What farms are the best?

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Bigpak

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Jul 29, 2019
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What farms should I be using, the old forestry farms or the new forestry farms or the minefactory reloaded farm harvester planter type thing, or I think theres something from steve's carts. What one is the best? What one should I use for growing crops etc, and what one should I use for wood and saplings for biofuel and wood?
 

RedBoss

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"Best" is subjective. What's your play style? They all are effective and offer automation.
 

Zenthon_127

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Forestry used to be really good, but with the removal of the old farms it's not quite as easy as before and can get kinda annoying. Still good for trees.

Thaumcraft Golems (with Reliquary Lilipads if installed) is the undisputed king of potato/carrot/wheat farming. Zero energy, zero upkeep cost, nothing.

Steve's Carts is dead. Nerfs to cart making time and adding durability (WTH?!) pretty much made it useless compared to Forestry/MFR.

Speaking of which, MFR is really good for tree farms and mob farms. Best mob farm by far and it's debatable how well it fares against Forestry.

So really, it's all about options. Go TC3 if you want crops, Forestry or MFR for trees and MFR for mobs.
 
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Bigpak

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Now I'm talking about FTB ultimate not unleashed or unhinged for 1.5.2, was steves carts ever any good at all? I am actually trying to figure out what gives the best saplings and what gives them fastest so I can setup a boiler
 

NTaylor

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Now I'm talking about FTB ultimate not unleashed or unhinged for 1.5.2, was steves carts ever any good at all? I am actually trying to figure out what gives the best saplings and what gives them fastest so I can setup a boiler


Steves carts is still good. Barely takes any upkeep to maintain the durability of the two lower tier farming modules and the highest tier doesnt take durability. While the question of which farm is best is somewhat subjective to what you need if you need a lot of materials from your farm steves carts is probably best as you can make the farm any size you want as long as you have rails, it just takes the longest to actually build. However if you are on 1.4.7 instead of 1.5.2 it is lacking quite a few updates to steves carts that adds some nice things to it.

If all you want is a small ammount of resources while steves carts is good it is lacking somewhat it cost effectiveness for small area farms so you might wanna use forestry multifarms. They are good for relatively small farms but if you need more materials for whatever reason than one or two farms can produce then it takes quite a lot of resources to get going and you might wanna look into steves carts.

MFRs farms are fairly cheap and can be used over quite a large area, they take a fair ammount of power to run though but are probably the cheapest to set up.
 

Omicron

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The thing about multifarms is that they start a little weaker than comparable farms but are meant to be upgraded through tree breeding. If you are using vanilla trees, then MFR is definitely the better farm. But only Forestry lets you pull off something like this: http://imgur.com/a/9c74I
 

cynric

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Jul 29, 2019
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The thing about multifarms is that they start a little weaker than comparable farms but are meant to be upgraded through tree breeding. If you are using vanilla trees, then MFR is definitely the better farm. But only Forestry lets you pull off something like this: http://imgur.com/a/9c74I

Interesting, however it seems, tree breeding is as much a undocumented (ingame) and imho unintuitive mess as bee breeding is.
 
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NTaylor

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Interesting, however it seems, tree breeding is as much a undocumented (ingame) and imho unintuitive mess as bee breeding is.


Part of Bee/Tree breeding is the discovery finding new species by randomly breeding bees together. Things like having all the types of breeding pairs on the internet and NEI addons has kinda killed that but that is why it is undocumented in game.
 

Vauthil

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The thing about multifarms is that they start a little weaker than comparable farms but are meant to be upgraded through tree breeding. If you are using vanilla trees, then MFR is definitely the better farm. But only Forestry lets you pull off something like this: http://imgur.com/a/9c74I

That's an impressive tree. It's been a while since I've gone biofuel/ethanol crazy (I went bee crazy with BC fuel last go round). Might be a fun time to play with that again, and definitely a reason for me to look at Multifarms (which I generally ignore).
 

cynric

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Part of Bee/Tree breeding is the discovery finding new species by randomly breeding bees together. Things like having all the types of breeding pairs on the internet and NEI addons has kinda killed that but that is why it is undocumented in game.

If there was atleast some information about the base classes of bees and a quality rating (instead of just other names) available, it would be great. With bees, I basically combine A with B and get result C and then have to check on the internet to know, if C is actually a improved version of A or B or something completely different or maybe even useless.

I don't need a complete plan on what to do (like some wiki pages provide), but an indication if I'm even moving in the right direction would be nice. As it is it just seems mostly luck based. Plant a bunch of trees, throw some random bees in a aviary and get lucky.
 

