Agricultural tower

Agricultural tower

Edit

Recipe
10 + 3 + 1 + 20 + 10 → 1
Total raw
14.25 + 4.5 + 3 + 20 + 10 + 50
Map color
Health	500 650 800 950 1250
Resistances	Fire: 0/100%
Stack size	20
Rocket capacity	20 (1 stack)
Dimensions	3×3
Energy consumption	100 kW (electric)
Mining time	0.2
Buildable only on
Prototype type	agricultural-tower
Internal name	agricultural-tower
Required technologies
Produced by

Object description

Space Age expansion exclusive feature.

The agricultural tower is a machine unlocked on Gleba. It automatically plants and harvests trees in its range, provided that it is supplied with seeds, and the soils near it support the kinds of seeds it is loaded with.

Operation

The agricultural tower can plant yumako seeds, jellynut seeds, or tree seeds. When placing it or hovering the cursor over it, its range will be highlighted. The agricultural tower's working area is broken up into 3×3 tile sectors, and its reach covers an area of 7x7 sectors. The tower itself is 3x3 and occupies the sector in the middle. A green sector indicates suitable soil, yellow sector indicates that suitable artificial soil can be placed there, and orange indicates unsuitable soil. All tiles in the sector must be suitable; if a sector contains a mix of tiles, the least suitable will determine the color. The tower does not distinguish between tiles requiring artificial soil and more expensive overgrowth soil, so care should be taken if artificial soil is not available.

If the tower has a suitable seed and an empty green sector, it will plant the seed in the middle of the sector. Towers will not plant in sectors that have any object or ghost in them, even if it wouldn't block the tree: a medium electric pole can be placed on the edges of the sector without any harm to the tree, but the tower will not replant that tree after harvesting it. Such blocked sector will still show up as green. A tower in range of different kinds of soils can plant and harvest both, but if a sector includes different types of soil, it will show up as green despite not being suitable for planting.

If there is no planting work and the tower has space in the output slots, it will harvest any fully grown plants in range. Note that this includes wild plants native to Gleba such as slipstack or cuttlepop; if you don't clear out the area beforehand, the tower will pick up items like wood and spoilage into its output. Otherwise, the tower will stand still and wait for the plants to grow. Yumako trees and jellystems take 5 minutes to grow, while trees on Nauvis take 10 minutes. Agricultural towers consume no electricity while waiting. The order in which towers plant and harvest appears to be random.

Harvesting trees on Gleba creates spores, which attract enemies. Agricultural towers themselves also produce spores while working.

A tower can support growing up to 48 trees; however, in practice the actual maximum number is 47 to account for power and inserters/belts, and using all 48 tiles would require at least a rare substation and manual insertion/removal. A fast underground belt is sufficient to use 47 sectors.

Example of an agricultural tower, showing the various indicators.

Trees and tiles

• Yumako seeds grow into yumako trees, which are harvested for yumakos. On the map, their natural soil is bright yellow, tiles suitable for artificial yumako soil are dark yellow, and tiles suitable for overgrowth yumako soil are greenish yellow.
• Jellynut seeds grow into jellystems, which are harvested for jellynuts. On the map, their natural soil is bright purple, tiles suitable for artificial jellynut soil are dark purple, and tiles suitable for overgrowth jellynut soil are red and dark red.
• Tree seeds grow into trees, which are harvested for wood. Most tiles on Nauvis are suitable for trees, other than sand and landfill.

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. This can cause your seed amount to diminish, especially if fruits are allowed to spoil, burned, or eaten. However, fruit processing does benefit from productivity - either via productivity modules 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 guarantees 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 turn into spoilage while still inside the agricultural tower.

Furthermore, agricultural towers do not coordinate amongst each other if more than one tower could harvest/plant on a specific piece of land. Having overlapping agricultural towers work areas will not speed up the action time of each tower, in fact, it will slow down with the towers attempting to harvest/plant the same tree.

Trivia

During development, the agricultural tower had a fluid input/output, and this can still be seen on the in-game sprite.

History

• 2.0.7:
  • Introduced in Space Age expansion.

See also

• Gleba