Can plants actually die of malnutrition or dehydration? And if, which?

    Hello fellow downtrodden workslaves happy employees of Apertura Agriculture!


    I've recently planted some simple plants (dandelions, tulips, sugarcane) and harvested them manually over and over without giving them any fertilizer or hydration. Since these plants are easily replaced, I didn't care at all what happened to them and was quite curious if they'd ever wither because of this. And it seems... they don't. Now I've set up an automatic farm (using mistaqur's forestry plugin) and got a chest full of dyes from my flowers... until the harvesting machine went out of fuel. ;) But the plants keep on growing...


    So, my question: has anybody else tried this? Did someone's plants die of malnutrition?


    I've done this at sea level in a forest biome (so, no special precautions, just ensured 3 dirt blocks are below each farmland), and it seems a really comfortable way to do some first farming. Sugar cane for example grows way faster on the IC-cropsticks than the vanilla version, and it can drop multiple canes on harvesting.


    What about the higher tiers? Now that seedmanager has updated, I really want to test this with some advanced crops, but maybe I'm not the first...

    No, plants can't die from malnutrition, although that actually makes sense, you might want to suggest that. The amount of fertilizer (and water I think) in the nearby area just determines growth rate and not survival percentage as well.

    Is the answer to this question no?


    Quote

    Hey don't take it so hard. Ignorance is part of this generation it seems. -the wise words of XFmax-o-l

    I'm not really sure if I want this to be implemented, if it's not already there. It should be possible for a plant to grow without artificial fertilizer (since there's nutrition in the soil) or hydration (rain, groundwater). I don't know how the crop mechanics work at the moment... for this to be balanced (and not just annoying) there should be a natural replenishment of nutrition and hydration in the soil (based on biome? is it already working this way?) and a variable demand based on plant and growth stage.


    So if you harvest a plant only once in a while, there should be no ill effects, but when growing demanding high-tier plants (especially with high-bred growth/gain) or when harvesting all the time the plants should depend on artificial nutrition (like most modern agriculture). But since getting new seed bags is such a hassle because of the necessary anti-weed-babysitting having your advanced plants die when you're away would be really frustrating.

    From my experiments back in 1.2.5 I remember, that my ferru, after manual harvest was dying, if not fertilised/watered, but this wasn't happening if the plant was fully grown. Automatic harvesting using this Forestry addon wasn't causing it.

    I've been growing ferru in 1.106 (updating to a newer version soon, so perhaps this is outdated information) and I can tell you that I've had plants die. Granted, I'm growing mostly in terrible conditions (desert biome, underground), but it seems that any plant with growth or gain 9 or over will stop growing in this setting and may disappear (die) while growing unless they are watered and fertilized at times. I assume that the higher the growth/gain stats are, the more nutrients they suck up from the ground, sort of like an overclocked machine requiring more and more power. But from what I can tell, if you keep your plants stats all at 8 or below, you can continually harvest without hydrating/fertilizing. At least that's the limit for me in my current surroundings.


    I started breeding plants for higher resistance, assuming it would lower the nutritional requirements for high stat plants so they won't disappear on me, but from what I can tell resistance doesn't help in that way. Although I really, really wish it would. It would actually make resistance a desirable, if not needed statistic. For the moment, I'm just trying to breed plants at lvl 6-8 for maximum growth/gain without the chance for death. I'm planting somewhat of a large community field of ferru, so everyone hydrating/fertilizing before every harvest is just impractical.


    If anyone actually has insight on how to grow higher stat crops without fertilizing/hydrating, I know I'd like to hear. I haven't entirely ruled out a high resistance trait as a possible way to do this (I guess I need more testing), but for now I'm just going for quantity of plants over quality. My people need their iron.

    Quote from CrafterOfMines57

    No, plants can't die from malnutrition, although that actually makes sense, you might want to suggest that. The amount of fertilizer (and water I think) in the nearby area just determines growth rate and not survival percentage as well.

    This would potentially be very bad on a server. I'd hate to come back to a dead farm after a week away because the chunk got loaded by a nearby base of operation for the other player on my server.

    Quote from Requia

    This would potentially be very bad on a server. I'd hate to come back to a dead farm after a week away because the chunk got loaded by a nearby base of operation for the other player on my server.


    Some sort of config option would probably have to be implemented as well.

    Is the answer to this question no?


    Quote

    Hey don't take it so hard. Ignorance is part of this generation it seems. -the wise words of XFmax-o-l