Magic Bees/Botania -- Beegonia Behavior?

[Brotuulaan]

I made some upgrades to my bee production in Infinity Evolved recently and have a lot more drones to dispose of. It's gotten so much that I've almost backed up my two diamond chests' buffer for my beegonias in just the last couple nights of playing.

I'm looking at the setup now, after adding some floating beegonias on top of the existing ring or regular beegonias, and every bee is disappearing just as the next falls.

But the problem is that the lower ring of beegonias (8 flowers, hollow 3x3) don't seem to be producing anything as I update them with my wand of the forest--and those in the upper ring (8 flowers, hollow 3x3) are constantly full...so that tells me every bee is being consumed, but they may be consumed by only the upper ring.

But that then begs the question whether they eat bees when they're full and waste the mana potential, or some other such situation. I didn't think they did like some of the other generating flora, but this is acting strange.

The wikis aren't helpful, and the lexica doesn't say anything more about them either.

So I have really three questions:
1) Do beegonias in any form consume bees and waste the mana?
2) Are there functional differences between floating and regular beegonias?
3) If no to 1 and 2, why would my setup be behaving this way?

***EDIT***
It looks like the beegonias eventually fall behind bit by bit. Just picked up 3 bees after it ran alone for the past ten minutes. Thing is, the bottom ring of flowers are still reading empty...
***/EDIT***

 

[Pyure]

I'm also curious about these

 

[Brotuulaan]

Is it the same question(s) or something else? I've used them for a bit and might be able to help.

 

[Pyure]

Same. I've got beegonias in my pack, I was planning to use them, but from your statements above it seems they have underlying mechanics I wasn't aware of.

 

[Brotuulaan]

I will say that while I used only the one ring of 8, they worked like a charm. I'm confused as to why they're acting up now, but they did work great with the one set. If you have space, you could set them up separately rather than stacking them and be fine. My space is limited, so I need to conserve space as I can.

I set up a big mana battery with a double-ring of pools and a couple in the middle, with a recessive spark on the middle pool that all my spreaders point to and a dominant spark on the middle pool that is drawn from for my uses, and it holds a crap ton of mana. The setup from before with bees and a second setup with apples from my tree farm (I forget what those food flowers are called) filled up my double-ring to almost half just off my bee/tree farms' castoffs. It was pretty great.

But then I tripled my bee output because I need more resources, which overwhelmed my beegonias--and this happened. So I'm not sure what to do but to hope whatever my extra beegonias are contributing will be able to keep up with my new bee output. I guess that if some percentage of bees are wasted, at least some are being transformed into mana and not all are going to waste. Better than having no mana gen at all.

***EDIT***
My tree farm came to a halt bc I didn't need the wood anymore, and that's when my mana gen dropped significantly and shut off my elfheim gate. I was hoping my new bee output would make up the difference, but we'll see since there are some other issues at play. Maybe I'll hook up my old tree farm to some of those burny flowers so the apples will start flowing again, and I'll get even more mana than before...yeah...that actually sounds like a good plan...
***/EDIT***

 

[Brotuulaan]

I'm messing with this again, going back and forth between my creative and survival worlds.

From what I can tell, these flowers refuse to consume bees if they're full. Regardless of whether they're connected to a spreader, so long as their own buffer is full, they won't eat flowers.

One thing I had forgotten about is that different bees produce different amounts of mana, which means that some breeds will stack up more than others since they give larger mana bursts and deactivate the flowers for a bit longer. That's probably why sometimes the bees piled up on the ground.

I'm still not sure why some of the flowers appeared empty with bees stacking up, but they're all eating the bees now, from what I can tell. I suppose it could have been a re-log issue or an actual functional glitch, or something. I've got it dropping a bee every two seconds for a total of 17 flowers (had to rearrange for spreader line-of-sight) and feeding 2 elven spreaders (same buffer size as regular, but larger bursts (higher transfer rate). It's working on yellorium bees right now, and they're eating up every bee with room to spare. I'll see how far I can push it with these bees and comment in a little bit with what I find.

 

[Brotuulaan]

So I think when stacks group up on the ground, they reset some sort of timer that allows the flowers to eat them. Speeding up past 2 seconds seems to make the flowers slow down a lot in their eating. I'll run some more tests in creative and try dispersing the bees and see if that makes a difference.

 

[Brotuulaan]

They are indeed getting stuck. I've got a setup in creative with four piles dropping simultaneously, and sometimes they eat the bees before the next one hits but sometimes the net one groups up before they do and they all hang for a cycle or two. It must have to do with the grouping together on the ground that's causing issues. I'm going to see how much I can spread out the drones and drop as many as I can.

 

[Brotuulaan]

I managed to get an array of item droppers to drop a total of 12 bees every 2.5 seconds without any issues with the flowers eating them and transferring them. They must be able to transfer their mana faster than they eat, so that's why a group of flowers is able to look like it's not eating at all. I used Open Blocks Item Droppers and EnderIO Item Conduits to get the bees where they needed to be, and it burned through drones super-fast:

This was using the same setup of 16 flowers that I used initially, set up in a hollow 3x3 under the conduits. So the bees dropped next to a stack of flowers every time, but all on its own.

