Agricultural Roboport — Lightweight automatic seeding & harvesting for Factorio

Overview

Agricultural Roboport automates seeding and harvesting inside a roboport area. It places virtual seed ghosts that robots build into real plants, and orders deconstruction of mature or unwanted vegetation — designed to scale with large maps while keeping CPU use bounded.

Key features

• Automatic seeding and harvesting modes (Harvest only / Harvest & Seed).
• Vegetation Planner: Manual selection tool for planning vegetation in specific areas - draw boxes to seed or clear (Alt-select).
• Per-roboport filters (whitelist / blacklist) to control which crops are planted.
• Independent filter configuration for vegetation planner tool.
• Option to seed only inside logistic range (respect logistics coverage).
• Virtual-seed system: plants are placed as ghosts and built by robots.
• Quality support: Plants retain quality from seeds and display quality badges. Toggle quality tracking with startup setting.
• Quality mutations: Configurable chance for harvested plants to upgrade or downgrade quality tiers.
• Universal mod compatibility: Automatically detects ALL plantable items from any mod - no configuration needed.
• Smart filtering: Whitelist mode supports per-quality filtering; blacklist mode blocks all qualities of an item.
• Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) scheduler: spreads work across ticks to avoid spikes.
• Per-roboport precomputed grids for harvesting to minimize search costs.
• Runtime settings to tune performance vs responsiveness.
• Multi-language ready (English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese).

How it works (player summary)

1. Build an Agricultural Roboport.
2. Open its GUI to choose mode, filters, and options.
3. Roboport precomputes a small grid of candidate positions on placement and then:
4. On each scheduler tick it processes a small batch of positions (configurable), issuing deconstruction orders for harvestable plants and placing seed ghosts where needed.
5. Work is spread over many ticks (TDM), so the mod scales to large surfaces with controlled CPU use.
6. Quality tracking: When enabled, plants preserve seed quality and can mutate during harvest (configurable rates).
7. Vegetation Planner: Already got construction robots, but have no Roboports? No problem, Vegetation Planner is your new best friend!
8. Manual selection tool for planning vegetation in specific areas
9. Access via shortcut bar (ALT+V) after researching "Soil Analysis"
10. Independent filter configuration for precise control
11. Perfect for decorative landscaping and targeted crop placement

Settings (what to tweak)

Startup Settings:
- Enable quality plants — Toggle quality tracking and display (requires game restart).
- Seed in dense grid — Attempts to plant on every tile instead of every 3rd tile. Enables much tighter plant packing and requires more construction bots. Requires game restart.

Runtime Settings:
- Max seeds per tick — how many seed placements are attempted per tick (lower reduces CPU).
- Ignore cliffs — when false, cliffs may be planned for deconstruction; set true to preserve cliffs.
- TDM period / tick interval — controls how often and how TDM divides work across ticks.
- Harvest checks per call — number of harvest grid cells scanned each harvest invocation (higher = faster coverage, more CPU).
- Max harvests per call — limit how many deconstruction orders per invocation.
- Seed checks per call — limit how many seed candidate cells are checked per invocation.
- Mutation chance multiplier — multiplies the base 0.5% quality mutation chance (0-200).
- Chance of quality improvement — probability (0-100%) that mutations upgrade instead of downgrade quality.
- Debug (runtime) — enables file logging while troubleshooting (off by default).

Performance notes & tuning

• The mod is optimized for scale: it precomputes grids on placement and uses filtered small-area searches during operation to minimize returned-entity counts.
• If you see slowdowns on very large maps, reduce "harvest checks per call" and "max seeds per tick" to trade coverage speed for lower CPU.
• The TDM tick interval can be decreased for more frequent small batches or increased to reduce wake frequency.

Tips

• Use filters to avoid planting undesired species and to limit the work set.
• Whitelist filtering: Select specific items with specific qualities to plant only those combinations.
• Blacklist filtering: Block entire item types regardless of quality (e.g., blacklist "tree-seed" blocks all qualities).
• If you change settings, the scheduler re-registers itself to the new interval automatically.
• Quality farming: Enable quality support to track seed quality through the growth cycle and configure mutation rates for breeding higher-tier plants.
• Adjust quality improvement chance to control upgrade vs downgrade probability during mutations.
• Automatic mod compatibility: The mod automatically detects all plantable items from any mod - works out of the box with Boompuff Agriculture, Space Age planets, and any other agricultural mods.
• Vegetation Planner: Use the planner tool (ALT+V) for manual control over specific areas. Great for decorative landscaping or precision farming.
• Force sparse mode in planner: Override dense seeding setting per selection area using the planner's configuration.

Compatibility & translations

• Built for Factorio 2.0+.
• Space Age and Quality are optional
• Universal mod compatibility: Automatically detects and supports ALL agricultural items from any mod. Scans every prototype category for items with plant_result - works with base game, DLCs, and all third-party mods.
• No configuration needed: Just install and play. Works out of the box with Boompuff Agriculture, Space Age planets, and any other mod adding plantable items.
• Full locale support included (English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese).