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I'm a huge fan of stone's inflammability, but still consume vast amounts of wood for doors and rest-efficient beds. Planting trees to harvest later led me to look up the numbers. The results are pretty straightforward.


While all values have similar daily wood production when harvested at max growth, Cecropia takes the fewest days to grow and has the smallest amount of harvest work. The only downside to Cecropia is it's the ugliest tree.

I'd also like to look at harvesting at less than 100% growth for trees, but I can't get my in-game results to match up with calculations. Harvesting sub-maximal amounts from trees is attractive given the long growth times involved, and since new trees almost immediately go to 5% growth (perhaps tied to the base tree stats?). Does anyone have insight on how harvesting from trees that are less than 100% mature works?

Excited to see how winter and summer might affect the availability of lumber in the next patch.

Note your 'days to grow' isn't accurate as the tree don't grow at night.

Quote from: Tynan on December 04, 2014, 02:19:36 AM
Note your 'days to grow' isn't accurate as the tree don't grow at night.

But it's always wrong in-game too, for the same reason.

Quote from: TynanNote your 'days to grow' isn't accurate as the tree don't grow at night.

Thanks for pointing that out! I debated whether or not to put actual times in, but I figured I'd avoid it since I didn't the last time I posted grow times, and since this is more for comparison than not. Like Cimanyd said, the numbers I posted are consistent with how it shows up in game too.

Semi Off-Topic:
I just wanted to say I have been following your posts REM and I really love your ideas. They're well structured, cohesive, and (as far as I can tell) original. Even if they weren't your presentation is simply beautiful. Keep up the good work. :)

Might I also suggest updating your personal note-thingy at the bottom of each post with more of your recent ideas?

P.S. That article by Steve Mann is simply astounding. I'm quite curious about the future of wearable tech since I only have one eye, and he seems to be the man to follow. Much appreciated for the link.

(glad you liked it! It's easy to write, I'm just glad for people like Tynan and modders who actually do stuff :D)

I was wondering about this last night, talk about convenient.

From those of us who lack the time, energy, or skill to throw something like this together I say thanks!

So correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this actually mean that Oak is the best as long as you don't mind batches of wood taking longer, since it effectively saves on space and/or work for an equivalent amount?

Since say you want 1000 wood, you either ...
Plant 20 Oak and get it for 24000 work in 50 days.
Plant 20 Cero and get it for 35000 work over 2.5 harvests in 50 days.
Plant 50 Cero and get it for 35000 work in 20 days.

What if you used sun lamps to make the trees grow at night? I am already running an indoor farm (without hydroponics) to grow potatos, strawberries, medicinal herbs and cotton and they grow just fine day and night. Even in winter if memory serves...but that may be due to not remembering whether my biome allows year-round growing. It IS snowing outside, that much I remember.

I didnt think plants grew at night anymore?

Yeah, plants only grow 13 of the day's 24 hours.

Here's updated for the 8f. Let me know if I missed something, was watching the NA LCS while doing this. :P

(http://i.imgur.com/RmIEk15.png)

Takeaway:
Cecropia's probably the best to plant since it matures fastest. Oaks grow at a similar rate, but you have to wait 61 days. Ew. From a time value perspective go cecropia.

Thanks for this man, was just thinking that I ought to do the tree number crunching.

Cercropias forever!

So based on what I'm seeing in these tables, Cecropia trees are the least efficient as far as wood output, but also the fastest. So en mass they could match up to other trees and would be much faster in doing so.

So if you're going to make gigantic tree farms you want to go Cecropia, but only when you've got a very large amount of them.

...I think? I'm trying to visualize this information. If you actually need wood, faster is better, but theres a point when you really don't need it anymore, thus making those longer times all the more inefficient.

I'm not sure what the absolute most efficient way to farm trees would be.

In terms of wood/day efficiency Cecropias are tied with oaks for first. They grow the fastest of all the trees and have the shortest maturation times which are really the most important factors imo.

If you're looking for an approach, I like to think of time value of money: $1 today is better than $1 tomorrow. In this case, 20 wood in 24 days is better than 50 wood in 62 days. The proportional yields are the same, just you get the yield much sooner with cecropia. Think of it this way: you could plant a cecropia, harvest it, plant another, then harvest it again in the time you wait for an oak to yield an equivalent output.

Of course if space is your deal, or prettiness or work time, the answer might change. If someone would take a stab at those (especially work time) I'd love to see it :P

Surely work time is directly proportional to the growth time? Ergo Crecopias take 2.5x the work/travel time.

Labor does increase with the number of trees (though I think it's kind of negligible since the constraint in wood production is waiting for the trees to grow). The labor aspect is a also little more complicated since each tree type has different harvest times. Eg, an oak's harvest time is 1000, a pine's is 700, and a cecropia takes 550. I'm honestly not sure how to calculate for the outcome of different work times and I'm being kind of lazy since I'm not sure what factors might change in A9.

Well of course the labor increases per tree but that's irrelevant because the wood output per tree is constant, you don't need more Crecopias to generate an equivalent amount of wood to Oaks for example.

You're definitely being lazy since you can derive the work per tree per time trivially using the data you've already collected :P

If it grows faster, yes you have to do more work, but if the tree takes less work to harvest, it kinda cancels out the wasted "man hours" to collect them more often.

In my eyes, it kinda makes everything even again and the only factor is growth time. So the only factor left is beauty? I like the fact that that feature is there, but I don't think it provides enough variety. It pretty much means oaks are only grown for beauty and ceco is grown for wood.

I think it would be more fair to require the same amount of work to harvest so the penalty for using fast growing trees is actually the increased "man hours" needed that could be used elsewhere (which is extremely painful price with an early settlement).

That, or introduce another factor. Like wood types (similar to stone types) where each wood has a different effect like look, HP, flammability, and maybe even add different types of wood that can have other effects. Like a "prickleberry tree" that is used for spiked doors/traps, has -2 beauty (or more/less), and yields a berry or thorned berry that is damaging unless cooked.

I don't want to see 7 different types of wood when creating a door or 7 different stacks of small amounts of wood, but some variety with trees would be nice and I currently don't bother growing them unless the biome is lacking sufficient trees.

Beauty is fairly irrelevant for wood since when you harvest it you just get Wood, no matter what type of tree it's from.  Personally, I'd like to see Wood expanded into Oak Wood, Pine Wood, etc with varying HP, Beauty, Value, etc.