MFR tree farm

[Van_Tastic]

Hi,

I wanted to set up a tree farm using Minefactory Reloaded's planter and harvester. The planter does its job well plating in a 12x12 area (I applied an emerald upgrade). However, the harvester just sits there without doing anything when it has the emerald upgrade, and I noticed that it works fine when I remove the upgrade but it just farms a 3x3 area as you would expect without the upgrade, this is weird because the harvester works as intended in my wheat farm even with the emerald upgrade. Is it a bug or am I just derping big time ? And thanks for any help !

 

[TrJace]

Is the output clogged? You try breaking and replacing?

 

[Van_Tastic]

It started working now without me changing anything, weird. But now it randomly leaves the bottom trunk of the trees (it cuts it down eventually but it takes time):

http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2014/07/1392467196-screen-shot-2014-02-15-at-12-25-35.png

I think I'm gonna switch to a Steve's cart tree farm, at least I know it works.

 

[TrJace]

Yeah, I am not sure what causes that. I have had the same problem though. I have thought about using the planter along with Steve carts. Basically do a lap around the trees a few rows in. Haven't built it yet though.

 

[Dragei]

The reason it leaves the bottom part of the tree is due to its operation cycle. It'll start attempting to cut trees down starting from the northwestern most corner, then work down the row until it moves to the next column. Presumably, when it finds a valid tree and leaves to cut, it starts this cycle in a similar manner, which is why it'll cut down the full tree to the west of the one it's cutting, but end its cycle before it can finish off the trees to the east of the current tree it's cutting.

 

[rhn]

Hmm might be a small bug due to the size of the farm. Have tried the same setup on smaller farm that worked just fine.
You could try a smaller farm and then instead try the sewer->fertilizer etc. setup. With that you really don't need large farms, and it actually feels like your farm animals are of slightly more use.

You could also of course just go with a much smaller farm and Ghostwood saplings.

 

[Van_Tastic]

Well, after a bit of testing the farm seems to work quite well even if it behaves strangely, so I'm gonna stick with it for now.
Thanks for the replies !

 

[Revemohl]

The larger a farm is, the longer the harvester will take to "notice" a tree has grown. This is why I'd rather have a default-sized farming setup, or one with the cobblestone upgrade in case I have a nice supply of MFR fertilizer from an animal farm.

 

[Van_Tastic]

Yeah that's why I put 2 harvesters, and I got about 29 stacks of saplings in an hour or so, which seems pretty good to me. But I will try smaller farms later to see if they are more efficient, and since I intend to set up an animal farm down the line, I will have plenty of fertiliser.

 

[PierceSG]

For a farm that big, I would actually recommend you to use 4 harvesters instead of just 2.
A 25x25 plot of tree farm is actually too big in my opinion and if you do not get the trees harvested fast enough, you might run into the sapling hemorrhaging issues where the trees' canopies starts to cause areas of low light level and saplings popping out of the dirt (those aren't collected by the harvesters) and the planter trying in futile to replant them over and over again.

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[Van_Tastic]

Yep the sapling started to pop out due to the slowness of the harvester so I switched to a 3x3 farm with fertilizer. But I don't produce enough compost from my cow farms to keep up with the demand

 

[rhn]

Yep the sapling started to pop out due to the slowness of the harvester so I switched to a 3x3 farm with fertilizer. But I don't produce enough compost from my cow farms to keep up with the demand

If you are using the farm primarely for charcoal, try and take a trip to the nether and get some Ghostwood saplings and set up a farm with those. They are insanely OP for would give you a nice start boost

 

[Van_Tastic]

Nope it's not for charcoal. I just wanna build up a nice amount of saplings to start biomass/biofuel production.

 

[rhn]

Nope it's not for charcoal. I just wanna build up a nice amount of saplings to start biomass/biofuel production.

I would properly go the Forestry farm route then. Build a max size farm, put some lilypads of fertility around the farm and just under the layer of bricks. Later you can then do a tiny bit of tree breeding to get a major boost to sappiness etc and replace the oak saplings.

 

[Van_Tastic]

I think I'll stick with the MFR farm and see how it copes with the sapling demand from the still(s) and I'll adjust/change the farm if needed.Thanks a lot for your help !

 

[PierceSG]

If so, why not MFR's very own bioreactor for biofuel?
I, too, second rhn's recommendation on breeding forestry's saplings if you want to make biomass/ethanol.


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[Revemohl]

Yep the sapling started to pop out due to the slowness of the harvester so I switched to a 3x3 farm with fertilizer. But I don't produce enough compost from my cow farms to keep up with the demand

If you're going to use fertilizer, I'm pretty sure a 1x1 farm is more efficient (unless your production of that is absurdly fast).
I recommend using a modded tree that has the old bone meal mechanics, such as MFR's rubber tree.

 

[MigukNamja]

Note the upgrades on the MFR Harvester only increase the area harvested and don't affect the speed, at least in my experience. An Emerald Harvester has the same per-block scanning/harvesting rate as does a base Harvester. Use multiple Harvesters if you're looking for speed.

As for saplings and biofuel/ethanol in general, I don't know a legit way to produce more Ethanol per farmland area than bred trees using Forestry. A well-bred tree in a Forestry Multifarm can produce about 1.5 orders of magnitude more Ethanoal/Biofuel per square meter of farmland when compared to MFR or Forestry using vanilla saplings. Expect well in excess of 1,000 MJ/t (10,000 RF/t) from a 5x5x4 Wood/Sapling farm and modest-sized Fruit (Lemon) tree farm using well-bred saplings. It's very server and client-friendly for that much power.

But, tree breeding is not for the feint or heart or the impatient. Expect it to take many, many hours of dedicated in-game time or else a real-life week or two if you do it in the background.

 

[rhn]

But, tree breeding is not for the feint or heart or the impatient. Expect it to take many, many hours of dedicated in-game time or else a real-life week or two if you do it in the background.

You dont really need to go all that crazy on tree breeding to get a significant improvement. I don't remember which one it was, but with 3 cross breeds you can get a default trait species that is a great improvement on the vanilla saplings.

A well-bred tree in a Forestry Multifarm can produce about 1.5 orders of magnitude more Ethanoal/Biofuel per square meter of farmland

I think it is much much higher than that. Take in mind that "sappiness"(amount of biomass per sapling) can be increased by more than 6 times alone!

 

[MigukNamja]

You dont really need to go all that crazy on tree breeding to get a significant improvement. I don't remember which one it was, but with 3 cross breeds you can get a default trait species that is a great improvement on the vanilla saplings.

Indeed, just a modest amount of breeding can produce awesome results.

The White Willow as bred in a Swamp or Jungle biome provides an enormous boost in sapling productivity.

Hat tip : @Omicron