Purpose of trees? And where are my Butterflies?

[Anton_]

I've been playing around with Forestry's Bees and Trees and, tangentially, Butterflies. I'm using DW20 LP S9 modpack. two queries...

1. I'm wondering what the point of Tree breeding is, other than getting Seed Oil (from Chestnuts and Walnuts). The only other purpose I can see is purely decorative?

2. Also, a few weeks ago I noticed Butterflies appearing and multiplying - there were 60-ish at one time. After a while my Trees were getting in my way so I cut them all down, but kept the Bees (one Alveary and several Industrial Apiaries), and the large flower garden is still there. As I expected, the Butterflies gradually disappeared. The Bees still seem quite content. I then planted some new Trees about a week ago, but the Butterflies have not reappeared. Do Butterflies spawn only in response to a particular breed of Tree? Or Flower?

 

[SevenMass]

From my experience, butterflies appear to spawn near forestry trees, but only the ones you've planted, not the ones that generate in the world.

Butterflies where added to allow tree breeding without the bees and to give the player a hobby. They look cute but don't add anything by themselves.
In my, admittedly not so humble, opinion; The butterflies are a nuisance, and the best you can do is turn them off completely in the configs. Tree breeding will then be handled by the bees again, something you have more control over. But that's me...

As for the purpose of trees; Trees have much more use than butterflies!
The different tree species do indeed provide decorative options, but they also have various functionally useful traits.
Some tree species have thicker trunks or are taller, thus providing more wood logs.
They have varying degrees of sappiness in their saplings, so you can get more bio-fuel from them.
Different fruits provide different amounts of fruit juice, again, allowing you to try and maximize fuel production.
They have varying chance of dropping saplings.
Different tree species have different amount of leaf blocks.
I'm not sure if this is still in the latest version, but different logs can also also convert into different charcoals with more fuel value.

The game here, is to try and min-max a "super tree" through tree breeding.


Of course, you can also just make a sufficiently large automated farm and brute force the production of bio-fuel and logs.

Edit: nuance should be nuisance

 

[Anton_]

Thanks SevenMass, that's more or less what I was thinking.

 

[Pyure]

Interestingly Forestry comes with a number of difficulty settings that influence machine energy cost and outputs and such. Its possible to make a pack leveraging these such that you'll need high-level trees in order to actually produce net positive energy from a biofuel tree farm.

 

[Anton_]

Interestingly Forestry comes with a number of difficulty settings that influence machine energy cost and outputs and such. Its possible to make a pack leveraging these such that you'll need high-level trees in order to actually produce net positive energy from a biofuel tree farm.

Interesting. That would make the game more fun too.
I'm actually just messing around following DW20's latest LP season, and Bees and Trees looking interesting.

 

[TomeWyrm]

Butterflies serve the same (tree breeding) purpose as bees. They only spawn from the forestry tree leaves (no forestry tree spawns in the world. The vanilla trees you plant in a farm get special forestry leaves).

If you want a completely passive tree breeding operation? https://forum.feed-the-beast.com/th...-or-how-to-make-trees-breed-themselves.32611/

But yeah, trees pretty much only serve as a min-max minigame for biogas/biomass/biofuel/whatever-it-is-called-now production(seriously screwed me up when 3-4 mods had a bio___ liquid and then some of them changed), seed oil boost (which can be used as a fuel in a liquid-fueled firebox and some engines in other mods), and there's also a villager-trade-only tree with some good traits. Personally can't stand the way forestry handled trees/butterflies/farms, but I like bees, backpacks, its energy production, and crafting mechanics (carpenter, thermionic fabricator, etc.), and one of my favorite mods has it as a dependency... so it stays.