The art of farming 1.2

[Lilalaunekuh]

After long tinkering I am able to present you my new and improved berry farm.

Spoiler

(Time to contribute something new to our forum )

 

Ideas/Assumptions:

-Plants auto-harvest 4 cycles after it became ready to harvest

-A 4 cycle timer doesn´t work when a game is saved and loaded again, so I asume I need to have a sensor to dectect if my plants are ready to harvest.

-I could use an auto-sweeper and a refrigerator or try to sense the power drain of my auto-sweepers.

=> Sensing seems superior to me, but if you want I have some more to the sweeper controlled version.

-Plants need no water or light to auto-harvest.

=> Cutting the water "right after" the plant became harvest ready is more water efficient than duplicant-harvest.

- When it comes to farming here are our options for illumination setups:

A)1 lamp              for  8 w can cover  8 plants using a 4 tile high corridor => 9x4 module size /  8 plants

B)1 ceiling lamp for 10 w can cover  9 plants using a 4 tile high corridor => 9x4 module size /  9 plants

C)1 ceiling lamp for 10 w can cover 11 plants using a 6 tile high corridor => 9x6 module size / 11 plants

(I went for A; B would be more space and less power efficent: C would be less space and more power efficent)

 

-If you want to min/max:

Spoiler

- 9 plants width using a ceiling lamp and an auto-sweeper.

(Can be more space efficent but costs slightly more power compared to my build.)

- Using a separate 12 pipe segment buffer for each plant

(This will result in the lowest possible water consumption, but the buffer pipes are a huge space trade-off.)

 

Numbers (we all love them):

- up to 5140kg of water used to grow a row of 40 bristle berries

=> If you cook all berries, a row will yield up to 8.000kcal each cycle.

- The average power consumption for each row is below 100w. (73-95W depending on the amout of seeds dropped)

=> Continuous consumption (0,86kg/s water) + (~100w)

=> 340kg of water sacrificed compared to an optimal setup

- A bristle berry will consume up to 8,5kg of water in up to 255s.

=> If your duplicants will allways harvest faster than 255s my farm will be less water efficient.

-The build can utilize water between 5°C and 28°C (The water is used to cool the auto-sweepers and lamps.)

 

 

Build:

- No special resources required to build this, maybe some steel for the lamps (not really needed)

- The farm in my picture is just small enough that one water sieve is sufficient. (~5kg/s)

- Will automatically adjust the amount of working rows to the water input.

One row means: 8000kcal each cycle for 0,86kg/s water and less than 100w (~70w)

=> Up to 48.000kcal each cycle

 

In-depth images and tricks:

Spoiler

Power:

-On the left heavy watt input/ on the right a normal wire would be more then sufficient.

-The right site uses ~1W for each plant or ~42W for each row

-The left site uses on average just half of that, but with huge power spikes.

 

- The automation doesn´t turn of the power transform, instead I use a power shut-off to save the stored 4kj.

(If the game is running without a reload the power inside my transform will show me when the plants are ready to harvest^^

Without the auto-sweepers running the only consumer is the daily drain of the smart battery and it takes 10 cyles for the smart battery to drain the power transformer.

=> When the power transformer got no power stored my plants harvest and the farm resets.)

 

Piping:

- If you would make the piping just one piece shorter or longer in the wrong spot you could end up with 99% grown plants ^^

- I use radiant pipes behind the plant itself to provide some cooling, with my gold pipes I am able to use up to 28°C water.

(Didn´t test 29°C over a longer time period but could work too.)

- Each lamp is automated by an liquid element sensor to provide only illumination if water is available.

(This ensures just one empty pipe segment for each group of plants.

=> More water efficiency if it takes less time between the activation of the lamps in each row.)

-The first time I am using a overflow sensor that consufes the liquid inside my pipe:

I use it just for the compact size, but it can lead to an additional 10kg of water beeing used.

(5130kg->5140kg, so no big deal if it happens but makes the fine tuning a pain^^)

=> I might swap it out in an later version.

 

Automation:

- On the right side are just liquid element sensor set to water that turn on the lamps.

- Since rows are independent we can look at just one module:

The harvest sensor:

- The switch on the top is just to kick start the system.

- Right now if the water input isn´t enough one row after an other will shut down till a manual activation. and test again if the tank is full after 10 cycles and than every 20 cycles.

-One pipe can just feed 4 tanks in time, so if you start >4 rows simultaneously the other will stop (after one harvest if you started with full tanks.

=> You can start more than 4 rows at once and the other will find their own time slot after a while (30-70cycles) so no need for manual intervention. (But I would recommand a manual delayed start for each row just for convenience.)

=> (less^^) Potential for optimization

 

-The upper right element sensor is attached to a 5s buffer to make the signal of a single "looping" packet continuous. (3s should be sufficent.)

-The filter gate is set to >30s (10s will not work, 15s do sometimes work if the "overflow sensor" traps an additional water packet.)

