Automated Crop Towers
A crop tower is a vertical multiblock that farms many crops in a compact footprint, hands-free. It is colony-scale automation, not a shortcut — every slot obeys the same rules as an ordinary crop, so a tower can never out-produce or duplicate compared with an equivalent farm.
Building a tower
Place a Crop Tower Controller, then stack Crop Tower Frame blocks directly above it. The tower's
tier is its height: it forms once the casing run reaches the minimum height and its capacity is
height x slots-per-layer, up to a configured maximum (a taller stack simply caps out). The controller
caches the formed structure and only rechecks it on a slow safety interval (a few seconds by default) — it
never scans the whole structure every tick, and a freshly stacked tower forms by itself within moments.
The controller's screen carries this build guide in-GUI: a panel down its left-hand column walks through the stacking steps (with a frame/controller sketch), so the tower can be built without leaving the game.
Running a tower
Feed the controller through Core side configuration:
- Resource seeds into the seed slots — the tower plants empty slots from them.
- Nero Flux and Nutrient — each growth step costs the same NF and nutrient as a powered grow bed.
- An optional Speed or Yield Fertiliser in the fertiliser slot boosts growth or harvest within the same caps as field fertiliser. A Yield Fertiliser dose is only consumed when a harvest actually banks its yield — a jammed output cluster costs nothing.
- Resource Fragments are deposited into the output slots on harvest — the full yield, split across as many stacks as needed; pull them with hoppers or pipes. A harvest is all-or-nothing: if the whole yield does not fit, the slot stays mature and retries once space is freed, and nothing is ever discarded. A zero-yield harvest still resets the slot so the tower keeps cycling.
Each cycle the controller works a bounded number of slots from a rolling cursor: it plants an empty slot, advances a growing one (paying NF/nutrient), or harvests a mature one. Planting, the progression gate, capped yield, and genetics/fertiliser bonuses all use the same shared logic as ordinary crops.
Environment surcharge
Towers keep working in hostile environments, but not for free. Each layer runs the same climate check
a grow bed uses (habitability, and the sealed-greenhouse requirement for high tiers, relaxed by the
crop's hardiness genetics). Where a grow bed would refuse to grow the crop, the tower layer instead pays
an NF surcharge — the growth step costs
grow_beds.energy_per_growth x crop_tower.hostile_environment_nf_multiplier (default 4x). Sealing the
tower inside a powered greenhouse, terraforming the region, or breeding
hardier crops removes the surcharge.
The controller screen
Alongside the slots, gauges and the height / active slots readout the controller shows:
- A growth bar summarising the planted slots: the fill is the average growth across every planted slot and the label counts how many are ready to harvest (e.g. "Ripe 3/12"). An empty tower shows the bare bar with a "Growth —" label, the same idiom as a bare grow bed.
- A status line with the tower's current blocker — progression gate closed, out of NF, out of nutrient, or a disabled/unknown material. Nothing planted reads as idle.
- A scrollable seed panel listing every material in the server's catalog. Unlike a grow bed the tower has no tier gate: any resource seed it accepts is a seed it will grow, whatever its tier. What still bites is checked at growth time — the progression gate, and the NF and nutrient the slot draws each step. The panel says so above the list rather than implying a bed-tier restriction that does not exist.
Genetics, contents, and safety
Slots carry full genetics and harvest history, which are preserved on save, chunk unload, and restart. Breaking the controller returns every stored item plus a seed for each planted slot (with its genetics and history), so nothing is lost when you take a tower down. Right-click the controller for its status (formed/height/slots/planted/NF/nutrient).
Performance
Work is bounded per pass and phase-offset, contents are cached, and crops are virtual slots rather than thousands of blocks — so a tower stays cheap even at colony scale. Any crop-layer visuals are presentation only; the server logic never depends on the renderer.
See also: Resource Crops, Automation, Genetics.