Getting Started (Forestry)

The following articles were contributed by the members of the FTB Forum and are intended to help introduce new players to the Forestry mod.

= Forestry by SunnyDaze = Forestry is a mod designed to enhance the agricultural aspects of MineCraft. It adds many machines which can construct and maintain an area of farmland for different crops or resources, an extensive and rewarding beekeeping system, and also introduces its own versions of "green" fuel and engines. Special honey-based foods, Survivalist's Tools, and Backpacks are noteworthy.

Forestry is designed to be compatible with BuildCraft (BC) and IndustrialCraft 2 (IC2). In particular, BuildCraft engines can be used to power Forestry machines, its pipes are all compatible for automation, and Forestry's Electrical Engine will not work without IC2 installed.

World Generation
Upon starting a new game and exploring, you'll probably notice colored blocks with stripes around the biomes of the world. These are beehives, and while you can break them easily with anything, only a Scoop will yield Bees and maybe a Honeycomb. Different biomes will house different colored beehives, with different species of bees.

If you find a village, you might see a yellow-colored house, with a new yellow-robed Villager. This Beekeeper Villager will trade with you in Bee products only, and he always has two Apiaries in his yard, possibly with goodies stored inside.

Finally, Forestry adds Apatite gems, for fertilizer, and Copper and Tin Ores, which will yield the Ore (like Iron) and can be smelted to produce Ingots. Copper and Tin are both used extensively throughout the mod, either directly in recipes or combined to create Bronze (3:1 Copper to Tin). Bronze is used in machines, as well as for a new set of armor and tools, with strength and durability just above Iron. In a few cases, such as for Buckets, Tin can be substituted for Iron in the Vanilla recipe.

Starting a New Game
To get started in Forestry, you'll want to do some mining and exploring to collect some resources, just like Vanilla MC. Keep an eye out for Copper and Tin on top of the usual Iron, Gold and Diamond -- you'll need all of these for machines sooner or later. Apatite is the only way to make fertilizer at the start, but other options will open up, and the demand will never be heavier than you can handle.

You should collect sand and dirt -- at least a few stacks of each -- because when a machine builds a farm it will lay out the growing space, and you will need to supply dirt, or use these to craft Fertilizer and Bog Earth for that space. Keep in mind that whatever automated farms you build will also need some seeds or saplings to get started.

You'll want to collect wood, some wool and string for Backpacks (and Scoops if you're bee-inclined).

Power
If you're strictly sticking to Forestry, or utilizing BC, IC2 or maybe another mod like Thermal Expansion, that may change how you power your first machines. Forestry machines use MJ power. Within Forestry, you have two basic choices for power: Peat or Biogas. Like BuildCraft Engines, Forestry Engines need a redstone signal to run; unlike BuildCraft engines, they cannot blow up!

Peat Engine
Runs on Peat or Bituminous Peat. Peat is really easy to produce, by crafting Bog Earth from dirt, sand and water, and placing it next to a water source block to let it 'moisten'. When it turns dark, you can harvest it. This process can be automated with a PeatBog and Turbary, which will place the Bog Earth, water sources, harvest the Peat, and replace it with new Bog Earth. Peat will burn for 5000 ticks! However, a Peat Engine will only produce 1 MJ/tick. You can craft 2 Peat with 2 Ash (from burning Peat in a Peat Engine) and 1 Propolis (bee product) to create Bituminous Peat, which will burn in the Engine for 6000 ticks at 2MJ/tick. Peat does have one advantage over Bituminous Peat: you can use Peat in a Furnace to smelt 20 items each, in a Sterling Engine just like coal (BC), or in an IC2 Generator for 5000 EU. You can't do any of this with Bituminous Peat.

