Factorio Forums

I have a couple desert gardens, seed extractors and desert farms. I know that one can slowly grow the number of gardens by looping through the cycle:
-- garden + 30 alien sample -> 2 garden
-- garden -> 32 alien sample

I carefully hand-carry the gardens and distribute them to seed extractor or farm as needed. Eventually I will have excess gardens, but dang it takes a long time, even with speed modules and beacons.

Has anyone figured out how to automate this process early on when I have only one garden and 32 alien samples? The danger is that if you accidently get all of your gardens into the seed extractor, you've run out of gardens and have to go forage for more.

I think I have an answer, which is probably not the most elegant. The problem boils down to: how to always guarantee that the gardens are distributed evenly between the farm and seed extractor. Logistics doesn't work, because I couldn't figure out how to control the "round robin" distribution requirement.
My answer: splitter!

One side feeds back to the farm, the other goes to provider chest which is picked up by beaconed seed extractors:

Hmmmm, now the problem becomes, how do I make 1/32 of the alien sample production go to research, and 31/32 get recycled?
This is my crude 1:32 selector

UPDATE: I realized that I can divert 1/16 of alien samples to research! Once I have enough to sustain the farming feedback loop.

Do you have an updated design for this because I'm working on this now and im stumped?

Load the gardens from a chest. Put the result back into the chest and then have another inserter take out gardens when "gardens > 1".

It will take a while to produce output since one garden will always be in the chest, another 2 (I think) will be in the extractor. So the first 3 gardens you produce will be stuck in the loop. Everything after that becomes output.

There are ways to minimize that, try searching for covarex setups, same problem. But they usually break down when you have brownouts. The simplest solution is to unload the product onto a belt with a fast or stack inserter. On the next tile load the garden right back with a yellow inserter (with stack override = 1). The inserter will pick up the first garden from the belt and let the second pass. But if you are low on power that screws with the speed of the inserter and it might miss the garden alltogether.

Personally I rather wait for the first 3 gardens to be replicated than risk loosing my last garden.

PS: use a chest for the alien samples too. But use "alien samples > 3" for inserter and "alien samples > 12" for stack inserters.