Limiting food production with automation

[Parusoid]

How do you automate your food production?

In theory my dupes need 12000kcal per day so i dont like to store huge amounts of food ready to eat.

Storing ingredients like raw berry or mushroom is less annoying but it still means that you used your resources to produce them in first place. Id want to delay the use of resources (e. g. water or slime). 

The first thing that comes to my mind is  smart fridges that closes off doors for farms, or shuts of water to farms. But i found two major issues with this

1. Fridge has full/not full signal instead of being able to set min and max (like smart battery). When dupe takes no matter how small amount from smart fridge the signal is opening the farm gates. Lets say fridge stores 100kg food. When 1kg is taken the production starts again. But i wish to start the production when there is only 50kg food, not 99kg

It would not be so bad if not the following problem

2. Dupes can take any amount of food, so instead 1kg they can take 0.87354 kg which messes up horribly with the fridge sensing if its full or not. In my experience fridge cannot be filled with food when there are decimal places to be filled instead of full numbers

So now i manually close and open doors for farms, 

How do you deal with it?

[catsRjerks]

off the top of my head you can use 2 fridges combined with a AND gate and fridge priorities to get the min/max ability. I have never tried it but it probably shouldn't be too hard to achieve.

for the second part, you can maybe use shipping to correct the weird food numbers. like use a couple of fridges and activate the arm for a specific part of time to dispense exactly 12kkcal or whatever the arm transports at a time

[Miravlix]

There is a bug where dupes try to move stuff to a container, but it never moves the stuff (It just teleports back to the pickup location) and the dupe just try over and over, until you change the settings on the container or another dupe remove items from the container. This seems to happen more with food.

 

If you make a single food container, power and link it with food stations, you will end up with the issue that the dupes can't fill the container because of the bug, so the automation ends up not working.

[PhailRaptor]

The one time I actually tried to use the Automation output port on the Fridge, it broke when I loaded the save again.  Dupes completely ignored the Fridge, resulting in all my food production being completely shut off.  Didn't realize it until the Food Shortage warning went off (I had ~200,000 prior) and almost lost a Dupe.

The Fridge's Automation functions are still in need of fixing.

[Parusoid]

Regarding the topic of making more than able to consume 

 

 

 

[MorsDux]

is it true that weight plates see the containers that they are under?

[Parusoid]

2 minutes ago, MorsDux said:

is it true that weight plates see the containers that they are under?

I dont think so. Im sure they feel the weight of resources as if they were lying on the floor, but it does not feel the weigh of a structure or contents of the structre

[MorsDux]

24 minutes ago, Parusoid said:

I dont think so. Im sure they feel the weight of resources as if they were lying on the floor, but it does not feel the weigh of a structure or contents of the structre

yes I tried, it didnt measure the compactor or its contents. Sadly. This could easily be a feature and solution for these automation problems.

This calls for the modding community :>

[Yunru]

Well... It's complex, but you could have a series of farms producing 12000kcal, and then automate access to said farms so that only one is accessible any given day.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but unharvested food doesn't spoil, so it should work.

[Neotuck]

16 minutes ago, Yunru said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but unharvested food doesn't spoil, so it should work.

Partially

Unharvested food will eventually overripe and wilt the plant.  After that the food will fall to the ground and start to spoil unless it's in CO2 or chlorine

[Bobanaut]

also remember that an untended farm tile will still use up all stored resources even if the plant is not growing. so you would have to control your water and other resources going into it, all of them... not just your dupes

[caffeinated21]

do we know how long plants will sit stifled before dying? You could automatically lock the room and disable irrigation whenever you have enough food, but if the plants eventually die it wouldn’t be super efficient. For me, I control the cooking of food with automation, but the raw ingredients are just stored on the floor of the farms. Sleet wheat is ‘refrigerated’ and pinchas are in chlorine, so they don’t spoil there.

[PhailRaptor]

26 minutes ago, caffeinated21 said:

do we know how long plants will sit stifled before dying?

Plants don't die anymore.

[malloc]

On 30/06/2018 at 8:37 PM, Bobanaut said:

also remember that an untended farm tile will still use up all stored resources even if the plant is not growing. so you would have to control your water and other resources going into it, all of them... not just your dupes

If the plant is stifled due to temperature/atmosphere they do not continue to consume the resources in current builds although they did in older builds.  I haven't checked if they are waiting for harvest if that is changed now as well as I always have high priority farmers harvesting.

 

Ok I just double checked this and it appears to be at least partially wrong.  Further testing required.