=> The additional time is for the pipe behind the sensor to empty.

(It will just delay the refilling, so some additional time will not decrease the efficiency of the build.)

 

-The smart battery is set to 100 / 80, so when the auto-sweepers start to work the power drain will reset the farm

(If you set the smart battery to 100/75 instead the farm will slightly less efficient (adds ~5 sec to the full >6000s harvest cycle^^), but additional rows will find their own time slot faster.)

If the tank isn´t full, the farm will test if the tank is full in 10 cycles again and then every 20 cycles.

 

 

 

PS:  What´s your opinion on the water efficency ? (/255s delayed harvest equivalent)

 

I missed that my filter gate (30s) triggers early enough to keep 20-30kg of water (the values I saw the most were 22-25kg) out of my farm.

=> Changed some of my efficiency calculations.

 

 

[mathmanican]

31 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

5°C and 28°C

But all my water now comes from a 2C to 3C homemade geyser.  I guess I'll have to tepidize it.

Love the build. Thanks for the post. Gonna build one of these.

[Lilalaunekuh]

10 minutes ago, mathmanican said:

44 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

5°C and 28°C

But all my water now comes from a 2C to 3C homemade geyser.  I

My build was tweaked for hotter inputs, but if you replace the radiant pipes with insulated pipes, remove the tempshift plates (and maybe remove the light automation) then you should be able to use water at 3-4°C .

[Dyrewulfe]

You inspired me to make one of these, as well(I'd never even thought of just letting the berries fall on their own )

100 berries, uses approx. 12.3t of water per harvest.

[fancyrat]

What do you mean by a 4 cycle timer not working if the game is saved and reloaded?

[Lilalaunekuh]

12 hours ago, Dyrewulfe said:

You inspired me to make one of these, as well

Glad that I could inspire you to build soemthing like that.

(Maybe next time I will try to link my lights more like you did.^^)

 

Here a quick list of changes you made (and I saw/deemed worthy to mention^^):

 

1. You gone for the more compact vertical stacking with your lamps ("-1 average room size")

2. You do the reset based of the farm based on the ouput of the conveyor system.

Spoiler

Done that, with mediocre success:

1. A conveyor system based trigger will need more power than a power sensitive system or a "normal liquid clock".

2. The delay is much higher than the delay of any of the other system.

3. If you want to minimize the downsides of the 2 points above you need to trade "resolution".

Or with other words your forced to use one control for a bigger block. (In your case one trigger for 100 plants.)

3. Single automation for all lights. (Good for synchronous rows, but it´s doesn´t allow a variable flow.

 

Did I miss something ?

 

 

30 minutes ago, fancyrat said:

What do you mean by a 4 cycle timer not working if the game is saved and reloaded?

In a perfect world a plant will become harvest ready and drop the berry 4 cycles/2400 seconds later.

But if you start/reload a game the timer till the plant drops will be "reset" by a small fraction.

Spoiler

(Maybe the game just saves a % value and restores the timer this way, so if you save/relaod the plant will take more than 2400 seconds.)

 

=> If you would start watering your plants again before they harvested, your farm will get out of sync ...

[Dyrewulfe]

@Lilalaunekuh

1. The pattern there allows for 10 plants per lamp, rather than just 8.

2. After doing some tweaking, the delay between a harvest, and the farm resuming growth, is less than 10s. I'm more than willing to ignore that, dupes would take longer than that to harvest under any conditions.

3. Not sure what you mean here by "variable flow"? If you mean varying the number of plants being grown, that wasn't a something I needed/wanted. I intend to add an interrupt to shut the whole thing down in response to having a full surplus stock.

 

Made two major tweaks to it...

Added a double bridge backup detector here:

This allows for kicking the lights off once the water loop starts to go dry. The memory toggle is tied to the reset line, so the lights kick back on once the first berry hits the plate, and water is both available in the line, and buffered in the hydroponic tiles.

The only other tweak was adjust the positioning of my prefill tank hydro sensor and moving the vent:

Set up like this, I can now fill very close to an exact 12t of water(comes out to about 12.05t).

I opted against wrangling with sweeper power usage detection mostly due to being unfamiliar with the process. I gave myself a hard 20 cycle "do  it or starve" limit when I built it. Tore out my existing farm before I began to give myself some extra motivation.

[Zarquan]

You can feed the bristle berries warmer water if you give them exactly or approximately what they need instead of full packets.  I feed my bristle blossoms 100 g/s of ~60 C water once every 3 seconds, then cool them with a hydrogen loop using wheezeworts.  With more wheezeworts or a more advanced cooling setup near my farm, I could feed them 90 C water straight from the geyser and divert the water cooling power to other parts of my base. 

I ran an experiment a few months ago feeding bristle berries 90 C water.  Feeding them small packets overheat the plants much slower, therefore you can use warmer water with less cooling.

[Craigjw]

If you were a TRUE farmer, you would have found a dozen different things to do in preparation for building this and would never have gotten around to making this post!