Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Add a better way to get seeds from fruit.

What?

Add another recipe with a much better chance to produce seeds, but with no other products.

Why?

Currently seeds are 2% per fruit and each seed produces 50 fruit which is on average a net zero if you have no production bonus. However, Biochambers have a 50% production bonus which incentivizes using them for fruit processing... which then floods your factory with the products! Due to this, you cannot even start automating gathering of fruit until your factory is completely set up for a lot of throughput, and then you have to scramble to get nutrients in everything to start it up, and it's just a royal pain.
If there was a way to produce seeds calmly without so much infrastructure pressure you could get a basic setup going that gathers fruit from your agricultural towers and turns it into seeds, allowing the player to see how much fruit the towers are producing and estimate how much throughput they'll need in their setup. It will ALSO allow a fallback in case your setup is incorrect and fruit starts rotting preventing creation of seeds. Running out of seeds is a failure state, meaning you have to go run out and find trees to harvest manually to get fruit to manually craft into seeds, and that's annoying!

In theory you can already set up something relatively basic by using assemblers instead of biochambers so you don't have to produce nutrients which greatly simplifies things, but you then have to use production modules and at least twice as many assemblers as biochambers, and the energy requirements for that are nontrivial on a planet where creation of energy is difficult.

I'm biased because I'm that one guy who thinks Gleba is unironically the most fun planet because of all the unique bs mechanics you have to learn to deal with (not without flaws though).

But I'm not sure about the suggestion. When I played initially, I would have definitely agreed (because I just wanted to have my way). But the thing is, having to figure out seed management is part of the bigger picture that made Gleba interesting to me. You have to figure out that in order to sustain seeds, you need to use prod bonus (preferably through biochambers). To do that, you need to also find out:
(1) how to bootstrap nutrient production for the biochambers in case of a factory cold-start,
(2) that you need to transport unprocessed fruit due to spoilage time (rather than processing on-site),
(3) that you need to discard excess seeds (otherwise mash/jelly production will be clogged),
(4) how to do all of the above with minimal waste.

Yes, running out of seeds is a failure state, and if anything I would argue the game doesn't make it clear enough that you did something very wrong and you must rethink your design.

With your suggestion, placing one seed production building close to the farming cranes is too easy, and importantly, too isolated, of a solution (meaning that it just solves the seed problem, once and for all, without interacting with all the other problems that exist).

The one part that is exceedingly annoying, and maybe not that well thought through IMO, is that reseeding the farming cranes is an absolute pain without requester chests. Maybe it would have been fine if the cranes themselves could post a logistic request for seeds, but even then you need to have at least one logistic bot, and several roboports on the planet.

So... I like the "bigger picture" problems that are caused by seeds in the current state. But I don't like how obnoxious it is to just get the seeds into the soil (without logistic bots). So yeah, I had your idea in mind too when I played but I'm torn on this.

I think the answer to your problem is that seeds are burnable ? You can dump the excess in your power plant or simply in the burner you unlock on this planet

i solved this by having a simple condition on the harvest tower that keeps it off while i have fruits or undisposed seeds left at the tower...

Mash and jelly are combustible. If I just need seeds and can’t use up the other products, I just shovel them into a heating tower. No more blockage.

dialer wrote: ↑Wed Nov 13, 2024 8:51 am
The one part that is exceedingly annoying, and maybe not that well thought through IMO, is that reseeding the farming cranes is an absolute pain without requester chests. Maybe it would have been fine if the cranes themselves could post a logistic request for seeds, but even then you need to have at least one logistic bot, and several roboports on the planet.

Ever heard of belts? There are even some that go underground.

Due to this, you cannot even start automating gathering of fruit until your factory is completely set up for a lot of throughput

Why not ? You can only have a few trees.

In theory you can already set up something relatively basic by using assemblers instead of biochambers so you don't have to produce nutrients which greatly simplifies things, but you then have to use production modules and at least twice as many assemblers as biochambers, and the energy requirements for that are nontrivial on a planet where creation of energy is difficult

Or you can also have a combination of assemblers and biochambers (without modules, or with efficiency modules), and then split your belts and prioritize them so that you get the % of extra seeds that you want.