New Forestry 2.0 Farm Blocks aare a PITA

[DoctorOr]

I didn't spend much time on this, but I built several farms in creative, powered them with multiple energy cells, and some water and I never got a functioning farm. Once, a 4x tree farm build the humus but then sat there with an inventory full of saplings, being pouty and sullen.


I noticed also that inserting items from the top only filled the upper right inventory slots, and the upper left remained empty. I don't know if this is situational depending on which side the hatch is on, but it's wasted space no matter the reason.

Also, all the items mix in a single inventory, much like the carpenter. Also like the carpenter I forsee problems when the inventory fills entirely with humus and saplings can't get in (to use the arboreum function as an example)

 

[Daemonblue]

I had actually made a mistake on my earlier post regarding saplings being duped with filters and the hatches - the farm can do it all on its own. It's very simple to duplicate, take a stack of saplings and drop it on a hatch. When the hatch sucks up the saplings voila, 4 stacks. This also happens with apples.

 

[Sphinx2k]

How does a rubber farm work with the new farm blocks? I cant figure it out atm.

 

[legomike]

all mods need books like TC3

 

[Cisco78]

How does a rubber farm work with the new farm blocks? I cant figure it out atm.

You need to create the farmland via dirt and then plant rubber tree saplings. The rubber farm will then auto harvest sticky resin. It's similar to how the previous cacti farms and reed farms worked.

For my rubber tree farm, I used an intricate circuit with 4 rubber electron tubes. I used the medium sized "manual" setup - 3x4x4. I placed dirt coming out each side and then placed a few rubber tree saplings on each size. I planted them, used bone meal, then cleared the leaves. I repeated this a few time so I could get max height rubber trees. I have about 5 per side. I've not got a barrel with 34 stacks of rubber lol! It works amazingly well. It doesn't require anything except water and power.

I'm actually happy it doesn't harvest the rubber tree itself. It's a pretty fire and forget type system.

My only very minor gripe is with the soldering iron eating tubes that you place in the wrong slots. This may be intentional though...

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

You need to create the farmland via dirt and then plant rubber tree saplings. The rubber farm will then auto harvest sticky resin. It's similar to how the previous cacti farms and reed farms worked.

For my rubber tree farm, I used an intricate circuit with 4 rubber electron tubes. I used the medium sized "manual" setup - 3x4x4. I placed dirt coming out each side and then placed a few rubber tree saplings on each size. I planted them, used bone meal, then cleared the leaves. I repeated this a few time so I could get max height rubber trees. I have about 5 per side. I've not got a barrel with 34 stacks of rubber lol! It works amazingly well. It doesn't require anything except water and power.

I'm actually happy it doesn't harvest the rubber tree itself. It's a pretty fire and forget type system.

My only very minor gripe is with the soldering iron eating tubes that you place in the wrong slots. This may be intentional though...

You want to have more fun? Use Portal/Gravity Gun to move the logs around so that all of your trees have a sap spot on every log.

 

[ItharianEngineering]

The soldering iron eating your tubes is a glitch that a newer version of forestry already fixed. It also changed the fertilizer use of a tree farm from 40 units of fertilizer to 30 and increased orchards from 5 to 10

 

[Cisco78]

You want to have more fun? Use Portal/Gravity Gun to move the logs around so that all of your trees have a sap spot on every log.

Oh that would be fun, I'd be overloaded by rubber though haha. Here I thought 3 stacks was a lot before. I'll be making a "public" nuke reactor soon, so the extra rubber will come in handy!

The soldering iron eating your tubes is a glitch that a newer version of forestry already fixed. It also changed the fertilizer use of a tree farm from 40 units of fertilizer to 30 and increased orchards from 5 to 10

Ah, good that's fixed. Love that they beefed up the apples. I'm adding the juice to a 20 million bucket tank and pumping it to fermenters to boost bio mass production.

