Factorio Forums

TL;DR

It would be nice if there was a way to only disable planting/harvesting while still doing the other thing

What?

Currently, you can connect the agricultural tower to a circuit (or a logistic network), and you can enable/disable it on a condition. However, that disables both planting and harvesting.

I'd like to request two separate toggles for planting and harvesting.

Why?

I'd like to use circuits to disable towers when I have enough of the thing they're harvesting, but then they'll sit completely idle. Since growing takes time, ideally I'd want them to still plant, but leave the trees unharvested.

TL;DR

Add ability to turn harvesting and seeding independently and read expected resources on agricultural tower.

What?

1. Harvest control
Any of the following:

• Add ability to set filters on plants to harvest, and seeds to seed
• Add ability to turn harvesting and seeding independently (have two distinct control behavior enabled conditions)

Either of this would allow seeding new plants without harvesting, preventing unwanted spoilage of fruits.

2. Read resources
Like the mining drills, add option to read "Expected resources" via circuit network. This may be an alternative mode to "Read contents" (but does not have to, so both may be read at the same time).

Why?

Basically, the main reason to do both is to enable/disable train stops for your fruit plantations based on circuit conditions, and plant fruits if and only if the train is arriving. You can partially achieve the second part by disabling inserters pulling fruits out of the tower, but the tower will still collect two whole stacks of fruits, initiating the spoilage process for them. Estimating the number of fruits or plants ready to be harvested is straight impossible without adding extremely complicated timers.

See Also

Dosh asking for that feature: Also requested by Dosh (https://youtu.be/8CVeY-9zmUM?t=5474)

Other related topics:

• 118070: Agricultural Tower UI/UX Improvements
• 120348: Agricultural Tower Grid

List of Edits

2024-12-05
Restore missing attached image.

+1

Its hard to get a desired circuit control of Ag towers when the two very different jobs are on an all-or-nothing control scheme. Separate harvesting/planting controls would make it much simpler to do things like allowing the Ag tower to plant to maintain a full field of trees, and only harvest when there is demand for the product. Seed/plant filters are just a bonus that enable sushi fields. But independent harvest and planting control is huge.

EDIT: On discord, we tried getting the above behavior with 2 Ag towers (one planter, and one harvester, for a full field that is only harvested upon demand) to separately control harvest by circuit. But we found that each tower maintains "ownership" of everything it planted. So the two functions can't be separated with different buildings, either.

Yes agree with this. I currently have to have a delay circuit around my harvesting to delay disabling the tower until after seeds have been consumed from its inventory. I usually have towers disabled in order to not harvest until production is ready to use whatever was harvested instead of it just backing up and spoiling.

to piggyback on this, it would be neat if the towers also output number of plants in range as a signal, optionally detecting matured plants only.

Koub wrote: Sun Dec 08, 2024 6:55 pm [Koub] Merged a couple threads with the same suggestion.

Technically speaking, mine suggestion is more than the original topic. :D

Hares wrote: Wed Dec 11, 2024 8:14 pm Technically speaking, mine suggestion is more than the original topic.

Absolutely, but when merging threads, it's the chronological order that matters, we moderators have no control over it. You should have been faster .

+1 for this! And a personal suggestion to call the toggles/filters "sowing" and "reaping".

I propose having a condition where the agricultural tower won't harvest unless it has a signal. It sounds small, but I think it would do a lot!

To mitigate Gleba pollution, you have to harvest as little as possible. To control the harvests, you have to connect your agricultural towers to the circuit network-- but there's a catch.

The tower doesn't differentiate planting and harvesting-- they're both just "on." There's no way to read when the plants are done, what the tower is doing, or to prevent one or the other. The circuit network is functionally blind to harvests until they happen.

This means that, to prevent premature harvests, you also can't stock up on planted fruit without a very finicky clock system.

Having these as different signals would open up a lot of mechanical depth for Gleba-- because now, you don't have to just 'accept' spoilage, you can control how many resources you get. It would be a balance, do you want to just muscle through the pentapod attacks, or set up this circuit network to mitigate the spores?

+1, seeding/harvesting could be separated.

I have found managing seed planting is key to controlling fruit output.

