I have a working Bristle Berry farm. Ask me anything.

[Walruscustard]

So I finally have an insulated, airlocked chamber that can keep a fairly steady 20 degrees C to keep these bristle berry plants happy.  Offscreen there's a thermo regulator that takes in gas from inside the chamber and returns it through insulated gas vents.  As far as I've seen, the biggest thing that hurts this setup... is dupes.  They have to go inside to harvest/fertilize the plants and every visit raises the temperature by about 1 degree apiece.

[Octyabr]

Ok, first question: What are those plants? food?

[Czeraphine]

24 minutes ago, Octyabr said:

Ok, first question: What are those plants? food?

yup. they're food that's pretty much inferior to the mealwood plant since the ninja "mealwood doesn't consume gasses anymore" patch

[Octyabr]

8 minutes ago, Czeraphine said:

yup. they're food that's pretty much inferior to the mealwood plant since the ninja "mealwood doesn't consume gasses anymore" patch

Wait... What? Did the patch that?

[Czeraphine]

Just now, Octyabr said:

Wait... What? Did the patch that?

Yup! Mealwood plants do not consume gasses of any kind anymore. Though they didn't post it; the results speak for themselves. 

[Octyabr]

Oh boy... back to the old way of dealing with CO2 then.

[jigggy2000]

I know this may sound weird. But I kinda liked the idea that the meal worms- I mean meal wood consumed gasses. Or even at least a little  oxygen (just a tiny bit) so you had to be careful not to have too many. I mean they are worms so it made sense. it kinda brought an interesting element on deciding how to proceed with farms. Also gave bristle plants an edge over the other. Now you just ignore them. 

I have a feeling that for now it was intentional, as Bristle's may have a better use in the future. Like they're an ingredient for a very good recipe/object in the game that would justify there existence. Or maybe they'll change them to consume a little CO2  being more plants than the mealwood. I mean, bristles are much harder to grow so there worse in every way at the moment. Sure that will change in the future though.

[Travin]

I'm hoping bristles will end up being medicinal. 

[Walruscustard]

As far as i can tell, you don't quite get faster food yield if you make a setup like this. A mealthingy takes about 5 days to fully mature and yields 3 harvests, but returns to 50% growth after harvests #1 and #2... so in 10 days you get 3 harvests of 1.5 kcal each making it 0.45 kcal per day per plant.  A bristleberry takes about 10 days to mature (exactly double the mealwood) and yields *5* harvests and returns to an impressive 90% after harvests #1 - #4... so in 14 days you get 5 harvests of 1.0 kcal each making it 0.357 kcal per day per plant.
 

Also, you need to feed them fertilizer and maintain a gas pump + thermo regulator.  And you'll eventually run out of fertilizer if you aren't using the fertilizer maker.  The only upside is each berry takes up 1 kg of space in the fridge per 1 kcal instead of the meal lice's 10 kg.

[Vilda]

 

44 minutes ago, Walruscustard said:

Also, you need to feed them fertilizer and maintain a gas pump + thermo regulator.  And you'll eventually run out of fertilizer if you aren't using the fertilizer maker.  The only upside is each berry takes up 1 kg of space in the fridge per 1 kcal instead of the meal lice's 10 kg.

If you run a long and digging game, you have to set up cooling anyway, heat is a base and food killer. But yeah, so far Meal Wood is the king.

Btw: more popular ratio is actually lower, because managing harvesting sucks. After two cycles the plant will drop the food and restart itself. It's something like 3.1 plant/dupe, I use 3.5 in case of heat stumping the growth.

[Sawtrack]

5 hours ago, Walruscustard said:

As far as I've seen, the biggest thing that hurts this setup... is dupes.  They have to go inside to harvest/fertilize the plants and every visit raises the temperature by about 1 degree apiece.

To improve your setup you need a intermediate chamber and double airlock so less heat will enter in the farm.

 

And the pump produce heat too. It's better to inject directly new cooled oxygen than making a closed system

[Vilda]

btw what hurts my setup is building farming pots out of materials that have like 90 degrees. Not sure what to do about that but deconstruct and tr other because they would reuse the one at ground. I kinda can guess why heat transfer is not finalized or at all in (because if not done properly it would be a race between heat from bottom, cold from top to kill your base) but i still throws big spanner in the works.

