Look Ma! No Bees! (or: How To Make Trees Breed Themselves)

[Saice]

Nice write up here guys.

 

[JunpakuKarasu]

I like my bees and I like my trees but breeding my bees to make my trees gets to be a bit annoying for me so I think I'll set this up. Thank you!

 

[glepet1962]

I'm using this setup and it works great! Having new tree types is great and collecting the different butterflies is fun. I really appreciate your contributions, Omicron. Thanks.

 

[ScottulusMaximus]

Awesome guide!

After reading this topic, I decided to give tree breeding a try, yay!

After my first butterfly finally spawned I did some searching and found out how to actually breed butterflies to speed up the process a bit. It took me about half a day to figure out the specifics

I just bred my first butterfly with a grand total of 2 butterflies !

Since nobody has mentioned it in this topic (don't read if you don't like spoilers!):

Spoiler

This only works for Forestry 2.2.8.0 and above.

1. Capture a butterfly with a scoops right click. The hit box is on the block beneath the butterfly!
2. Put the butterfly in a escritoire and solve the puzzle. I think the higher the complexity of the butterfly, the harder the puzzle is.
3. Craft the butterfly with the loot you got from solving the puzzle.
4. Throw the "crafted" butterfly in your greenhouse with Forestry trees, it will put an egg on a leaf.
5. Harvest the caterpillar from the leaf with again a scoops right click.
6. Put the caterpillar on a "clean" leaf and it will hatch as a butterfly some(?) time later.

Don't know if the tree species helps, but my butterfly laid it's egg on on a red spruce. The color of the leaf block was a brighter then normal.

I don't know what exact conditions the butterflies have for laying eggs, but i will keep researching

Just an update on this, on Forestry 2.2.8.4 you simply have to capture the butterfly, place it in the escritoire, use glass bottles in the left side to solve puzzle(check a vid on how to do this below, is impossible to explain while typing), then you get a butterfly in a bottle. Simply throw the bottle onto the ground and after a few sec it will change into a butterfly. You seem to have to use the throw shortcut key, if you drop it off the side of your inventory with a mouse it doesn't seem to work...

With this you basically convert glass bottles into butterflies and can jump start the whole process really quickly. I made about 20 this way and within 4 hours I'm already up to Sweet Chestnut and Papaya while breeding bees and doing other things as well(took 5min from planting the correct trees till I got the papaya sapling). Think I've got at least 50 butterflies in my area as well now.

 

[SmokeLuvr1971]

However, you’d be wise to close the shaft around the tree trunk as soon as you’ve grown the tree, for trees are not the only thing that’s foolish. Butterflies will happily get stuck for all eternity in a hole that’s even two blocks deep - seriously, you guys have wings! What the heck? Anyway, don’t offer them any holes they can fall into. And if some slip through before you can close it, remember that you can pick them up with a scoop and carry them back out...

The above snippet implies you can place captured butterflies back into the world. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to do this / if it is even possible.

 

[Omicron]

1.) Put butterfly into your hotbar
2.) Press Q to throw it to the ground
3.) Watch it magically come to life about 5-10 seconds later

 

[SmokeLuvr1971]

1.) Put butterfly into your hotbar
2.) Press Q to throw it to the ground
3.) Watch it magically come to life about 5-10 seconds later

Yeah, after searching for many RL days on how to do this, I ran across the answer shortly after asking here. Some of my confusion comes from people using the words drop and throw interchangeably. There's no keyboard shortcut for 'throw' but you can throw eggs/potions/etc., so this implies [at least to me at some point] 'use item'. Once I figured out I had to drop them, I knew what to do...and when that didn't work I knew I potentially had a much bigger problem (possible runaway butterfly population).

 

[Yusunoha]

Yeah, after searching for many RL days on how to do this, I ran across the answer shortly after asking here. Some of my confusion comes from people using the words drop and throw interchangeably. There's no keyboard shortcut for 'throw' but you can throw eggs/potions/etc., so this implies [at least to me at some point] 'use item'. Once I figured out I had to drop them, I knew what to do...and when that didn't work I knew I potentially had a much bigger problem (possible runaway butterfly population).

brings a whole new meaning to "gotta catch em all"

 

[SmokeLuvr1971]

Been trying to figure this out for days now. How did you get a still water ceiling, or is there glass under the water that I'm not recognizing?

 

[SmokeLuvr1971]

brings a whole new meaning to "gotta catch em all"

Indeed. I posed the question/problem on the Forestry forums, looked around there for a bit, and noticed I'm not the first to report this problem. Also noticed no one [Sengir included] has posted any solutions.

