Suggestion: Disabling farms

[Yannick Vachon]

When you have your base, your goal is to produce enough food for your dupes and have a little bit of excess so you can overcome small issues (power, fertilization, etc.) and also plan for incoming dupes if your base is still growing.

Still, at one point, that excess become too much and you can start to lack space in your ration box / refrigerator to hold that food. You could of course have all of your farms in carbon dioxide but it reduce the time your farmers can work there without breathing.

As a suggestion, I am asking myself if it could be possible that when you disable the farm station if it could have as an effect that the crops would finish their current growth cycle and then not grow again until the station is enabled. I know that I could dig the seed up but I would prefer to link that with automation, maybe on a signal from the refrigerator, so food is produced only when there is room to store it.

It would also help in making sure that you do not waster phosphorite / slime / dirt on crops that may end up wasted if you cannot store them in a sterile environment.

[blash365]

You can effectively do this already.

Manually:

Select the door of your farm, change it either to disallow entry or to locked. When you need food again, change it back.

Automatically:

Same thing, just disable the door with an automation input connected to your smart fridge.

[Yannick Vachon]

The refrigerator send a signal when it is full? I though the entrance was to disable the refrigerator itself. Did I miss something there? Would be stupid on this sunday morning

[blash365]

It looks like an output to me. But i didnt use the smart fridge yet, so you'll have to take my word with a grain of salt.

[Sasza22]

Yup it`s an output. They added it a few patches ago when the fridge got a "hat". It works like the smart storage container. Gets active when reaches the set (or max) capacity.

[martosss]

guys, you can just disable auto harvest - press y => select all the plants that you don't want to harvest => they will grow to 100 % and dupes won't touch them - problem solved... as for me, I have 10-20 fridges in CO2(food in CO2 doesn't spoil, neither in chlorine, I think) full of stuff, so that even if a nuclear bomb falls my dupes will have food to survive until the air is clean.

Another solution is cutting access, as people already suggested, BUT that might not work due to your farm's position - mine is in the middle of the base so disabling access means dupes have to go around that chunk of land, which will effectively slow them down.

And my mushroom farm is already submerged in CO2, so ... I wouldn't worry about work time.

I've also seen crazy automated solutions as growing plants in planter boxes on top of horizontally placed hatches. Then when the fridge is full it sends a signal to open the hatches. This in turn stops plants from growing, as they have no land below them(planter boxes need to have a tile beneath them to work). However, I find that very unnecessary, unless you plan to leave the game running for a long time without manually controlling dupes. But then something else unexpected might happen.

[Yannick Vachon]

Shutting down the door is a good idea, except when you got a farmer in the farm and get stuck because of the automation. And we all know that they will do.

Building the farms on horizontal doors for me seems like an exploit (it's a door, not a tile, and the fact that people / critter can walk on horizontal open doors baffled me, even if sometimes it is useful.

Still, I can instead disable the microbe musher / grill if the fridge are full, so the duplicants will stop creating new high end recipe. They will end with a lot of ingredients but if they are not in the same refrigerator, then it is a way of doing so.

Will have to think of it I guess.

[Sasza22]

11 hours ago, martosss said:

guys, you can just disable auto harvest - press y => select all the plants that you don't want to harvest => they will grow to 100 % and dupes won't touch them

I`m not sure about this but don`t they still need fertilisation meaning dupes will still deliver dirt or phosphorite even after they are harvest ready? I know the fully grown plants still consume liquid from pipes. There`s no real way to prevent that (maybe a shutoff but then it`s wasting whats left in the pipes).

[martosss]

12 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

I`m not sure about this but don`t they still need fertilisation meaning dupes will still deliver dirt or phosphorite even after they are harvest ready? I know the fully grown plants still consume liquid from pipes. There`s no real way to prevent that (maybe a shutoff but then it`s wasting whats left in the pipes).

Ah, you're right, disable auto-harvest does not work!

However, for Planter boxes, they do have disable building option, that should work as disabled buildings receive NO resources whatsoever. Unfortunately

• you'll have to disable/enable each planter box individually.
• Dupes need to go there and disable them themselves
• Only planter boxes work.