Any way to control water with Hydroponics?

[Nazgren]

Hey,
I am relatively new to the game and am trying to work out how to balance water and farming. My understanding is that Hydroponics will accept as much water as you can put into them, which means that if you just hook them straight up to a water pump you will use a massively inefficient amount of water, compared to hand watering them, albeit with much less labour. Until such a time as i find a water / steam geyser, am i better sticking to regular Farms? Is there a way to use automation to control the amount of water the farms recieve? like setting them to be watered for one hour per cycle or something simmilar?

Thanks.

[Alkaline]

I could(likely) be wrong, but unless you NEED to get rid of water asap I never found much need for them. To me the Hydeoponic blocks are a trap, anything you could grow and use is just not worth the massive loss of water. with the geyser nerf water is just too precious to spend on luxurious food not made of dirt or worms.

[ForrestFox]

wait, what? You guys mean the hydroponics are useless right now? Daaamn.. This game, when I start to think I get the hang on it watching vids, and then its all for nothing because it was changed/nerfed/removed/etc..
I'm depressed :/

[PinkDaddySasquatch]

By default the liquid pump will pump 10 kg of liquid and lets say for example youre growing bristle blossom, the blossoms only need 20kg of water so from what I can tell you aren't losing anything. Infact it seems like you'll need a valve to pump more liquids for some of the other foods as I'm sure theyll require more, like thimble which requires 160kg of polluted water.

[ghostrider]

you branch your main water pipe off into each hydro farm and at the end the water goes back into your tank or somewhere else

[Nellvan]

A plant consumes as much water as it needs, wether it's growing in a farm tile or a hydroponics tile makes no difference.

Now I guess I should do a test with simple seperated setups for no possible interference to be 100% sure, but :

Hydroponics certainly don't take all the water you can pipe into them. The pipe feeding my pincha pepper farm is backed up all the way, showing only the "small pips moving" animation for less than maximum flow. Plus, the pump feeding it does not run all the time, plus my pwater supply would have run out by now.

[Nazgren]

Originally posted by Nellvan:

A plant consumes as much water as it needs, wether it's growing in a farm tile or a hydroponics tile makes no difference.

Now I guess I should do a test with simple seperated setups for no possible interference to be 100% sure, but :

Hydroponics certainly don't take all the water you can pipe into them. The pipe feeding my pincha pepper farm is backed up all the way, showing only the "small pips moving" animation for less than maximum flow. Plus, the pump feeding it does not run all the time, plus my pwater supply would have run out by now.

From the wiki, listed as a bug:
Hydroponic Farm will keep consuming liquid used for irrigation even when full.

I've certainly seen my hydroponics beiing flooded with full water, but i may have had Mealwood in them which doesn't need water, something i have since discovered. More testing is definately needed

[Nellvan]

Yeah currently I can only tell what I see in my farm. Each tile got filled with 5000g , and it's constantly consuming a bit of water and getting filled back up. ( oscillating between ~ 4940 and 4980 g)

Maybe it is consuming more than it should, but it's not eating all the water that the pipe could supply.

[Nazgren]

Its probably just a bug when you put non water consuming plants in it then, in either case, unless you have 2+ water / steam geysers, they just dont seem to be worth it.

[The Queen Salis]

yup, these hydro farm tiles have 5 kilos of water storage, much less than regular farm tiles - I think it used to be they both had tons of storage but it was changed because people would hook them up just with a line and water never reached the second tile - we needed elaborate branching to ensure roughly equal amount was sent to each and every tile. nowadays they will cap at 5 kilos which seems totally reasonable

[Angpaur]

Originally posted by The Queen Salis:

yup, these hydro farm tiles have 5 kilos of water storage, much less than regular farm tiles - I think it used to be they both had tons of storage but it was changed because people would hook them up just with a line and water never reached the second tile - we needed elaborate branching to ensure roughly equal amount was sent to each and every tile. nowadays they will cap at 5 kilos which seems totally reasonable

Finally a right answer!
To add to this I would suggest to run a pipe system through hydroponics tiles and then back to water tank. Pump doesn't need to run all the time - in case of bristle blossom you just need to run it 4 times per cycle for some short time (depending on how many tiles you need to fill). I made automation for my pump to turn on every 150s and work for 25s - it will pump 250kg of water which is enough for my farm - water will go through all the tiles and then rest of it, which was not used for irrigation, is going back to the tank. Additionaly water can also work as a cooling factor if you first run it in a radiant pipe, above the hydrophonics tiles. But of course its temperature must be below 30C.

[SKull]

I don't have any problems with them. I think this used to be an issue but got fixed, because now the water I use for farming lasts a long time.

[Lancar]

Yeah, I don't think there's any problem with the hydroponics. Haven't had any issue with them consuming too much water since several upgrades ago. I can't remember when it was, exactly, when you had to use a valve to regulate the flow to them, or they'd eat all your water in a flash.
Nowadays I just connect all the tiles up without thinking too much about it and they only consume just as much water as they need. Nothing else.

[PinkDaddySasquatch]

It seems to me that the plants are constantly consuming small amounts of water instead of just it's total requiment in one instance at the end of the day... I don't think there is anything wrong with the tiles...

[Nellvan]

Now that I've paid more attention to the water consumption I still cant' find anything gong wrong either.

What I did notice, there seems to be one issue with bristle blossoms in a farm tile. If you plant them without any light present, it consumes water even though growth is halted. The one in a hydroponic tile did not consume any. After turning the light on and then off again, the farm tile did stop as well.