Agriculture-specialized industry grows crops?

[azuarc]

I started a game on mountain meadows, which has a very large fertile land base near where you start. Not wanting to immediately begin with a industries-DLC farm, I zoned the one side of the highway for agriculture specialization and built up normal zoned industry there. It worked well until I began to build my farm on the other side, where I discovered two things.

1) Industries DLC seems impervious to Industry 4.0; I was hoping to not leech workers. Oh well.
2) All my zoned industry keeps sending trucks into my farmland.

Eventually I took a closer look at where it was going and realized...it's heading to my silos and my animal fields. Simply put, they're growing crops that are contributing to that grown in the main fields. Which is neat...except it's also created absolute havoc on my traffic. I knew going in that I was going to have some seriously dense, borderline overbuilt farmland, and now this is adding extra congestion on top of that.

Is there a way to get them to stop? Plunking silos outside the farm is just going to start sending traffic the other way. As dumb as it sounds, I'm about to institute Old Town in my farm in the hopes it prevents outside traffic...except it probably won't because those trucks have business locally.

[MaxFX]

You can do several things:

- Increase the amount of crop-growing fields at your DLC farm to make sure the silos and pastures are supplied with enough crops so there's no need for additional crops coming from your specialised zoned industries. (there will always be some traffic between them as the request for crops can happen at the same time your specialised industry offers it, while your fields might not).
- Remove some (if not all) of the speialised zoned industry.
- Set the silos to 'empty'. This will lead to more exporting of crops, but can also lead to moments where your pastures and other crop processing facilities are without resources.

[azuarc]

The problem with the first option is that I'm already overproducing...or at least I think I am. It's hard to tell. But in the meanwhile, thing #3 I discovered is that my commercial stops getting supplied with goods because it's being rerouted to the silos and processors. So maybe I'm not actually overproducing. But I *am* exporting like 4 times as many crops as processed goods. So setting the silos to empty wouldn't really help.

Removing the specialized industry defeats the point of this exercise. I would honestly rather remove the DLC industry area if forced to choose, given that it:
a) Is far more land-intensive for the number of jobs created
b) Is expensive to set up
c) Is time-gated
d) Creates literally 4 times the traffic, as the things it produces have to get shuttled to five different steps along the journey...and this traffic means I can't fully utilize the land (above and beyond my first point.)

And the only real advantage it has is aesthetics.

[MaxFX]

Originally posted by azuarc:

I discovered is that my commercial stops getting supplied with goods because it's being rerouted to the silos and processors.

That's not the case. Take a look at the diagram I've linked below showing the supply chain. As you can see crops do not get send to your commercial area's. These are considered raw materials which get exported or processed by processing buildings from the Industries DLC (pastures, flour mill) and stored in your silos.

These also get processed by processing buildings from your specialised zoned industries (if not zoned on fertile land)

These products ('Specialised Goods' and/or 'Zoned Products') get exported at a higher price or get processed even further by your generic industry or the unique factories.

Products coming from the generic industries and unique factories will be send to your commercial area's to be sold. Or exported off course.

Link: https://skylines.paradoxwikis.com/Supply_chain

[azuarc]

Normal crops, don't, no. But what about from specialized yellow zones? I fixed the not enough goods issue by finally putting in cargo terminals and getting some imports, but it seemed strange to me that there was no issue up until the farm got built.

Anyway, I seem to have fixed several of my problems with a funny fix. I bulldozed my silos. No more traffic swarms around the silos. No more yellow zones sending their crops to the silos. The processors seem to be getting supplies at about the same rate considering the silos were fully capped anyway.

[MaxFX]

Originally posted by azuarc:

Normal crops, don't, no. But what about from specialized yellow zones?

Those are the same crops, as these got delivered to your silos and processing facilities.
If you're talking about processing buildings from the specialised zones; these turn the crops into 'zoned products' that in turn get exported or send for further processing to your generic industries.

Originally posted by azuarc:

Anyway, I seem to have fixed several of my problems with a funny fix. I bulldozed my silos. No more traffic swarms around the silos. No more yellow zones sending their crops to the silos. The processors seem to be getting supplies at about the same rate considering the silos were fully capped anyway.

Good to see that you got it solved. But keep in mind that storage facilities like silos and warehouses are crucial for a good flow of goods and materials.

[azuarc]

You'd think that, but they tend to inhibit the flow whenever I've been playing. Every extractor sends a truck to the same storage facility at the same time. Every processor draws from the same one. It's like the one-lane-traffic problem, in a different form, except that they'll actually fill the second silo once the first one's full.

Originally posted by MaxFX:

Those are the same crops, as these got delivered to your silos and processing facilities.

But does that mean that yellow ag zones normally produce crops that won't get sent to your commerce areas? Even if you don't have the industries DLC?

[MaxFX]

Originally posted by azuarc:

But does that mean that yellow ag zones normally produce crops that won't get sent to your commerce areas? Even if you don't have the industries DLC?

Indeed. As an example, let's imagine a setting without the Industries DLC for a moment:

When you zone specialised agricultural industry you get:
- crop producing buildings on fertile land
- crop processing buildings on non-fertile land

These crops are the 'Raw Resources' in the supply-chain picture from the link I posted in my first comment.

These raw Resources (crops) get processed into 'Zoned Products'.

When you zone generic (basic) industries, they will import these 'Zoned Products' to make stuff for your commercial area's. Using specialised industries in your city makes sure theyu don't have to import it, as it now gets produced locally.

[azuarc]

I didn't realize there were also processors. Interesting.

[WhiteKnight77]

Specialized vanilla industries (oil, ore, farm and forestry) all interact with DLC industry areas. If you do not want vanilla specialized to interact with DLC storage or other DLC entities is to not build vanilla specialized industries.

Check out this video.

https://youtu.be/gCWbUftEArA?t=575

[kristofburger]

Originally posted by MaxFX:

When you zone specialised agricultural industry you get:
- crop producing buildings on fertile land
- crop processing buildings on non-fertile land

Zoned processing buildings spawn on both fertile and non-fertile land, it's even easy to observe this visually. This seems to be one of those misconceptions that have taken off because some youtuber said so.

Originally posted by azuarc:

Removing the specialized industry defeats the point of this exercise. I would honestly rather remove the DLC industry area if forced to choose, given that it:
d) Creates literally 4 times the traffic, as the things it produces have to get shuttled to five different steps along the journey...and this traffic means I can't fully utilize the land (above and beyond my first point.)

Traffic for my DLC farming area is probably less than half of what it would be in zoned farming, because I have a lot more control over the supply chain. People tend to put down way too many extractors compared to what's actually needed to meet the processors' demand for raw materials, which is what kills traffic.

[azuarc]

Originally posted by kristofburger:

Traffic for my DLC farming area is probably less than half of what it would be in zoned farming, because I have a lot more control over the supply chain. People tend to put down way too many extractors compared to what's actually needed to meet the processors' demand for raw materials, which is what kills traffic.

I usually pay attention to the net output and add processors until the raw material output is close to zero. My problem is that I don't want to waste space, and it feels like it should be more efficient to put the extractors in one cluster and then the processors in another. Not necessarily one giant cluster, but certainly in pockets since at least they're all the same size and make a decent rectangular tile that way. But the epic infighting over the storage building between all the delivery trucks seems to result no matter how I configure it, so I just have to accept that I'm going to get some insane amount of single-lane traffic. I'd love to know how to prevent that. ("Build less and waste all your available space" is not acceptable.)