Hello!

Long story short, I started to dive into the exact same idea of quality seeds/plants should produce quality items, and about half way through tinkering with this idea, I came across your post several months ago: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=122445 - I was wondering if you had any luck in those months to get the agricultural tower working with some sort of events or something.

I am able to store quality by creating a "fake" jellystem or yumako-tree with fake versions of the jellynut and yumako items with the quality name appended onto the fake plant. When its harvested by the player or bot, it overrides the fake items I created to give the player the real jellynut or yumako of that quality and quantity. Its just the agricultural tower in its infamous glory, acts like it doesn't exist to any events or readability. I am trying to read its inventory using on_tick, but I hate to go that route as that's a bit resource intensive if I check on every tick...

Thought I reach out to see if you made any headway in this area and share what I have done so far!

Thanks for your time,
-NovaDrox

Howdy!

I also had a follow-up after my own investigations, to which I got this response, which didn't actually address the core of my question =( post about quality trees.

I could never get it working, as originally envisaged, which is a huge part of the reason this mod works the ways it does. You could almost argue its better off for it - as dealing with quality fruits directly (assuming its easy to turnover seeds like regular plants) is very overpowered.

It sounds like you've reached the same impasse I found - I also considered the "many fake named plants" "one for each quality" and use triggers to bypass and give the real items - but it also felt like a hacky way to solve a problem which should be as simple as adding a quality tag or something to a plant prototype. lol

I wish you all the best in your investigation, please let me know if you get the mod working, who knows, maybe I should have another crack at it too, I even tried to direct message Boskid, who replied to my post with the exampled quality trees in his screenshot but he never got back to me on how he actually did that.

Darn ):

Well, guess its back to the drawing board about this. Seeing that post you got from boskid does inspire a bit of confidence, leaving me wonder how we could extend the trees and plants to get the same results. In terms of the fake plant method, yeah I don't blame you on it being sketchy. I've done a good job so far of mimicing the real prototypes, and even being to swap the event.buffer when you harvest the items from the fakes to the real ones so its seamless, but without much info from the agricultural tower, that's about as far as it gets with that method...

I will keep you posted if I find anything in my research to get this going. Thank you for this further info!

Hey mate,

I asked again specifically for ag tower on events, and they will be added to the next reelase for all our modding pleasure - this will make making the initial envisagement of quality plants easily do-able!

https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?t=129937

I am currently working on a really cool mod which is about taming pentapods, and if you maintain their nests they will harvest and plant yumako and jellystems for you, and this system will involve various quality mechanic options. One of the options is to give the little critters a way to plant quality plants, in a performant manner - and its working really well! (basically just whenever a plant is created, store it in a big vector with a key using a x,y position in a prime hashing function. Then whenever a bot or player (or anything with a harvest event that exists ahem ag-tower ;-) ) harvests them, you insert the quality from the hash table by looking up the plants position, if it exists, and override the loot table.

You can even render a fake quality icon on the plants with quality to really sell the effect, the only issue is the plant itself doesn't say yumako-tree (legendary) in the name - its only a visual.

Anyway, keep a look out for my upcoming mod, and let me know if you wanna colab making a simple ag-tower quality plants mod (I know I'll be making one as soon as the next update pops)

Hello hello,

That is some awesome news to hear! I kind of took a break from it as I just kept hitting the same brick wall and focused on another mod idea I had - still in development as my game is currently firing off multiple of the same event (on the same tick) when I place an equipment. For some reason...

As for your new mod you're developing, that's a unique idea for the pentapods! Why only have bitters work for use when we can make them work too xP Will the pentapods have an advantage over the ag tower in terms of like growth performance or something else besides being able to plant quality plants? If you can say without spoiling too much :P

Lastly, I be very keen on how to fake that overlay icon on the plant entities as that is something I like to do for my mod for quality plants. In terms of collaborating, I would be up for it if you want to! Though, I will say I am a bit of a beginner when it comes to this area of programming. My first mod I did was a simple tiered wall clone that allowed for regeneration to be applied to them (in a non-overpowered way). Nothing fancy, but I am trying to expand my horizons with doing my new drone companion mod (and even mass item air transportation or an invasive plant/bacteria that spreads over the map slowly).

All and all, its great to hear that 1. They are adding events to the ag tower, and 2. You're development is still going strong from what you have said here!

I should really get better at hosting my mod sources - in development or no - on my github so I can more easily share when I'm away from my computer, I'll sort that out and share where I am upto if your interested, which has the quality tree thing implemented so you can have a look at how I did it.

The pentapod planting might be faster? ... I've still yet to decide exactly - they kind of double as a military defensive building too which is fun - and they have a range of harvesting which is bigger than the ag tower, but obviously require bioflux as a trade for their fruits without them turning on you. You can even bring them to nuavis which I thought was a fun addition. Still lots to be decided, but all the base stuff is in place, just need to kit-bash some solid entity sprites for the custom spawner and I'll be done haha.

invasive plant / bacteria has been on my list too! Specifically the red lickmaw stuff on Gleba feels like a perfect for a spreading infection idea. No idea how to do that implementation at the moment either haha.

I am also rather new to this - only started when space age came out.

Yeah! If you have it up on github or something, would gladly like to take a look at it to see how you did it!

That sounds pretty fun indeed if they can help defend your plants. Would you be able to give them quality based on their nest? Kind of like the bitter nests, but the actual the entity would have more health, speed, etc etc. Even if that isn't an intended feature, what you have so far sounds really cool!

Ha! Glad I am not the only one thinking of this. I had the thought it being like creep from StarCraft 1 and 2, or Creeper World 4, where there is a node that produces this ever growing spread of creep. Pollution causes increase rate of growth, and if provoked by an attack, the spread moves faster towards your base. As evolution continues on, harder creep is created, but little/massive tendrils spawn to act kind of like worms, but are able to shoot at walls and such to poke at you while the creep spreads towards your base to cause contact damage. To add onto it, you could harvest this creep for further tech that helps fight against it or something. Those are my initial thoughts to the idea :p

As for modding, I just started roughly a month ago myself all due to posting a bug on someone else's mod. It kind of inspired me to start making my own from that :p Still have a lot to learn, like making custom spirits for my mods, as I like to do more then just recolor/tint versions of things, lol.