Self Sufficient Sapling Bio Farm

[NateSci]

So I have spent most of the day trying to figure out how to turn my 2 tree farms into an automated, self sustaining system that will not only keep itself full of items needed to continue growth but also turn all excess saplings into Plant Balls, then compressed balls, then put through a Fermenter.

The problem I am having is with a couple of things.

1. The sand. How do I pump it out effectively.

2. I figured out saplings will stay in the saplings boxes by pumping them into the top but it is very inefficient. I basically have sorters pumping them out, then if they Arboretum is full then it goes into a chest with an automated crafting table.

3. The refinery, should I have more than 1? 2 or 3 perhaps? What should I use to power it. It seems if I have a liquiduct for water, another with a pneumatic tub for balls and I need to find another for mulch how do I automate it better or power it?


P.S. I did a little sleuthing on youtube but only found very outdated automated systems that only automated themselves and did not put anything into a fermenter.

 

[JasonZZ]

Um...if you're using a Fermenter, you're better off processing the saplings directly. A sapling is worth 0.8 bucket of biomass, a compressed plantball is something like 0.5, and takes 4 saplings to make (two plantballs for 8 saplings).

Plantball fermenting is best saved for things like leaf blocks or seeds, that you can't normally process in a fermenter.

 

[NateSci]

Thanks for that info, would say a 4-5 stack high reed farm be more efficient and easier to set up as automated?

 

[Evil Hamster]

Fermenter setup took a bit of work. This is my current setup (I just happened to b working on it!):

Mulch from my moistener gets fed in the bottom, water in from back, power from the left, cactus/reeds from the top and output to the right. The output is piped to a large iron tank and I currently have 2 stills working to fill the tank next to it with biofuel. I have a 36HP liquid fueled boiler ready to go, but unfortunately this system doesn't look like it's nearly enough to keep it running so I never turned it on.

The farms (2 layer reed, 2 layer cactus):

Does anybody know how many stills it will take running full time to keep a 36HP liquid fuel boiler fed? I can increase my cactus/reed farm to keep the stills busy as needed since the fermenters aren't nearly operating at capacity at the moment.

 

[DoctorOr]

Does anybody know how many stills it will take running full time to keep a 36HP liquid fuel boiler fed? I can increase my cactus/reed farm to keep the stills busy as needed since the fermenters aren't nearly operating at capacity at the moment.

More than two, less than 8.

I run 8 fermenters and 6 stills, and my 3200 tank (5x5x8) each for biomass and biofuel are maxed out. I do tend to over-build these things...

I want to move the floor anyways, so I'm gonna rebuild the tanks as a full 7x7x8

 

[DaWhiskers]

I run 1 Fermenter on saplings/water and 3 Stills, this keeps on top of a 36HP boiler at full make sure you have a good sized biofuel tank before starting to the boiler though

 

[Evil Hamster]

Maybe I'm just over-building and have enough already.. I'll fire the system up tomorrow and see.

 

[MilConDoin]

I have one fermenter with 5 stills feeding into an iron tank, feeding into 5 boilers. The tank very slowly fills up. 7 industrial steam engines (56 MJ/t) feed this system + a fertilizer production system (cobble->sand->sandstone->niter->saltpeter->fertilizer) and the inline RECell stays at full. Liquiducts handle all the liquid transport, REConduits the energy transport.

engines -> conduits 1 -> RECell -> conduits 2 -> machines with another line of conduits connecting conduits 1+2. Thus all the machines get filled with only one time the 5% loss and the RECell is filled inline as a backup in times of need, which should never happen (I just happen to feel safer with it ).

I forgot: The fermenter runs on water + fertilizer. I think with mulch you can only feed 4, but I may be mistaken. The water is sometimes changed to apple juice automatically, when the juice buffer tank becomes full, to stretch the sapling output, but this is not needed to keep all 5 stills running if you have enough fermentable material (saplings, plantballs, ...) otherwise.

 

[Daemonblue]

A single fermenter running on water and at full power can support about 4.5 stills running at full power (can oversupply biomass for 4, undersupply for 5, in my tests). For a fully heated boiler, 4 stills are more than enough for 2 36 HP boilers, while it takes more than 3 stills to keep them supplied.

Going by those numbers you could probably try a 7:4 ratio of stills to boilers and probably come out even, though I haven't personally tried this as I'm leaning more towards the rubber tree farm > methane production line for boiler fuel. Sure, methane has half the fuel value of biofuel in boilers, but it doesn't look like it would take much more than maybe one or two farms seeing as going by the recipes it takes 16 rubber wood for 4 methane cells at a rate where you would need 1.2 centrifuges per boiler. The only question then would be how quickly you could resupply rubber wood compared to, say cacti and normal trees and how many farms it really would take to support the system.

 

[MilConDoin]

One fermenter can keep 5 stills running, works fine in my testworld for days now. Did you use fertilizer or mulch in your tests? Edit: Liquiducts or waterproof pipes?
Also one still can keep 1.2 boilers running, if I used the correct math. I tested for days now, that 1 fermenter + 5 stills can keep 5 boilers running.

