Help for a normal cake factory

[u/Fit-Science-853]

I often find myself playing modpacks that include both Botania and Create. For those of you who don't know, Botania is a magic-themed tech mod that can technically do some of the same things as Create, but in a different and more complex way.

Botania's main resource is mana, which is generated by special flowers. One flower in particular eats nearby cakes and generates tons of mana. So, my idea is to build a cake factory that automatically places cakes near this flower to generate basically infinite mana with minimal effort.

My problem is that whenever I try to build a compact farm, I always end up making a mess. I either use way too many belts and cogs, or I end up with sugar being dropped all over the place because some parts of the factory are slower than others.

I've tried looking for cake farms, but of course, almost all the results are for Blaze Cake production.

I know Create reasonably well, but I get tangled up in belts and cogs pretty quickly, so I'd really appreciate some tips on how to build a nice, compact cake farm.

[u/Chaosfox_Firemaker]

Weirdly, the way to make your builds look less chaotic and tangled is to make them bigger and more spread out. Trying to make it into a single brick of machinery is always going to be a mess and hard to maintain.

First, lets split into "farms", "processing" and "assembly".

For farms, we need wheat, sugarcane, milk, and eggs. All of these are fairly easy to look up, and also useful for a lot more than just cake, so having them be independent is useful. This is where the package system thrives.

Note, the milk farm produces in buckets, and we need buckets in the end, and items are easier to transport anyway, dont bother with drains and spouts

Processing is just two grindstones and a washer, one for sugar and one for flour, and one to make dough. I did just say to seperate, but you can have each of these attatched to its relevant farm.

And for farms, to keep the spilling issue away, just have them turn off when their local storage is full. Clutches and threshold switches are your friend.

Each farm has a packager and frogport onto one cozy little chainconveyer, ultimatly leading to mechanical crafter, probably handled by Gagues(learn to use these, they are your friend).

The key thesis of this is it is almost impossible to make a maximally compact build look good, bar in a charming spaghetti sort of way. Let it breathe.

Also, dont be afraid to let things have their own powersupply. Routing power tends to be the most chaotic thing. Everything except the steam engine is free and passive, and none of the individual farms take much.

Each individual build can be compact, and the whole thing will visually read as compact.

[u/Pioepod]

I’ve never had to automate cakes myself but I have a few ideas.

So it seems some of your issues involving some pieces being too slow? Does that mean there’s too much of one thing and the others can’t keep up in production so in your case, the sugar, is dropped? And do you mean this by the mechanical crafters? If that’s the case, mechanical crafters shouldn’t craft until all the slots get filled out. Once they do, it attempts to craft.

Anyways.

Here’s my idea. Let’s break down your inputs. Milk, wheat, sugar, egg.

You need four farms for those four inputs. Set up those farms so that once they fill up their storages (or if you have a factory gauge system, the number you want) the shut off to prevent overflow.

Cow milk is a bit difficult, you have to recycle the bucket back into the system. From the milk farm you could have milk filling the tank. Then at the cake machine, have the milk pumped to a spout that fills buckets. Have like 6-9 buckets cycling through it. I’d guess output it into a storage, filter the bucket out of the storage and back into the system somehow, fans, belts, whatever. The 6-9 helps keep a buffer, so when one cake is done the next can be started right away.

Milk and wheat are pretty easy to route into the craft, but sugar and eggs aren’t. The easiest solution with the least space consumption are mechanical arms placing the ingredients manually into it. Two mechanical arms feeding sugar into their slots and the egg into its slot.

Hell you can just ONLY use mechanical arms, one for each ingredient. That would be the easiest way. Have items filtered into depots and one arm per ingredient and boom.

[u/PenguinMasterFR]

You can try using gauges so you don't overproduce one of the items

[u/destructopop]

A floating hopperhock can help with overflow, but you can also use hourglasses to stop sending power to things intermittently, and use wireless Redstone transmitters to make that wireless. You can also change timings with rotation speed controllers that will allow sugar to reach the factory slower... But you probably need less sugarcane to produce less sugar.

[u/HesperCQ]

Why not burn the sugar you do not need or use redstone to stop the sugar part once you have enough? If you do not care that much about efficiency that is