Sometimes they still hang, and I'm thinking that maybe parts of the game are calculated separately (e.g. the flowers' pickup times are calculated first, then the redstone system with the droppers are calculated) because my computer hangs sometimes and causes lag in the game. Pair that with it seeming like the flowers depend on the items being on the ground for so long, and it seems like the droppers are still running when there's a bit of hang, so the flowers are paused on their pickup pattern while the droppers keep doing their thing, and thus the flowers see an update to the items on the ground and fail to pick them up. This is happening occasionally with the timer at 3 seconds with just the 8 flowers on the ground, but otherwise, it's behaving just fine. None of the flowers are filling their buffers, so I'm guessing their eating habits are what's getting in the way of making the system more efficient.

This system generates mana with about one bee every .25 seconds (if you disregard the hangups), so you could probably set up a decent flower gen with just the eight flowers. In fact, if you used transvector interfaces or some other method of remote insertion, you could probably do even better with this by making a solid ceiling of droppers since they would need just the redstone pulse rather than the item conduits connecting to every one. I'm going to look at redesigning this for my survival world and possibly spread out my beegonias a bit more if they still can't handle my bee production.

 

[Brotuulaan]

I set up a 5x5 field of Item Droppers, and they behaved just as before, as far as all bees being consumed each round and with occasional hangs and delays. So this is probably the best solution for amassing huge amounts of mana in short amounts of time:

I'm going to see how few flowers can handle this 5x5 block of droppers.

 

[Brotuulaan]

I cut it down to 4 flowers (corners from the original 3x3), and they quickly got stuck. They didn't fill up their buffers, but they stopped eating. Perhaps they have a visual buffer and calculated future buffer? As in, they know how much mana they're going to have from the bee they ate, so they stop eating if they know that this bee WILL fill up their buffer to an amount where the remaining buffer will not be enough for one more bee if they ate it.

5 Also fell behind after just the first few rounds, so it looks like 8 flowers will be close to efficient for this size of a dropper array.

Does that all make sense?

 

[Brotuulaan]

So I've tried a few different things, and I think I've found what I'll be using for my base. Since my mana farm is where I see it a lot and I'm limited on space, I won't be using the massive 5x5 transvector setup I showed above. My setup that I'll try running for a while uses 11 flowers (6 standard, 5 floating), with the original ring of 8 on the ground and the other three above them in a v formation opening toward my spreader. This does a couple things for me:

1) Gives me some height variation to work with
2) Gives me more flowers than just the 8
3) Lets me keep my spreader where it is so it can still see the mana pool across the way

I suppose i could add 1 or 2 flower in the middle of the bunch without interfering with anything. Meh. Maybe.

I set up 5 Open Crates from Botania and 3 Item Robins from Immersive Engineering, setting the Item Robins to disperse one to each Crate. Two of the bees fall on those two lower floating flowers, putting the bees one block above the ground, and the other three bees fall all the way to the ground, between those floating flowers and on the other two corners of the square. I'm not positive whether the height variation gives me any advantage, but it's sure to leverage it if there is some consideration for where the flowers scan for food and when, spreading out the job and giving (hopefully) a more diverse pattern. Or not.

The central Item Robin is fed with a Thermal Dynamics Itemduct (set to transport ONLY 3 items per extraction) on a ProjectRed Timer (set to 3 seconds right now), with red alloy wire and two PR Repeaters set to 4 ticks each (repeaters are to lengthen the Timer's pulse, and one set to 8 didn't give a long enough pulse to trigger the Itemduct). Since they can be stuck on the sides of blocks, they're great space-savers (marble blocks except for the one above the Itemduct represent the mana pools in my survival mana battery, and I put the PR stuff there so I could destroy and rebuild the dropping bit as much as I wanted without having to reset the timer component. It can be set to fit on the Crates/Robins now that I've got it designed).

Because the Timer is set to 3 seconds, the Itemduct is set to extract 3 bees, and there are 5 destinations, that means there are always 2 rotating locations where the new bees are not dropped, always giving some extra time for them to settle and be eaten. One could raise the primary Robin and add a sixth Barrel in the center with hoppers on either side to feed the secondary Robins if you wanted a flat back-and-forth with 6 locations and 3 bees. One could also simply add a Crate below the primary Robin, but my spreader pulses pass through that block. I suppose I could add a lens to make the bursts pass through, but I haven't made any lenses yet. Would be easy enough, I suppose. As it stands, this drops one bee per second and should be fine. The diamond chest is where my Ender Chest will be, and I think I'll be able to eliminate the extra storage if I want to (two diamond chests for overflow), but I may keep it as an "OH CRAP!" backup.

There are still occasional hangups, but the flowers catch up the next round and eat all the leftover bees in their stacks, starting with a clean slate shortly thereafter.

If you tweaked this a bit more, you could probably make it drop a bit faster and still be fine. I'll probably do some more tweaking to it, but I think I'll roll with this basic idea.

Any thoughts on all this?