Crops, Hydroponics and Chemfuel : Tutorial Nuggets

and we're back with some more room world and today's tutorial we're going to be looking at crops and all the things that go with them including hydroponics chem fuel generators uh solar wind all of that stuff because it's all important for how you grow your crops depending on what stage of the game you're at now the first thing we're going to look at here is the different soil types and if you press this little button down the bottom right toggles fertility overlay this is baked into the default game that bright green line that's rich soil the yellow line that's gravel or what do you call it stony soil and that middle stuff is just regular soil rich has 140 percent fertility regular is 100 and stony soil is 70 this fertility sensitivity is very important for crop growth because whichever soil you have access to really determines what you're going to grow now if we say grab up this here and have a go in and have a look at the plants you can actually plant you'll notice that corn here has a fertility sensitivity of 100 oh i should probably point out any anything below 70 fertility on a soil you pretty much can't plant anything on us there's a few things you can but realistically for the food ones we got it's got to have 70 so corn here is a fertility sensitivity of 100 meaning if you plant it in bad soil as in seventy percent uh fertility it's gonna get a 30 hit to its uh its growth rate rice exact same thing fertility sensitivity 100 potatoes however they have a fertility sensitivity of only 40 percent meaning you plant them in stony soil true they won't grow quite as fast as good soil but they'll be much less affected than rice or corn would be however the thing that gets people is it also works in the opposite direction if you plant potatoes in really good soil like 140 rich soil they don't gain as much of a benefit from it rice will gain a 40 growth speed corn will grain at 40 growth speed but potatoes will gain like a fraction of it so that means if you have stony soil what you want to plant in it potatoes if you have rich soil which one i planted is either corn or rice and which one you plant and at what time will depend on the the stage of the game now all three all three of these sections the potatoes the rice and the or the potatoes the rice and the corn were all planted at the same time so let's fast forward time a bit until the rice is about ready to harvest and then see how everyone else is doing in all their different sections if you click on the plants as you're growing you can actually see their growth rate down here so rice is 140 enriched 100 irregular and 70 percent over potatoes you'll notice 88 in the stony soil where it should have 70 100 at regular and where it should have 140 it only has 116. before we get any further i should point out this whole playthrough is or this whole tutorial is designed around playing on the maximum difficulty level when you play on the maximum difficulty level your crop yields are reduced by 20 and this is what we're working around here because i think working on the hardest difficulty you go backwards it's actually much easier on the easier difficulties but this means that rice has a yield of only five as opposed to the six you will see on the wiki or if you play on normal difficulty i just want to do this there's plenty of information on normal difficulty but there's very little unheard and it does change the math and how everything works out quite a bit anyway the harvest yield on rice is five the harvest yield on corn is 18 and the harvest yield on potatoes is nine so what this means is by the time this one is ready to harvest and provide you with five rice the potatoes when they'll grow up on average will provide you about 3.8 potatoes for every five rice you get and the corn comes out about 4.92 or to round that up a bit just so you were to take this entire sun lamp and fill it full that's 100 tiles in there you'd end up with about you know 500 rice for every 492 corn you got out which is a tiny fraction of a difference and potato wise you'd end up with about 388 potatoes which is an awful lot less because potatoes rice and corn the nutritional value of each individual unit is worth the exact same amount so let's have a let's have that rice harvested and what we'll do is we'll wait until the potatoes or was it the next level comes up which will be this rice here and then we can figure out the percentages on potatoes and corn versus the average soil sensitivity oh one thing i should also point out potatoes uh every plant you plant starts at five percent so you can ignore the five percent when you're doing the math on these things another thing to note plants sleep okay i know that sounds weird but between 1900 hours and five o'clock in the morning they they basically don't grow it doesn't matter if you've got some lance or stuff like that and the sun lands actually turn off during that time and don't draw energy during that period this will affect how the numbers work out so for example if you check here you can see this has a growth race has a growth time of three days but since it's asleep for 11 hours every day it doesn't matter what you do you can't really get it much faster an eclipse and a solar flare well i'm trying to do testing thank you randy just just thank you so much now there we go ready to be harvested let's have a quick check of the numbers here now remember this is for normal soil so this is the the numbers for if you're growing all your plants in normal soil working it out in batches of say if we grew a whole patch of it we're