Pip Planting: Everything You Need to Know

[nakomaru]

Pips do this:

In honor of the series, and because we have probably really figured it out by now, and because there is still confusion, here is Everything You Need to Know About Pip Planting.

Thanks for the discoveries and shares along the way @Coolthulhu, @abud, @snoozer, @shuuny, @Lurve, @Gurgel, @Promethien, @OxCD, @bzgzd, @suxkar, @vascoegertklei, @mathmanican @Tobruk @Ketmol and many people I missed.

 

1. Planting rules.

 Pips will consider planting a seed in a tile under these conditions:

1. The tile has no more than 2 other plants in a square 6 left, 6 down, 5 right, 5 up from the tile.
2. It is either a "natural tile" of less than 150 hardness, a farm tile or a hydroponic farm.
3. The pip can navigate to the seed and the tile, and there must be no buildings obstructing the plant's location.
4. The atmospheric pressure is greater than 100g.
5. The atmospheric temperature is around ±50C to ±100C of the requirements of the plant.

If you can't figure out why your pip isn't planting, it is always rule #1.

Details:

Spoiler

Rule 1:
The range is from the TILE to the PLANT.

• Here, "plant" means the 1 to 3 tile height that the plants occupies.
• For decorative plants and sleet wheat, it means the 1 tile height that they occupy.
• Most plants including trees are 2 tiles high and branches do not count.
• Thimble Reeds and Pincha Pepperplants are 3 tiles high.
• Decorative and domestic plants count. Because this checks only at the time of planting, and it is a large area, planting order matters.
• Buried seeds do not count, but if a living plant is later entombed in e.g. falling sand, it will count.

Rule 2:
Essentially, all natural tiles except for obsidian, abyssalite and diamond are eligible. They are happy to plant right into "natural" steel tiles. If they plant in a farm tile or hydroponic farm, the plant will be domesticated.

Rule 3:
They can plant hanging plants. Trees need the 1x2 trunk zone, they do not need the branches area to be free. There is probably a maximum pathing range, but about 25 tiles distance still works. After that it might be too slow so you will want to move the seeds closer.

Rule 4:
Any gas or liquid seems to work as long as the mass is more than 100g above the tile.

Rule 5:
The temperature of the tile doesn't matter, just the atmosphere. A couple of examples
Sleet Wheat: -155C to +85C
Bristle Blossom: -55C to 125C

 

2. Optimal Horizontal Spacing

The 3x3. Highest density pattern. This 15 tile span has 9 plants, or 60% density.

Start out as shown, then remove each ladder starting from the right, waiting for the plant to take its place.

The 1x1. This 15 tile span has 8 plants: 53% density. At long distances these two will be about even, but the 3x3 is nicer for placing buildings anyway.

The Tree One. (UK spelling: The 3-1) Place a 2 space gap every third tree.

This pattern allows for maximum branch density. The 4 middle ladders must be left there until all trees mature. This will ensure that the outer trees grow 4 branches on their exclusive spots, and the middle will be available for the middle tree to fill in. These spots are the outside 4.

If you mess it up, you can still prune (dig) the middle branches out and they will respawn until you get maximum density.

 

3. Vertical Spacing

For maximum density for normal plants go top to bottom to achieve a plant every 5th tile.

For hanging plants go from bottom to top, every 6th tile.

Spoiler

 

4. How to make "natural" tiles

As always, there are better and worse ways.

The better way.

Yup. You really just deconstruct a door. It needs all 7 tiles surrounding it. It also works when rotated and deconstructed from the right.

The other ways usually involves using vole puke or cooking algae or fertilizer into dirt.

For algae, you can construct/deconstruct storage bins to drop 1-10kg of algae into each location.

The Glass Forge.

Now with high efficiency thanks to @abud. Place 5kg algae per tile and set the valve to 2084 (25kg glass / 12).

Original recommendation in the spoiler.

Spoiler

Try 10kg of algae with this. Thanks to @Gurgel for the numbers. Use your best insulated pipes.

\

If you insulate it, and even if you don't probably, it will continue to cook the neighboring tiles. Here I cooked 5 tiles with the three outputs after some time.

The Tuner/Tepidizer.

You can cook it from below with an aquatuner or tricked tepidizer.

Spoiler

shuuny also discusses the vole method in this post.

