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Design Challenge: Cheapest self breeding apiary setup

forestry apiary bees breeding

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8 replies to this topic

#1
Celestial Oblivion

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This was originally a side question in another question of mine, but after investigating it more I think it deserves its own section.

 

The challenge is I want to build a self breeding apiary for my pure pairs without using an apiarist pipe, or ideally anything else that uses diamond. It should be both 100% reliable and have some way of dealing with overflow. Preferably it should use not use up much space and can the apiaries should not be linked to each other.

 

 I've tried the two main piping systems but both have their flaws.

 

 

1. Buildcraft: Buildcraft pipes have the bonus of being very intelligent with apiaries. They will be smart enough to put princesses and drones in the proper slot regardless of which side you put them into, and will never put a bee into the wrong slot. My initial attempt was simply to pipe out all the contents of the apiary then come around to another face of the apiary, have an iron pipe put stuff direct stuff into the apiary and have a chest on the other side of the pipe for overflow. And this almost works perfect! However, unlike every other pipe iron pipes will send items back the way they can if it cannot input an item into the correct slot, rather than simply reroute to another available path, so produce and extra drones get discharged from the pipe. Using a standard cobblestone or other pipe gives a chance for the princess to be put in the chest, forcing the system to be manually reset.

 

 

2. Redpower: Redpower 2 tubes are sadly not as smart with apiaries as buildcraft pipes are. With tubes, queens must be put in the top and drones on the bottom, and they will put drones and princesses in the wrong slot if you do not prevent them from going into the wrong side. It thus at a minimum requires depositing all bees into a chest where a sorting machine or filter will then send the queens and drones into separate paths. For a decent number of apiaries producing the same bees this might work, but it seems like a bit of overkill for a single apiary, and having too many species can overwhelm even a sorting machine.

 

 

tdlr: Both of these systems can work but not very elegantly without an apiarist pipe. If anyone can come up with a good self contained system without using one I would be very grateful.

 


"The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him- The reasoning mind."

...And his fists for punching trees.

#2
Celestial Oblivion

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In case anyone was curious this is the best I could come up with, and it actually works pretty well in practice.

 

Apiary%20Building%201.jpg

 

As you can see its pretty compact on the first level. The system can handle most of the output but random drone mutations will be ejected from the apiary, which the wooden golem will collect. Once your pure's genome stabalizes though its pretty rare that it will be actually used, you'll be getting stacks of genetically identical drones in no time.

 

Basement is where most of the fun is at.

 

Apiary%20Building%202.jpg

 

The key to getting the basic buildcraft pipes to work is to use barrels to collect the bee's production. They must be placed immediately below the wooden transport pipe you're using to extract from the apiary, as if the produce backtracks to the wooden pipe and there is no other place to go it will pop out immediately. It also ensures no wasted time with bees going down the wrong path.

 

Apiary%20Building%203.jpg

 

You must have an iron transport pipe connect back into the apiary. This will ensure the princess always gets put back into the apiary and will cause the produce to bounce back towards the barrel if it goes that way.

 

Apiary%20Building%204.jpg

 

There is a lag risk with bees that produce specialty products. Since you need two barrels to collect the products, you can't rely on the basic buildcraft inventory check at the wooden transport pipe to ensure the bees won't go down. Using an iron pipe on the ends of the product path will bounce the bees back up to the apiary, but this means there is no way for mutated drones to exit the system, they will just go in circles between the apiary and the barrels forever. Again once your bee's genome stabilizes mutations are pretty rare, but you may want to check on it and empty and floating drones whenever you have a chance.

 

 

If anyone has any good ways to improve this please let me know.


"The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him- The reasoning mind."

...And his fists for punching trees.

#3
digitallyApocalyptic

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Wow, nice. I would say that you could probably use Autarchic Gates to extract the various items from the apiary (possibly allowing for a one-block wide setup in some cases, making it about twice as compact?) if you have the infrastructure for that, but otherwise, I can't think of a way to improve it. My sparing intellect didn't realize, during the five seconds I was thinking about this, that one could simply have an iron pipe as products don't go back into the apiary.


My username is digitallyApocalyptic. I contribute where I can on the wiki and I've previously built pretty much the entirety of Category:Twilight Forest. I play FTB Ultimate, some games on Steam, and I follow MS Paint Adventures.


#4
timrem

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If you have access to basic autarchic gates, I may have a better design, with no chance of items falling out (unless the products chest fills up). Start with an apiary, and add a hopper on top. Use a wooden pipe to pump things out the bottom of the apiary, then 3 cobblestone (or stone) pipes straight up to the hopper. Then, another wooden pipe on top of the hopper, with an iron pipe on top of that. Bees and products get pulled from the apiary, and into the stone pipes. The bees sometimes go into the side of the apiary, sometimes they go into the hopper and are placed into the apiary in the next tick. With the gate set to "Items in inventory", it seems the hopper will deposit the bee into the apiary before the gate pulls it out. Products, on the other hand, will be pulled from the hopper and sent down the iron pipe to your storage. This is compact enough that you can have apiaries side-by-side, as long as you alternate between stone and cobblestone pipes. I started testing it with redstone engines pulsing the gate on the hopper, but that managed to pull a princess down the iron pipe.

