[Forestry] Help with Automation

[Zerro]

Greetings,

I was wondering if someone could give me some tips on ways that I could better automate my Peat and Tree farms in a way that requires little to no observation on my part. I also want to hook up a Biofuel generator since I will be having a lot of excess saplings.

This is how my setup currently looks (above ground):

There is 1 Peat Farm and 4 Tree Farms (You can't see the rubber tree farm in the pic)
Each farm is powered by 4 Peat Engines

I started out with BuildCraft piping but of course that led to items overflowing out of pipes when the inventory was fun. I could use Logic Gates but I haven't gotten around to setting up an assembly table+laser setup.
Currently everything is being sorted with RP pipes and machines. I haven't figured out how to config the sorting machine to extract items without the machine jamming or getting stuck in cycle-mode because the item does no exist in the adjacent inventory.

Peat Farm:
Sorting Machine sends peat to one chest and dirt to another chest where more Bog Earth will be created
When the bog earth is created, it gets sent back up (using a filter) and into the hoppers.
Currently I manually move the peat fuel from it's chests to the engines since all the farms are spread out (as you can see in the mini-map) and I haven't figured out the piping yet. I would like a separate room underground for an engine factory but without teleporting pipes, I'd have to worry about signal degregation with the powered pipes

Tree Farms:
Sorting Machines sends:
..saplings back to the Arboretum (Excess just travels back to the chest. I'm thinking Excess could go to Biofuel generation)
..Sand (x4 farms) is sent to the Bog Earth generator
..All timber (except rubber) is sent to another chest where they are sorted into Crystal Chest. The Crystal Chests are all full now so I don't know what to do with the timber other than make Creosote which I have a filled 3x3x5 tank.
There is no system to restock Humus into the machines.
I have a setup that creates Compost and Humus but I have to manually input the dirt into the chests for the auto crafting table to craft.

I also have a cactus farm and wheat farm but I don't really need to worry about those other than sending PeatFuel to them and extracting ash.

For the Peat-Engines, which sides are the Input sides for peat and Output for ash? When I was sorting with BC pipes, the ash would come out the same way the Peat went in which was one of the reasons for converting to RP tubes.

So that is how my Peat and Tree farms are configged. As mentioned, there is some automation but still alot of manual labor on my part. Also the sorting machines seem to get jammed or stuck when there isn't an item to pull out. I was hoping someone could give me some advice on how to improve the system so I can automate the creation of Bog Earth, Compost, and Humus as well as distributing Peat to engines.

Thanks for the assistance

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Some ideas:

For peat... run a Tube from your Peat output past each of your peat engines. While it may take a while, it will eventually fill up each peat engine as it comes to them, since they go into the nearest inventory. If you use an in-line Filter to only allow peat to go in, you won't even need a sorting machine, because the Filter automatically pulls the peat that direction, and the dirt can keep going on it's merry way to your bog-earth-production facility. Set up a chest at the end of the line for the surplus peat to go to once all of the engines are capped.

Ash will automatically come out in any direction, however Tubes are rather more intelligent than Pipes are, so it can't get past the Filter to clog up your other systems, and it won't go into any engines, so it'll go on down the line to the chest at the end of the line.

Be certain that your peat line doesn't connect to any other pipes. Use covers where necessary.

Managers are a great way to auto-supply. Put in, say, one stack of Humus in the Manager attached to your Arboretum, and it will try to make sure that exactly one stack is always in your Arboretum. Same thing with your Peat Bog and Bog Earth.

There's several things you can do with logs. You can put them in a Carpenter and get Wood Pulp, with which you can make Paper for your Mystcraft/TC3 research/etc needs. You can cook them up into Charcoal to run things. If nothing else, you can Void Pipe surplus.

 

[Zerro]

Thanks for the tips, Sneekey. Here's what it currently looks like under my Peat farm and one of the tree farms:

Red: Is where the Peat currently goes
Yellow: Where the sand and dirt goes for making Bog Earth
The hanging chest is currently for wood, apples, and excess saplings. I haven't setup a sorting machine yet for it.