The Tricked Space Heater.

Cook it from all over.

Spoiler

Be sure to isolate the room. It takes a while. Use low pressure hydrogen (50g). Drop your wires and pipes beforehand.

To make space heaters work above their temperature use either of these circuits:

Metal Refinery and Conveyers.

Spoiler

See this post by OxCD. Very straightforward!

 

5. But why won't they plant!

Spoiler

It's always rule #1. Here are some examples of problems and how to identify them by applying rule #1.

Spoiler

5-6 plants are below the intended room. Replant from top to bottom:

A third decorative plant on the bottom left:

The trees below are barely in range: trees count from either of their two tiles (some plants are 3 or 1):

Planting inefficiently from bottom to top. Left: the three height plants are in a 6 tile range from above.
Right: the minimum distance for this:

A rare rule #4 issue:

Thanks for reading! Please share if you have found any exceptions or better methods.

[mathmanican]

Beautiful. Thanks for sharing. @SamLogan could add this to his profile and remove the outdated steam turbine one. 

[Nutter]

Awesome, Thank You!!

[abud]

Complete explanation in one place. Thank's for your effort making this.

[Gurgel]

Excellent!

Two remarks:

1. For wild growth, you need to plant in regular "natural" tiles

2. I do not understand your "better" way to make natural tiles and probably nobody will from that video alone.

[Gus Smedstad]

55 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

4. How to make "natural" tiles

As always, there are better and worse ways. Here's the better way. Please don't remove this.

 

I don't understand why that creates a natural tile. Shouldn't that just create an ore lump? Are the metal tiles bounding the mechanical airlock important? I'm assuming the vacuum isn't.

The natural tile thing has been on my mind primarily because of parks.

[suxkar]

Thanks for making this very complete and useful thread, and for showcasing my idiocy  I was the owner of problem #2!
Thank you!

[abud]

5 minutes ago, Gus Smedstad said:

I don't understand why that creates a natural tile.

It's a bug that happen to metal door. Possibly related to metal cannon bug

Multiple reports about this, but I just link one that I see first.

[Gurgel]

20 minutes ago, Gurgel said:

2. I do not understand your "better" way to make natural tiles and probably nobody will from that video alone.

Fascinating. This actually works as displayed. It has the disadvantage of creating a 200kg metal tile though. With my "drip fresh liquid glass on algae" technique, I can create dirt tiles down to 10kg (drip half of the glass on one tile, half on another by splitting the output), which are a lot easier to cool down.

Note to those that find buried glass an aesthetic problem: This seems to happen only on heavier algae loads. I have created 28 10kg dirt tiles for Peppernut and not a single one has glass embedded. Apparently, if the conversion is fast enough, the glass gets pushed out instead of embedded. 

[Gus Smedstad]

4 minutes ago, abud said:

It's a bug that happen to metal door. Possibly related to metal cannon bug

Oh. In that case, I won't be using it. It's clearly not intended behavior.

The only obvious ways that cross my mind involve cooking algae or polluted water. Both of which are a bit of a PITA, if you ask me.

[beowulf2010]

I was playing around with this last night and discovered one slight exception to the "It's always rule #1" answer to why won't my pips plant. If you're weird like me and used sandbox to make the planter tiles but want the pips to plant in them, the pips won't plant until you reload the game. 

This is mostly a meaningless exception as there will be very few people that will half-cheat like I was by using sandbox to paint in algae/dirt tiles but not just spawning the plant in directly also using sandbox. 

(It's most likely caused by the same issue that causes plants you move with debug's Alt-Q teleport function to be dug up by changes to the original root tile instead of the new root tile until a save/reload). 

[bzgzd]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

Fascinating. This actually works as displayed. It has the disadvantage of creating a 200kg metal tile though. With my "drip fresh liquid glass on algae" technique, I can create dirt tiles down to 10kg (drip half of the glass on one tile, half on another by splitting the output), which are a lot easier to cool down.

But with this bug there is nothing to cool down.

Spoiler

 

 

[Gurgel]

34 minutes ago, bzgzd said:

But with this bug there is nothing to cool down.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

There is if you want to plant Sleet Wheat.

[nakomaru]

5 hours ago, Gurgel said:

1. For wild growth, you need to plant in regular "natural" tiles

2. I do not understand your "better" way to make natural tiles and probably nobody will from that video alone.

1: Wild/domestic growth is mentioned.