Omicron

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Not my tree, by the way. It's from a reddit post that Sengir retweeted ;)

I tend to be content with small power generation setups, so I don't need to breed trees. Even the smallest of tree farms is overkill for me. I usually run my basic processing facilities off of a 1LP or 1HP steam boiler buffered by a redstone energy cell, and so long as it keeps running while I do other stuff it's generally more than enough. Once I build large factories, I'm likely to upgrade to something like six combustion engines or thereabouts.

Seeing how much I can achieve with the least input and waste is always one of my favorite challenges :)
 
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TangentialThreat

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Not my tree, by the way. It's from a reddit post that Sengir retweeted ;)

I tend to be content with small power generation setups, so I don't need to breed trees. Even the smallest of tree farms is overkill for me. I usually run my basic processing facilities off of a 1LP or 1HP steam boiler buffered by a redstone energy cell, and so long as it keeps running while I do other stuff it's generally more than enough. Once I build large factories, I'm likely to upgrade to something like six combustion engines or thereabouts.

Seeing how much I can achieve with the least input and waste is always one of my favorite challenges :)

This is the right idea. A lot of people build a dozen 36hp boilers, then never use all the power, then complain that they have no FPS.

We're all still recovering from GregTech's power requirements.
 

Zarkov

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Mar 22, 2013
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Part of Bee/Tree breeding is the discovery finding new species by randomly breeding bees together. Things like having all the types of breeding pairs on the internet and NEI addons has kinda killed that but that is why it is undocumented in game.
For me, it was sort of the other way around. The breeding information was the enabler for bee breeding. I dislike repeatedly trying things on random and hoping for the best. I guess that's one reason why I've never even started with Thaumcraft.

This is the right idea. A lot of people build a dozen 36hp boilers, then never use all the power, then complain that they have no FPS.
Bit off topic here perhaps, but are there known / confirmed FPS issues with boilers (even when using power converters rather than 18 engines each)?
 

whythisname

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Currently not, MFR beats any other farm method hands down.

I agree. The idea of "upgrading" a tree farm through tree breeding isn't really relevant. I mean I can have an MFR tree farm running at max speed with 1-2 mining trips, to get a Forestry tree farm up to that speed through tree breeding will take waaaay more time than that.

The BoP trees are interesting for farms as well. The apple trees can be picked by an MFR fruit picker for example, so a decent sized field of BoP apple trees will give you tons of apples without having to do any tree breeding. Though you'll want some sort of fruit farm (Melons are pretty good) to go along with that as you won't have enough Juice to keep up with all the Mulch.
 

InfamousAsHell

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This is the right idea. A lot of people build a dozen 36hp boilers, then never use all the power, then complain that they have no FPS.

We're all still recovering from GregTech's power requirements.
Evidently you have never messed with MFR's laser drills, they require ALOT of juice. Fully automating one at full speed and processing the ores takes even more juice. Thats about the only reason I can think of for needing more than one boiler though.
Anyways back on topic, rule of thumb if its a beginning/basic/small/uncomplicated farm go with an MFR setup. If its more complicated/larger go with a forestry farm. I wouldn't use TC golems because they are kinda derpy but they are fun to watch. But in 1.4.7 a steve's cart farm is still good and worth making.
 

TangentialThreat

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Bit off topic here perhaps, but are there known / confirmed FPS issues with boilers (even when using power converters rather than 18 engines each)?

Yes and no.

You probably also built a massive network of tanks, pipes and treefarms. A lot of events have to happen to keep your boilers powered and every one of those tick events will cost system resources. A boiler by itself isn't that evil, but bases with large numbers of boilers are almost always laggy.
 

Succubism

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Multiblock farms have a fair bit of cost to them.
Water, Power, Fertilizer, Soil in most cases.
These machines can't work without all of them. And soil especially is a cost considering it's not as easy to automate dirt than it is cobble.

The MineFactory harvesters are a bit cheaper.
They need Power (Arguably more) and space to work. 3 x 3 by default which can be resized to as large as 29 x 29.
Dirt isn't used up with each harvest, the planter hydrates it's own soil (in most cases) without the use of water and Fertilizer (The kind of which it likes) is both optional and acquired and automated much easier.
However with the bigger farms there tends to be a lag issue.

The retro Forestry Farms are much like the Multiblock farms, just more compact and less smart. They require more or less the same things to work.
I believe they're being phased out, however. If not already.

You'll find they output more or less the same in terms of saplings and wood, however I'd suggest MineFactory as it's fertilizer is more or less an automated bone-meal engine.
If you're up for a challenge however, the Multifarm's your best bet.
 

RedBoss

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Currently not, MFR beats any other farm method hands down.

Always yes. "Best" is not a universal term. What's best for one player may mean the option that has the most moving parts to manage. To another best may mean sheer yield. For others, "best" may mean whatever seems the most fun. What's "best" for you isn't what's best for someone else.
 
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