 

[NateSci]

Thanks for all the great info guys!

 

[Daemonblue]

Back when I had tested it liquiducts weren't even out yet, and I was using mulch. The fertilizer/mulch thing is really a non-factor. The fertilizer uses 11.2/200 buckets worth of liquid per cycle, or 56mb of liquid, while the mulch uses 12/250 buckets worth per cycle, or 48mb. These numbers are on the wiki for forestry, and it pretty much shows that mulch, while being superior, doesn't really affect how quickly you produce biomass, but how much resources you use to create it. This is really a non-factor when using water, but will show its benefits if you're running something like apple juice.

Also, I might have overstated how much i was losing, it was about 1 bucket worth of biomass over a few minutes from a storage tank, so not something most people would notice if they don't bother storing biomass.

 

[MavericK96]

Somewhat on topic...what's the best way to ensure that some saplings make it back into the farm, and the rest get sent to the fermenter? I was thinking about using a Manager or something but I'm not sure that would work.

 

[Daemonblue]

Have your logger input items into an adjacent relay, set up tubes coming from the relay (obviously), have a branch with a filter for only saplings on one side leading to your arboretum and for the tube you want the rest of your items to go set a restriction tube. You don't HAVE to use a restriction tube, but I personally prefer to use them to ensure that the default path is the last one chosen since each restriction tube acts as if it was 5000 blocks long, so will be the last destination anything chooses. This tends to help more in very compact setups.

Small diagram:

    \
  +_|
    |
    X

Where x is your relay, | is your output tube, +_ is a filter, and \ is the restriction tube, if that makes any sense.

 

[NateSci]

Have your logger input items into an adjacent relay, set up tubes coming from the relay (obviously), have a branch with a filter for only saplings on one side leading to your arboretum and for the tube you want the rest of your items to go set a restriction tube. You don't HAVE to use a restriction tube, but I personally prefer to use them to ensure that the default path is the last one chosen since each restriction tube acts as if it was 5000 blocks long, so will be the last destination anything chooses. This tends to help more in very compact setups.

Small diagram:

    \
  +_|
    |
    X

Where x is your relay, | is your output tube, +_ is a filter, and \ is the restriction tube, if that makes any sense.

I am having trouble following that, can you show a picture of that setup?

 

[Icarus White]

I think the issue here is he wants to send some, but not all, of the saplings back to the arboretum, while the rest goes to a fermenter or something.
How intelligent is the arboretum - if you hook up a pneumatic pipe to it and pump in saplings, will it only fill up the saplings slot, or will it fill up the humus slot too?

Out of curiosity, how did you automate the humus production system - or are you just making a barrelful and sticking it on?

 

[Daemonblue]

Spoiler

For the power you don't have to set it up just like that, but since it's creative and I wanted to get the items moving I set up a forester in the back, and I wanted you to be able to see the arboretum without it being covered by the REC. You place both the logger and arboretum next to the relay as shown so both machines will deposit their output into the network, and only saplings will go through the filter in this setup. Once the arboretum can't take anymore saplings, none will go that way until it can. If a sapling is on its way but the arboretum becomes filled before it reaches it's destination it will clog the filter with the sapling, but that doesn't matter since you're only sending saplings that way when they're needed anyway and it will unclog when it needs it.

This is just a simple system, obviously, but you can tweak it a bit to add in humus as well fairly easily.

Edit: Derped the first setup, it was dumping saplings into the sand slot, you HAVE to have the saplings go in from the top. You could set it up like the previous version, but you'd have to place the filter a few blocks higher and use paint, so I redid it like this and it shouldn't have any problems.

Another method would be to have the restriction tube near the bottom where the relay ejects from and have the default path run underground instead of above ground - as long as the saplings go into the top slot you shouldn't have any problems though.


Another Edit: Just test it a bit more, saplings go into the top, humus into the bottom. Anything input from the sides will go into the sand slot and be instantly extracted.

Edit again: Just made the design more compact, have the relay's output facing away from the arboretum and put the filter on top of it with the output facing the arboretum. This gives one block of space for a tube to enter the arboretum from the top, with only 2 tubes needed to connect the relay to the filter.

Here's the more compact design

Spoiler

 

[NateSci]

I like this setup much MUCH more compact that what I was trying for.

 

[Daemonblue]

Yup, when I make a build I generally start off rough to get the idea of it down and then try to refine it to be as compact as possible as I plan on fitting my machinery into spaces that are mostly two blocks high due to how I set up my floors (floor level has a floor, four blocks of space, and a ceiling - this leads into an attic with two blocks of space and the roof/next floor).

 

[MavericK96]

That looks awesome, going to try it tonight...thanks!

My main problem when building a rig like this is trying to determine exactly how the machines interact with each other, especially RP2 stuff. The only wiki info is fairly old, but not everything has changed how it works so some of it is still relevant.