searched the page for "Bonemeals" and found a few bees.

As for MFR vs. Forestry tree farms in general, MFR will produce more wood by far per acre/area of farmland, but Forestry will produce more saplings and fruit. I've used power systems based on both and when I go with MFR Oaks, I usually have a 3:1 ratio of boilers from charcoal to boilers from ethanol. When Forestry, the ratio is roughly 1:2 charcoal:ethanol.

Note that their trees are not comparable. MFR takes vanilla saplings and MFR rubber trees only (I believe), and Forestry requires saplings that can have genome information.

In general MFR is easier/cheaper and Forestry has a nice upgrade path, if you're interested in that. A top-end Forestry tree farm, while a lot of work to get a top-end sapling with all the right attributes, should produce more energy. But, you can achieve the same in MFR with more farms.

Either kind of tree farm, when scaled up to just 1, 2, or 3 tree farms, will produce way more energy than you practically use.