Efficiency wise I'm starting to question how much the perk of auto planting is worth in terms of my wheat farm. I can build huge auto harvesting farms that can generate orders of magnitude what these do. The cost is my time replanting. At a certain point if the 'auto' method starts being too much of a PITA to set up, there is no point.
New Forestry 2.0 Farm Blocks aare a PITA
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I'd agree Xakthos, except these multiblocks can do significantly more than plant and pick wheat. They have a fairly comparable resource cost to other automated farming options, including vanilla piston farms, so I'm not seeing why everyone is up in arms about them.
have you guys tried rubber farms with them yet? i set up a creative world to test it, and they are a PITA to setup for rubber farming. plus, you no longer get rubber tree logs as it does not cut down the trees or plant sapplings.
i can say the only nice thing so far is feeding it water and fertilizer, it will keep the rubber trees going. but getting the layout for the most efficient use of land is not going to be easy. especially on the smallest scale.
not only that, before you can even do anything other than plain trees, you need the circuits and tubes along with a soldering iron.
i can say the only nice thing so far is feeding it water and fertilizer, it will keep the rubber trees going. but getting the layout for the most efficient use of land is not going to be easy. especially on the smallest scale.
not only that, before you can even do anything other than plain trees, you need the circuits and tubes along with a soldering iron.
Even if the apatite can be obtained in abundance, for the most part it is placed out of the way of where people normally mine. Add that into people wanting fully automated systems without any reliance on you having to add an input every so often and the new farms look more like a bad joke. For cacti, melons, pumpkins, wheat, etc. there are the farming golems which are nearly as fast as the old farms at harvesting (if you place 2 of the straw golems so they recognize stuff faster, dunno why that happens). For trees there's steve's carts, and it can be made to be self-sufficient. The only reason why I haven't fooled more with Steve's Carts is they don't seem to want to plant and chop down rubber trees while the Forestry farms can cut em down. Having said that, if Steve's carts remains unable to handle mod trees I'll just have to bite the bullet and switch from a methane farm to a biogas farm again - either that or refine the melons -> methane method a bit.
For anyone wondering, 16 rubber wood = 4 methane cells + some other stuff, while 64 melon slices or 16 pumpkins give only a single methane cell, all at the same time cost of centrifuging - melons grow faster than pumpkins though so you don't need as many. With wood you would need 2 centrifuges for the first boiler, while with the other methods you'd need 5 centrifuges. For biomass you can produce enough for a single 36HP boiler with a moistener, fermenter, and two stills (though the moistener can support two more stills easily, some say it can support five total but I couldn't get it to do it).
Basically, due to the small space needed if you can automate chopping down rubber trees you wouldn't need as much space to keep a liquid boiler running, but with the new farm's need for constant apatite and SC2 not liking rubber trees this becomes less feasible : /
For anyone wondering, 16 rubber wood = 4 methane cells + some other stuff, while 64 melon slices or 16 pumpkins give only a single methane cell, all at the same time cost of centrifuging - melons grow faster than pumpkins though so you don't need as many. With wood you would need 2 centrifuges for the first boiler, while with the other methods you'd need 5 centrifuges. For biomass you can produce enough for a single 36HP boiler with a moistener, fermenter, and two stills (though the moistener can support two more stills easily, some say it can support five total but I couldn't get it to do it).
Basically, due to the small space needed if you can automate chopping down rubber trees you wouldn't need as much space to keep a liquid boiler running, but with the new farm's need for constant apatite and SC2 not liking rubber trees this becomes less feasible : /
Rubber farms were already out of control, automation-wise. Greg has lowered the return on the 16 wood recipe to 1 methane cell anyhow, regardless of Forestry's new farms. Steve's Carts would just be ridiculous. I prefer methane in the gas turbine, as it seems the intent was there rather than churning a massive return from rubberwood through boilers.
Really? It is fertile ground for copper and tin as well, isn't it?
These machines seem really good to me for some reason. I can't wait to build them (been working on my TC lab first). I really can't figure out why people are so fired up and angry about them.
I have two primary concerns with the new forestry farms, one is the apatite input required for _everything_, and two is the general space required.
The space requirement, for everything but the tree farm, has shot up tremendously. Old wheat farms held over 120 growing spaces in a 15x15 area. The new farms either match that in a slightly smaller space, or beat it slightly in a larger space. But only if you ignore the vertical. Old wheat farms, peat farms, etc, had a height requirement of only two blocks. The farm itself and some air. The new farms require 4 blocks high. So before, where you had 240 growing spaces, you now have just 120, or 156 if you go with 15x17
(I also suspect, but haven't tested, like most multiblock structures, that they need a block between the farms vertically, so really the farms are going to require 5 blocks high in order to stack them)
The apatite requirement isn't itself crippling, except in the face of other methodologies available (turtle and steve's carts for trees, golems for wheat/carrot/potato/netherwart, any number of methodologies, some even vanilla, for cactus, reeds and melons. Basically it's a maintenance requirement that I want to avoid - and I have the option to do so by going a different path. Trees grow on normal dirt, after all.
