Entire agriculture engineering system is annoying and counterintuitive-overcomplicated

    Well, i think its fun. A plant that drops shards of diamonds would be cool, and I like the idea of setting up a functional bar/coffee shop :/ Its a fun thing to do. My goal is to get all the plants.


    If you dont like it, dont use it. Its as simple as that, dont like it then dont use it. Really.. If albaka is gonna expand he'll expand, but you bitching about a future that some of us like that you dont have to use gets you no where.


    Sorry if I repeat or its hard to understand, its 1:30 at night here xd

    After spending some days with the agriculture system I would summarize it as flawed, but definitely not crap.


    The trampling is... let's say a friend wanted to check my crops, hovered in with his jetpack, failed to aim properly as usual and wiped out 2 crop setups trying to land. But I think this has been mentioned often enough.


    The other things that annoy me are for once that on some plants (e.g. Ferrum) you cannot tell whether it is fully grown or not, and for second the crossbreeding of plants is way too random. For example I setup a farm of melons and pumpkins crossbreeding, and in 5 setups not a single one produced either melons nor pumpkins. As far as I can tell there is no reproducible rule on what happens if you crossbreed two plants, you always get either the first or the second plant, or something completely random.


    The general problem with Agriculture (as well as with the entire IC2 mod) is that nothing that you generate through the system is useful for anything, you just breed plants to breed more plants. There are some useful outcomes, but the time it takes to breed these into a reasonable shape is so huge, that you would have already masses of it if you created it the vanilla way. I would love to see some plants being able to create basic materials to make it an alternative for running around mining, or EU-creation plants as a literally green way of producing energy. Other ideas would be ladder-plants that if placed on the ground quickly grow into a ladder, or redstone sensitive plants that can be used as alternate circuit setups. Things that are useful and an alternative to the usual way of doing things, so you don't feel like you wasted days of your life and all you got was some flowers.

    "The general problem with Agriculture (as well as with the entire IC2 mod) is that nothing that you generate through the system is useful for anything, you just breed plants to breed more plants. There are some useful outcomes, but the time it takes to breed these into a reasonable shape is so huge, that you would have already masses of it if you created it the vanilla way. I would love to see some plants being able to create basic materials to make it an alternative for running around mining, or EU-creation plants as a literally green way of producing energy. Other ideas would be ladder-plants that if placed on the ground quickly grow into a ladder, or redstone sensitive plants that can be used as alternate circuit setups. Things that are useful and an alternative to the usual way of doing things, so you don't feel like you wasted days of your life and all you got was some flowers.
    "


    This guy has nice ideas too. Maybe even a (really expensive) fertilizer that can grow stuff instantly?

    To those saying to simply not use it look at it this way. Imagine you where buying a car and the salesmans shows you a feature on the car where you could press a button and for the next hour random lights would go of on the dash and if you hit all the respective buttons you would be rewarded with a piece of candy. If you failed to hit even one it would dump all the oil and gas out of the car. If you ever saw something like that in a car you would complain even if you didn't have to use it.

    Quote from Mlah

    To those saying to simply not use it look at it this way. Imagine you where buying a car and the salesmans shows you a feature on the car where you could press a button and for the next hour random lights would go of on the dash and if you hit all the respective buttons you would be rewarded with a piece of candy. If you failed to hit even one it would dump all the oil and gas out of the car. If you ever saw something like that in a car you would complain even if you didn't have to use it.


    So basicly by failing in agriculture you absolutely wrecked your whole savegame, no more fuels, nukes blown up your bases and all?

    Everyone is kind of exaggerating a bit, I like how IC2 has a tech tree where you have to work to get to the next level, and can continue improving even once at the highest tier. This part of the mod can be fun, but I've been sitting here crossbreeding for 2 RL days trying to make hops, and i have yet to find the combination. I find that rather ridicules.

    Hopefully you can provide some more intuitive measurement tools, better visual feedback, and a system that will be more "engineering" crops rather than mashing mass amounts of wheat and reeds together and getting a result that makes absolutely no sense.


    Another problem is that unless you can get more than 1 seed, you cannot create more of a crop. If the crop drops no seeds at all... well, that's that.
    You discover a crop you would like to grow more of, there's just no way of mass-producing it.


    Most of the accidental discoveries I have made can be summed up with a flat "what."



    I look forward to seeing more depth added to this aspect of IC2, keep it up!

    This. So much this.

    I've spent about 15-20 hours on making a crop farm and I've successfully gotten a rather large ferru farm (30+ plants), I've got a hundred+ stickreed plants producing about 10 stacks of rubber every 15 minutes, I've got more hops and dyes than I know what to do with, and my crossbreeding workshop has stats up to growth and gain 15. The problem is threefold.


    First, I had to micromanage the farm and literally couldn't leave my crops to do anything at all for those 20 hours. In order to get my crossbreeding going so I can get better stats, I have to sit around and stare at my crops until they grow. I can't mine, I can't engineer machinery, I can't do anything except literally watch grass grow.