Now I've been thinking about reorienting the engines so the run (in the picture) from left-to-rightinstead of how they currently are setup (North to South)

I was also thinking about sending the Peat to a chest on the far left and then do what Shneekey suggested and send the peat down along a line connected to the engines and circle around until the peat returns to the chest (if all engines are filled with fuel). Of course this probably will cost alot of tubes

As for creating Bog Earth, Compost, and Humus, I was thinking of reconfig the sorting machine to have dirt sort for 3 colors (if possible). This way dirt should be evenly distributed to the creation of each item

 

[slay_mithos]

You can also put all the surplus into barrels, and remember to void or lava what is still "excess" after all that, to ensure you won't clog the system.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Apparently, forestry machines are rather picky about which side they accept input from, at least from RP2 machines. I have a fully automated and functional setup now,

The components:

Peat Bog and Turbary setup:

The Peat Bog is placed down first, the Turbary is directly adjacent to it, in the direction of the (first) Tree Farm

The Peat Engines which run them are on the long side. Underneath them are a pair of Iron Transport Pipes with Gates. The pipes are for the automatic collection of Ash from the engines, they need to be Iron so the ash knows which way to go, and the Gates are set to Inventory Empty -> Redstone Signal, so they provide power constantly. The 'output' Iron Gate is attached to a Relay, which sends the Ash down the Peat Line.

Adjacent to the Turbary, opposite the Peat Bog, is a Relay. It acts as an inventory which the Turbary will automatically spit peat into the Relay, which will then automatically sent the peat along the Peat Line.

The Peat Line goes up one block, then goes one block in the direction of the peat engines, then wraps around a solid block which is next to the peat-fired engine running the turbary. From there, it hits a T intersection. One side goes to the sides of both peat-fired engines, the other side heads off to the (first) Tree Farm's Peat-fired Engines.

Adjacent to the Peat Bog, opposite the Turbary, is a Relay, into which the Peat Bog will spit out Dirt into the Dirt Line. Following the Dirt Line around comes to a rather interesting section which is actually Redstone Tubing. Following the Redstone Tubing away from the Peat Bog will find a Filter directly attached to a chest, then a transport pipe with a Gate, then a Liquid Transposer atop an Aqueous Accumulator into which Wax Capsules are put in, which are crafted in the Bee Products area, elsewhere. This function is simple: When it is detected that you need Liquid Capsules, a redstone signal will pulse, which pulses the Filter, which pulls one water capsule out of the chest. When the Chest is empty, the gate on the transport pipe is set to give a Redstone Signal, which activates the Liquid Transposer to fill a couple of wax capsules, which automatically are spit through the transport pipe to the chest, turning off the signal and the Transposer.

Following the redstone tubing the other direction, you come to a T intersection, where a non-redstone tubing heads off in the direction of the (first) Tree Farm, the other going a couple of blocks, has a Jacketed Wire and some Redstone Wire which is the output of a Pulse Former, and the tube itself goes to the Bog Earth Production Chest. This chest has a structure pipe with a Golden Gate. If it detects that there is space for water capsules, it emits a redstone signal, turned into a pulse by the Pulse Former, and orders a Water Capsule from the Filter previously mentioned. Directly attached to this chest is the Bog Earth Automated Crafting Table.

This is then attached to a wooden pipe with an Autarchic Gate leading straight into another chest, with the conditional "Inventory Empty -> Pulse". Now we get to the fun part of this fully automated system

This second chest is where Bog Earth is stored until needed. It has a Manager directly attached to it. It is set to Priority Zero, with a single Bog Earth, set to loop so that it will accept any amount of bog earth. The tube runs to another Manager which is set to Priority 1 (so it will pull from the previous), and insists on *exactly* one Bog Earth in the attached inventory, which in this case, is a Relay which outputs up into the bottom of the Peat Bog.

Here's the thing, I'm actually using the 'jamming' mechanic to my advantage. If the Peat Bog is full of Bog Earth (four stacks), then when it tries to put one more Bog Earth in, it will hit the 'buffer' and jam, and then it will put one more into the inventory of the relay, and will then be satisfied that the relay does, in fact, have a single Bog Earth in its inventory and request no more, any Bog Earth in the line will go back to the other one. When a Bog Earth is used, the 'jam' is cleared because the one bog earth in the 'buffer' jamming it spits out into the Peat Bog, the one in the inventory re-jams it, the Manager requests another Bog Earth from the one attached to the chest with all the bog earth in it, and it repeats.