[noodog]

2 hours ago, Travin said:

I'm hoping bristles will end up being medicinal. 

"Swamp Lily";
"An elegant, warm climate that can be dug up and agriculturally domesticated. It produces long, fragrant leaves with natural medicinal properties."

[Walruscustard]

I double-checked and noticed that the berry plants go down to 80% growth when you harvest them and not 90%... so the daily yield is more like 0.278 kcal? still quite a bit lower than mealwood.

[Risu]

For Bristle Blossom:
10 days to grow, 2 days regrowth, 5 total harvests, 1 item per harvest, 1000 kcal per item.

10 + (5 - 1) * 2 = 18 days per seed.
5 / 18 = 0.278 harvests per day.
(1 * 1000) * 0.278 = 278 kcal per day.

For Mealwood:
5 days to grow, 2.5 days regrowth, 3 total harvests, 15 items per harvest, 100 kcal per item.

5 + (3 - 1) * 2.5 = 10 days per seed.
3 / 10 = 0.3 harvests per day.
(15 * 100) * 0.3 = 450 kcal per day.
 

[Octyabr]

Don't really worth the effort then.

Unless they add some unique characteristic to the blossom, like healing diseases or reducing stress.

[Zimmaster7]

You can try to use passive tile cooling to maintain the room temperature. Since tiles don't heat or cool, but maintain the temp they were built at, if you cool the materials down enough before building, you can alleviate some of the temperature issues. I'm currently trying to manipulate vomit into an infinite clean water source using passive heating and cooling purification. It's not working well, but the plan is to use vomit and... urine?... to make oxygen and power and just try to deal with the constant strain of 100% stress.

[Ned_Fland]

8 minutes ago, Zimmaster7 said:

I'm currently trying to manipulate vomit into an infinite clean water source using passive heating and cooling purification. It's not working well

That Sir, is pure comedy gold

[Lampostsamurai]

17 hours ago, Zimmaster7 said:

You can try to use passive tile cooling to maintain the room temperature. Since tiles don't heat or cool, but maintain the temp they were built at, if you cool the materials down enough before building, you can alleviate some of the temperature issues. I'm currently trying to manipulate vomit into an infinite clean water source using passive heating and cooling purification. It's not working well, but the plan is to use vomit and... urine?... to make oxygen and power and just try to deal with the constant strain of 100% stress.

Dwarf fortress level !!!Science!!! here.

[Walruscustard]

So after about 30 cycles of this silliness i ran into a fertilizer crisis and realized i wasn't making near enough fertilizer to keep up 20+ bristle berry plants.  I built a fertilizer maker only to realize you need *immense* amounts of contaminated water to fertilize *one* plant, let alone 20.  Now my farm almost exclusively makes meal lice.

So the takeaway here is that this is a really bad plan in the current build.

[mrbunnyban]

3 hours ago, Walruscustard said:

So after about 30 cycles of this silliness i ran into a fertilizer crisis and realized i wasn't making near enough fertilizer to keep up 20+ bristle berry plants.  I built a fertilizer maker only to realize you need *immense* amounts of contaminated water to fertilize *one* plant, let alone 20.  Now my farm almost exclusively makes meal lice.

So the takeaway here is that this is a really bad plan in the current build.

What about fertilizer from compost heaps?

[Walruscustard]

1 hour ago, mrbunnyban said:

What about fertilizer from compost heaps?

 

6 dupes exclusively using an outhouse was making enough contaminated dirt to fuel 2 bristle berry plants using a compost heap.

[mrbunnyban]

Just now, Walruscustard said:

 

6 dupes exclusively using an outhouse was making enough contaminated dirt to fuel 2 bristle berry plants using a compost heap.

Gah. Not nearly enough huh?

[Vilda]

2 hours ago, Walruscustard said:

 

6 dupes exclusively using an outhouse was making enough contaminated dirt to fuel 2 bristle berry plants using a compost heap.

Wut? I never tried to use them, but they take Fertilizer every harvest? Unlike meal plant which takes 100 at start and thats it?

[Walruscustard]

As far as i can tell they eat up about 50 kg of fertilizer in the time it takes to make 5 harvests.  They *still* use up fertilizer while they have the "Stifled" condition so if they stop growing when they're overheated they still eat into your fertilizer stock.