looking at about for every 500 rice you'd get out of normal soil you'd get about 464 potatoes and about 473 corn which is pretty good now let's check out gravel fun thing to note because plants start at five percent growth and rich soil is twice the fertility of stony soil that means that you actually get in two crops of rice in rich soil before the first crop of rice and stony soil gets to where it needs to go which is kind of impressive that's why you never ever plant rice in tony soil and now let's check out the numbers for gravel and this is where potatoes comes into their own assuming you're looking at one full sun lamp area again for every 500 rice you get you'd get 587 potatoes at the same time you'd get about 473 corn so big takeaway of course yeah potatoes put them in stony soil but for rice and corn you'll notice that they're all very close to each other i mean 500 rice that's great but 473 corn that's so close you really don't care at that stage the big difference here is rice is a lot more labor-intensive you have to plant and harvest it much more frequently corn much longer between planting and harvesting this is sort of a short term you gain a lot of rice very quickly long term the corn sort of wins on labor requirements however there are negative effect events that can knock both of these out so you can get your cold snaps your blights your volcanic winters your there's all sorts of things that can affect both of these but generally what happens is you usually go rice early on because you need the food desperately now now now and then once you've stabilized and you've got your food production sorted you usually can't migrate to corn or you can just be like me and just plant potatoes everywhere because you're just irish anyway that brings us on to hydroponics and chem fuel now when it comes down to hydroponics we'll come back to corn again but hydroponics you're kind of stuck here only two things can be planted in hydroponic styles and that is rice and potatoes that's it they're the only two things you can plant in them well okay strawberries exist but let me just say strawberry's advantages they can be eaten raw but their disadvantages are they go off really quickly and they don't produce quite as much as rice so they're basically a weaker version of rice that goes off faster and doesn't produce quite as much no one you don't really use them there's very nice scenarios let's just ignore them for the purposes of the tutorial here you have hydroponics basins these have a fertility sensitivity of 204 percent which means yes stuff grows in them really really really fast because of that 240 percent of fertility planting anything but rice in it is pointless putting putting potatoes in there would be like hooking up a formula one car to a plow it's just it's a bad idea well it can be done i'm just saying you you're really not taking full advantage so let's cover the different setups you can use to use hydroponics now the main reason i came here is because there was a lot of talk about you should use chem fuel power generators to power your hydroponics and your sun lamps this gives you a nice temperature controlled area and the um you can take this rice and that rice can be then put to a biofuel refinery this biofuel refinery will take 70 wood or it'll take 70 rice and it will turn it into 35 chem fuel which is amazing you can then take that chem fuel burn it into generators that will power this whole setup and is actually power positive and food positive so you can get power you can either use it to make more power or you can use it to make more food the question is how much and the thing is if you go onto the wiki it'll give you a bunch of information however all that information is based on playing on normal difficulty where the crop yields are about 20 higher so what we want to do is take this corn run it through one of these biofuel refineries and use it to power our setups and see which one is better either using a greenhouse which is where we use the normal soil with sun lamps these sun lamps allow us to maximize the usage of it and protect our crops we'll go to more into protecting your crops later and we're also using hydroponics on this side to see how much power it draws and see which one gives us the best return on investment a quick note on how all this testing was done we have three pawns locked in with each one of these setups only one of them is allowed to farm uh they're also they're really incredible farmers they also have a bunch of archotec arms and legs we could have made them better but this seems like a good balance where one pawn does all of the harvesting and all of the planting on both sides and then we just let it run and this is after 17 days we've almost got it evened out as in you'll see over here there's a few of these hydroponic spaces that haven't been quite planted they couldn't finish it by the end of the day and these crops were not quite harvested even though they could get a body into this let's just skip forward to the morning and maybe just count this as say a full 17 days we're being a little bit generous to this side of the equation but it kind of needs it after 17 days pretty much almost exactly this side ends up with 4 320 rice however that does not take into account the amount of rice you would have to convert to chem fuel to power this whole setup that's about 918. now do note that you can get by with this with six chem fuel generators if you have a wind turbine on top of it this thing is it only requires a little scooch of power over six to run correctly however we're putting it at seven