Factorio Forums

TL;DR

Agricultural Towers should be able to know not to harvest the same tree if two or more tower areas overlap

What?

Almost every building and machine "communicates" with adjacent ones for better efficiency, for example, inserters will not keep inserting items inside an assembler if the internal buffer has been reached. If they did not communicate, you'd constantly see inserters have their hands full and be stuck in the inserting position until there was enough room to do so, and all inserters would need to be filtered since, if they did not communicate, they would not know what item is "valid for insertion" and which one isn't. Another example would be the asteroid collector arms on space platforms, they are never competing for asteroids to grab, they know amongst each other what asteroid chunk "has been claimed" by a collector and which one hasn't, so they don't waste time or energy going for a chunk that's already being grabbed or would be grabbed by a faster/closer arm.

It makes no sense that Agricultural Towers are apparently the only ones that don't cooperate. When you have overlapping areas for this building, they'll fight each other to harvest a plant first, and even if the plant has been harvested and re-planted, they'll still waste time trying to plant in the same area (pointlessly)

Why?

A lot of mechanics in endgame Factorio are: Make the factory more compact with good modules and make more of the factory.
Agricultural towers fall on the latter, never the former. I'm not asking to make it simpler to expand, that's really fine, I quite like it as it is, I'm asking to be able to make the planting/harvesting process faster, and if it's not modules, then let me increase how fast a field gets processed.