Biogas Engine
Runs on various organic fuels -- water, liquid honey, milk, seed oil, or Biomass. It's a tad pricier than Peat Engines to startup, requiring Bronze instead of Copper. Biomass is your end-game Forestry power, so you could essentially invest in Biogas Engines and use them even as you work your way up the fuel chain. However, with Forestry alone, you might find you never need that much power. Biogas Engines output different amounts of MJ depending on the fuel used (up to 5MJ/tick with Biomass), can only hold one type of fuel at a time, and they require some lava when at start up while they get hot, which can be added by bucket. Note that water as a fuel source requires a constant input of lava. You can use BC waterproof pipes to fuel them.

Electrical Engine
If you have IC2 installed, you can also use an Electrical Engine, which does not need its own fuel, but instead draws EU power from a source (for example, from a Batbox through Insulated Copper cables) and converts it to MJ, at a 6:2 ratio. This ratio can be altered using Circuit Boards with Electron Tubes.

All Forestry Engines are compatible with BC Conductive pipes.

Machines
Once you have power, you will need two simple crafting machines: Thermonionic Fabricator and Carpenter. The Thermionic Fabricator makes various electron tubes, and the Carpenter makes circuit boards. All farm machines require some combination of both.

Thermionic Fabricator
The Thermionic Fabricator needs at least 2 MJ of power: 1-2 Forestry Peat Engine(s) (depending on the peat), 1-2 Biogas Engine(s) (depending on the fuel), 1 Electrical Engine, or 2 BC Stirling Engines should do the trick. It needs this steady stream of 2 MJ to stay hot enough to melt glass. In the GUI, the left side shows the conversion to liquid glass. You will need to supply Glass blocks, Glass panes, or Sand in the top left slot to melt. The slider indicates how much heat you need for the recipe. By left-clicking an item in a spot on the crafting grid, you shape the recipe (you don't place the items there like you would in a crafting table -- instead you store the needed materials in the inventory spaces below). If you right-click a spot in the crafting grid, you'll remove the ingredient. Once the recipe is valid, the item will appear in the bottom right spot, and when there's enough heat and liquid glass, you can click to take one. It will automatically draw from its own inventory. The last spot - the top left - is for a wax cast, for making stained glass.

Carpenter
The Carpenter also needs at least 2(?) MJ of power; more power supplied will make it operate faster. It needs some amount of liquid, usually water or seed oil, depending on the recipe. You can fill up the tank by bucket, or you can use BC pipes to pump it in from a source into any side. The liquid level is shown on the right side of the GUI. The crafting table functions more like a normal crafting grid: you can leave a stack of items in any slot, and you arrange items to produce an item in the slot next to it. Unlike a crafting table, the Carpenter will start automatically crafting if every slot has more than 1 available. If any ingredient only has one, it will not craft, but you can manually grab it from the slot above the arrow. Some recipes require certain "boxing" items, like crates -- these go in the top right slot. As the Carpenter automatically crafts, it will move the products to the bottom right slot. If there is no room, it will pause production until the slot is open.

Farms
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Beekeeping
Beekeeping is a huge part of Forestry, and can be intimidating. It can get very in-depth but you don't have to map entire genomes to start producing those sweet bee products. Here's what you need, and how to get it:

Bees
Breaking a beehive with a Scoop (sticks and 1x Wool, shaped like a slingshot) will yield one princess and usually one drone. The species depends on the biome; there are 6 starting species of bees: Forest, Meadow, Tropical, Marshy, Modest, and Wintry. Keep in mind: bees don't stack! Forest and Meadows are very similar species and make good starters. Extra Bees a forestry addon adds additional bee species.

Frames
You will want 3 of these per Apiary to maximize honeycomb production. Bees can work and produce without them but you'll get noticeably more with them. They have durability, and come in 3 flavors: Untreated, Impregnated, and Proven. The first two can be crafted through similar means as an Apiary (requiring a Carpenter and a Squeezer). Proven Frames are the best however, and can be bought from Beekeeper Villagers - 6 Proven Frames for 1 Emerald. Beekeeper Villagers will also offer to buy Princesses for 1 Emerald, so you can trade exclusively with him, if you prefer.

