Crops

Basics

Crops is the name given to hydroponically grown plants that grow inside of the same planter (such as a net or pot), and gives an attachment point for related sensors. Crops are primarily concerned with determining their needs-feeding status trigger, which informs the feed reservoir it is attached to that it is now in a waiting state to be fed (since the act of preparing feed water may take a while depending on what equipment is available). The system, once enough crops are reporting as hungry, will start the feeding cycle. Once the feeding cycle is complete, the crop can signal such and the system will disable feeding once most of the crops are reporting as fed.

The Scheduler may further limit crop feedings, or reduce nutrient amounts, as configured, and/or based on crops in-use.

If all plants being grown by a given feed reservoir are exactly the same, you may instead opt to use a single crop object instead of one for each planter. Other groupings can also be organized similarly, but keep in mind doing so may require setting a custom weighting modifier so that feed water requirements are averaged-out correctly.

Crops come in two main flavors: timed crops (that use a basic on-time/off-time timer to calculate feeding cycles), and adaptive crops (that use an attached trigger to calculate feeding cycles).

Supported Crops

See Crops Data & Library for supported crop types specified by the CropType enumeration.