When to go fertlizer instead of increasing farm size?

[meepmoop]

Title says it all

[NurdRage]

Personally i never found fertilization worth it. There is dupe time spent using the fertilizer and additional time making it and transporting it. In my play style, dupe time is more valuable than physical resources.

If i had enough resources to automate most of the process using conveyor lines and sweepers and such, i could automate a bigger farm instead.

A case might be made if you're in a very cramped situation and with a dire shortage of farming resources and you happen to have lots of fertilizer already mined. Like in the very early part of the game. Then a fertilized farm might tide you over until you build out enough of your colony.

 

 

[psusi]

Umm... no... fertilizer is always worth it.  Use it as soon as you possibly can.  Labor?  It always saves labor to do the fertilization compared to adding the other ingredients, unless the crops only need liquid that is piped in, which would be limited to berries, which take a lot of water to produce food.  The effort to produce fertilizer?  You can deliver the resources with auto sweepers if you must, but it really doesn't take much labor to run a fertilizer maker and the NG you get out of it is well worth it, even if you ignore the material cost it saves you to grow crops.  The only way you can possibly gain labor growing twice as many crops to feed your colony can outweigh the cost of fertilizer is if you are only eating berries, and I never grow those.

[NurdRage]

My play style isn't your play style. 

(BTW, you can fully automate more than just berries, including pincha peppers, mushrooms, etc.)

In any case, your recommendation to OP (extracted from all the other criticisms) is: 

"Use it as soon as you possibly can."

[meepmoop]

45 minutes ago, NurdRage said:

Personally i never found fertilization worth it. There is dupe time spent using the fertilizer and additional time making it and transporting it. In my play style, dupe time is more valuable than physical resources.

If i had enough resources to automate most of the process using conveyor lines and sweepers and such, i could automate a bigger farm instead.

A case might be made if you're in a very cramped situation and with a dire shortage of farming resources and you happen to have lots of fertilizer already mined. Like in the very early part of the game. Then a fertilized farm might tide you over until you build out enough of your colony.

 

 

was kinda my same thought. mushroom farm can be automated by sweepers. berries by pipes and hydrofarm tiles. if I add fertlizer, those crops become a daily work for the farmers, while it does not reduce the time it takes them to harvest (since they harvest half as much per each harvest, but they have harvest twice as often so it cancels out.).

So it just adds more work to save on resources? I cant see how this is a fair trade. maybe if instead the farm station would apply the fertlizer to ALL the crops in the greenhouse. Or something else that would reduce the time the fertilizer adds.

11 minutes ago, psusi said:

Umm... no... fertilizer is always worth it.  Use it as soon as you possibly can.  Labor?  It always saves labor to do the fertilization compared to adding the other ingredients, unless the crops only need liquid that is piped in, which would be limited to berries, which take a lot of water to produce food.  The effort to produce fertilizer?  You can deliver the resources with auto sweepers if you must, but it really doesn't take much labor to run a fertilizer maker and the NG you get out of it is well worth it, even if you ignore the material cost it saves you to grow crops.  The only way you can possibly gain labor growing twice as many crops to feed your colony can outweigh the cost of fertilizer is if you are only eating berries, and I never grow those.

But, as I stated, most crops can be automated and just need to be harvested (hell some people even will not do that, and let crops fall themselves then let sweepers do even that).

Its not about making the fertilizers. yes you can produce it without much dupe time but USING it is what tedious and takes a lot of time.

[KittenIsAGeek]

I enable or disable the use of farm stations depending on the situation.   For example, there are some worlds where don't have a lot of seeds to start.  I can make mush bars.. or I can use fertilizer.  The fertilizer is definitely less labor intensive.  Mush bars suck the life out of your colony.  Fertilizer is free to pick up after digging out your water pockets, so you can get quite a few cycles of quick growth to bump your seed supply while also providing food for your colony.

 

[NurdRage]

With fertilizer, the biggest waste of labor is that they need to come back every cycle to apply fertilizer. And it must be applied to every plant. That's a tremendous amount of dupe labor being used.

Now I definitely don't think fertilizer is universally *bad*, they are certainly worth it in a number of situations. It really depends on what's available and your play style.

Reed fiber, with it's excessive polluted water consumption, can benefit quite a bit from fertilization. One time i needed a lot of reed fiber really quickly but just didn't have enough polluted water available. So i ran already mined fertilizer on it and that greatly helped. The fact that thimble reed only takes 2 cycles to grow, and that is cut to 1 cycle with fertilization means that you only need 1 fertilization run to get a yield. Since you already need dupe labor to harvest it, you essentially come out even in terms of labor, but now only used half the polluted water. In total that's a win in my opinion. (assuming you're using already mined fertilizer and not making it)

Lack of seeds is a great example of where fertilization is tremendously helpful. Because you simply have no choice unless you want starving dupes. 

