# Automated 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.

## Building a tower

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.

## Running a tower

Feed the controller through Core [side configuration](Side-Configuration.md):

- **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.

## Genetics, contents, and safety

Slots carry full [genetics](Genetics.md) 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).

## Performance

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](Resource-Crops.md), [Automation](Automation.md), [Genetics](Genetics.md).