So I'm rebuilding in a new world while waiting for a response. And this time I'm keeping all my forestry trees enclosed and making sure no breed-able trees are anywhere near my bees [unless I want pollination to occur]. This way if the BF population explodes, there's a chance they'll be contained and somewhat easier to reign in.

 

[Yusunoha]

Indeed. I posed the question/problem on the Forestry forums, looked around there for a bit, and noticed I'm not the first to report this problem. Also noticed no one [Sengir included] has posted any solutions.

So I'm rebuilding in a new world while waiting for a response. And this time I'm keeping all my forestry trees enclosed and making sure no breed-able trees are anywhere near my bees [unless I want pollination to occur]. This way if the BF population explodes, there's a chance they'll be contained and somewhat easier to reign in.

it'd be nice if there would be an item/block that'd attract all the BF in the world, even those in chunks that are not loaded. that way you would be able to catch all the current BF's in the world without them messing up your plans

 

[Celestialphoenix]

Been trying to figure this out for days now. How did you get a still water ceiling, or is there glass under the water that I'm not recognizing?

You can craft water stills/blocks out of IC2s UUM, and then use Gtech's centrifuge to turn soulsand into fuel (via alkahest from redstone bees) and run several 36HP boilers. Combine this with a 8200 Eu/t supply from a single reactor you can couple AE's Quantum tunnel into an MFFS projector with a camouflage upgrade. This obviously requires several galgadorian drill bits, fusion coils and some bedrock armour- courtesy of RotaryCraft. (BTW the rotarycraft jet engine make a nice toy for your pet wolves). If you build a large enough M.A.C then AE can autocraft some glass and load it into the MFFS camouflage projector- giving that glass ceiling that hold up the water.

 

[SmokeLuvr1971]

Holy confusion and over-complication? If I understand the above correctly, you get MFFS to place a glass ceiling for you, then you put in the water over top, then MFFS removes the glass but causes no block updates during the removal...so you end up with a true floating still water roof/ceiling? That's amazing [I just put a layer of clear glass underneath mine]

 

[Celestialphoenix]

Holy confusion and over-complication? If I understand the above correctly, you get MFFS to place a glass ceiling for you, then you put in the water over top, then MFFS removes the glass but causes no block updates during the removal...so you end up with a true floating still water roof/ceiling? That's amazing [I just put a layer of clear glass underneath mine]

Its a layer of glass under the water.

 

[draeath]

Eh just use MFFS, it's cool and shimmery.

 

[fstblacklt1]

I've made a similar setup except I'm using an mfr auto spawner to spawn tons of butterflies. Is there any good way to auto kill all of them and collect the pollen? Mffs seems to just kill and not drop anything, although I no next to nothing about that mod so I may be doing something wrong. Mfr grinders don't work. Anything I else I could try?

 

[Shirkit]

Hey, I finally realized what was wrong with my build (http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/thr...ees-breed-themselves.32611/page-2#post-460113) that I posted on the previous page.

On 1.5.2 at least, with Biomes'O Plenty, a large portions of the biomes won't allow butterflies to spawn/pollinate/appear/turn into entity. Specially Jungle biomes, Mountains, Arid/Hot biomes. Only nice biomes like Garden works for me at currently, now they are breeding, spawning, doing their thing.

I didn't know that, I've spent a few days into this, to finally come to this conclusion. If anyone can spawn trees in Jungle/Rainforest/Oasis/Tropico biomes, please tell me, because I'm pretty sure it won't work (at least I've test a few times).

I hope this helps someone in the future.

 

[Omicron]

Very interesting find! I currently have a 1.6.4 world with both BoP and ATG adding its own biomes and/or partially overwriting vanilla. Wanted to get into tree breeding soon - I guess that makes it a good test case to see whether I can get butterflies to spawn there.

So if I understand you correctly, butterflies won't even take flight when dropped in an "incompatible" biome? Should make it easy to test.

 

[Shirkit]

Exactly, at least in 1.5.2 yes.

 

[Algester]

ok I have BoP so I'll be testing what will be the outcome of this experiment

Biomes my map has thus far
Garden (spawn)
Savanna (Base)
Coniferous Forest
Wasteland
Maple Woods
Coniferous Forest
Seasonal Forest
all on 1.6.4
For BoP compatible Biomes
Garden
Seasonal Forest
Maple Woods
Coniferous Forest