If you have no automation, then the labor of delivering the plant-specific fertilizer (like dirt, or slime), can be traded for delivering the micronutrient "fertilizer" resource. 

If you have severely limited resources, then you again, have no choice. 

The transition though is when you have have automation and abundant resources. You can essentially make zero labor farms. It's a trade off though, you use lots more resources as delivering the micronurtient fertilizer can't be automated, so you need more plants to compensate for the lower yield.

Now if the sweepers could apply the micronutrients themselves, without dupe labor. Holy crap, i would go 110% fertilizer right there.

anyway, fertilizer is good for early game with limited resources, for mid or late game with abundance resources, bigger farm size and automation is the way to go... assuming you want to save dupe labor, if dupe labor is abundant and you have idle dupes standing around, the fertilization should be kept.

In the end it's still a play style decision. you're not going to die outright going one route or the other if you manage the trade-offs properly. Some people have abundant dupe labor. I'm not one of them, but more power to them and i wish them all the best. 

[speckle21]

13 hours ago, psusi said:

The only way you can possibly gain labor growing twice as many crops to feed your colony can outweigh the cost of fertilizer is if you are only eating berries.

********. Here is my pincha pepper farm that is completely labor free:

Not the cleanest build i admit. But it works. The sweepers give the peppers phosphorite and polluted water comes in off screen from my lavatories. I don't harvest directly, but just let the peppers drop where the sweepers pick them up and the conveyor system sends the peppers below to the gas range (also off screen). Completely and totally 100% sealed. My dupes never have to touch it. 

Uses a ****load of polluted water and phosphorite, but i don't care since i make so much of both that i still end up with excess that i need to dump in space. Fertilizer would waste time rather than save it. 

Every four hundred cycles or so the phosphorite runs out and i have to open it up to deliver a new load. but that's 1 cycle of dupe work every 400 cycles. A real bargain compared to fertilizing every ******* cycle. I've since put that conveyor loader on the right so i can load it without even having to open the room. 

I also have labor free berry farms and sleet wheat farms. My dupes eat pepper bread and stuffed berries only needing to spend time to cook them, that's all. No farming needed.

I'd like to give them spicy tofu but my map has no nosh sprouts.

I used to give mushroom wraps, also labor free, but i ran out of slime. 

When you get up and running, you can run so much more when you don't have to worry about farming. I use up all my fertilizer at the beginning to crap out as much food as possible and then live just off stored food until the mid game when i can get a labor free farm going.

Bottom line, fertilizer sucks. Use it up and be done with it. 

 

PS: For those of you with OCD and wondering what that geyser is in the middle. It's actually a volcano. I was going to make a petroleum boiler but by the time i got around to it I already went to space and had a sour gas boiler cranking 60kw. So i left the volcano and didn't bother. 

[psusi]

I suppose you can automate but I've never bothered.  One farmer can fertilize, add the slime, and harvest an entire greenhouse of mushrooms and still have time left over.

[NurdRage]

And zero farmers can do the same thing without spending any time at all. Claiming that's always favorable to use fertilizer and only berries have a net gain of labor (as opposed to almost every plant) is flat out wrong. 

Nonetheless i refer you to my original statements: 

My play style isn't your play style. 

In the end it's still a play style decision. you're not going to die outright going one route or the other if you manage the trade-offs properly. Some people have abundant dupe labor. I'm not one of them, but more power to them and i wish them all the best.

[KILLABUDZ]

15 hours ago, NurdRage said:

Now if the sweepers could apply the micronutrients themselves, without dupe labor. Holy crap, i would go 110% fertilizer right there.

Well with hydroponics the food is typically diluted and distributed via the water, I think we need an advanced farming station which plugs into the line and automatically applies fert to a certain amount of connected hydroponics tiles. It would still require some operating, and perhaps the station would have a regular cleaning task like outhouses. Or a cloche could be added which is like an incubator but for plants.
 

As to the OP, use fert when the mats are available and the food cost is higher relative to your stocks, or when you find or get given some seeds you want to propagate. Fert isnt hard to make and if you find it you might as well use it. Depending on your map and play style, some resources will be more valuable than others, including dupe time and temp controlled space. As you move to the late game most people seem to go for automated wild farms, but if you go for a more space intensive base you may find dupe time worth trading.
Another factor is break points. A break point would be when you cant supply all of your dupes from your current farms, or get enough dupes that a single farmer cannot supply all the food so need a 2nd, or when your reeds are consuming more pwater than your system will support etc, If you can manipulate that break point then that might be worth it.

[Gurgel]

I have never used fertilizer so far. No need in ramp-up and no need in long-term survival where you would also have to make it.