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Farmers and their timings


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So I've been spending some time with my farmers.  Assuming they fix whatever bug is making them mass produce Micronutrient Fertilizers, there's a few things about them that seem to be frustrating and I'd like to recommend some adjustments.

Grabbing a stopwatch, I figured out some timings.  A level 12 farmer gets a 30% crop tending value, 60% harvesting.

There's a bit of an overlay for the time due to my personal finger speed and what not, but on average a fertilization for Farmer's Touch takes about 11 seconds.  That puts it at roughly 15 seconds at base.  Producing a micronutrient load takes ~12 - 13 seconds.  This means it should take, at a minimum, about 28 seconds base time for a single load of fertilizer to be loaded and shot into an adjacent target.

Dupes lose 0.9% breath (while holding it) / second.  I believe they start running for fresh O2 at 70%.  That means just over 33 seconds or so.

What's the result?  Constantly having Mushroom farmers having to run for more breath in the middle of a fertilization delivery.  I don't remember if that 33 seconds is the correct value but it seems right when I have to exosuit my farmers just so they can run from one end of a farm to the other to deliver a single sprayer of fertilizer.  If they take a little time in a block of CO2 on entry it's even worse.

If possible, it'd be nice if a farmer would step back out of the farm after producing fertilizer to get some fresh air, then come back in with full breath to pick up their fertilizer and spray it into the target plant.

Additionally, it seems that 30 seconds (including walk times) for fertilization seems high.  Even if you have everyone just straight loading up your farmers into the fertilizer machines, a single farmer can only reasonably fertilize ~20 plants.  Include bathroom, sleep, eating, and running for fresh air (or hoping in and out of his exosuit) That averages to ~8 - 12 plants / farmer.  That's not even the entire length of a single one of my mushroom plots.  Considering you can slime / standard fertilize plants at ~ 1 second each and in packs of four, you can load up twice the amount of plants in a fraction of the required time.

Admittedly I'm basing this concern on Dusk Cap, which is a mid-game food item that doesn't require significant renewable resources.  However, mushrooms grow at almost 3/dupe without Farmer's Touch, 2 and some extra/dupe with.  So if one farmer is able to provide 12 Dusk Caps Farmer's Touch/cycle, then your farmer is spending all his time feeding 5-6 other dupes.  Meanwhile, without any additional work, he's able to provide 18 Dusk Caps once every 7 cycles to harvest and the occasional drive by fertilization AND get other work done around the base.  Balm Lily is even more silly, stick it in Chlorine and drop by every 12 days.  Want more of them?  Plant two.

Thimble Reed, Sleet Wheat, Bristle Blossom, and Pincha Pepper would be the only crops that would require water rationing that might require the Farmer to be worth spending that much time to fertilize because of the cost of water versus the cost of fertilizer.  Other than Bristle Blossom, however, these are typically grown wild simply because of those water costs.  I'd say blossom would be more often grown wildly if the light constraints weren't there when bases are first being built up.

All this adds up to I think farmer's are a good idea, but they still need some tweaking.  Currently water crops are still typically not worth the resource prices, and non water crops require far too much time for the dupe to be worth bothering with.

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7 hours ago, MatthewCline said:

The problem could be at least partially alleviated if the farmer could prepare multiple micronutrient doses in a row and then carry them all at once, 

 

5 hours ago, BlueLance said:

My only option is exosuits, but that isn't exactly desirable. What about using the station in a separate room and ferrying the micronutient thingy into a storage container via loaders etc

I think you're both on the same track.  This would require a new building however.  One to process the micronutrient, another to create the greenhouse building and be available for deploying it to the greenhouse.  I'm not sure if that's an easy option for development, but it would certainly help.

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No new building needed IMO, just a revamp of a current one - farming station.

I think if the greenhouse requires the farming station then it should have a hose connection (like old time diving tanks) with a 96 tile AOE (same mechanic as sweeper). As long as you have a qualified farmer, they should be able to spray using the hose as long as the station is operational and the room requirement is met.

Add a fullness/charge meter and treat it like a storage tank with a power + water input requirement. Dupe would have to add the ingredients to fill it up and use it. Water requirement shouldn't be tough since most people are already running in for hydro tiles and power is likely there from the lighting.

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On 4/17/2018 at 5:25 AM, scientas said:

I think if the greenhouse requires the farming station then it should have a hose connection (like old time diving tanks)

A potential problem with that would be if there was a door set to auto inside the greenhouse (separating one part of the greenhouse from another without actually demarcating inside from outside), as presumably the hose would be in some manner "solid" to prevent an inadvertent "build tile" command from trapping the nozzle on the other side of a wall.  I can't imagine a situation where a greenhouse would be built like that, but you never know what weird setups people can come up with.

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