Kind of hate Cereal Plants

[Ekimmak]

Every time I start this game, I forget what a major pain this bottleneck is.

Cereal plants can be threshed into two completely separate products, straw and cereal seeds. Straw is used for a ton of things in the early game, being the main source of floors. And cereal seeds are only used for a food product you have to put a lot of effort into installing, and it's highly inefficient to transport across long distances. But you have no control over what you get, it's always 1 straw/1 seed per cereal lump. Now, you can irrigate or fertilise to increase the yield per plant, which means you have extra seeds leftover, they don't immediately go back into regrowing the plant.

I basically have two options.
Either I set it so I only use up the cereal as I have space for both of them, or make an ugly mess with a tower of seeds into the sky.

I've tried using tiki heads before, but I can't think of a good coding trick to keep them from burning off ALL the unneeded product.

And the thing is, this problem reverses in the lategame, because everything ends up needing cereal seeds, and straw remains unused because now there's better floors. There's a need for straw across several different settler needs, but it just doesn't feel the same as "Baked goods for everyone", because I end up with no seeds left, and full up straw.

And let's not even get into other plants that have this same "Seeds+product" yield, like Bulrush.


Offhand note, but this run is the first serious attempt I've made since they introduced the hard limit on robots, and I still hate that. It's now given me a case of anxiety, since if I need more of a resource, I can't just double the number of bots working on it. I will end up crashing headfirst into that limit, and I'd rather it just not happen.

[Wolfie_]

Originally posted by Ekimmak:

... And cereal seeds are only used for a food product you have to put a lot of effort into installing, and it's highly inefficient to transport across long distances.

You may already know, otherwise worth noting that grain can be loaded from a storage silo with a cart (from memory carts hold 30?) and deposited into another silo straight from the cart. Makes bulk transportation more speedy. Depending how far needing to travel, could also look at using trains (is a progression of rollingstock available, which hold 50, 100 or 200 each, can have 2 cars per train), so that's a whole lotta grain transportedin one go. Might find this helpful.

[Ekimmak]

It definitely gets easier at that point, yeah. I'm trying not to use too many bots for long range transportation (due to first proper attempt at playing with the bot limit), but unless you have separate bots for loading and unloading, vehicles aren't really viable until you get to the MK2 bots and memory upgrades.

Come to think of it, I don't think that other plants like cotton have this problem where BOTH products are important. Aside from the plant breeding station, you can simply tell them "When capped on seeds, send seeds to furnace", but cereal seeds AND straw have enough uses that I can't use that standard program.

[Wolfie_]

Originally posted by Ekimmak:

Aside from the plant breeding station, you can simply tell them "When capped on seeds, send seeds to furnace", but cereal seeds AND straw have enough uses that I can't use that standard program.

To manage over-supply of either seeds or straw, after using the Thresher to convert the harvested Cereal into the Seeds and Straw, and place a Mystical Stone Head nearby. Then have two bots (one picking up seeds, the other straw -- could be done with one bot though suspect the throughput might be tad too slow), then they'll both have logic like...

Repeat until hands-empty
   If seed-silo/straw-crate not-full
   Then
      Move-to seed-silo/straw-crate
      Add-to seed-silo/straw-crate
   Else
      Move-to mystic-head
      Add-to mystic-head
   End-if
End-repeat

That way, don't get seeds or straw stacking up, but both storages get topped-up as needed.

[Ekimmak]

Hmm... going straight from the thresher to the stone head would help things a bit. Do you have some sort of control on the threshing machine to ensure it doesn't burn through all the cereal? Because it feels like a bit of a waste to run the scythe and thresher infinitely when you don't need all of it.

[Wolfie_]

I put the control on my wheat harvester(s) to prevent that...

Repeat forever!
   If hands empty
   Then
      Move-to scythe-crate
      Take-from scythe-crate
   End-if
   If seed-silo not-full
   Then
      Find wheat / Move-to / Use tool
   Else
      If straw-crate not-full
      Then
         Find wheat / Move-to / Use tool
      End-if
   End-if
   Wait 2
   If seed-silo full
      If straw-crate full
        Wait 5
      End-if
   End-if
End-repeat

[Hypersapien]

I think it's interesting that all the crops have different dynamics.

I keep two wheat seed containers. A replanting silo (which I generally keep as single-level) and a food inventory silo (which I keep at three-level or upgrade to a large silo). The seed collecting bot delivers to the replanting silo first. When that one is full, then it starts delivering to the food silo. The planters take from the replanting silo, and the bots take from the food silo to deliver to the kitchen areas.

When the straw crate is full, any overflow is delivered to the fertilizer box.

Upgrade to metal tools as soon as you get the chance. It really makes a difference.

[Jipopotamus]

You're better off with a besom broom instead of tiki head if you don't like the tower of items. Most underrated tool for sure. Set the bot to fill up backpack with some automatedly produced brooms and you can whip one out of there when hands are empty to avoid travel times. Can be set up to only sweep one particular item when its storage boxes are full. For you to set a specific item, which you need to do with cereal fields, you kinda have to cheese it. When you're instructing the bot to sweep you have to also record yourself picking the specific item up. You then replace the item to search for sweeping line with your "find nearest straw" or cereal seed line.

Been an update too, you don't need separate load and unload bots to use wheelbarrows etc. Just need to once again cheese it into their hands and then picking up and dropping off the cart itself doesn't need to be in the code. It can directly pick up and drop off items now without letting go of the cart after the update. You can make this more efficient too by making the flour on site, you use 2 cereal per crude flour or something, so makes the transport twice as efficient if you ship flour instead of seed.

Using this info and some suggestions from others above, makes cereal much more chill, and helps with other industries too. Being able to easily transport items in particular also means you don't have to hyper plan your base. Just ship stuff somewhere excluded and ship the final products back.

[Wolfie_]

Originally posted by Jipopotamus:

You're better off with a besom broom instead of tiki head

Don't agree with that because with the brooms, they wear out, so there's the re-occurring resource cost of making replacement brooms, whereas a stone head setup is do-once-and-done. That said, either approach works, the brooms cost very little, so really, comes down to whatever suits each player.

[ナオヤ]

I told bots that store seeds and straw to only go to tiki head once the storage is 80% full.
Cereal threshing-bot has a guard clause that checks (simple if) if seed storage is >= 80%, then checks again (nested if) is straw storage is >= 80% and if both are true then it exits repeat (whole processing task is in an extra repeat times 1 block).

I hate loose resource towers and I'd rather spend some time figuring out proper solution...
I did manage to finish 300 bot limit run without compromising on basic aesthetics (but screw fooling around with decorative flower patches or garden gnomes - that ♥♥♥♥ not for me).

Edit: Oh, and that's at bots Mk1 tier so basically available right from the start.