Factorio Forums

GotLag wrote:I'm looking to make a simple mod that allows growing trees. Craft or find saplings, plant them and they'll turn into full-sized trees after some delay.
I don't play multi and from memory last time I did control.lua modding there are things to avoid to maintain multiplayer sync.

I want to be able to place a sapling entity, and after some delay (fixed or random, not sure yet) it will be removed and replaced by a full-sized tree (don't have the art skills to do intermediate steps, but the same principle would apply).
So what's the best way to go about adding a whole bunch of timed events in a way that won't break multiplayer or slow the game down too much if the player throws down a large number?

script.on_event(defines.on_built_entity, function(event)
if event.entity.name == "sapling" then table.insert(global.sapling, sapling)
end

script.on_event(defines.on_tick, check_saplings)

function check_saplings()
for k, sapling in pairs (global.saplings) do
  if k % 600 == game.tick % 600 then //This is the magic, the 600 spreads all the checks over 10 seconds
    if math.random(0,1) > 0.6 then //This is how you can make it semi-random
      grow_sapling(sapling)
    end
  end
end
end