 

[Sphinx2k]

Ok i tryed it that way...and it did not work out. The cherry trees i plantet to test it get harvested but not the rubber. *confused*

 

[HeffronCM]

I'm overloaded in rubber just from my bee farms (propolis -> sticky resin in centrifuge), I can't imagine needing more than that.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Ok i tryed it that way...and it did not work out. The cherry trees i plantet to test it get harvested but not the rubber. *confused*

Cherries are harvested in an Orchard. Rubber trees require their own setting.

 

[Sphinx2k]

Cherries are harvested in an Orchard. Rubber trees require their own setting.

Oh that is my mistake then i thought rubber trees use the orchard. Ok never mind

 

[DoctorOr]

I'm actually happy it doesn't harvest the rubber tree itself. It's a pretty fire and forget type system.[/quote

I'm not, I want the wood. I actually recycle rubber for scrap. Looks like "new forestry farms" are actually losing functionality in addition to efficiency

 

[Sengir]

I'm not, I want the wood. I actually recycle rubber for scrap. Looks like "new forestry farms" are actually losing functionality in addition to efficiency

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/44760587/forestry/changelog/2.0.0.4

That's the beauty of the new system: Way more flexible than the old farms. Adding new farm logic is very easy and new circuits to expand and extend the functionality of the multiblock farms will be added over time. Not to mention that many farms will be open to other mods adding saplings and crops with simple one/two lines of code (see this PR I made to EBXL for an example: https://github.com/ExtrabiomesXL/ExtrabiomesXL/pull/249). I also have plans for at least one additional farm component which will make adjusting a farms output according to actual needs easier.

Now: Back to our regulary scheduled doom and gloom on TheoryCraft!

 

[Celestialphoenix]

More flexibility and working with bigger trees is fairly cool.

Though I will miss the old style 'plonk it down an go' squares. (namely the height cap, makes building underwater farms a lot easier)


Edit- though its a fairly neat way of breaking the stack farm exploit with the old system.

 

[Xakthos]

While I can appreciate the gets better over time aspect of development looking at it from a pure cost benefit now perspective I'm not really seeing it do much for me. First is the space issue. I'm not opposed to something needing a lot of space, I'm opposed to it using it poorly. With the multiblock height required for the largest, for equivilant space it produces less when calculated on all axis. The shape doesn't help planning any either quite honestly. I wish you had stuck with just a basic square. Second the fertilizer specifically from one gem/ore/whatever you want to call it frankly is a tad annoying. I just quarry the bejesus out of stuff so the impact to me is pretty minor but it still annoys.

Perhaps it is my gaming style. I tend to go big/huge or not bother at all. When I lay out a farm I lay it out expecting to store up tens of thousands of its product and generate that daily. When I built the prior farms there would be 20 levels of stacked wheat farms, several per level for instance. That was my small version of the system. I can still do the same now but the height is further than I like to build up so I'll need more wheat buildings, more pipes to handle all the various accessories desired and similar. Tree farming is in the same boat. I liked the forestry mod's base one block modules a lot but I'm ambivalent about the multiblock. I haven't really been convinced that I should invest the effort into it instead of one of the alternate solutions. Meh I'll wait and see how it goes.

 

[Sengir]

(stuff)

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.)

 

[Scaffolding]

I really like the changes and fixes made in the latest version of Forestry.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/44760587/forestry/changelog/2.0.0.4

Excellent work, so much for taking a break though =/.

 

[HeffronCM]

I'm actually looking into building a couple of apple orchards using the new multifarms to feed my biogas set-up. Assuming they can crank out more apples with less waste products than other available options, we might finally have a nice clean efficient method of running a biogas refinery entirely on apple juice and mulch. Now I just need multiblock squeezers and fermenters that use insane amounts of MJ for even more insane levels of production. And to learn tree breeding to maximize crop sizes. WTB ExtraTrees :-D

 

[Dark0_0firE]

Sengir, I would just like to say Thank You. I understand you don't get paid to work on these mods, so any upkeep is truely appreciated. While I did use and abuse the old farms (which in my opinion WERE multiblock structures, 1 to farm, 1 to harvest and include the piping), I still plan to thouroughly use and abuse the new ones. To everyone else, if you don't like 'em, don't use 'em. And if you really don't like 'em, make your own mod.