HCH is going vastly improve the future of automated farms

[BlackCat]

So before I get into this, let me start out by saying this is all observation, I've not had the chance to play with HCH yet, and it's most certainly not meant to critique. I wrote this up earlier today while thinking about what HCH could mean for me specifically, and then I got thinking what it meant for automation of farms as a whole.

With that out of the way here is what I wrote up :)

Prior to HCH wheat automation was basically enough to survive, once you automated wheat you didn't need to automate other food (exception being reeds), and this stemmed from a pretty simple but incredibly frustrating idea.

Wheat -> Cows -> Beef -> Food

This seemingly small "chain" of sorts had very severe consequences.

This discouraged players from making a number of automated farms, it left no real reason to automate any other food source. You could just carry around a stack of cooked steak with you, and all. You had to do was build a wheat farm and a cow farm.

It was disgusting, I knew that it was going on, and I didn't try to fight it because I would just be shooting myself in the foot.

I wanted automation to be a challenge, I was disappointed when I found myself passing up opportunities to automate things like potato/carrot farms, but I couldn't justify spending time doing it when I had a stack of steak and a full hunger bar at all times.

HCH obliterated that little problem, it didn't just solve it, it opened more opportunities. And I can't really even begin to describe how happy that makes me.

I'm genuinely excited to work on automating more farms, I can't wait to design my own builds for the food sources that now have a purpose.

It's no longer going to be enough to have a few automatic wheat modules, they are going to either need to be made in mass quantity or be self sufficient. Awesome.

Automating carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, etc. matters now, it's not just a luxury. Fucking awesome.

Chain automation and resource distribution is even more important than it was previously, you can't just make your wheat farm, hook it up to a cow farm and be totally done. You actually are going to need to either make more farms, or have multiple areas of distribution. God damn awesome.

I really just love everything about this update, and I haven't even played it yet. It's absolutely astonishing how much this has done to motivate and necessitate automation that was previously extraneous.

Keep up the good work FC, you've outdone yourself yet again, and I admire you for that.

[Sarudak]

Indeed! Hardcore hunger is a real game changer! And that's not even half of what it accomplished. I think hardcore hunger is maybe too small of a name for this amazing release. :)

[FlowerChild]

Thanks man! That was definitely one of my goals with HC Hunger, and hopefully it will have the results we both seem to be hoping for :)

So far so good though. I built my first ever manual mushroom farm in MC the other day, and it was awesome to have a "new" system to play around with like that. I also spent a great deal of time expanding my manual farms for other crops to keep up with the new demand, and I definitely felt the desire to automate them more than ever to cut down on my own "busy work" in maintaining them.

So, I don't see any reason why this won't promote further and more varied automation, hopefully with a bit more incentive to incorporate bonemeal into their design as well, making them a bit more interesting to fool around with too :)

[Moldiworp2]

I'd just like to say, previous to this update I'd always planned on making an auto mushroom farm, I'd always planned to use bonemeal to maximize farm efficiency. Well, now I finally have. Farm satisfaction increased tenfold.

[BlackCat]

Damn, I totally skipped over that, I forgot to mention how bonemeal is going to be huge now.

That's another thing that struck me actually, I realized how few of my designs incorporated easy access bonemeal, something that is definitely going to change ;)

But yup, you're absolutely right man :)

[Sarudak]

Yeah. When I finally get bored of trying out the early game over and over again I think I'll go on a big farm automation spree with added bonemeal!

[ion]

i do agree with you here, but there seems that there is no way to proper detect the full growth stage of potatoes and carrots using a BD. in my testing sometimes a carrot will grow two stages at once or in close succession and the growth recorder would detect only once thus closing the cycle. for wheat works just fine as you use a block detector

[FlowerChild]

i do agree with you here, but there seems that there is no way to proper detect the full growth stage of potatoes and carrots using a BD. in my testing sometimes a carrot will grow two stages at once or in close succession and the growth recorder would detect only once thus closing the cycle. for wheat works just fine as you use a block detector

This is intentional, and promotes the use of Buddy in such circumstances.

Potatoes and Carrots are much easier to grow than wheat in general, and frankly, Buddy needs more practical applications to motivate people to learn how to use him.

If there are issues with the growth stages of potatoes and carrots that make this a problem, then I'll look into those for sure, but that's how I'll want to address this, not by extending DB functionality to the new crops.

[ion]

i do agree with you here, but there seems that there is no way to proper detect the full growth stage of potatoes and carrots using a BD. in my testing sometimes a carrot will grow two stages at once or in close succession and the growth recorder would detect only once thus closing the cycle. for wheat works just fine as you use a block detector

This is intentional, and promotes the use of Buddy in such circumstances.

Potatoes and Carrots are much easier to grow than wheat in general, and frankly, Buddy needs more practical applications to motivate people to learn how to use him.

If there are issues with the growth stages of potatoes and carrots that make this a problem, then I'll look into those for sure, but that's how I'll want to address this, not by extending DB functionality to the new crops.

i know how to set up a proper growth detector using buddy blocks and a bd timer to proper detect the harvest time. just sometimes the time between 2 growth updates is so short that the buddy will only detect once instead of 2 thus voiding the BD timer that would not properly place the redstone at the harvest time. it just need a little delay between growth stages to properly function.

[FlowerChild]

i know how to set up a proper growth detector using buddy blocks and a bd timer to proper detect the harvest time. just sometimes the time between 2 growth updates is so short that the buddy will only detect once instead of 2 thus voiding the BD timer that would not properly place the redstone at the harvest time. it just need a little delay between growth stages to properly function.

Because of the way MC updates work, that's WAY easier said than done :)

I'll figure something out though.

[MoRmEnGiL]

Erhm, are you using a BB and a BD for every single carrot/potato grown? Because if you need to mass produce them, slight inefficiencies are not really important, besides, you only lose time if you harvest a crop not fully grown, you still get a carrot/potato back.

Mass producing crops for me is more about quantity than precision. Personally I'd just use 2-3 BB+BD counters, AND them all together, and when they are all set harvest the entire farm. Much more sane than a counter for each single one!

[FlowerChild]

Mass producing crops for me is more about quantity than precision. Personally I'd just use 2-3 BB+BD counters, AND them all together, and when they are all set harvest the entire farm. Much more sane than a counter for each single one!

Wouldn't you want to OR them in case any individual updates get skipped?

[MoRmEnGiL]

Eh, is the skipping that frequent? Otherwise I'm ok with the occasional jammed farm, vs a lot of premature harvestations :P

[BlackCat]

Yeah those farms can be fairly tricky and wonky from what I've seen, I'm not sure what can really be done about it though.

[Sarudak]

Well you could have multiple sets. Say OR together two sets of BB + counters that are AND'd and then when one goes off trigger your farm complex and reset both triggers. Jamming should be almost impossible in that case.

[FlowerChild]

Eh. I'll just fix it. It would be a real pain in the ass with vanilla code, but given some of the internal changes I've made in the past to differentiate between random and scheduled block updates, it should be fairly straightforward for me to do.