Now then, let's head over to the Tree Farm area.

The Arboretum and Logger are lined up on the same axis as the Peat Bog and Turbary, with the Arboretum being the closer of the two. The Peat-Fired Engines are on the same axis as the ones for the Peat Bog and Turbary, and hey... here's that Peat Line, feeding these two peat-fired engines once the engines at the Peat Bog and Turbary are completely full. Like before, it's got a couple of Iron Pipes underneath with Gates set to always be emitting a redstone signal to keep the engines running which feeds into a Relay that continues on. The Peat Line also connects to this Relay, and the output of this will carry all the ash from all four Peat-Fired Engines as well as any surplus Peat that they aren't using. After a short while, there is a Filter which is adjacent to the Peat Line. This is set to pull all the Ash out of the line, which goes to the Fertilizer Production Facility. The remainder can go on to wherever else you need Peat.

There's a Relay adjacent to the Logger, directly opposite the Peat-Fired Engine keeping it running. This is where all the Logger output goes. It immediately forks, one side goes to an in-line Filter permitting only saplings to pass through to the Arboretum. The other direction is where Logs, Apples, and surplus Saplings go, wherever that might be.

There's a Relay directly opposite the Logger from the Arboretum, which automatically receives Sand and spits that out into the Sand Line. This terminates into a Relay, which outputs to the Dirt Line. Now, you remember that fork back just before the Bog Earth Production Facility? The Dirt Line continues along down here, so if the Bog Earth Chest doesn't need any more dirt, it ends up in the Humus Production Facility instead. However, there's a Restriction Pipe in the direction of the Humus Production Facility, so sand will try to go to the Bog Earth production facility first, and only if that is full of sand does the sand go the other direction. Yes, this means that Sand is flowing in the opposite direction that Dirt does in the Dirt Pipe.

Now then, the Dirt Line passes adjacent to a Filter which pulls all the dirt out and sends it directly to the Humus Production Chest. Surplus sand not needed by the peat bog continues on.

The Ash Line (which starts at the Filter which pulls Ash out of the Peat Line) and what sand remains in the Dirt Line connect to a Relay that pipes down and hits a fork. One way has a restriction tube, and is your 'overflow chest' for whatever you aren't using at the moment. The other way hits the Humus Production Chest. So now you've got Sand and Ash in the chest, and that should be it. It's adjacent to an Automatic Crafting Table with the recipe 8x Ash around 1x Sand = 2x Fertilizer. This is, in turn, attached to a Golden Autarchic Gate set to Pulse when there is Space for Inventory, and Fertilizer is the item it looks to find space for, spitting it out into the Humus Production Chest, which is where the dirt from the Dirt Line terminates as well.

The Humus Production Chest is directly adjacent to the Automatic Crafting Table with the recipe for Humus being 8x dirt around 1x fertilizer to make 8x Humus. The output is a wooden transport pipe with an autarchic gate set to pulse when Inventory Empty which goes to the Humus Chest.

In a very similar setup to before, you've got a pair of managers auto-filling the Arboretum on demand through a Relay.

 

[Daemonblue]

*Wall of text is super effective*
*Wall of text critically hits for 9999 damage*
*Daemonblue faints*

Anyway, yes, the sorting machines are indeed overkill for this setup. An inline filter will do just nicely with sorting out peat from other junk, and relays are indeed very useful with forestry machines.

Another thing to note, if you have some trouble with only have some of your peat going through your filter and the rest choosing to go the other path when the engines aren't full you can use restriction tubes. Those things can help massively when you want to make certain sections more compact and can be helpful when you want to run loops over a smaller area, since items treat them as tubes that are 5000 blocks long.

 

[rekasa]

What texture pack is that? It looks nice.

 

[slay_mithos]

I don't understand, why not go with BC pipes, now that they won't just drop items on the ground if placed correctly?
They work way better with forestry machines, and you can even do the whole resupply thing with gates.

