Good afternoon So today, I was building a new space station and havnt played for some time (since 2019ish?) Never noticed it before but today I found the grow plots rotate--- SWEET NEW BUILDING CAPABILITIES soooooo I built a blueprint to incorporate this new idea and developed a floorplan that would save so much space and harvesting time frustrations (you know-- running through a plant and not timing the button clicky right) why not a 6 sided grow room--- so i built a concept and power and blam... plants 'rotate' then the dreaded "This plant cannot grow here".... well.... why not?? its got air, its got the grow light properly spaced... so why not??? into the ecf files i dove.... [Place: Face] ah that seems like a good start... whats the syntax? Free, Cockpit, NoRotation..... hmm "free"... what else is "face"... turrets... yeah those auto rotate to where youre trying to place them... ok now what controls planting.... sprouts... hmm... face... *type type type* Place: Free... restart server... nope... hmm... damn... PlantGrowingTemplate........Place: Free.... nope... plants "rotate" but snap to *horizontal* placed plots only.... What am I missing? Why is the plot able to rotate but not the sprout? It must be an easy type type typitty type type but im running out of places to look.... or what to look for :/ Any help??? Please enable 6 axis farming ^_^ posted here as well https://steamcommunity.com/app/383120/discussions/0/3119298624523623342/
You aren't missing anything. It's hardcoded, you can't change it. Yes, for some reason they allowed the plots to rotate and then hardcoded sprouts to only work in one orientation. Why? To drive us mad I guess. * No, it obviously wasn't to drive us mad (or was it???). Most likely an oversight. However, it IS an oversight that has been brought up many times over the development and has still not been rectified. I'm guessing they would probably have to change how crops grow in order to allow them to work rotated, so the obvious solution (for now at least) is to disallow rotation of grow plots.
Ok interesting... from what Ive discovered, the grow plot block is basically a function block and what we see it as is a superfluous "skin" that has been applied to it. So we see it as "rotating" which is just the skin of the dirt and the side textures rotating but not the plantable surface rotating following the dirt texture. Test for yourself, rotate a plot upside down, you can still plant something on the bottom side that is facing "upwards" Ive found the "dirt" is texture 6, then the side textures are 31, 93, and 70. Block ID's: 462, "GrowingPot" Texture 6(dirt) 31 (steel???) 1238, "GrowingPotConcrete" Texture 6(dirt) 93 (concrete) 1239, "GrowingPotWood" Texture 6(dirt) 70 (wood) Now I think the model of the block modified so that all surfaces looked like "dirt" or the remaining 5 surfaces be plantable.... need some form of 3d software to modify the block itself... then theres Block Id: 315, Name: PlantGrowingTemplate which looks like the function of being able to plant sprouts and if that space above the pot is planted making saving it in blueprints illegal and Block ID: 316, Name: PlantHarvestTemplate which looks like how to harvest the space above the block
Here is a pic showing only the "top" surface is plantable.... the spice sprout is actually on the bottom of the pot opposite of the dirt texture
Don't forget about the light! Even if you happen by chance to solve the grow pot or plant placement problem, it may still not work because the plant has to find a light in a certain range, which is probably a simple function based on coordinates + light direction. If the plant needs to have a light anywhere within y+2 blocks from it pointing towards y-, and its own x/z coordinates minus or plus 1, or with some kind of 3x3 matrix, then this will not work in any other direction. I suspect that the plants models have an "empty" on their bottom face in the prefab setup, showing the attachment point of the model, so the game knows how to attach the plant to the grow pot on its "top" face, whatever texture it's showing. The grow pot itself may not have any special "requirement" as it can be rotated and it has no consequence on the plant placement. We can even rotate the plant before clicking the mouse to "spawn" it, and then the plant places itself in the correct alignment, despites what the "ghost" model was showing (ex. on its side). So it's really all controlled by script as the placement is determined when the object is instantiated. These "empty" are added in unity and require a specific name that is used as reference in the scripts. From what I found by searching for tutorials and trial-and-error, I know that weapons use that same trick, and probably many other models that have moving parts or a fixed placement rule. Without the specific names and location of the pivots/ empty, there is not much we can do...
I'm assuming plants only grow up because a stalk sticking out of the wall on a planetary base doesn't exactly look correct. As for being able to rotate the plots themselves, if it's not just a side-effect of it being a standard construction-type block it is at least useful for wrecks to show destroyed farms with tipped-over plots. But I would wholeheartedly support being able to plant crops in any orientation.
hmm... maybe its not the plot but the plant itself... HMMM im gonna try and toy around with Shape: ModelEntity and assigning it to something else and see if i can get something other than a crash ***edit*** changing to Shape: New CoQ ~_~ ***edit*** reverted back to ModelEntity changed Place: Free to Face now it behaves like a turret but only plantable on top of plot still... *edit* **throws desk** bah
i did inadvertently find this little trick: G=grow plot S=sprout L=grow light _L_ _L_ SLS SLS SLS SLS SLS SLS S_S GGG 8 plots (center of 3x3 is blank) but as long as there are lights in the center stacked 1 more than sprouts, you can have a tower of growing plants and only 8 plots.... SOOOOooooo...... i guess thats a "win" for mas producing plants? I guess ill just stick with editing the ecf files
Ok I see now. But will the plants grow ? If plants are stacked one on top of the other (else they are "floating" above nothing) then there is not a 2-blocks space above the grow pot, right ? And to stack the plants we have to put them on top of each other et a 1-block spacing ?
thats why the stack of lights are in teh center block... just offset 1 block at the top to keep the 2 block gap between "ceiling" and "plot"