Ignoring build-cost, I'll personally be switching away from Forestry farms solely due to the mining input required of apatite. Humus was bad enough when it didn't require apatite, trees grow on normal soil, the creation of a humus was an unnecessary requirement.
The space requirement, for everything but the tree farm, has shot up tremendously. Old wheat farms held over 120 growing spaces in a 15x15 area. The new farms either match that in a slightly smaller space, or beat it slightly in a larger space. But only if you ignore the vertical. Old wheat farms, peat farms, etc, had a height requirement of only two blocks. The farm itself and some air. The new farms require 4 blocks high. So before, where you had 240 growing spaces, you now have just 120, or 156 if you go with 15x17
(I also suspect, but haven't tested, like most multiblock structures, that they need a block between the farms vertically, so really the farms are going to require 5 blocks high in order to stack them)
The apatite requirement isn't itself crippling, except in the face of other methodologies available (turtle and steve's carts for trees, golems for wheat/carrot/potato/netherwart, any number of methodologies, some even vanilla, for cactus, reeds and melons. Basically it's a maintenance requirement that I want to avoid - and I have the option to do so by going a different path. Trees grow on normal dirt, after all.
Ignoring build-cost, I'll personally be switching away from Forestry farms solely due to the mining input required of apatite. Humus was bad enough when it didn't require apatite, trees grow on normal soil, the creation of a humus was an unnecessary requirement.
No clue, either, Kirin. I've had the smallest default treefarm in 2.0.0.3 running for just over 30 minutes on 4 mj/t - roughly 3 stacks of wood, 3 stacks of apples, 4 stacks (!) of saplings, and barely touched the stack of fertilizer I put in. Moving apatite out of the mines was a great idea. 10 minutes in the hills and you are sitting on piles of it, which so far seems like the right amount of maintenance. It looks nice, feels right, it's efficient. Love the new farms so far.
Via the new wiki:
Now, remember that water level is at 62 for the ocean, and you can see why it's not exactly around prime mining grounds outside of cave systems inside of mountains or similar. That said, this might be ok for Direwolf20 packs as I'm unsure of all the ore gen they have. In Mindrack, however, copper can spawn above 40, but tin can only spawn below 55, unless this was changed recently (the old value was 50 max). While that does kinda put apatite within range based on how it spawns, it's not firmly on those levels.
I could say a bunch about mining and reach and all that, but I decided to cut it out. The main point is since apatite is set to spawn above 60 for the most part you have to go out of your way to farm it, since there are better layers that you can get multiple useful ores from. I believe it's head lvl 40 in Mindcrack, for example, where you can get tin, copper, lead, and silver, the latter of which can be useful with TE stuff. Personally, I have a preference with mining on head levels that are multiples of 8 due to reach, but that's just me.
My experience so far (in 2.0.0.3) has been: not 200 blocks north of my house, this, at level 88. The whole chunk of apatite already mined out of the picture netted me around 4 stacks (without Fortune) .. I left because my inventory was full.
I really have no need to mine this for a while, because that 4 stacks turned into 32 stacks of fertilizer. 64, if I had ash. Which is a lot when you only have one tree farm. Most of it goes to humus in this case, because the farm itself is pretty light on fertilizer usage.
It seems to me that 10-20 minutes was well spent (I even found a TC3 obsidian totem spawn nearby thanks to the apatite expedition, and netted that Portal Gun in my inventory from the chest). The apatite gathering has the potential to not scale well for a multiple large-farm build, but we'll see. If you don't like exploring for veins, exploring in general, or mining, I can see that it might be a put-off. But, yea .. minecraft.
I really have no need to mine this for a while, because that 4 stacks turned into 32 stacks of fertilizer. 64, if I had ash. Which is a lot when you only have one tree farm. Most of it goes to humus in this case, because the farm itself is pretty light on fertilizer usage.
It seems to me that 10-20 minutes was well spent (I even found a TC3 obsidian totem spawn nearby thanks to the apatite expedition, and netted that Portal Gun in my inventory from the chest). The apatite gathering has the potential to not scale well for a multiple large-farm build, but we'll see. If you don't like exploring for veins, exploring in general, or mining, I can see that it might be a put-off. But, yea .. minecraft.
For me it was biogas -> biofuel -> boiler. I drop mods from my worlds that only provide a moderate use while filling my world with cruft. I dropped IC2 because all I wanted from it was the drill and backpacks. Not worth the rest of it when I can get comparable gear elsewhere. Similarly Forestry was ok when it was just bees clogging up my world. But now with tree breeding (ungh), bees, and these new farms I decided I really, really don't need the biogas -> biofuel -> boiler line. I'll figure out another way to power my machines. So Forestry went buh-bye and my world is cleaner for it.
And that point is lower if you keep RP2 thanks to Seed Bag and Sickle. Quick harvesting and replanting almost literally on the run.
Most people quarry or frame quarry so...not really?
Multi-farms are an incredible addition to the mod ecology of the pack if for no other reason than they incentivize people to explore other farming options. Now Forestry farms aren't simply "the best" for all situations, but when you have the space/mats/apatite to use them they are better than the previous implementation.
I found 216 apatite ore in a vein, that is 648 when mined and 1426 if Fortune III'd. Are you seriously saying that having to find a single vein of this (because are you really going to use all that) is killing the automation?
I don't mind the new farms, I just wish they had some sort of in-game documentation for both the recipes and the multi-block requirements. Thaumcraft has the thauminomicon, gregtech has NEI and gui hints, I believe it's Minechem that has that blueprint projector thing... What the fudge, sengir?
Going with the current 40mu per tree, it's 50 trees per fertilizer. Sure, while what you have may be useful for a long time, it's not completely self-contained thus not being fully automated. Attaching a quarry to it isn't going to make it fully automated either since you have to manipulate the quarry yourself unless you attach it to a RP2 frame and have it move the quarry around. So yes, it's not fully automatable within a closed setup.
As for the cost, while it requires no diamonds, the absolute smallest farm still requires 72 copper and 36 tin electron tubes (45 tin iirc) on top of some tin gears for the components that do the work. For the largest farm (5lx5wx4h) this becomes 200 copper and 100 tin tubes for a 17x17 area that isn't even fully covered. Compare that to Steve's Carts where you throw in a few diamonds for the cart itself and then can expand the system as much as you want by adding rails AND it's self sustaining and you can see why the new farms are a turn off in comparison. For all your vegetables like wheat, cacti, sugarcane, melons, etc. you can have TC3 golems do the work there with relative ease while also not costing you any power at all.
So given the costs and alternatives as well as not being able to run within a self-contained environment then I would have to say yes, this change makes the new multiblock farms not very appealing, not to mention the bugs I've run into with em such as duping saplings ad absurdum, but that's more with how they interact with filters from RP2 (attach filter, add redstone signal, get stack of saplings inside farm and thrown out of filter when it tries to pull saplings).
Edit: Also, since my quote from earlier where I quoted the wiki someone removed the "up to 48 blocks" part, so it could very well be either this amount of apatite was planned or wasn't planned, and unless Sengir decides to reduce how much we can say what's in there now is planned.
As for the cost, while it requires no diamonds, the absolute smallest farm still requires 72 copper and 36 tin electron tubes (45 tin iirc) on top of some tin gears for the components that do the work. For the largest farm (5lx5wx4h) this becomes 200 copper and 100 tin tubes for a 17x17 area that isn't even fully covered. Compare that to Steve's Carts where you throw in a few diamonds for the cart itself and then can expand the system as much as you want by adding rails AND it's self sustaining and you can see why the new farms are a turn off in comparison. For all your vegetables like wheat, cacti, sugarcane, melons, etc. you can have TC3 golems do the work there with relative ease while also not costing you any power at all.
So given the costs and alternatives as well as not being able to run within a self-contained environment then I would have to say yes, this change makes the new multiblock farms not very appealing, not to mention the bugs I've run into with em such as duping saplings ad absurdum, but that's more with how they interact with filters from RP2 (attach filter, add redstone signal, get stack of saplings inside farm and thrown out of filter when it tries to pull saplings).
Edit: Also, since my quote from earlier where I quoted the wiki someone removed the "up to 48 blocks" part, so it could very well be either this amount of apatite was planned or wasn't planned, and unless Sengir decides to reduce how much we can say what's in there now is planned.
You know, if you really want to you can (at least, using the mods in the Mindcrack pack you can) still fully automate fertilizer production. High-tier enderman soul shard for enderpearls. Grind them into dust and run them through an industrial electrolyzer for nitrogen and potassium. Combine with compressed air in electric crafting table for saltpeter, which makes fertilizer when combined with sand. You do get some extra cells (beryllium, excess nitrogen, and chlorite) which you will either need to find a use for or run through an extractor to get the cells back, but you can make it work (I set up one of these in a creative world, just to see if it was feasible).
Of course it's still a royal pain compared to other automated farming methods, but the option is there.
Of course it's still a royal pain compared to other automated farming methods, but the option is there.
NEI has no way of "handling" multi-block structures, it's just not within the scope of the mod (or really, any mod other than the one that adds said structure). The NEI plugin for forestry that shows the carpenter/etc recipes will update eventually and then you'll have those back though.