Cactus Farm - Failure

My next venture was a farm. However, the Forestry mod doesn't exist in Tekkit Lite, so I couldn't use most of the information about farms in Tekkit.

The way to build farms in Tekkit Lite is by using a Planter, Fertilizer, and Harvester from the MineFactory Reloaded mod. The Tekkit Lite Wiki page on Planters has a couple of great diagrams on how to do it. I love diagrams--all the knowledge without the tedium of watching a video. 

The diagrams were absolutely fantastic--precise and easy to understand--but I still had trouble. My planter seemed to plant just fine, but then that is the only piece that worked. When looking at my fertilizer and harvester, it seemed like maybe they were faced the wrong direction, but placing and replacing them from every angle changed nothing. I searched and searched:

"How to get Havester/Fertilizer from MineFactory Reloaded to work?"

"How to turn the Harvester or Fertilizer from MineFactory Reloaded" 

"Tool used for Harvester in Tekkit Lite"

and came up with nothing. This was a few weeks ago, and is seems the Tekkit Lite Wiki is on the ball, because they've now updated the description to mention exactly what I needed, the Precision Sledgehammer. A couple of clicks with that, and my wheat farm worked like a charm.

I changed it once to a tree farm my using saplings in the Planter and only putting one dirt block in the very middle with cobblestone all around. That also worked like a charm.

My mining buddy and I, at the time, were needing quite a few waterproof transport pipes, so I decided to change it to a cactus farm. My advice is: if you're trying to grow a cactus farm in Tekkit Lite, remember to replace the soil with sand! I forgot about that somewhat obvious step and was stuck for quite awhile. My second piece of advice is: don't make a cactus farm this way. It does technically work, but the fertilizer doesn't do anything to the cactus. Bonemeal won't work either. The cactus has to grow at its own pace, and that just takes way too long to be an efficient use of power.

Here is a much better alternative:

This version of an automated cactus farm still works beautifully in Tekkit Lite (version 0.5.7). We only changed ours to have glass on the top instead of wood, so it looks like a pretty little cactus greenhouse.

If you have any other problems with MineFactory Reloaded machines, I found this site useful: github.com/balr0g/MineFactoryReloaded/wiki. Happy Farming!

The First Project: A Fisher

I wanted to pick an easy first project. Thumbing through the pages of machines, I chose to build the Fisher. Looks simple enough, I thought. I'll have a reasonable supply of food, I thought. Good.

If the fisher was my only possible source of food, I would have starved to death.

More than once.

I haven't played with Tekkit Classic very much, so my knowledge base is woefully limited. I have, however, played with it a little bit. Tekkit Lite has just enough similarities to hang myself with. I don't fully understand MJ (BuildCraft power) or EU (Industrial Craft 2 power), but according to the wiki article the Fisher could use both. Good.

Because I had extremely limited knowledge as well as resources, I had to choose very basic power sources. Would a nuclear reactor or some sort of flux capacitor thingie be a much better power source? Definitely. Do I, personally, have any chance of making one on my survival server? Not in the slightest.

In the end, here's what I learned about how the Fisher works:

On Power: Redstone Engines aren't enough to power it. They won't even start pumping. You need at least a Combustion Engine, and even then, they're ridiculously slow. If you're poor like me, use power from Industrial Craft 2. I used 4 Water Mills. I hear Solar Panels are good, too.

On orientation: Don't try to plug power cables into the bottom. It needs that area clear to fish. The caught fish pop out the hole in the top, so don't plug it in there. It doesn't seem to use the sides, though, so plug it in there.

On being completely submerged: Still operational!

On its interface: If you see any red pop up on the far left column, then you know it's getting some power. When the middle column fills up with green, a fish will pop out the top. If the right column fills up with blue, it's resting for some reason. You know it's getting some power, but maybe it needs more or maybe something else is wrong.

On storage: Regular ol' pipes work great, assuming you attach them at the top. You can pipe them into a furnace to cook them automatically, too. If you don't want ugly pipes running all the way to dry land, you can even plop a chest directly on top of the fisher, no pipe needed.

My finished product was 4 Water Mills deep underwater, all connected together and run up to the Fisher with Ultra-Low-Current Cable. I used some cobblestone pipe to transport the fish to a wooden chest I had on shore, but now that I know better, I'll probably take the pipe out, and give my Fisher a fashionable wooden chest hat, which they tell me is all the rave this season. (Tekkit Lite Version 0.5.2)