 

[Daemonblue]

Because gates require that assembly table thing, filters and relays are fairly cheap, and RP tubes are a bit more intelligent when you set them up properly? Not to sound mean but, well, RP tubes just seem to be a whole lot better and, while the tubes can cost more, they seem to fair better and are more set and forget. RP also tends to have easier working tube systems. As an example with BC you have to use a diamond pipe even if you want only one type of item to go in a specific direction, while with rp2 a simple filter will suffice. With BC diamond pipes any items that end up overflowing that direction will either pop out or have to either be forced into some kind of loop or piped into the main transport pipe you may have, which will require either another diamond pipe or an iron pipe to prevent items from flowing down the overflow pipe, unless you want to just void any extra. With RP2, items won't even get put into the system if they don't have a valid location and if a location becomes invalid it will either find a new destination or temporarily back-clog the system, the latter of which can easily be dealt with depending on how you have it set up.

Basically, BC pipes are "dumb" pipes while RP tubes are more "intelligent" in the way items are handled within their networks. This is why there's that whole Logistics Pipes mod, which makes the BC pipes more intelligent in how they handle items.

 

[Supremeone]

Maby becous the gates are prity advacend and costlely ?

 

[slay_mithos]

Maby becous the gates are prity advacend and costlely ?

what?
Oh, gates are advanced and costly?

Well, they cost a bit, that is true, but either way, you can use what system you prefer, you just need to know that BC pipes have less problems with forestry machines than RP.
But contrary to the bees, where BC and apiarist pipes are way better, you can still automate the automated farming machines pretty easily with both systems, it's more based on preference and design choices.

To answer the "you have to loop or it will pop", I would say:
Why not simply make your main line run through the diamond pipe in the first place?

For BC systems, you need to consider the fact that branching might not always be the solution.
And the gates are only if you need to add specific complexity to your system, as opposed to fine tunning the times for everything.

 

[whythisname]

Personally I prefer BC pipes, but that's mostly because I use Forestry, Railcraft, TE and BC machines which eat up a lot of my Copper and Tin in the form of Bronze. That in turn makes Brass expensive for me and the fact the main BC pipes are made from simple Cobble and Smooth stone means they are a lot more affordable for me.

The RP2 machines, like the Filter, Sorter and other stuff are pretty cheap and I like them a lot, but the plain tubes are what make the RP2 system pretty expensive for me. You might argue Diamond pipes are expensive, but you only need those rarely (you need fewer of those than you need Filters and stuff) and you get 8 pipes per 2 Diamonds.
I have my Peat/Wheat/Tree farm largely automated with BC pipes now and I'm pretty sure I've only needed 1 Diamond pipe so far.

All in all though, I think it doesn't really matter. Both are good systems if designed well and they can both fill similar roles. RP2 Tubes might be able to do their job in less space, but the Brass tubing is expensive compared to practically free cobble and smooth stone pipes from BC which only occasionally need anything more expensive than Iron (that being Gold, Diamonds or Redstone).



Anyway OT, I've got my farms setup like this:
A self sustaining Peat Farm, it gets Sand from an Igneous Extruder + Pulverizer.
The left over Dirt is sent to a Wheat farm where it's combined with Wheat to make Compost and that into Humus.
The Humus is sent to the Tree farm.

I power my farms with steam engines, so I don't have to worry about Ash or distributing Peat or anything. That might be something you can try as well. So instead of powering your farms by having to pipe Peat to them, just turn the Peat into some form of energy at your Peat farm and send that to your farms, the distribution of liquid or power is a lot simpler than that of items.

 

[joseff amador]

What texture pack is that, OP?

 

[Peppe]

...

Anyway OT, I've got my farms setup like this:
A self sustaining Peat Farm, it gets Sand from an Igneous Extruder + Pulverizer.
The left over Dirt is sent to a Wheat farm where it's combined with Wheat to make Compost and that into Humus.
The Humus is sent to the Tree farm.

I power my farms with steam engines, so I don't have to worry about Ash or distributing Peat or anything. That might be something you can try as well. So instead of powering your farms by having to pipe Peat to them, just turn the Peat into some form of energy at your Peat farm and send that to your farms, the distribution of liquid or power is a lot simpler than that of items.