6 hours ago, nakomaru said:

If they plant in a farm tile or hydroponic farm, the plant will be domesticated.

2: Okay, I added clarification.

6 hours ago, nakomaru said:

Yup. You really just deconstruct a door.

 

5 hours ago, Gurgel said:

I can create dirt tiles down to 10kg (drip half of the glass on one tile, half on another by splitting the output), which are a lot easier to cool down.

Added - this is definitely the easiest method for cooking! Thank you.

5 hours ago, suxkar said:

Thanks for making this very complete and useful thread, and for showcasing my idiocy  I was the owner of problem #2!
Thank you!

Valuable data my friend!

3 hours ago, beowulf2010 said:

one slight exception to the "It's always rule #1" answer to why won't my pips plant. If you're weird like me and used sandbox to make the planter tiles but want the pips to plant in them, the pips won't plant until you reload the game.

I assume you mean farm tiles and not planter boxes. I was unable to reproduce this. Left side tiles created with sandbox and right side was created with debug.

If you meant dirt tiles, I also couldn't reproduce this as all testing was done in sandbox/debug. Was it perhaps a vacuum? (Was it rule #1?)

[beowulf2010]

1 hour ago, nakomaru said:

I assume you mean farm tiles and not planter boxes. I was unable to reproduce this. Left side tiles created with sandbox and right side was created with debug.

I actually meant creating brand new 20kg blocks of algae directly with sandbox mode's brush tool. 

[shuuny]

Nice teamwork everyone ! Take that Klei ! 

6 hours ago, nakomaru said:

The Glass Forge.

Love it !

[nakomaru]

2 minutes ago, beowulf2010 said:

I actually meant creating brand new 20kg blocks of algae directly with sandbox mode's brush tool. 

Still unable to reproduce. Left with sandbox, right with debug.

[OxCD]

@nakomaru wonderful job ! Thanks for this !

[nakomaru]

11 minutes ago, shuuny said:

Love it !

Check out rev 3!

6 hours ago, nakomaru said:

 

[beowulf2010]

58 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Still unable to reproduce. Left with sandbox, right with debug.

How odd... I'll try it again tonight. This morning I went 15 cycles, no plants. Reloaded the 15th turn's auto save because I missed a sand tile and broke open a water reservoir and flooded my industrial area. 3 out of 4 seeds planted with a cycle of the reload. 

[abud]

7 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

Check out rev 3!

A bit out of topic, where glass from middle vent?

edit: probably we can make it more efficient using 1kg valve? Would prevent state change too

[nakomaru]

24 minutes ago, abud said:

A bit out of topic, where glass from middle vent?

edit: probably we can make it more efficient using 1kg valve? Would prevent state change too

Perfectly topical! Added.

7 hours ago, nakomaru said:

I believe you run out of energy at 1kg, and without perfect insulation the problem is worse. I tried 6250 to split the 25kg evenly. It works (well 5kg was already tested originally). Looks like I was lucky the first time to avoid buried glass.

By the way, the above picture naturally cooked the surrounding 2 tiles just from sitting there.

If you sort out an even better design please share.

[beowulf2010]

@nakomaru OK. I cannot replicate the issue I mentioned earlier.  I tried 3 different combinations of Sandbox brushing and debug Alt-Q teleporting of seeds and pips. Editing my previous posts.  Must have been one of those stupid random things that gets fixed by a reload like when autosweepers stop loading or a Pacu literally getting stuck in one square of the water pen. Sorry for the issue. 

[bzgzd]

37 minutes ago, nakomaru said:

If you sort out an even better design please share.

Why only 4? Make 25 it should be enough heat...

Wait... WTF Sand!

 

[nakomaru]

14 minutes ago, bzgzd said:

Why only 4?

Without perfect insulation, you really want to get the glass out as soon as possible. The recommendation of 3 is chosen to be able to instantly boil 10kg of algae to dirt without tending to bury glass or turn to sand. If you play with it, you have to figure out the numbers again. The heat is not lost: it will continue to cook nearby algae. Box off your room and most of the heat will go to good use. Drop 3 every 6-9 tiles or so, probably.

You might try changing the 3-4 output design to drop every third tile, to spread out the heat and be guaranteed that glass doesn't get buried.