TL;DR - Plants seeds at regular intervals based on the number available. Plants every 2.5 minutes when you only have one seed and decreases up to a cap as you get more seeds.
Automate your agricultural tower's fruit planting with this timed solution! This blueprint adapts to your seed supply, maintaining a regular planting cycle that keeps the fruit coming, the nutrients flowing, and your factory well-stocked. No more frantic seed hunts or wasted resources!
On Gleba, the agricultural towers are your lifeline, producing fruit that's essential for your factory's nutrient supply. But managing these towers isn't as simple as watering plants. Seeds are scarce, trees grow slowly, and the towers go through wild cycles of massive fruit production followed by periods of fruitlessness. During these dry spells, your factory might be left with little to process, causing the whole operation to grind to a halt and have to be re-primed once production resumes.
In addition, if you don’t process the fruit fast enough, it spoils. And the seeds produced by the fruit? Gone, just like that. If your processing center can’t handle the fruit when the floodgates finally open, you're looking at wasted resources. It’s a frustrating cycle of feast and famine that can throw a wrench in your entire factory’s operations.
Enter this blueprint. It solves the problem by using combinators to automate the seed planting process and regulate planting intervals. The timing adjusts based on your available seeds, ensuring that your agricultural tower plants at optimal intervals. If you only have one seed, the tower will wait 2.5 minutes to plant it. As your seed stock increases, the planting interval shrinks, all the way down to a cap set by your combinators. The default value of 1000 is ideal for 18 plantable tiles, but you can tweak it. Just make sure you change it on both combinators closest to the tower. Change the value to - 18000 divided by the number of plantable tiles - to ensure that even with hundreds of seeds, the tower will plant them at just the right time.
With this blueprint, your factory will no longer face wild fluctuations in seed production or nutrient supply. The timing system keeps the agricultural tower running smoothly, ensuring your factory stays stocked, and no potential seeds end up as wasted spoilage. No more feast-and-famine cycles – just reliable, efficient farming for a reliable, efficient factory.
Update: 11/23/24 - After thinking that I did a great job solving this puzzle, I continued my game. I spent time on Fulgora, then looked back and saw that my belts were getting swarmed with fruit followed by nothing! Aghhhh! Dishonor! Shame! Diapers!
The time between the tower receiving a seed, searching for an open tile and planting it, would accumulate and cause the tower to plant with shorter intervals. This error would cause the tower to accumulate seeds. Now the tower is planting willy-nilly every time a space opens up.
The combinators now check for seeds in the tower's inventory, and will pause the timer if any are found. Once the seed is removed, the tower resumes the timer and everything is awesome once again.