Easy mode forestry sets fertilizer at "modifies the time a piece of fertilizer lasts in a farm" to 2000. Hard mode sets it to 500. So apatite works 25% as long as it does in the default mode that people are used to.
Oh. Its worse (or better!). It also cuts how much fertlizer you get from one piece of apatite. From 16 down to 5. So Hard mode will use fertilizer at 10-15x the rate of the default? hard mode also removes the ash recipe for fertilizer.
There is a normal mode in between, and its changes a lot of other things too. Wow, seed oil production cut to 30% of normal.
The cool thing about forestry is that you can just use one of 3 pre set configs, so its easy to change around.
I get cutting the yield of the apatite recipe. But removing the ash recipe? The synergy between multifarms and peat-fired engines is one of the reasons why I like multifarms so much. I think it is a really nice gameplay mechanic. Oh well, it won't affect me at all because I am leaving forestry on easy, I was just curious.
Apatite is really the fuel for a multifarm, not the engines that power it.
That is actually a really good way of thinking about it. At least in easy mode forestry. A jaunt up a high mountain (really easy in Biome's o plenty) with a backpack of some kind and a jetpack or at least a few stacks of cobble can easily find you about 3 huge veins of apatite. I don't usually have mega long-lasting worlds except for creative building projects and I don't play on a server, but with those two caveats in mind, I have never had to automate a reliable income of apatite.
-----"How far is too far..?"
I'm tempted to say never but I understand that even in really large modpacks there are only so many ways to build a sorting system and not all of them will you find interesting (like a hopper based sorting system, I don't even want to start understanding what goes into making that, I value my remaining grey matter too much). Sorting systems, automated farms, automated mining and ore processing. These are the hallmarks of automation in minecraft and they can be really fun to build. I still have fun doing these things, but whenever I am a bit jaded with automating that, but I still crave automating something I pick a slightly more wild project. The last one I did wasn't even a big project but it made for a fun afternoon. I automated a dartcraft force infuser so that whenever I wanted to force infuse something it would always have liquid force and power available and it was completely self-contained (expect for an input of force logs). I added the extra challenge that all automation had to be completely discrete so it didn't ruin the look of my enchanting hall. It was a small project but it refreshed the mind for the big ore processing plant I was trying to motivate myself to finish.
If you feel like you are going too far with automation, I bet there is still plenty of stuff that you could find to automate that may refresh your opinion of automation. If your value of an automation project is based on the overall utility of the project then automating something silly like a force infuser you hardly ever use is probably not all that fun, and "regulating" automation is maybe more of a priority than I give it credit. Otherwise, if you feel like you are going too far with automation, maybe its because you really like automation and you feel yourself approaching the point where there is nothing left to automate which means that the thing you like most to do in minecraft has no more gameplay mileage. In most cases I bet that there is plenty more stuff to automate but it won't be in the least bit conventional (as always I could be completely and utterly wrong when I make assumptions about other peoples games).
