Multifarms - what are the benefits?

[Kajin Style]

So I search the forestry wiki on how to make a peat farm, it recommends me to go use the Multifarm setup. Immediately I'm surprise at the shear resource cost. Copper has become the new diamond with how it's needed in like every other mod in FTB.

So here I see the multifarm requiring so much of it to just assemble a small multifarm. Then I discover the old way of doing a peat farm and I'm pleasantly surprised by this much simplier and less costly method. No need to get Apatite either.

Now this leaves me with a burning question. What is the point of multifarms? The cost in resources and power to operate it not to mention the continual cost of fertilizer leaves a bad taste in my mouth and me wondering why would I ever want to run something like this?

Anyone got any good reasons?

 

[Abdiel]

Sengir doesn't want cheap to build free infinite resource and energy generators with minimal energy and no resource input required. The old farms are going to be removed "soon".

Besides, pros of the new farms:
- Farms stuff faster.
- Plants trees and uses space overall more efficiently.
- You can have multiple crops managed by one farm.
- Larger area covered by one farm.
- Easier automation as you can choose where the inputs are and hide everything under the farmland.
- Can be shut down with a simple redstone signal.

 

[Bickers]

just remember farms can farm anything say you dont need peat anymore you can change it to say a treefarm without any rebuilding just need to pop in a new circut board

 

[danidas]

As was said the old farms are getting disabled probably next time FTB updates so you have little choice but to use the new farms. Also if your only after a little bit of peat you can very easily farm it manually by placing the bog earth next to water and waiting for it to turn black which does not take long.

Personally I am waiting to do anything with the forestry farms until the pack updates again as the current multi farms have a few issues that later versions of forestry addresses. Such as adjusting the amount of apatite needed and adding a few more size options a long with improving some of the mechanics a bit. It also fixes the bug where the farms are nearly doubling the output of plant drops they collect by duping them and throwing off balance metrics.

Since the benefits were already covered lets look at the disadvantages of the old farms straight from Sengir him self:

I appreciate that the new farms may not be everyone's cup of tea, especially if you min/max and/or compare to a SC's tree farm.

However the old farms

a) were incredibly OP, especially if their design flaw, which unintentionally allowed for stacking of several layers, was abused. Endless resources at the cost of cheap energy. The only reason you'd ever switch off one of the old farms was because you couldn't be bothered to deal with the deluge of resources they swamped you with. It just wasn't fun playing with them for me. I haven't built one of these things in a long, long time. I went out of my way not to build any in my legit worlds.

b) were dead, deeply flawed code. It hadn't been touched substantially in something like six months and it showed. Everything was creaking and little things were breaking. Dirty hacks to patch things up all around. And they still cracked at some points (Arboretums going haywire with rubber trees anyone? Fixed height for all trees, making it impossible to harvest larger trees, etc.)

c) felt flimsy and cheap. I like magic blocks as much as the next guy, but after a year, a single, brightly colored, cartoonish looking block which harvests melons 5 blocks out and 5 blocks above just felt wrong, almost comical. I don't want to knock the old farms too much, I had a lot of fun playing with them for quite a while, but they used up all their novelty to the point where suspension of disbelief just wasn't there anymore. Granted, the new farms can still be said to be a gigant magic block, but I am more inclined to believe, that these large structures house all that heavy machinery necessary to harvest and plant a variety of crops. Imagine a harvesting arm extending outward and circling the central structure while it works and it doesn't even feel magic anymore. (That was actually the plan at some point, but was discarded in favour of making layer placement more flexible.)

There is more, but I already wrote way too much anyway. X)

tl;dr: I know some people like the old farms. I will try to keep them around as an option for a while, possibly even longer as a seperate module. I will not guarantee porting them forever and ever. Try the new farms before you knock them. Yes, they take space. Yes, balancing and development is in progress. The old farms were actively developed for almost a year. The new farms have been in development less than a month and under actual public scrutiny for a week. No, I will not try to compete with Steve Cart's tree farms or TC3 golems. (A multifarm doesn't stand a chance against the cuteness of a TC3 golem anyway.)

 

[Velotican]

The old farms will remain quality admin tools if Sengir decides to keep them in but already crafting them is disabled by default in the latest versions of Forestry.

The new farms are meant as a strict to the old farms as well as a giant nerfbat to them. If you continue to use the old farms there is no guarantee that they will not be removed in the future.