The tree farm produces enough sand to convert to sandstone and pulverize for a chance of niter. With the niter you can make fertilizer -> humus. So the tree farms can be fully automated with an external supply of dirt.

It actually makes a surplus of humus, so you could probably split off some sand if you wanted to make a loop with a peat farm. I use a macerator for dirt instead of peat.

 

[SkuxxDeluxe]

Greetings,

I was wondering if someone could give me some tips on ways that I could better automate my Peat and Tree farms in a way that requires little to no observation on my part. I also want to hook up a Biofuel generator since I will be having a lot of excess saplings.

This is how my setup currently looks (above ground):

There is 1 Peat Farm and 4 Tree Farms (You can't see the rubber tree farm in the pic)
Each farm is powered by 4 Peat Engines

I started out with BuildCraft piping but of course that led to items overflowing out of pipes when the inventory was fun. I could use Logic Gates but I haven't gotten around to setting up an assembly table+laser setup.
Currently everything is being sorted with RP pipes and machines. I haven't figured out how to config the sorting machine to extract items without the machine jamming or getting stuck in cycle-mode because the item does no exist in the adjacent inventory.

Peat Farm:
Sorting Machine sends peat to one chest and dirt to another chest where more Bog Earth will be created
When the bog earth is created, it gets sent back up (using a filter) and into the hoppers.
Currently I manually move the peat fuel from it's chests to the engines since all the farms are spread out (as you can see in the mini-map) and I haven't figured out the piping yet. I would like a separate room underground for an engine factory but without teleporting pipes, I'd have to worry about signal degregation with the powered pipes

Tree Farms:
Sorting Machines sends:
..saplings back to the Arboretum (Excess just travels back to the chest. I'm thinking Excess could go to Biofuel generation)
..Sand (x4 farms) is sent to the Bog Earth generator
..All timber (except rubber) is sent to another chest where they are sorted into Crystal Chest. The Crystal Chests are all full now so I don't know what to do with the timber other than make Creosote which I have a filled 3x3x5 tank.
There is no system to restock Humus into the machines.
I have a setup that creates Compost and Humus but I have to manually input the dirt into the chests for the auto crafting table to craft.

I also have a cactus farm and wheat farm but I don't really need to worry about those other than sending PeatFuel to them and extracting ash.

For the Peat-Engines, which sides are the Input sides for peat and Output for ash? When I was sorting with BC pipes, the ash would come out the same way the Peat went in which was one of the reasons for converting to RP tubes.

So that is how my Peat and Tree farms are configged. As mentioned, there is some automation but still alot of manual labor on my part. Also the sorting machines seem to get jammed or stuck when there isn't an item to pull out. I was hoping someone could give me some advice on how to improve the system so I can automate the creation of Bog Earth, Compost, and Humus as well as distributing Peat to engines.

Thanks for the assistance

Thread necro, i know. but since i found this wile looking for help maybe it'll help other people.

Diamond pipes next to Peat Fired engines can be set to input peat, and ash will be popped out into them automatically (which can be sent in the opposite direction, or to a storage device.

If the peat fire engine is full, the peat will 'bounce' and head back the way it came.

So i have a pipe system going from my peat bog to my engines, and in the middle is a diamond pipe at a T intersection.it comes in, sends 1 ash and 1 peat down red (to my ME system), and 3 peat down to my peat engines on my farm.

If my engines are ful, it bounces back, hits the other diamond pipe, and goes to my me system. Yes there is a little bit of items bouncing around. but they find their way eventually.

Just means you need a few diamonds (i have used 6 for my rather large setup)

 

[Omicron]

Diamond pipes next to Peat Fired engines can be set to input peat, and ash will be popped out into them automatically (which can be sent in the opposite direction, or to a storage device.

If the peat fire engine is full, the peat will 'bounce' and head back the way it came.

No, it won't. Items that bounce will only continue travel down alternate exits that are not the way they came. You'd have to build a loopback. With just the diamond pipe and no alternate exits, peat that bounces will spill out.

...or so it was taught to us when Buildcraft introduced that behavior in 1.4.7. I've seen nothing in the changelog that suggests this was modified again, but I haven't put it to the test. Does it actually work for you?