Trouble starting hemp
Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2016 2:50 am
First, a synopsis of what I've done. I posted before about my hemp farm taking a lot of damage. I lost most of my seeds, and my iron hoe is hovering around 40-ish percent durability right now. I do have 5 hemp seeds, and if I have to I can always scrape for more (I FINALLY managed an iron pick, so I anticipate a new hoe won't be too burdensome.)
I've placed my farm underneath the swamp lagoon outside my OS (you can see in both shots below evidence of slimes on top of the ceiling, though in the shot with the more-level gaze, admittedly it's harder to spot but it's there.) I've figured out the easiest construction method is to go topside during daylight and shelve off the lagoon at 1-block depth, replacing all sand blocks with either dirt or glass. I managed to generate about two stacks of glass, and while I began the placement underground, I returned topside to extend the glass ceiling to the opposing shore before digging out extensions to the farm plots. I dig a new irrigation column from the lagoon every fifteenth block, of course, and I straddle each channel four blocks to a side for seedlings. With this setup, I can follow the irregular shape of the lagoon jaggedly in all four cardinal directions, without the need for step-downs. My original design called for step-downs to increase irrigation range, but I redesigned this because I suspect that the further away my seedlings get from the glass ceiling caused them to grow slower.
My pumpkins were tilling past parity before the redesign anyway and are therefore not an issue (you can kinda make out in the screenie below that I conserve glass by only installing them above the pumpkin stalks, opting instead for dirt ceiling over where the gourds themselves spawn in the middle.)
My issue is that my hemp is not sprouting, at all. These shots are both from at least 19 or 20 day-cycles after being planted -- you can tell by the greenery, as those were bare dirt blocks laid over stone substrate (again, the sea-level water is only one-block deep.) From my disaster, I survived with seven seeds, but uprooting and replanting them has lost me two of them. This is my last ditch attempt, incorporated into my recent redesign that emanated step-downs, because I hypothesized that I was planting too far from the water channel. For comparison, all pumpkin stalks were intentionally destroyed in the recent redesign, and the pictures shows the second harvest wave coming in (it's been a while since I've been so low on chickenfeed that I insta-harvested a pumpkin, I just wait for 80% coverage or more and chop them all in a single run.)
So, can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong, if anything? I experimented with light levels, wondering if it was too bright or not bright enough, by relocating torches. I suppose I could've seeded closer to the middle of the 4-wide ceiling to allow for sun angle, but the wood-plank channel housing runs east-west, and the picture faces west, to the sun's path tracks longitudinally with the ceiling pattern. The ground-torch was only placed there a mere four day-cycles prior to this shot, more than ten cycles after those seeds were sown.
I've read other posts, and I'm not sure how to interpret what other people have said. One thing I draw from previous discussions is that hemp, specifically, is on a more-randomized growth timer than other crops in the game. Someone even described them as "lottery tickets," and the only way to consistently increase overall yield is to buy more tickets. One veiled statement by FC himself described a single hemp planting as "lonely," implying that multiple seeds planted in close proximity to one another somehow increases growth rates overall. This last example was years ago, however, so even if I'm understanding the statement correctly, the facts might've changed with subsequent versions of the mod.
Any help would be appreciated. My food supply is decent-but-not-robust, so I'm not in a terrible hurry to start grinding hemp, but coal for torches is in very short supply (the 44 pictured in my hotbar is, stupidly, my entire available stockpile; Just prior to this I'd hit a fortunate seam of coal for about 7 or 8 of them, but this is after un-torching and dirt-sealing LARGE sections of my underground base that I've been carving out to mine stone for tools while also anticipating future expansion needs -- the utterly CONSTANT zombie / spider / witch calls at all times of the day cycle is horrendous for the moment as a result.)
http://imgur.com/a/GJoDD
I've placed my farm underneath the swamp lagoon outside my OS (you can see in both shots below evidence of slimes on top of the ceiling, though in the shot with the more-level gaze, admittedly it's harder to spot but it's there.) I've figured out the easiest construction method is to go topside during daylight and shelve off the lagoon at 1-block depth, replacing all sand blocks with either dirt or glass. I managed to generate about two stacks of glass, and while I began the placement underground, I returned topside to extend the glass ceiling to the opposing shore before digging out extensions to the farm plots. I dig a new irrigation column from the lagoon every fifteenth block, of course, and I straddle each channel four blocks to a side for seedlings. With this setup, I can follow the irregular shape of the lagoon jaggedly in all four cardinal directions, without the need for step-downs. My original design called for step-downs to increase irrigation range, but I redesigned this because I suspect that the further away my seedlings get from the glass ceiling caused them to grow slower.
My pumpkins were tilling past parity before the redesign anyway and are therefore not an issue (you can kinda make out in the screenie below that I conserve glass by only installing them above the pumpkin stalks, opting instead for dirt ceiling over where the gourds themselves spawn in the middle.)
My issue is that my hemp is not sprouting, at all. These shots are both from at least 19 or 20 day-cycles after being planted -- you can tell by the greenery, as those were bare dirt blocks laid over stone substrate (again, the sea-level water is only one-block deep.) From my disaster, I survived with seven seeds, but uprooting and replanting them has lost me two of them. This is my last ditch attempt, incorporated into my recent redesign that emanated step-downs, because I hypothesized that I was planting too far from the water channel. For comparison, all pumpkin stalks were intentionally destroyed in the recent redesign, and the pictures shows the second harvest wave coming in (it's been a while since I've been so low on chickenfeed that I insta-harvested a pumpkin, I just wait for 80% coverage or more and chop them all in a single run.)
So, can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong, if anything? I experimented with light levels, wondering if it was too bright or not bright enough, by relocating torches. I suppose I could've seeded closer to the middle of the 4-wide ceiling to allow for sun angle, but the wood-plank channel housing runs east-west, and the picture faces west, to the sun's path tracks longitudinally with the ceiling pattern. The ground-torch was only placed there a mere four day-cycles prior to this shot, more than ten cycles after those seeds were sown.
I've read other posts, and I'm not sure how to interpret what other people have said. One thing I draw from previous discussions is that hemp, specifically, is on a more-randomized growth timer than other crops in the game. Someone even described them as "lottery tickets," and the only way to consistently increase overall yield is to buy more tickets. One veiled statement by FC himself described a single hemp planting as "lonely," implying that multiple seeds planted in close proximity to one another somehow increases growth rates overall. This last example was years ago, however, so even if I'm understanding the statement correctly, the facts might've changed with subsequent versions of the mod.
Any help would be appreciated. My food supply is decent-but-not-robust, so I'm not in a terrible hurry to start grinding hemp, but coal for torches is in very short supply (the 44 pictured in my hotbar is, stupidly, my entire available stockpile; Just prior to this I'd hit a fortunate seam of coal for about 7 or 8 of them, but this is after un-torching and dirt-sealing LARGE sections of my underground base that I've been carving out to mine stone for tools while also anticipating future expansion needs -- the utterly CONSTANT zombie / spider / witch calls at all times of the day cycle is horrendous for the moment as a result.)
http://imgur.com/a/GJoDD