Arbor Tree farming

[zOldBulldog]

Although I recently restarted my map and thus very limited on what I can do, I just got an arbor tree seed and after reading how useful they are I decided to setup a farm.   I found very little information about what is the best way to setup a farm for it.  The main thing I found is that (at least for early farms) it seems best to set it up as a wild farm, planted by pips (lukily, there are good tutorials on pip-driven farms).

Any hints, clues or links to good arbor tree farm tutorials/guides/threads?

[cpy]

Make pips plant a lot of wild trees and you'll drown in polluted dirt/pw and power.

[DonDegow]

You got the gist of it, domesticated Arbor tree consumes large amount of Pwater (and power for pumping it) making these not really useful for power generation via refinement into ethanol.

However having wild trees using pips is nice because it generates power, dirt, Pwater, CO2 and heat for free.

If you want to have 1 petroleum gen running full time, you will need 4 ethanol distillery that needs 7.2 trees each, so aiming for a farm of 29 trees guarantees no downtime of petroleum gen but you can have a really good enough system using half of that amount.

The hardest part with wild farms is finding the space needed; 20 trees takes about 30*8 tiles. You don't have to be that cautious with destroying natural tiles, it's quite easy to fabricate a natural tile using algae and a hot liquid, quite a few videos explain it better than me.

Also important, you have to cool your system, it can quickly get out of control if nothing is done to tame it.

some other tips : -The easy way to handle CO2 is enclosing your whole distilleries + petro gen in a non-accessible room and feeding them via conveyor + sweepers and also extracting the Pdirt with sweeper; you'll quickly get over hundreds of kg of CO2 per tile and won't be limited by it.

-As any farm, watch out for air pressure and temperature (0.1-10kg of gas per tile and 15-40°C)

-No automation is needed except for smart battery if you want to limit your lumber consumption and maybe for Pwater extraction if you choose to box it.

Screenshots 

The power box

Spoiler

Plumbing

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The farm

Spoiler

[Gurgel]

On 9/6/2019 at 2:37 PM, cpy said:

Make pips plant a lot of wild trees and you'll drown in polluted dirt/pw and power.

Pips changed the whole farming aspect of the game fundamentally.

[Ketmol]

Since petroleum generator make enough polluted water for the trees needed to provide ethanol for the generator the pw use of a farm is not a problem... and you need a lot less trees when domesticated, so less space.

and ..you don' get 27+ arbor acorns to start with.

With salt water, pw water, steam vents and such... it is only early game water is an issue anyway... mid game it is never really a problem.

[PhailRaptor]

The big advantage of the Ethanol cycle is that the clean-up and supply parts get more efficient as you add more units to the complex.  Assembling your wild Arbor farm can be done so that you only need a single Sweeper and Loader to automate the entire thing.  Just build it vertically, and with no flooring under the branches of the Trees, so that all the branches will fall down to the range of the Sweeper at the bottom.  A Liquid Pump maxes out at 10 kg/s, so a single Pump can clean up the Polluted Water produced by 13.333... PetroGens.  Each unit requires 4 Carbon Skimmers to offset, but the Water Sieve can process 5 kg/s.  Rather than Composting the Polluted Dirt that comes from the Distillers, you can feed it to either Sage Hatches for Coal for more power, or to Pokeshells for Sand and Molts for Lime.  Both produce Eggs, and the Hatches will produce Meat.

Ethanol complexes are not meant to be isolated units chugging away in dark corners of the map, but rather as resource converters as part of a vast interconnected network.

[zOldBulldog]

Thanks for the details. My initial farm was intended to avoid wasting printer drops and "getting started" with arbor trees, but the information provided will also help me when I am ready to scale it up.

 

Additional information I discovered:

- Baby pips (what you get from the printer) don't plant, but they can be wrangled and delivered to the farm.  Need to be patient and wait for them to grow up before they start planting.

 

My plan:

- Initially just plant the printer seeds (wild, by pips).

- When ready make exactly one domestic tree.  It's purpose is seed generation.

- Use the seeds to scale the wild tree farm and significant production.

- If I find myself with an excess of water, create a domestic tree farm for increased production (assuming that I need it).

 

 

[suicide commando]

4 hours ago, Ketmol said:

Since petroleum generator make enough polluted water for the trees needed to provide ethanol for the generator the pw use of a farm is not a problem... and you need a lot less trees when domesticated, so less space.

and ..you don' get 27+ arbor acorns to start with.

With salt water, pw water, steam vents and such... it is only early game water is an issue anyway... mid game it is never really a problem.

Sorry, but this is incorrect. This USED to be the case, until they nerfed this by increasing the amount of pWater that domesticated trees need.
The Domesticated tree -> Ethanol -> Power -> pWater loop is now pWater negative. ie. you need more pWater to grow the trees than the generator provides.

EDIT: Just did a bit of math, this loop IS pH2O positive if you add in 30 tame molten slicksters to process all the CO2 from 3 ethanol distillers and 1 generator to create the fuel to keep it running. So that's about 4 ranches worth. You will also have to install cooling around the trees to make sure they don't overheat, as the pH2O coming from the generator will be hot. It has to be because you need the CO2 to be 90+ degrees for the molten slicksters comfort range.

Edit 2: Mixed up my numbers.

[Ketmol]

@suicide commando oh. I have somehow missed that nerf and since i do survival playthroughs and not experimenting very much I haven't noticed it since i tend to put all pw from different sources into the same pipe and then distributing it. So in my current playthrough I think the net positive pw from my toilets have made up for the deficit in this case.(I circulate the same water for my bathrooms but tap a tiny bit of PW all the time from the loop since you do get a small net gain of pw) And because of that I have  not noticed this.

 

[suicide commando]

Hmm.. you must have a lot of dupes running around then in your base, or you're slowly cutting into your lumber supply by having less trees growing than needed. ( you need just under 2 per ethanol distiller, and 4 ethanol distillers to run a petrol generator continuously )
The deficit is around 190kg/cycle.
 

[KAJ3D]

From what I could tell from doing the math based off the info from the wiki, what is needed to fully support 1 petroleum generator is:

6 domesticated (-420 kg/cycle pWater, -60 kg/cycle dirt)
5 wild (all 11 make a little over 2400 kg/cycle of lumber)
4 Ethanol Distillers (-2400 kg/cycle lumber, +400 kg/cycle CO2, +1200 kg/cycle Ethanol, +800 kg/cycle pDirt)
1 Petroleum Generator (-1200 kg/cycle Ethanol, +450 kg/cycle pWater, +300 kg/cycle CO2)
4 Carbon Skimmer (-720 kg/cycle CO2)
1 Water Sieve (+100 kg/cycle pDirt)
4 Compost (-200 kg/cycle pDirt, +200 g/cycle Dirt)
5 Sage Hatches (-700 kg/cycle pDirt, +700 kg/coal, + food & eggs, didn't math that part)

Obviously you cold do Pokeshells instead of sage hatches, but didn't calculate that. Or if you're anti ranching you could just off gas the pDirt or make a ton of composts.

At any rate, the above is a net gain in power, +30 kg/cycle pWater, +140 kg/cycle Dirt, +700 kg/cycle Coal, some food, some eggs, and a slight gain in lumber.