Agricultural tower

Agricultural tower

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Recipe
10 + 3 + 1 + 20 + 10 → 1
Total raw
10 + 3 + 1 + 20 + 10
Map color
Health	500 650 800 950 1250
Resistances	Fire: 0/100%
Stack size	20
Dimensions	3×3
Power input	100 kW
Mining time	0.2
Crafted only on
Prototype type	agricultural-tower
Internal name	agricultural-tower
Required technologies

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Space Age expansion exclusive feature.

The Agricultural tower is a machine unlocked on Gleba. It automatically harvests and re-plants trees in its range, provided that it is supplied with seeds obtained via fruit processing.

The Agricultural tower can plant either Yumako seeds or Jellynut seeds. The agricultural tower's working area is broken up into 3x3 tile sectors - if one of these sectors is completely filled with a viable soil type, and the agricultural tower has a matching seed in its inventory (Artificial yumako soil or Overgrowth yumako soil for yumako seeds, and Artificial jellynut soil or Overgrowth jellynut soil for jellynut seeds), then it will automatically plant the seed in that area. Hovering the cursor over an agricultural tower reveals its range, clearly broken up into the 3x3 sectors; each sector will be colour coded, with a green sector representing farmable land, a yellow sector representing areas that could have the farmable landfills placed there, and a red sector representing an area that cannot be farmed. The yellow indicator does not make a distinction between overgrowth and regular soil, so it is possible that a tile may appear to be farmable before the player can actually farm it. Note that a red area may have some farmable areas within it, the colour of the 3x3 sector is decided as a whole.

Example of an agricultural tower, showing the various indicators.

Yumako seeds will grow into a Yumako tree, whereas Jellynut seeds will grow into a Jellystem. While a tree may be harvested by hand or by bot before it is finished growing, the agricultural tower will wait until it is fully grown to harvest the tree, outputting 50 of either Yumako or Jellynut.

Tips

Unlike most other methods of resource gathering in the game, agricultural towers do not benefit from mining productivity research, and they have no module slots. Each processed fruit has a 2% chance to return its respective seed, so the expected number of seeds that each tree produces is one - the same number of seeds that was used to produce the tree. Initially, this may restrict efforts to grow plantations, especially if fruits are allowed to spoil before being processed, which can actually result in the effective stock of trees and seeds diminishing. However, fruit processing does benefit from productivity - either via productivity modules in an assembling machine, or via the 50% inbuilt productivity of the biochamber. Using just a biochamber with no extra productivity modules takes the expected seeds each tree returns from 1 to 1.5.

Note that this is only an expectation - there is no underlying mechanic that guarantee 50 fruits will return any number of seeds. It is entirely possible that one might process all 50 fruits harvested from a single tree, or even multiple trees, and obtain no seeds in return.

Agricultural towers may be activated or deactivated via the circuit network. This can be useful to avoid letting excess fruit back up, as they may eventually spoil and be wasted - and even if it does not, the extra time spent waiting to be processed decreases the freshness of the item, which in turn may decrease the freshness of recipes that consume this item. It's worth mentioning that agricultural towers will collect fruit until their inventory is full, even if inserters aren't removing the fruits, and therefore it's inadvisable to control fruit production via inserters, lest the fruit turns into spoilage while still inside the agricultural tower.

History

• 2.0.7:
  • Introduced in Space Age expansion.

See also

• Gleba