because it's pretty much the same for this one as well you could chop off a one generator here if you put on a wind turbine but realistically that means if you run this thing all self-contained you can get enough food to feed 10 pounds indefinitely so it'll be able to power itself and feed themselves assuming you power the cookers and all that stuff off something else but this thing runs just about beautifully and the hydroponics on the other hand they're far more productive as you can see there's yeah there's an awful lot of rice here that 240 percent productivity is it or fertility is amazing however this costs an awful awful lot more generators and so a lot more powers require as well it's about 1836 rice and that results in about 23 pawns can be fed off this 23.4 that would make you believe that this is a far better deal but don't don't jump that way just yet this makes greenhouses look a lot weaker than they really are because what we're doing here is converting this all to chem fuel now this is a very heavily recommended thing though i would not really go that way the reason being is there is better ways to power these setups than resorting immediately to chem fuel that is oh see look at this down here this is a power brick oh i should probably go over one other thing i like to do designs that revolve around a certain shape i like to base my designs around everything that's uh 18 down 17 across and then four of them stuck together these kind of box designs really help out because it just fits a whole bunch of things very conveniently so this would be a power brick that fits nicely inside us and it fits exactly 28 solar generators and four wind turbines now the great thing about solar and sun lamps is like i said before these plants have a sleep cycle and as well as that it seems to match up rather closely with the sun cycle so over here we have our 24 solar generators we have our four wind turbines we have five batteries and we have 16 sun lamps and if you'll notice those but this whole thing is on its own power grid as in this is the only thing powering all of these things is all of the things here and there's no problems doing it as in this can power 16 sun lamps indefinitely okay now we'll get into costs and all that but this is actually way cheaper than hydroponics and everything as well and you could run 16 of them seriously that's that's ludicrous now there are some caveats to this that i should really point out and that is to do with solar power itself the amount of power you get for the entire day out of solar panels is determined by two things one it will always max out at 1700 watts unless there's some sort of negative event affecting it and the second is your location on the planet yes your planetary location you'll see here there's a 23 degrees 33.6 degrees north that means we are 23.6 degrees north of the equator so the further you go down yeah here we go we're just about at the equator there where is it come on a little bit now whatever close enough this is the equator so the equator down here will have more sunlight than this place up here and the further you go north or south of the equator you'll get a little bit less power so but unless you go up really really far like we're talking top of the planet or bottom of the planet your power is actually going to be pretty solid the only video i could find doing detailed analysis on it was uh bjorn's strong arm i've got a link up in the top right has some graphs on it and everything it shows you how it is but basically what you can do is i've just done some practical testing here and all that happens is these some lamps will work just fine the solar panels will cut in a little bit early in the morning but cut out a little bit later in the afternoon so you'll you'll need a few batteries to smooth out the power flow you don't definitively need the wind turbines though i would cram them in there because the extra power they can give will get you over a hump here and there what that does mean with this one set up here you can run 16 sun lamps that's an incredible amount of crop growth potential now as you'll see there the batteries actually went down but now in the middle of the night they're all getting charged back up even if we took out these wind turbines you'd actually be fairly okay as it starts to come to morning before the lights even switch on you'll notice solar power is already creeping into these panels and boom and you'll notice during the day stored power 600 watts the batteries are not discharging at all that means you can run these all forever however there is things you should be worried about natural events that can mess you up one is what happens in winter time like when we get into the depths of winter are we still going to be able to support the same amount of uh lights on the one hand yes it does it seems not to matter at this latitude doesn't matter the time of year you'll still be able to support 16 lights however volcanic winters yeah that's a little bit different volcanic winters mess with the amount of power generated by your solar panels so what will happen there instead is you'll max out at 1471 watts instead of 1700 watts this is problematic however not as bad as you think you can basically just turn off two sun lamps you can still run 14 of the 16 sun lamps it's just you don't quite have enough power to run the full 16. honestly not that big a deal now i would not recommend you keep all the sun lamps this close together you would have to spread these out and position them more you know something like this or you know there's different ways it can be done but