Give agricultural towers separate circuit toggles for planting and harvesting

[FiveYellowMice]

+1 for better agri towers curcuit control.
The mod is good in principal - and I use it, but, I don't know why, it eventually just stops responding to signals: whenever I change the signals it just wont update the items inside...

That sounds like a bug of my mod. I couldn't reproduce it though. Do you mind sharing more details on how you encountered the bug? Like your circuit setup, other installed mods, or how long before it happens. Preferably on mod discussions page to not clutter this thread.

[Izzabelle]

just gonna +1 this because god it'd be so useful

[binaryDiv]

This would be a really useful feature. Especially with the spoilage mechanics, it makes a lot of sense to have this kind of control over the agricultural tower. Sure, you can just harvest everything and burn what you don't need, but usually this game encourages it a lot to experiment and find your own ways of solving problems. A Gleba base that always produces things and burns the excess items is just as valid as a Gleba base that's focussed on waste minimization and conscious control of production.

And while I very much appreciate FiveYellowMice's mod, it is quite hacky and has its drawbacks, like having to set a filter on the inserter just to avoid filling your chests/belts with placeholder items. ^^' (No criticism about the mod, it's cool to see how people get around the engine limitations, but it would be great if that wasn't necessary.)

[Shadowhawk]

Cant you just harvest all fruits and then start a timer of 5 minutes to enable the trainstop. You know that all trees are fully grown after 5 minutes so then the train can come, you activate the tower gather all the trees ( you know how many trees so you know when all fruits are harvested ) and then start the timer again and disable the tower.

You need to do the same with biter spawners to determine the number of eggs in them.

[binaryDiv]

But you also need to make sure to only disable the tower after all new trees have been planted. And the amount of trees depends on how many you can actually plant, which might vary for each tower depending on the soil etc... And it falls apart when you have partial harvests for some reason, e.g. because a full harvest isn't needed to fit the demand.

I guess maybe you could build extremely complicated circuitry for that, but it still feels very limiting that the tower doesn't just have an option to disable harvesting. Compare that with the many circuit settings that assembling machines have for example, and the agricultural tower just feels very limiting in it's capabilities. You wanna tell me the engineer mastered logistic bots and space travel but can't add a switch to a crane that stops it from planting trees?

[Tertius]

For my farms with circuit controlled harvesting, I see no need to ever deactivate planting seeds, because ripe fruits don't spoil as long as they are not being harvested. I harvest on demand, and there should be as many fruits available as possible, so all plants should have grown as much as possible.

Since it isn't possible to keep planting enabled while harvesting is deactivated, I made the harvesting circuit (1 combinator) so that it performs harvesting for at least 800 ticks (13 seconds) no matter the actual request. This seems a reasonably low number to not harvest too much and at the same time give enough time so every harvested spot is planted again.

Would be easier and result in more exact harvested fruit amounts if planting has its own activate/deactivate switch, since in this case I can keep this enabled permanently and stop harvesting as soon as the desired amount has been harvested.

Would also not appear as cheat or circumvention of a challenge designed to be more difficult, since there is no example in the real world where farmers are forced to either harvest and directly plant or not do both at all. For farmers, harvesting and planting is always independent from each other except of course that only a harvested spot can be planted again.