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Crop Towers
A crop tower is a vertical multiblock that farms many crops in a compact footprint, hands-free. It is colony-scale automation, not a shortcut — every slot obeys the same rules as an ordinary crop, so a tower can never out-produce or duplicate compared with an equivalent farm.
Place a Crop Tower Controller, then stack Crop Tower Frame blocks directly above it. The tower's
tier is its height: it forms once the casing run reaches the minimum height and its capacity is
height x slots-per-layer, up to a configured maximum (a taller stack simply caps out). The controller
caches the formed structure and only rechecks it when a block changes or on a slow safety interval — it
never scans the whole structure every tick.
Feed the controller through Core side configuration:
- Resource seeds into the seed slots — the tower plants empty slots from them.
- Nero Flux and Nutrient — each growth step costs the same NF and nutrient as a powered grow bed.
- An optional Speed or Yield Fertiliser in the fertiliser slot boosts growth or harvest within the same caps as field fertiliser.
- Material Essence is deposited into the output slots on harvest; pull it with hoppers or pipes.
Each cycle the controller works a bounded number of slots from a rolling cursor: it plants an empty slot, advances a growing one (paying NF/nutrient), or harvests a mature one. Planting, the progression gate, capped yield, and genetics/fertiliser bonuses all use the same shared logic as ordinary crops.
Slots carry full genetics and harvest history, which are preserved on save, chunk unload, and restart. Breaking the controller returns every stored item plus a seed for each planted slot (with its genetics and history), so nothing is lost when you take a tower down. Right-click the controller for its status (formed/height/slots/planted/NF/nutrient).
Work is bounded per pass and phase-offset, contents are cached, and crops are virtual slots rather than thousands of blocks — so a tower stays cheap even at colony scale. Any crop-layer visuals are presentation only; the server logic never depends on the renderer.
See also: Resource Crops, Automation, Genetics.