you can support an awful lot of crop growth here not only that because you're actually using soil you're not limited by what you can plant in hydroponics so you can plant corn if you want and since you're probably going to be doing this with mostly normal soil honestly potatoes corn any of those are really good to use you can also plant devil strand pretty much everything and it can all be kept indoors and this whole thing is rather stable now i'll go over the numbers of like say one of these one of these grow zones can support if you're growing rice about 4.23 duplicates or ponds so a full stack of these three of these together makes about can support about 12.7 pounds and bear in mind you can put down 16 of these that means if you ran all of these lamps supporting nothing but food you could support about 67 dupes on nothing but simple meals and all you're doing at 4 is what like 28 solar generators and 4 wind turbines this map is currently experiencing a volcanic winter and a toxic fallout and you'll notice that the power output on these is 1470 but that should drop to about 14.59 slowly but surely as the toxic fall that kicks in that means you can still support 14 sun lamps those two down there are not powered so you can still support 14 sun lamps even if you're in the middle of a volcanic wilter and a toxic fallout meaning this thing is pretty much just year-round growing for 14 sun lamps that's what you're pretty much guaranteed to be able to support however there is a few other problems that can get you if you get a heat wave what can happen is it will stop your plants from growing because the plants will get too hot but it won't kill the plants however a cold snap can so to counteract the cool snaps put in a couple of fireplaces that's literally it you'll notice there's a toxic there's a cold snap outside it's now minus 26c outside inside it's a well not so toasty -4 that's not great uh so minus 25 and now it's coming up one morning so the temperature should start rising a little bit again now if you want to be really careful about this put in a third fireplace then that will take your temperature up into nice comfortable growable ranges but cold snaps don't last very long usually about a day and a half to two days at which point you'll go back to growing as normal and if you're running enough sun lamps and you have enough crops coming in you're probably not going to care too much and then once when when a cold snap kicks in normally what you do is you will have these with toggle automatic refuel off you will basically say no refuel all of those and once all of them are refueled turn it off again and by the end of the call snap these will go away again and you're done that will protect you from cold snaps at the same time it also protects you this whole setup will protect you from toxic fallouts it will also protect you from volcanic winters you can grow food all year round now i don't want to beat hydroponics into the ground hydroponics have their purpose but uh cost wise this is just so much cheaper the cost of 24 24 solar panels and four wind turbines is uh well it's 92 components and 3200 steel the cost of all over this over here is unfortunately an awful lot more the cost for all of these hydroponics basins and the chem fuel generators that's about 108 components and 8 400 steel no um now these things have their places both have their uses it's just this year this is designed for a really inhospitable map if you're on an ice sheet or an extreme desert or something like that this sort of setup could be very useful um i think using this and the chemical generators it's probably more suited to somewhere in the arctic or something like that for the desert you could probably get away with it not using the sun lamps instead just leaving the hydroponics outdoors there's different ways of doing these things they're all different tools for different jobs but if you're on a map and there's a lot of fertile soil around the place then there is no problems running one of these power bricks and just chucking in huge amounts of just as many sun lamps as you want now do remember this solar power power is only during the day so it's literally there just to power the lamps the rest of your base you're probably going to hook this whole thing into your main grid so do remember to have power for your buildings during the day and night so you're going to want to use your geothermal and maybe even some chem fuel to power all of your machines cookers all that stuff year round but for the daytime the solar panel should be able to take all the load from your sun lamps also do remember that you're getting it we're testing this all on the hardest difficulty level so what this would mean with these these hydroponics would gain an awful lot in productivity and so would this if you were playing on an easier difficulty level and you were getting that extra 20 from the crops the cost for the chem field generators would be drastically reduced because you'd be getting 20 more crops every time and you'd be using a smaller percentage on the actual fuel let's go through a few things that will make your life easier if you're trying to use any of these setups first let's start with this power brick uh you'll notice here that this entire area is sealed in tight as can be and as well as that we've got granite barricades in here those barricades can be made of anything but every single tile in here is occupied with something this stops drop pods from landing in there also there should only be one entrance in that way you don't ever have enemies trying to path to it to get