Agricultural Flower Growing – Grow flowers on growing tables

Intention

In Minetest Game flowers spread very slow and have a maximum density of 7 “flora types” in a 9x9 area (81 nodes).

If a player needs more flowers for dyes or other things this could cause some trouble to find flowers of the needed type and also would result in harvesting all the flowers which removes the chance of re-growing flowers in the world.

This mod addresses this problem by providing a plant table where players can agriculturally grow flowers from seeds. Those seeds can be crafted from 4 flowers of a type. With this only 4 flowers are needed to grow infinite amounts of a flower without having to search and harvest the whole world.

Crafting and placement

There are three elements needed in order to use the plant table. The plant table itself, a plant lamp and a default chest or a locked default chest. It is also important how to place the nodes (the order of placement is not relevant, though).

Crafting

The plant table can be crafted from any kind of soil, default bricks, and any kind of wood. When crafting it, there will be three plant tables returned.

The plant lamp can be crafted from any kind of fence, any kind of torch, default glass and default steel ingots.

There are three plant lamps returned when crafting it.

Placement

In order to work the placement has to be done properly. Place the plant table there you like and place a chest below the plant table, then place a plant lamp one node above the top surface of the plant table.

You don’t need direct access to the chest after placement. The plant table works as a “proxy” for the chest. So right-clicking the plant table opens the chest inventory for placing the needed items there.

Please note: Due to keeping the mod’s footprint small the plant table cannot take items out of any other chests than the default chest and the default locked chest. It can however take items out of default locked chests only if it was placed by the same player that placed the locked chest.

Usage

To use the plant table you need to craft seeds. Seeds are made from flowers. The recipe is always the same. The seeds are distinguishable by their highlight color.

Seeds are not plantable in the world and not obtainable in the world to keep the mod’s footprint small. You can only craft them and use them in conjunction with the plant table.

If everything is placed properly (you know if everything was placed as needed if right-clicking the plant table opens the chest and the infotext indicating the water level) you now can fill the chest.

Place as many seeds as you want in the chest (seeds are automatically taken by alphabetical order of the flower they grow into) and also put as many water buckets as you want in the chest.

When the timer executes the plant table takes the water out of one bucket and internally stores the water level (the bucket is returned to the chest) and then takes one seed and grows it. As long as the flower is not taken off the table nothing more happens. If you take the flower the next time the timer runs a seed is taken from the chest and gets planted.

This repeats until there are either no seeds left or the water level is at 0 and there are no water buckets for refill available. Otherwise refilling the plant table’s water storage will be done automatically and if there are seeds the process continues.

Configuration

The following configuration options are available (shown with their default values.

# Plant table timer minimum value.
# Do not set higher than afgrow_timer_maximum.
afgrow_timer_minimum = 30

# Plant table timer maximum value.
# Do not set lower than afgrow_timer_minimum.
afgrow_timer_maximum = 90

# Duration display multiplicator (1 to 1000 in advanced configuration)
# 1000 means 1000 times larger than the random value between minimum and
# maximum. This is only a visual thing for psychological reasons. Really
# read settingtypes.txt documentation on this value :)
afgrow_timer_multiplicator = 1.25

See settingtypes file for a detailed description on what those values do.