Inserting one seed will result in 50 fruit after 5 minutes. An inserter with hand size 1 inserting seeds, clocked in any way you choose (no smaller than approx 240 ticks per agri-tower) will yield a fruit output as regular as the planting timer, in batches of 50. The 240 tick minimum assumes the agri-tower has every square in range plantable. If you need more fruit then add more towers.

I can't give a mathematical rationale for the 240 tick figure, smarter minds than me may have already figured it out. Indeed they may have already discarded the idea as fundamentally flawed, but it is keeping me in 20k Agricultural Science per minute for some time without a hitch and with every single fruit processed, burning seeds pretty much full time! Setting it much below 240 results in seeds and eventually fruit backing up inside the tower.

Vast fields can be controlled with a single combinator. The ratio of fruit yields between yumako and jellynut can be controlled by using different timing intervals (for the same number of agri-towers).

I like the idea of accessing the intervals from the tower itself, and addressing plant/harvest separately. It would make my system obsolete and make it easier to address imbalances caused by power cuts and attacks!

Makka77 wrote: Sun Sep 28, 2025 12:26 pm I have found managing seed planting is key to controlling fruit output.

Inserting one seed will result in 50 fruit after 5 minutes. An inserter with hand size 1 inserting seeds, clocked in any way you choose (no smaller than approx 240 ticks per agri-tower) will yield a fruit output as regular as the planting timer, in batches of 50. The 240 tick minimum assumes the agri-tower has every square in range plantable. If you need more fruit then add more towers.

This idea falls apart the moment fruits stopped being consumed in full capacity.
The "stop harvesting" mode of work will solve that.

Hares wrote: Mon Sep 29, 2025 3:59 pm

This idea falls apart the moment fruits stopped being consumed in full capacity.
The "stop harvesting" mode of work will solve that.

Never stop consuming fruit! Process it for seeds then burn what's left, or if you have enough seeds just burn everything!

Makka77 wrote: Mon Sep 29, 2025 4:02 pm

Hares wrote: Mon Sep 29, 2025 3:59 pm This idea falls apart the moment fruits stopped being consumed in full capacity.
The "stop harvesting" mode of work will solve that.

Never stop consuming fruit! Process it for seeds then burn what's left, or if you have enough seeds just burn everything!

I made my Gleba base error-prone. It successfully recovered itself without in-person interaction multiple times after several catastrophous disasters, including but not limited to:

• Trains not departing due to Wube removing a virtual signal
• Trains stuck at the deadlock
• Stomper attacks

All of these resulted in power outages that lasted multiple hours before I noticed it (mainly because Factorio was running on the background), after that I made a global alert system. And all of these were recovered after restoring power and rebuilding destroyed machines, no resupply/reconfiguration/egg hunting was necessary.

If I just added system that constantly consumes seeds and produces fruits, that base would have gone ages ago.

Hares wrote: Mon Sep 29, 2025 4:12 pm

Makka77 wrote: Mon Sep 29, 2025 4:02 pm

Hares wrote: Mon Sep 29, 2025 3:59 pm This idea falls apart the moment fruits stopped being consumed in full capacity.
The "stop harvesting" mode of work will solve that.

Never stop consuming fruit! Process it for seeds then burn what's left, or if you have enough seeds just burn everything!

I made my Gleba base error-prone. It successfully recovered itself without in-person interaction multiple times after several catastrophous disasters, including but not limited to:

• Trains not departing due to Wube removing a virtual signal
• Trains stuck at the deadlock
• Stomper attacks

All of these resulted in power outages that lasted multiple hours before I noticed it (mainly because Factorio was running on the background), after that I made a global alert system. And all of these were recovered after restoring power and rebuilding destroyed machines, no resupply/reconfiguration/egg hunting was necessary.

If I just added system that constantly consumes seeds and produces fruits, that base would have gone ages ago.

Sounds like you have an excellent system in place for your requirements. I suggested one combinator as the bare minimum, but I have a combinator system controlling throughout, restarts, etc. Mine has recovered the two times its needed to, fingers crossed for the future!

+1 better circuit connections for these would be wonderful, as well as a report of harvested or sown similar to machines working or finished signals

There is a sneaky way to extract this information in the base game, however. An inserter ready to insert a seed into a tower that's full will take exactly 1 tick to do so, so a decision can be made based on when the count of seeds in the tower is 1 less than maximum, for most seeds that's 29. The signal will equal 29 at exactly the tick the seed is planted successfully, useful for triggering other logic