Water and farming

[chairman_mentos]

I'm a Factorio player, so sorry if my perspective is a bit strange. I'm learning this game and how to play.

I'm trying to get a senses of how much water production I need for farming.

I understand the recipes. My water pump at the river produces 6 units per 15 days.
My cocoa and olives each require 1 unit of water per field per 30 months. So each operation is 3 per month

So one would think, easy problem, That's 12 units of water in 30 days , which can supply 4 cocoa/olives.

Not so simple. There's transit time to consider, between the water producition, and the warehouse, and the cocoa/olives.

Ok, so you factory that in. Maybe you math it as , 1 pump can suppliy3 farms at a time continuously, due to transit time.

Great, you're done, right? Nope.

Let's say you expand your farming operation. You add 3 more fields, And 1 more pump. But maybe the transit time is not the same.

Now, you start to accumulate extra water. Where does this water go? It doesn't stay in the warehouse. It goes to the fields as extra input buffer for more production.

"That's great", you think.

But here's my problem. I have no idea how much water I'm consuming each month, in other words... can I expand my farming and squeeze in one more field? Or will my farming inputs start to run dry?

It's hard to tell based on the information the game gives you.. or at least what I can find. It tells you about the efficiency of pumps, but not about how much of a product gets used and consumed

[Alex, Master Penguin]

The ratio you said is correct, but I always recommend overproducing slightly (10-20%) and automating it with a warehouse to sell the extra stuff

Or use a Water Tower to instantly move the water from the Siphons to the Farms :)

[chairman_mentos]

Ok, yikes, I just noticed something on these farms.. there is a user interface button that specifies the size of your input buffer..

then next to it there is a thing that says "slots":1.. trying to figure what that means..

[chairman_mentos]

oh, yikes, i see that tower now. ok.

[Alex, Master Penguin]

Also, take a look at the "cycles" thing :)

[Frag-ile]

Edit: Ah well, you've figured it out while I was typing it seems.

Yeah so the Factorio approach of constant stream production does not exactly work, well not elegantly at least. What you want to do is build up a resource buffer at your warehouses so that transport times do not matter. This makes it a pretty simple input/output calculation. One pump will always produce as much as it claims it will and your farm will always consume the amount it claims it will.

Every production building has a setting where you can determin how much of it's required resources they will request and stockpile from the warehouse, it's usually set to 2 which means it will stock one set of stuff extra other than what it's currently using. So a farm with 3 fields will when first constructed will request 6 water from the warehouse, but next month it will only request 3 in order to keep it's buffer of 1 extra. This again helps to negate transport times as the farm can start the next production cycle immediately and has the whole month to stock back up on water while the fields grow.

If you build your production in stages so that you can build up a buffer before you start using things everything will work out. Build your water pumps first, let them work for a month to build up some stock, then put down your farms, let them work for a month and then put down whatever next tier stuff you're planning on to use the farm produce if that is the plan.

[Dead-Duck]

My water pump with three harvestors in a lake only does 6 water per month total, so I needed one water pump for every two farms of 3 crop fields each as each of the 6 total fields consumes one water. Nevertheless, i had the water pumps directly adjacent to a warehouse that was directly adjacent to the farms and the farms only ran at 80% uptime due to lack of water.

[Intro]

There are two types of water collection buildings. The water syphon which takes water from bodies of lakes. Uses collectors which needs roads and collects 9 water with 3 collectors. Then there is the water pump which collects water from land, which doesn't need to be by water and has collectors that doesnt need roads collects 6 with 3 collectors.