Hello everyone, After a little over a year of not having this and being slightly infuriated, I have created a cropper simulator. This simulator can simulate any farm design (with or without the items/sec restrictions on t1/t2/t3 croppers) to determine which is the best. I have currently simulated my old design and a few others, and am taking suggestions for designs to test. Once you have submitted a design, I will edit it into this post and include data for it (items/hour Not sure if anyone still plays econ or uses croppers, but I figured I might as well make a post here.
Is it possible to test using the crosshatch design but alternating the rows between melon seeds&pumpkin seeds (credit to Awesomolocity) and see if those rates are any good?
I forgot about that design! Will do an extended test today Edit: tested, and holy wow! almost twice as good as any other design I have tested.
Would you mind posting your results for how many layers you need to reach diminishing returns on that setup?
I assume 7 or 8 layers as that would be roughly equivalent to 14 / 16 layers of "normal" planting. Edit: it's in the OP - 8 layers for max efficiency
Please can you also simulate crosshatch design but with every 2nd row of pumpkin stems only (not dirt blocks which adjacent rows pumpkins will spawn) removed. I theorise these blocks are unnecessary and building a full scale farm you can save around 15-20 million dollars on dirt. (While also only selling one item, which prevents hopper gridlock)
This is actually an interesting idea. Crops that are growing side-by-side (including diagonal) with identical crops have their growth rate chopped in half. If you remove that second stem, the first one should be twice as fast as it previously was...but now you only have 1. So output would theoretically be the same. I suspect that expanding this logic farther than just 2 stems will still apply - a crosshatch farm with half of the stems removed, would be roughly equal in output to having all the stems planted. If the dirt isn't getting used (and therefore doesn't get bought) that's about 25% of the farm cost saved. However, you could also place the dirt and till it - since any tilled soil directly around a stem (including diagonal) does slightly help the growth rate. (But at that point, you'd be saving exactly $0 for minimal gain in efficiency) One final note: I wonder how the auto-sell stuff coming with the 1.19 update will affect hopper gridlock
Sorry that took me so long, I entirely forgot to make a reply. After 12 simulated hours, the pumpkin farm grew 8135 pumpkins. This is about 0.19 per second, within margin of error of the full crosshatch, and about consistent with Awesomolocity's design pumpkin return rates. This also proves that the crosshatched pumpkins/melons do not impact either's performance in any way. I will edit the main post to include this info tonight.