Flowers
Forest and Meadow bees like Flowers, but Tropical bees (from Jungles) prefer Vines and Ferns, Marshy bees (from Swamps) need mushrooms, Modest bees (from Desert) need cacti, and Wintry bees (from Taigas) need snow. One near the Apiary is good enough, and they will actually create more flowers in the vicinity as they work. With addon mods you can have bees that want rocks or redstone torches or even bookshelves as a flower.

Apiary
You can craft these for the low (total) price of 10 logs, but the process requires a Carpenter and a Squeezer (to make seed oil). You can get started before you've even gone mining by finding a Village with a Beekeeper. He can offer a trade of 1 Apiary for 24 logs, and he will always have two free Apiaries in his yard. They might even have Frames and Queens inside. You can find him quickly in a Village, because his house is uniquely yellow. Apiaries must be broken with a Stone pick or better to drop.

Apiary Recipe
When you place your Apiary, you can right-click to open the GUI, and check the middle tab on the right to see what the temperature and humidity of the area is -- this is dependant on the biome, and different bees like different climates, but if you're having trouble, remember they will produce in a climate like their native biome. For example, Forest bees will breed and produce in Forests and Plains. You can also craft a Habitat Locator, place honey and your bee inside, to locate a suitable home.

Once you find a place for your Apiaries, put your frames in the 3 slots down the middle, and then place a princess and a drone in the left slots (top and bottom respectively). The bar on the left will fill up, your princess will be replaced with a Queen, and the drone will dissapear. The full bar on the left now represents your Queen's life, and she will produce honeycomb (appears in the right-side honeycomb-shaped slots) until she dies. How much honeycomb a single Queen can produce varies, but there are traits that can be improved through breeding, such as working speed and life length; however, you can't see these traits without analyzing the bee in a Beealyzer. The type of honeycomb produced depends on the species. When the Queen dies, she will leave a princess, and 1-3 drones inside the Apiary.

You can simply put a same species princess and drone in an Apiary, to produce honeycomb, and that encompasses the basics of beekeeping. A Centrifuge will break down honeycomb into other honey products. You can also use honeycomb to craft the Apiarist's Chest and Apiarist's Backpack, which will each store 125 bees.

Bee Breeding
Placing different species together in an Apiary will attempt to crossbreed them, yielding hybrid bees and sometimes completely mutating into new species. There are many advanced species, with their own special traits and honeycombs, that can be created only from crossbreeding. The affects of crossbreeding won't always be readily apparent - the Queen will keep the traits of the Princess, but her offspring can have traits from the pools of the princess and the drone. All bees have active and inactive traits, and crossbreeding can create bees with traits unusual to their species, such as nocturnal Forest bees, poison-less Tropicals, or Marshy Bees that like Normal climates and flowers. Breeding a new species, special traits into (or out of) a species, or refining a species with all the best traits, is an end-product of experimentation, persistence, and chance. A Beealyzer is an essential tool for this manual process.

Automation
Beekeeping can be automated to different degrees depending on which mods you are using. Forestry includes Apiarist Pipes, which can be used to sort bees, sending a princess and drone back to the Apiary, and products to storage. Buildcraft pipes are also compatible.

Beekeeping is necessary to craft foods like Honey Bread and Ambrosia, and items like Woven Backpacks (45 slots vs. the standard 15), stained glass, and wax capsules.

= Forestry for Newbies by ShneekeyTheLost= (A reference guide for the rest of us)

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Backpacks
Because there is no such thing as ‘too much inventory space’

It’s happened to the best of us. You’re branch mining down at Y10, and your inventory fills up. So you then have to shuffle all the way back up to drop off your load and go back down. This is all very time consuming. Fortunately, I’ve got your answer… Backpacks. There’s two of them immediately useful to you: the Digger’s Backpack and the Miner’s Backpack.

