Factorio Forums

On Nauvis, it is possible to use Agricultural towers to counter pollution. I guess this is by design and intended use, as there is no use for wood farming at the point those are unlocked whatsoever and it does work quite good (save for the fact that there is no grass-fill so any ocean near your base is fubar). I tried to use it on my base and the decrease of bitter invasions was massive.
About 1400 agri towers were deployed and cover three sides of base that are somewhat close to walls. Except now the towers themselves use 5% of simulation time, 0.5 out of 10. Quite a lot, at least much more than expected, especially since they spend most of the time waiting and then performing fixed action which will happen at exactly predictable timestamp - when oldest tree in range finishes growing. It seem that growth is currently linear so it should be easy to predict when tree is ready for harvest. I am not sure if mods can affect this or not. For comparison purposes, there are about 50k inserters in whole base and they use about 30% of time. A lot of them actually do perform some sort of activity constantly.

You probably can reproduce this with attached save, its just 1.8k placed agri towers eating 0.6 of whatever unit time-usage uses. I am not using any mods

Thanks for the report however this is not a bug. Additionally, the towers already work how you describe when it comes to harvesting plants.

Are you sure its working as intended? Nauvis's trees take 10 minutes to grow, you can delete all the trees in the demo save, they will get replanted pretty fast and then you have like 7 minutes of idle time till they grow and get harvested.
Nothing is happening and it still uses same amount of cpu. For record, it uses even more, although by only tiny amount, cpu when harvesting, but that is somewhat in can't-be-helped area. The fact that they use cpu while idle is what feels weird to me

The time is taken by periodically checking if there’s an open spot to plant a new tree. Since the tower has no way to know if “failed to find a spot” was due to an existing tree growing, a player entity, a cliff, a biter walking past or any number of other possible ways it could be blocked, it instead checks every so often for a possible place to put a new plant.

I see, this is quite unfortunate. There are very few activities that could free or occupy spots around the towers but I guess there aren't something that could be used by the tower itself.

I guess i can try to do some circuit network to turn them off and some timing circuit as a workaround