[Project] Vertical Farms/Grinders? (Like Turbo Truffle Worm Farm)

[ZeroGravitas]

Ok, so I've just posted up a written guide and video guide about a fun little use for an active size 1 hoik (and hoik engine).

Anyway, what I'm asking the T-MEC group is: what other farms might be configured to fit neatly into this slim, tall (i.e. 'vertical') farming format?

Lining up farms next to each other could save a lot of effort excavating additional sites, by simply extending a cavern instead. It might be convenient and look quite neat, etc...

Or are there not many farms that can be co-located? Diceman's Ultimate Chain Autofarm went all over the world, to different altitudes and natural locations (like the dungeon).

The aim here isn't necessarily to be most efficient, or most compact, but more to be easy to build in game, more accessible and fun to use. For example, speeding the truffle worms up is almost entirely frivolous and seeing the mobs getting killed is not necessary either, but more interesting. Perhaps a series of small, separate, farms in parallel, rather than a somewhat complex surface inter-changer mechanism crammed cleverly into a single farm space. They may need different loot hoiks in each one anyway, for example...

So, thoughts? Suggestions?

 

[Choir]

I use a (almost) vertical grinder for nymphs banners. Without using hoiks, mobs go faster vertically than horizontally !

Nymphs spawn as losts girls (so regular dart trap awoken them but don't kill), flame and spears traps kills bats, slimes, or others trash mobs.
Lava destroy white loots, but not the banner.


EDIT : Dang. I didn't see your video at the top of your post
In that case ... I noticed while farming that some monsters were only 1 block tall, like beetles. In my worm grinder, red beetles aren't killed by my dart battery.
If I understand well, this vertical grinder could be used only for small monsters. Right ?

 

[ZeroGravitas]

this vertical grinder could be used only for small monsters. Right

The verticality is more about the spawn mechanics and space use. The hoik is only to collect the 'loot', which in this case happens to be 'alive'. You could use a very similar setup to gather certain other bait creatures and animals, perhaps, but not sure you'd need to collect the monsters you want to kill. Just collect their loot afterwards. Although, moving them around (with different sized hoiks, of course) might be a better way to separate out their loot specifically (e.g. to avoid clogging the inventory and/or avoid it de-spawning).

Nymphs/Lost Girls should spawn and be killed in my truffle farm, simply by replacing the mushroom grass with plain stone (or whatever they most like). It would then only be a case of making sure all banners are collected regularly (or automatically), to ensure they don't de-spawn. The risk is that a loot hoik for the bigger loot (banners are size 2) would also pick up mobs. So you'd have to make sure that they can't get to the player (especially if AFK) and are dropped back into the kill zone afterwards.

 

[HDanke]

The concept of vertical farms is something that I played with for a long time, but the ease of getting and setting up dart trap engines left this subject a bit untested. To contribute to this topic, I have a hoik powered turbo dual jellyfish statue farm presented in my pocket farms project.

 

[ZeroGravitas]

the ease of getting and setting up dart trap engines left this subject a bit untested

Dart traps are a big issue here for the vertical setup, in that they are generally more suited to horizontal operation, given their direction of flight, etc. So will this be a big limiting factor against vertical farms, pre-temple key? Is there all that much to farm before that anyway? I'm thinking of wild type spawn grinders, btw, rather than statue farms.

 

[Choir]

The verticality is more about the spawn mechanics and space use. The hoik is only to collect the 'loot', which in this case happens to be 'alive'. You could use a very similar setup to gather certain other bait creatures and animals, perhaps, but not sure you'd need to collect the monsters you want to kill. Just collect their loot afterwards. Although, moving them around (with different sized hoiks, of course) might be a better way to separate out their loot specifically (e.g. to avoid clogging the inventory and/or avoid it de-spawning).

Nymphs/Lost Girls should spawn and be killed in my truffle farm, simply by replacing the mushroom grass with plain stone (or whatever they most like). It would then only be a case of making sure all banners are collected regularly (or automatically), to ensure they don't de-spawn. The risk is that a loot hoik for the bigger loot (banners are size 2) would also pick up mobs. So you'd have to make sure that they can't get to the player (especially if AFK) and are dropped back into the kill zone afterwards.

Here is the complete version of my farm :

Hoiks gather everything, mobs and loots, that fells into lava. The aim of placing hoiks here is to speed up the grinding. Faster you kill, faster the respawn will be.
Lava and traps kill monsters, player will automatically collects loots. AFK => 1 banner/IRL night.
Nymphs can also spawn in mushroom biomes. But they are simply too rare in HM.


Concerning your vertical farm, if a monster is on the elevator, maybe some spears traps placed near the hoik should do the work. But it may kill everything, including worms. Need some tests.

