Agricultural tower

The Agricultural tower is a building used to manage plantations by harvesting and planting trees and collecting the fruit they produce. It is part of the agricultural production chain and can be controlled through the circuit network, which makes it useful for regulating fruit flow and preventing excess fruit from backing up into spoilage.

Unlike most resource-gathering structures, Agricultural towers do not benefit from mining productivity research and have no module slots. Their output is therefore driven by their built-in harvesting and planting behavior rather than by mining bonuses. Fruit processing is a separate step and does benefit from productivity; a biochamber alone provides 50% built-in productivity, and productivity modules can further improve seed return.

A few practical points are important when using them:

• Each processed fruit has a 2% chance to return its seed, so the expected long-term return is 1 seed per tree without productivity bonuses.
• This is only an average; a batch of fruits can still produce no seeds at all.
• Because fruit can spoil while waiting to be processed, letting harvested fruit accumulate for too long can reduce overall efficiency.
• Agricultural towers keep collecting fruit until their inventory is full, even if inserters are not removing it, so controlling production only with inserters is a poor idea.
• Circuit network control can be used to disable a tower and stop overproduction when fruit storage is getting backed up.
• Overlapping work areas do not improve throughput. If multiple towers can act on the same land, they will interfere with each other and slow down harvesting and planting rather than speeding it up.