somewhere else and resulting in your whole solar array being destroyed uh you'll notice there's two doors here this is to demonstrate that door is unusable because it's facing into this wind turbine pawns cannot pass through there so if say this solar panel breaks down they'll have to walk in through here through across of these and go down it'll be very slow but you know what it's better than these ever getting destroyed keeping them in a nice sealed in tight as can be container with no open spaces means you don't end up with a centipede landing in there and then destroying 90 percent of your solar while you're busy fighting off the nas the the rest of the attack not that it's happened to me several times so trust me wall it in make sure there's not one single free tile and you will be an awful lot happier and an awful lot safer make sure you put roofs over your batteries otherwise they will go exist out or you'll get this event uh when it comes to these lamps a good thing to do is to put a power cable beneath them that's connected to nothing you notice there's a see that little blue underneath each lamp that is there so that whenever there's a an issue like just say we have an eclipse eclipses will basically cut your power to all of this and you don't want well your lights are going to go off but you're going to drain all your battery powers first and redline your entire grid instead what you do is you grab all your lights and you go okay i want you all to connect to another piece of electricity oh sorry we'll get rid of those two and you'll notice every single one of them have disconnected and instead they've connected to that one piece of wire that's sitting there doing nothing so now we have turned off all of our sun lamps with one button click well two in that instance and then when the actual eclipse goes away you can just press that button again and then they all turn themselves back on done this is just a quick way of making sure you can turn on and off and deal with eclipses instantly without flatlining your entire grid last event that can mess you up that would be zist events because they can drain all the power out of your batteries at which point select all your sun lamps make sure you turn them all off let the batteries charge up a bit and then turn everything back on again you should be fine then you've got your your emp style things that knock out all electricity so nothing can actually be used well in that instance you're probably fine because you are running on solar and that solar carries you during the day however it will of course affect all your other machines however hydroponics do have the negative of when they've been had power cut for them for a sustained period of time all the plants in them will die now you usually have enough time to try and harvest them it's just you're probably not going to get the best crop out of them if your harvest plants early you won't get much and you do have to do it very quickly otherwise they will die before you get them so you're going to want to prioritize harvesting those so we have covered volcanic winters toxic fallouts cold snaps eclipses heat waves the heat waves okay you basically just eat those there's nothing you can do about it well you could put in cooling but honestly the amount putting in cooling is not really worth the effort considering heat waves only last like day two tops you can live without a day or two of growth no the last one you have to face is blight now we're just going to summon in a quick blight here oh look it's hit up a bunch of our crops but normally what it does is it only targets a small enough patch and all of the same crop type so what i would advise you to do is just sort of alternate your crops you have potatoes corn potatoes and then you know just alternate one after the other so you might get blight on one patch of potatoes but it won't get it across the corn sometimes you can get rather large blights so instead of doing that just make sure you split up your cups and as long as they're spread far enough apart the butt can only take out one batch at a time i do believe that setting up a greenhouse or hydroponics facility should be one of those high end priorities when you're in your playthroughs these things will insulate you against so much that you just really do need them they protect you from all of the major events that can be colony killer killers namely volcanic winters toxic fallouts those two can basically [ __ ] you if you don't have some sort of way of growing crops through them the hydroponics themselves hydroponics on their own without sun lamps can probably be used in some of the more inhospitable but sunny climes and then the uh hydroponics plus sun lamps plus the chem field generators that's more for ice sheet or something somewhere where the resources are very you know almost no resources are available if you have a maf with decent fertility you should be doing lots and lots of greenhouses they're cheap cost efficient and they'll be done at almost any latitude you will find that solar panels are quite resilient to most latitudes extremely excluding the actual extremes please consider solar panels basically light filtration they uh filter out all of that nasty toxic fallout and volcanic winters and instead turn it turn it into clean pure sunlight that can keep your plants going all year round anyway i hope you enjoyed and good luck do [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Francis John

Views: 38,828

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Id: hc_MWFPbfLA

Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021