 

[HDanke]

Dart traps are a big issue here for the vertical setup, in that they are generally more suited to horizontal operation, given their direction of flight, etc. So will this be a big limiting factor against vertical farms, pre-temple key? Is there all that much to farm before that anyway? I'm thinking of wild type spawn grinders, btw, rather than statue farms.

Not that much to farm, we have just lava and dart traps, so vertical farms seem to be more like a post plantera thing for now. Pre hard mode farming isn't a popular topic, mainly due to how limited is, it needs to be addressed however.

 

[DicemanX]

Not that much to farm, we have just lava and dart traps, so vertical farms seem to be more like a post plantera thing for now. Pre hard mode farming isn't a popular topic, mainly due to how limited is, it needs to be addressed however.

One worthwhile thing to farm for starting in pre-hardmode is gold for reforges, dynamite, wire, and eventually cannonballs in early hardmode. What's the gold per hour rate on an optimized jellyfish farm? I have a completely different approach to pre-hardmode gold farming I want to work on, but I likely will put it on hold if I cannot beat the jellyfish numbers.

 

[HDanke]

One worthwhile thing to farm for starting in pre-hardmode is gold for reforges, dynamite, wire, and eventually cannonballs in early hardmode. What's the gold per hour rate on an optimized jellyfish farm? I have a completely different approach to pre-hardmode gold farming I want to work on, but I likely will put it on hold if I cannot beat the jellyfish numbers.

Almost 24 jellyfish a second, the cooldown isn't exactly half a second, it's enough to fill up your inventory in a couple of minutes.

 

[DicemanX]

Almost 24 jellyfish a second, the cooldown isn't exactly half a second, it's enough to fill up your inventory in a couple of minutes.

So what's the ballpark as far as platinum per hour would you say?

 

[ZeroGravitas]

what's the ballpark as far as platinum per hour

~1% drop rate for necklaces, and close to 12 jelly kills per second, you should be getting ~7 necklaces per minute, per statue, on average. Each necklace worth just over 1 gold, on average. So for twin statues: 2 x 7 x 60 = ~840 gold/h (8.4 platinum). But with the item limit at 400, you could run if AFK for less than half an hour before having to collect and sell. A Hero style 'tracktronic' farm should be pretty much as efficient as Danke's clever hoik powered contraption, provided optimised track length and good plate wiring.

Anyway. So the early game has little to farm, which is kind of good for this farm format, since we don't have to worry so much about trying to fit in dart trap configuration into a vertical setting. So that leaves hardmode items, like?: souls, rod of dischord, etc... Anyone think of anything significant Diceman's not shown how to farm? (Other than *all* of the banners.)

Also, just thought of another possible advantage to this setup compared with the existing surface changers: you could pick and mix, turning a couple of different ones on simultaneously (depending on the loot gathering system(s) involved). Would have to make the farms very narrow, but my calculations suggest that even 10 tiles wide should be fine, less if multiple farms are always run simultaneously.

 

[ZeroGravitas]

Hmmm, what about pre-hardmode mushroom zombie farming? At 15 silver a piece is that worth it? (Would need almost 1 spawn per second to equal necklace farming.) From this Reddit post today.

Also, @Choir, you could certainly try making your nymph farm more vertical. Narrower, for a start. Alternatively, purely changing out the mushroom grass in my truffle farm for ice would farm nmyphs just fine. Then install a loot collector instead of the worm elevator.

 

[DicemanX]

Here's a quick sketch of my attempt at gold farming pre-hardmode:

This is a modification of my rotten chunk grinder, incorporating Vendidurt's idea of an overhead mushroom farm:

http://forums.terraria.org/index.php?threads/full-afk-console-worm-food-farm.5364/

The player sits in the hole in the bottom right corner where the altar is situated (altars tend to spawn close to 0 altitude). Dart traps fire over the surface, and the surface cycles between an actuated and de-actuated state. Two rows on bottom hoiks are also actuated/deactuated continuously. Above are corruption grass blocks that also cycle between actuated and deactuated states to rain down mushrooms below and have them hoiked to the player.

The idea is to keep collecting chunks and vile mushrooms via the hoiks, and use them to constantly create meat to summon Eater of Worlds. 10 eaters should be enough for 80-100 gold. It's the demonite ore that sells for a fair bit (8 silver per ore, and each eater will generate 100 ore on average).

The farm isn't AFK because rotten meat has to be constantly crafted and consumed. Also, the bottleneck is at the rotten chunks - they control how quickly the eaters can be summoned. The eaters can die instantly if they spawn right in the path of the darts, or it might take a while if they don't.

