Agriculture Tower Options/Transparency

[erronius]

I love that in 2.0 a lot more things are controllable with the circuit network. It's so cool that I can directly connect circuits to an assembler to enable/disable it or even set the recipe/do other things.

So I was a bit disappointed that there seem to be very limited options for controlling the agriculture tower. My goal is to provide fresh fruit on demand. I thought I had a clever solution with one tower doing the planting that was always enabled, and another tower doing the harvesting that would only be conditionally enabled. However that leads to this issue: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=119111 which at first I thought was a bug (and no one on the discord was able to explain this either).

First, related to this issue, it would be great if the message about why the tower isn't harvesting could be more helpful/descriptive. "No ingredients available" does not explain what's going on. There are ingredients available, it's just not allowed to harvest them due to an engine limitation (or something?). Personally I don't understand why this limitation exists and if it could just be removed that would be great (I think?). Personally I'd rather have a small performance issue for people's megabases on gleba than a situation where players just trying to get start get caught in a weird problem.

Second, given all the fancy new controls we have with the circuit system, it feels like I should be able to conditionally tell the ag tower whether to *harvest* or not. Because of how long it takes trees to grow, you don't want to find yourself not having fruit and then turn on your tower, let it plant, wait for trees to grow, etc.

TLDR:

1. Either remove limitation on ag towers harvesting trees planted by another tower, or provide a more descriptive message. "No trees planted by this tower available". Alternatively maybe when mousing over on the tower, show trees it can't harvest in red or something.

2. Allow circuit control of *harvesting* functionality on towers.

[keleios]

1000% this. Just tried to do it myself and realized there weren't any solutions.

[Scellus]

Yeah I feel the lack of an option to circuit control harvest separately is an oversight in Glebas game design. The whole point is to keep things as fresh as possible, so not being able to properly control the planting and harvesting, just makes me more annoyed with the spoilage system, which I don't really like to begin with.
While there's an alternative of just burning overflow, you need to make sure to at least process enough fruit so that you don't run out of seeds. It'll also create more spores than nessesary, which causes a whole different set of issues. Having to produce more than I need is just annoying, especially if said overproduction has downsides.
It's especially annoying that the end goal is to make the science as fresh as possible, yet 'proper' optimisation from step one is not possible.

[geekofalltrades]

I signed up to post this suggestion.

The easy implementation is to be able to enable and disable harvesting and planting separately. A more complex implementation might also add circuit network options for the status of the various grid squares managed by the tower, so that you could read the number of empty plots, trees growing, ready to harvest, etc.

In my case I wanted to go full on JIT and build a very big base that could kick on and produce a lot of products in short bursts for maximum freshness. But not being able to ensure that trees are being replanted when the towers are disabled to prevent unneeded fruit being harvested is a blocker.