Self Harvesting Farm

[wachunga]

So plants will harvest themselves 4 cycles after reaching full growth. This is a nice way to reduce dupe labor and eliminate one of the causes of "dupe running across the entire map to do a task" syndrome. However during this period the plants continue to consume resources. Unless they become stifled. Something I've been doing for awhile is stifling bristle blossoms on command by automating the lights. Each light is offset time-wise to prevent a power spike from all the sweepers going at once.

I like this method so much that gristle berry is my go to food. Get approximately the correct food production (while still looking nice and symmetric) with number of plants, then fine tune with the timer's duty cycle. In this screenshot, production is a bit below consumption because of excess food I wanted to get through.

This is super easy with bristle blossoms because of automating the lights. But what about other plants? My current thinking is an airtight farm with gas pressure just above what the plant needs. Then automate pumps to drop the pressure and stifle the plants when appropriate. Obviously that consumes power which is not ideal. Maybe instead of a pump, stick some mech doors in the farm and have them open or close to regulate gas pressure. Anyone else have ideas or examples of what they have done?

 

And a bonus food storage and distribution screenshot because I hate the ugly liquid lock freezers that are popular.

Think of the weight plates as buffet tables. When both are empty, a green automation blip is sent to the loader which sends out one packet of food. The loader itself is kept in cold co2 via a thermo regulator offscreen to stop decay (this is version 469300 without the changed decay mechanics, but I pretend that it has changed). Food on the weight plates is consumed before it has time to decay. Also food is in the center of the room so that any leftover table scraps are eaten before a dupe goes to the weight plate. Note that food in the loader isn't seen by the kcal counter. I keep some muckroot around in order to stop the annoying not enough food messages.

[Hokaeru]

Smart idea really !

Thanks alot for sharing, I'll try that in the future 

[wachunga]

It's one of those things that once I started doing it, I can't go back to not doing it.

Anyhow, the door idea to stifle plants by gas pressure seems to work pretty well. Getting the correct amount of gas in the room is an extra, but easy, step.

When doors are closed, plants grow in 160g gas pressure. When doors are open, plants stifle in 136g gas pressure and stop consuming water/dirt. The long growth time of sleet wheat makes fine tuning the cycle more annoying though. Here the first counter is set to 4 for a growth period of 18.2 cycles (a bit of extra wiggle room to account for any brief hiccups in growth is a good idea). The second counter is set to 5 and resets both counters making a total cycle time of  22.75 cycles. Filters or buffers could probably be added to further fine tune things if wanted. More complicated than just a timer sensor but not too terrible. I do forget if there are any bugs or problems from using timers and counters in this way.

[Jann5s]

Your timer does multiple cycles?

[LadenSwallow]

Timer 'sensors' can be a lot more versatile than cycle sensors.

Timer sensors can be set to alternate rapidly when using the 'seconds' setting, or less frequently than the cycle sensor using the 'cycles' setting. Click the mode button to switch between seconds mode and cycles mode.

[KonfigSys]

mutated plants -> self harvested (bio-engineering)

if mutated plants same goes with r/a lamps.

light and pressure switching schemes look great

[nikk]

On 12/8/2021 at 2:35 PM, wachunga said:

Getting the correct amount of gas in the room is an extra, but easy, step.

I'm not good at automation. Can someone post it in this thread then?

[wachunga]

I guess the easiest would be vacuuming the room and slowly filling it with a valved down pipe. A simple switch can close the vent when you get to the correct amount, keep an eye on the pressure and then flip the switch. Deconstruct the vent and direct any gas left in the pipes somewhere else. Another method would be to do some math before hand and stage the correct amount of gas in pipes. Say you have a 9x3 room, 3.8kg of gas would give you 0.165 kg over 23 cells (with 2 doors closed) or 0.140kg over 27 cells (with the 2 doors open). Again use a valve to slowly fill the pipes until you get to 3.8 kg and then close a shutoff with a switch to stop the flow. Then let that gas into the room. Or you could go with some even amount of gas based on completely full pipe segments and alter the room size as appropriate. Alternately you could overfill the room and slowly pump it out and turn off the pump with a switch when the correct amount is reached.

If you use a liquid lock which would eventually be removed once everything is done, you need to keep in mind any pressure changes that might occur from sealing off that liquid lock. If you don't like liquid locks, you could build everything and include a stub off the room positioned in such a way that it can be pinched off by corner building a tile. Put your pump and vent in that stub, seal everything up, vacuum the room, fill the room, and pinch off the stub. This would also result in a small change in pressure when that tile gets built so keep that in mind.

There are probably other methods as well. Maybe using pedestals? Anyone who does this sort of stuff routinely and has a favorite method is certainly welcome to chime in.

[LadenSwallow]

There are the meter valves if you have access to plastic and refined metal. I use them to make double liquid locks with 30g ish of petrol/crude oil, as they will let only that 1 tiny packet through and will hold up the rest of the pipe until you click reset. You can set the amount higher for this purpose.