If the Eater can be forced to spawn at the darts, and if the chunk collection rate can be increased, then theoretically this farm should produce the best gold/hr rate. However, I have all spawn points outside the surface blocked within mob spawn limits, and yet the eater occasionally spawns elsewhere. I think someone mentioned that the bosses can actually spawn in locations much further than regular mob spawns. Are idea if that's true?

 

[ZeroGravitas]

corruption grass blocks that also cycle between actuated and deactuated states

Have you observed that vile mushrooms grow on actuated blocks too? (As I first realised on seeing Hero's glowing mushroom farm.) And aren't the mushrooms the bottleneck? At 6 per worm food that's quite a grow rate you need; a *lot* of teirs to build...

bosses can actually spawn in locations much further than regular mob spawns

Certainly they don't need a safe spawn surface to appear on, I tried this out by building an area that was entirely spawn blocked for over ~200 tiles in each direction (with infill and lava) and bosses still popped up, just to the side of the screen.

 

[DicemanX]

Have you observed that vile mushrooms grow on actuated blocks too? (As I first realised on seeing Hero's glowing mushroom farm.) And aren't the mushrooms the bottleneck? At 6 per worm food that's quite a grow rate you need; a *lot* of teirs to build...

They seem to spawn pretty quickly even with my non-ideal set-up (non-ideal since I had a space of two tiles, instead of one tile, between surfaces, and with a 5-second timer). I've done a bit of testing already and the chunks have always been the bottleneck.

I was planning to change the timing system to use a 1-sec timer cascade and set it up so that the blocks actuate every 10 seconds for a 1 second duration. This should increase the grow rate of mushrooms.

Certainly they don't need a safe spawn surface to appear on, I tried this out by building an area that was entirely spawn blocked for over ~200 tiles in each direction (with infill and lava) and bosses still popped up, just to the side of the screen.

So you mean they can spawn anywhere, including inside of blocks themselves?

 

[ZeroGravitas]

So you mean they can spawn anywhere, including inside of blocks themselves?

I don't know, don't see why not. You'd need to test, pretty quick and easy though.

This should increase the grow rate of mushrooms.

So do vile mushrooms definitely not grow on corrupt grass blocks actuated to background?

 

[DicemanX]

I don't know, don't see why not. You'd need to test, pretty quick and easy though.

So do vile mushrooms definitely not grow on corrupt grass blocks actuated to background?

I've seen nothing grow on actuated corruption grass after letting it sit for quite a while (while mushrooms were growing in another section with non-actuated grass) so it seems that the mushrooms only grow on grass in the foreground.

I'll test the boss spawning and report back later!

 

[Choir]

Also, @Choir, you could certainly try making your nymph farm more vertical. Narrower, for a start. Alternatively, purely changing out the mushroom grass in my truffle farm for ice would farm nmyphs just fine. Then install a loot collector instead of the worm elevator.

I'm not 100% sure, but I noticed that if the spawn area is narrower, less monsters will spawn.
I need to test more.

 

[DicemanX]

OK tested whether I could control the Eater of Worlds spawn location - I blocked off a massive chunk of the area close to my location:

Every single EoW spawned to my left just offscreen and died almost immediately to the traps (the EoW spawns in a ball so the darts hit all sections at the same time). It looks as if boss spawns can be controlled. Now I'll have to figure out just how much has to be blocked off. If the chunk spawn rate can be improved this farm could be a serious money-maker!

Alternately, it might be the best key mold farm assuming every EoW segment can drop a key mold, since the EoW has 50 segments. If an EoW can be summoned and killed within 5 seconds (there's a slight delay before it appears after consuming the meat), then theoretically it could mean effectively increasing the spawn rate and drop rates by a factor of 10.

I recall @Suweeka and/or @W1K doing some testing on boss spawn conditions and posting pics of bosses spawning. Maybe they can weigh in on the boss spawn requirements, and what the limit is to spawn distances.

 

[ZeroGravitas]

I noticed that if the spawn area is narrower, less monsters will spawn.

This is true. Monsters only spawn 39-50 tiles above the tile you're stood on (a little lower than what you have built currently, I think. And making your spawn area narrower than, say 50-60 tiles (while 10-11 tall, so ~500-600 tiles area) might lead to a noticable drop off in spawn rate due to wasted spawn events. This is not a linear effect though, so you can probably find an acceptable compromise/cut-off point. A little tricky to measure in game, with certainty.

Every single EoW spawned to my left just offscreen

May have to check that the directionality is not effected by anything silly like the direction player is facing, or which part of the map you are in... But just off to the left sounds about right to me. hate to say it, but this kind of testing might be easier with Gameiki's zoom (out) functionality (is that in the general release yet?).