Using Multiple Gourmaryllis

[Brotuulaan]

I've been trying to figure out a setup to use multiple gourmaryllis to dispose of my apples from my auto tree farm and make mana in the process, but they have an odd pickup pattern. I've been using themal dynamics itemducts and a regular servo to slow down the movement rate.

I started of with a square of 8 flowers with the apples dropping in the middle, but only one flower ate them every time.

NOTE: For anyone wondering about excess production from flowers that overeat, they simply waste the food available if they're still producing mana.

Making an X with four flowers works fine, giving each flower its own food but making a less-dense and more resource-intensive farm than I would like, given the inherent difficulty of dispersing items into an X-shaped dropping system. I used an item robin and natura hoppers to move the apples to the corners.

I tried making a cross with four flowers, each with an open crate dropping apples down, but some of them never ate anything and were useless. After doing some experimentation, I've discovered that offsetting the flowers in a cross from the crates does the following:

To SE: 3 eat, S starves
To S: 3 eat, E starves
To SW: All 4 eat
To W: 3 eat, S starves
To NW: All 4 eat
To N: 3 eat, W starves
To NE: 2 eat, N and E starve
To E: 2 eat, N and E starve

So unfortunately, the cross shape requires the system to be offset from the flowers in order to make it work. I'm not quite sure how to figure out the exact meaning behind this series of tests, but I want to get all 8 flowers together. It seems I can't do that without spreading them all out like with the X shape I mentioned earlier.

Does anyone know of a way to condense mana production with these flowers?

 

[Brotuulaan]

Turns out this flower generates a fair amount of mana even with just apples. I'm having to put a mana spreader on each flower and throttle the apple drops as it is. So it's not all bad that I can't condense the flowers more than four in a cross or X.

I'm experimenting with flowers in an X and the spreaders in a cross between them, so they wind up in a block of 8 together. It can be tiled, so I'm starting to like this idea. I'l post back as I keep experimenting and let you know what I find.

In the meantime, I'll still appreciate any links/videos/ideas you have on dense farms for the Gourmaryllis.

 

[Brotuulaan]

So I think I've settled on this setup. I've got my four Gourmaryllis in an X shape (or a square, if you prefer), below four Open Crates, each fed by a Hopper (I'm using the ones from Natura, though their function is the same), with those hoppers fed by an Item Robin from Immersive Integration, which is fed by an Itemduct from Thermal Dynamics using a standard servo, which is pulling from an Ender Chest (from Ender IO) that I've set up to pull in my apples from my tree farm.

Laying over the crates and hoppers, I have a redstone torch feeding a horseshoe of redstone dust to throttle the movement of apples from the hoppers into the crates. This means the rate of flow of apples into the hoppers doesn't matter, so you can interchange any pipes going into the Item Robin. Fast, slow, it'll just fill up the hoppers until they're full, then only feed once they fire off.

The redstone torch sits on one of the crates, meaning I can disable the torch by powering the crate itself. I set a Timer from ProjectRed Integration to power the crate and set the timer to 15.5 seconds. Since my mana pool is not immediately between the flowers, there seems to be a longer delay before the flowers and spreaders fully empty. 15.5 seconds seems just right so there's no mana buildup and almost no lag time between cycles.

It's important to note that I had to manually connect the Gourmaryllis to the Spreaders in order to ensure they were paired 1-1, preventing a bottleneck and unused mana pathways.

All in all, this seems to be a pretty efficient setup, and you can raise the dropping system as high as you want, so long as nothing unloads. You can lower it one more block from where I have it.

If you wanted a large field or long rows, you could run the redstone along the row rather than around in a horseshoe. And since this prevents flowers from stealing food from other flowers, you can make this into any shape or size you want, so long as you have the materials and the space to build it and the food to run it.

 

[Brotuulaan]

Anyone?