    Second, my relatively massive ferru farm produces maybe 10 iron dust a DAY. I was hoping to produce iron in large quantities so my friend could use them for HV solars, but it's embarrassing that I've been playing as long as he has and I've barely got anything at all. The effort/reward of everything except stickreed is ridiculous, and that's only because I've got a 50x50 farm dedicated to it.


    Third, my friend, who joined the server when I did, already has a umatter generator and is almost at a full crystal chest full. The only reason I have quantum equipment is because he gave it to me out of the goodness of his heart. There's so many better things you can be doing with your time. The only thing that is truly unique and that you can't get some other way is coffee and booze, and you have to micromanage those as well -- coffee by having a four step production process and booze by setting a timer and not forgetting on pain of poisoning yourself.


    The research is kinda fun, I have no real problem with that. It's just that crops aren't worth nearly as much as the effort that's required for them.


    If I had any say in the matter, I would suggest a few things:

    • Remove weeds. Completely. At the very least, make it so they don't spread. Loosing your attention or doing something else shouldn't equal the loss of everything in that plot. I've got homework to do, I want to be able to do while waiting for them to grow instead of religiously bowing and praying to my crops for hours at a time.
    • Increase the reward of crops. Make them grow faster at lower levels and yield more at all levels. Getting 31/31/31 crops should be a goal that's worth dedicating dozens of hours to, but now you get the same reward by just increasing the size of the farm and spending the extra growth time mining or doing something more useful. Stickreed is the perfect example of a useful crop -- you can't get it nearly as well from rubber trees, but stickreed is quick and easy and produces a lot. It's the perfect crop, and the only crop that's actually worth anything as things stand.
    • Make a stationary cropnalyzer that you can drop crops into and instantly get all the stats. Power consumption can be the same, just make it so you don't have to load the thing up with power all the time and only from your hotbar. I want to power a stationary one off an msfu driven by my solars. Hell, I want to make one which is automatically loaded up from whatever I put into a chest so I don't have to do every seed packet individually.
    • Allow the cropnalyzer to analyze soil conditions. Since the seeds can be analyzed without it, give it some other use.

    I'm a bit baffled by all the trampling horror stories. After I worked out that even crouching wasn't enough to save my plants, I started to use raised beds in a glass greenhouse. No more trampling from myself, mobs, or nosy players on my home SMP server.


    It also means I can leave signs on the front of the dirt blocks to remind myself what is growing, or which plants are hybrids.


    I'd still love a stationary cropanalyser though. One I can plug into my electric supply, and leave a bunch of seed bags overnight to be idenitified. Even using a Lappack is frustrating when you have a large breeding farm.

    I'd love it if it works a bit like beekeeping in forestry, as in actual Mendelian genetics.
    That with auto farming would still add the time sink through selective breeding.


    The way the beekeeping works also allows you to breed in and out requirements and other traits.
    With something like that you could breed a ferru plant that doesn't require ore
    (this would however would take you probably 2 or 3 days of micromanaging after you've managed to get a lot of them to start with)
    Which could start a nice server wide trade of seeds with interesting traits.


    So instead of just watching grass grow, you'd spend your time collecting and pairing seeds for crossbreeding.

    Please take some inspiration from Forestry-Apiculture. It has some controlled randomness, where you can selectively try to improve your bees. You always know what to expect (except for the new user who freshly discovers new species-combinations). If you won't babysit them for a while, you won't lose anything, just the progress is missing. Maybe your crossbreeders get unusable in the time via the weeds, but you shouldn't lose your plants.
    If you have your perfect breed, where all stats are stable, you can even fully automate the production via the apiary pipes. No intervention from the player and the goodies are pumped. The time investment before that, where you tried to optimize your bees, is the offset for the perpetual production. The agriculture of IC could do something like that with an automatic farmer, which just harvests stuff as if the player right-clicked on the plant. Let that farmer be slow (time between checking for harvestable plants is 30 seconds or longer), so that manual harvesting will be better.



    And for narc's idea:
    The dedicated seed storage has an (infinite?) storage space for seeds. The GUI has a dropdown menu to only display the chosen seed bags. Menu 1: All, unidentified, wheat, reed, ... aurelia (maybe only show the options, which already in the storage). Menu 2: Sort by growth, gain, resistance, combined (i.e. growth+gain+resistance).
    If a stationary cropnalyzer is positioned directly next to it, that machine will automatically identify all seed packs which need identification (just let it cost a fixed amount of 10k EU, or maybe even 15K as an offset for the increased convenience). It has an internal storage big enough for 2 analyzations and accepts LV, but these stats can be enhanced via the usual upgrades.


    Edit:
    I should have looked in the Addon section, before wrting the second half... The seedmanager is almost verbatim what I wrote there. :)