 

If autarchic gates are beyond your reach (since the assembly table and lasers do require diamond), have you tried using redpower tubes that pump into a hopper rather than straight to the apiary? That would solve your wrong-slot problem, at least.



#5
Celestial Oblivion

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Wow, nice. I would say that you could probably use Autarchic Gates to extract the various items from the apiary (possibly allowing for a one-block wide setup in some cases, making it about twice as compact?) if you have the infrastructure for that, but otherwise, I can't think of a way to improve it. My sparing intellect didn't realize, during the five seconds I was thinking about this, that one could simply have an iron pipe as products don't go back into the apiary.

 

Yeah I almost used autarchic gates, but part of the reason I'm starting to invest in bees in the first place is to get the excited branch to produce redstone. I was tired of having to set up a quarry every when redstone was the only thing I had run out of. Since redstone engines only need 1 redstone using them was the cheapest solution for me. If wooden transport pipes don't connect to each other then you can indeed do this 1 in a 1 square wide area with gates.

 

The ideal thing to use here would actually be an insertion pipe, if you've ever used that extra pipes addon to buildcraft. That way anything that could go into the apiary would always be put in there and you could have a chest above it to catch anything else, drones and all. Sadly this is a direwolf server so I couldn't just add that mod.

 

 

If you have access to basic autarchic gates, I may have a better design, with no chance of items falling out (unless the products chest fills up). Start with an apiary, and add a hopper on top. Use a wooden pipe to pump things out the bottom of the apiary, then 3 cobblestone (or stone) pipes straight up to the hopper. Then, another wooden pipe on top of the hopper, with an iron pipe on top of that. Bees and products get pulled from the apiary, and into the stone pipes. The bees sometimes go into the side of the apiary, sometimes they go into the hopper and are placed into the apiary in the next tick. With the gate set to "Items in inventory", it seems the hopper will deposit the bee into the apiary before the gate pulls it out. Products, on the other hand, will be pulled from the hopper and sent down the iron pipe to your storage. This is compact enough that you can have apiaries side-by-side, as long as you alternate between stone and cobblestone pipes. I started testing it with redstone engines pulsing the gate on the hopper, but that managed to pull a princess down the iron pipe.

 

If autarchic gates are beyond your reach (since the assembly table and lasers do require diamond), have you tried using redpower tubes that pump into a hopper rather than straight to the apiary? That would solve your wrong-slot problem, at least.

 

Hmm, my experience with hoppers in my biomass production system perhaps made me a little skeptical of them, but that indeed could be better. It would need rigorous testing to ensure even with princesses and drones being inserted near simultaneously the princess will always be deposited before the gate pulls her out.

 

For a very large system of bees producing the same product I could see red power working better. However, you'd need a retriever to handle getting all the products out of the hoppers, and I'm not sure how many different products a retriever can pull out (no more than 9 I think). You'd also eventually have drone mutations fill up all the hoppers unless you had some way of dealing with them as well.


"The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him- The reasoning mind."

...And his fists for punching trees.

#6
ZER0-0

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Wooden Pipes do not connect to each other. My initial thought was that this could possibly be simplified using emerald pipes and chests as buffers.


When in Trouble or in Doubt, Run in circles, Scream and Shout!


#7
Celestial Oblivion

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Wooden Pipes do not connect to each other. My initial thought was that this could possibly be simplified using emerald pipes and chests as buffers.

 

Yeah that is my usual approach to these kind of things, however an emerald pipe for each apiary is also a bit expensive. I don't think emerald pipes will treat all of say a common bee the same though (barrels at least don't), so you'd need a genetically identical princess to use for the emerald pipe to recognize it. And if the other princess mutates you're going to be out of luck.


"The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him- The reasoning mind."

...And his fists for punching trees.

#8
ZER0-0

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Yeah that is my usual approach to these kind of things, however an emerald pipe for each apiary is also a bit expensive. I don't think emerald pipes will treat all of say a common bee the same though (barrels at least don't), so you'd need a genetically identical princess to use for the emerald pipe to recognize it. And if the other princess mutates you're going to be out of luck.

I just realized, that once you have all the bees you want, then you don't need to worry about any of these costs. You can just have bes that make emerads, diamonds, etc. But i see your point.


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#9
Celestial Oblivion

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I just realized, that once you have all the bees you want, then you don't need to worry about any of these costs. You can just have bes that make emerads, diamonds, etc. But i see your point.

 

Yes I am still relatively new to bee breeding. The only useful non-bee related material they're producing right now is redstone. It will take a while to get emerald and diamond, and I am not going to do that totally manually until then.


"The mind is the attribute of man. When man is born, he comes into existence with only one weapon with him- The reasoning mind."

...And his fists for punching trees.





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