Vehicular Farming

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I want to plant vehicles in my seeds.

Wait, I mean I want to plant seeds in my vehicles.

Vehicles have many utilities that can be placed in them - renewable energy, a water gathering & purification system, a fridge, welding rigs, etc, but I can’t put some seeds into some dirt that’s in a clay pot.

You can guess where I’m going with this - I want to grow things in my vehicle.

Hydroponics would require lots of clean water (dirty water works too but has a chance of poisoning) and electricity, but would grow plants quickly and would be otherwise fully automated. Oh, and they’d be rare and expensive.

Pots, well, they’re pots. You put some dirt into some sort of container, throw in a seed or two, and add water. These would grow slowly and would require you to manually water the plants. In exchange, they’re much smaller and require zero electricity… If they’re placed near a window.

2

Space is probably the primary reason this would be limited to only the most important of crops. Its just terribly inefficient space wise to do this.

You might have better irl luck if you took a handful of seeds and threw them out a window. Or planted them and came back when they ripened.

3

It is a waste of place but i could imagine something like the back of a Pickup filled with dirt to grow some plants in it.

4

You could grow one or two plants per hydroponic tile, meaning that you can either have a single tile cannabis plant or a modified pickup that’s essentially a mobile farm.

You could place small plants in pots and have quite a few pots per tile, but you need to maintain each of them separately and, again, they grow slowly.

[quote=“pisskop, post:2, topic:11354”]Space is probably the primary reason this would be limited to only the most important of crops. Its just terribly inefficient space wise to do this.

You might have better irl luck if you took a handful of seeds and threw them out a window. Or planted them and came back when they ripened.[/quote]

Putting seeds in a pot with some dirt and putting them in front of a car window instead of a house window makes a difference? What?

Hydroponics would grow things very quickly. They are boxes with a really powerful lamp, some pumped in fertilizer, dirt, and seeds. It’s a better alternative to just sticking a pot in the window or shoving seeds into some dirt outside.

Bases don’t even have working electricity programmed in yet, so hydroponics in vehicles is the best we can get so far.

5

Youre not thinking about how to implement the ‘pots’. Nor apparantly about how large the harvest would be.

6

I am.

Let me scribble something quickly. I have no clue what Cataclysm is written in so I’ll use Javascript since I’ve been working on a web project.

int checkForShiznit(plantItemID, plantType, tile) { // get passed the tile the plant is in. oh, and the plant itself too.
If (tile.light > plantType.lightRequirement - 1) { // check for light
plantItemID.lightRequirementMet = true
} else {
plantItemID.lightRequirementMet = false
}

if (plantItemID.water < plantType.minimumWater && plantItemID.lightRequirementMet == false) {
    canGrow = false
    decay = 10
else {
    decay = decay - 10 //it'll be checked once in a while, so the speed of decay will gradually go down
}
if (decay == 0) {
   var canGrow = true
}
game.saveValueToItem(plantItemID, canGrow)

}

Keep in mind this is nothing more than an example, so please don’t start scrutinizing my code - I wrote it in Javascript for gods sake.

Anyways, the game would keep track of the items value and check if it’s in a hydroponic (which I didn’t write for in the example) or if it’s a pot on a regular tile.

Just add a maximum amount of pots per tile and bam, working pot system.

7

[quote=“pisskop, post:2, topic:11354”]Space is probably the primary reason this would be limited to only the most important of crops. Its just terribly inefficient space wise to do this.

You might have better irl luck if you took a handful of seeds and threw them out a window. Or planted them and came back when they ripened.[/quote]

that’s not true. Hydroponics allow you to stack trays filled with plants on top of one another literally, which would all grow fine. Space is not a constraint in hydroponics. Hydroponics also allow you to provide 24/7 light, water, and nutrients, your handful of seeds out a window doesnt even come close

8

What do you expect the crop output of this method to be? How do you expect a car going 90 down a road to contain the fluid/plants unharmed?

How often do you harvest? How many resources are required to keep it running?

As far as larger, less mobile ‘bases’; I guess you could try it.

9

http://www.growtainers.com/growtainer-2/

I am not exactly sure what aspects you’re opposing because there are clear real world parallels which are implemented to different degrees of success.

With regards to resources i suppose the normal ones( power, seeds, fertilizer) and the output can and should be balanced with the existing system of farming.

10

[quote=“nuker22110, post:9, topic:11354”]http://www.growtainers.com/growtainer-2/

I am not exactly sure what aspects you’re opposing because there are clear real world parallels which are implemented to different degrees of success.

With regards to resources i suppose the normal ones( power, seeds, fertilizer) and the output can and should be balanced with the existing system of farming.[/quote]

As Nuker has said, hydroponics could easily work in a vehicle, both real life and in-game. Since the core concept would probably work, I’m going to throw out another ambitious suggestion and see if it sticks.

Cataclysm is set 34 years in the future. To put this into perspective, 34 years ago computers were huge and impractical, and now we can fit them in our pockets.
We can’t see into the future, but we can guess what hydroponics would look like then. Perhaps horizontally growing plants, genetically modified plants that are almost entirely the desired output (ex: corn with super short stocks), etc.
More advanced hydroponics and crops would be found in labs, meaning that you couldn’t start growing hyper-efficient crops in self-sufficient hydroponics in the early game.

11

All that seems left is either a mod or pull request.

Somebody to write this code

12

without going into significant source code edits to implement this, here’s an idea that i have.

Firstly, there should be a new vehicle part called hydroponic rack which uses electricity and water(similar to foodco/welding rig).
This hydroponic rack would be a required part (tool) in a recipe as follows:
Tools required:
Hydroponic rack(x charges)
tool with digging 1?

Components required:
water/clean water
fertilizer
hydroponic tray
seeds

which would give you a ‘filled hydroponic tray’. You would then place said hydroponic tray into hydroponic rack, where it would be ready to harvest after x time by ‘activating’. It can use the same code as yeast/ charcoal/tanning so there would be no need to make some new code for it.

Ideally the ‘filled hydroponic tray’ would only ‘tick’/countdown when its placed in the hydroponic rack, but im not sure if code for this is supported. Additionally, the hydroponic rack would also have a storage space constraint so it can be balanced with normal farming.

I believe since this way uses alot of existing codes and functions, it shouldnt be too hard to implement(but im an idiot at coding, i know nothing). Do let me know what you think!