A chest, some wool, some string, and a couple of other things is all you need. These backpacks are great, because they have some extra functions. First off, only certain things can go in the backpacks. Digger’s backpack gets things like cobblestone, dirt, sand, and gravel. Miner’s backpack picks up anything from the Ore Dictionary, so ores, gems… things like that. Anything you pick up that should go in your backpack automatically does so without hitting your inventory first. You can also click a chest with your backpack and dump its entire contents into said chest.

Shift + Right-click with the backpack selected. You’ll notice the icon now has a green arrow. Basically, if you click on a chest, then anything that is supposed to go into that backpack goes into it until it is full, so the reverse functionality of what it normally does. Shift+Right-click again, and now it’s a yellow arrow. This is really handy on the digger’s backpack when building things, because it will automatically fill stacks in your inventory. So you could have fifteen stacks of cobblestone in your backpack and one in your inventory, while building your Great Wall, that stack in your hand keeps getting refilled by the stuff in the backpack until it runs out. Pretty nifty. Clicking on a chest with the bag now dumps everything into that chest. Shift+Right Click again, and now you’ve got a picture of a lock. Basically, nothing goes in and nothing comes out unless you say so.

These are a great help when doing branch mining or any kind of excevation or building project where inventory space is at a premium. You can also increase the size of the backpack, but that will require a lot more. Look up the recipe for the woven backpack and you’ll see what I mean.

The Basics
Setting up your infrastructure

Right, so you want to ‘go green’ with your industrial bent. Well, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve got biomass production which can run biogas engines, refined in a Still into Biofuel which can go into buildcraft Combustion engines and Railcraft boilers, fully automated farms for most things that grow out of the ground, and bees which can produce resources which are otherwise not necessarily renewable, or produce alternatives for them. But first, we’re going to need to build some infrastructure to support all this.

For all of your farm and plantation type machines, you’re going to need some vacuum tubes. For that, we need a Thermionic Fabricator. Look it up in NEI. That hardened machine? You are going to see it a lot in this mod. Virtually every single machine in this mod requires it. Yea, it’s some bronze. Wait… what?

Bronze is an alloy, you don’t dig it up. It’s made with one tin and three copper to get four bronze. Right, so let’s keep going.

Okay, so this Thermionic Fabricator… it needs at least 2 MJ/tic to function. And you’ll need to give it some time to warm up, and feed it some glass. Look up the recipe for any of the glass tubes, and you’ll quickly see that the recipes are pretty standardized. Five of the material being used and a couple of glowstone. For our first farm, you are going to need copper and tin tubes, but later on gold and diamond tubes will also be necessary.

'FYI:' The Thermionic Fabricator can also be used to make stained glass, although you’ll need quite a bit of bee production, since it requires a wax mould and propolis. Look up the recipe in NEI if you are curious.

Next we need a Carpenter. You can look up the recipe in NEI. Hey look, it’s our old friend the Sturdy Machine. The rest isn’t too bad either. It’s going to need power, and it can be a real power hog if you let it. The more power you feed it, the faster it goes. This is a very handy machine that produces a lot of things you will need. Many of its recipes also require some form of liquid to run. Typically, it’s water, but some things require more… esoteric liquids. If you like, an Aqueous Accumulator can be used to keep it topped off with water.

Another machine we’re probably going to want sooner than later is a Squeezer. Looking up the recipe in NEI won’t yield any surprises. This can be used to produce liquid out of things you put in. Apples produce apple juice, honey produces liquid honey, seeds produce seed oil. There’s a few more things it can do, check it out. Yes, it also requires power.
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Bees
A very brief overview

With these two machines hooked up and running, we can proceed to automated production.But first, I’d like to briefly mention something that probably requires a guide all to itself: Bees.

In short, you’ve probably seen the beehives out in the world already. You might’ve even tried to break one, only to find that nothing happened, and been discouraged. That’s because you need a Scoop to break one and get the bees. Watch out, though… bees only stack if they are drones and of a matching species, you can quickly get your whole inventory filled up very quickly. Just one wool and six sticks are all you need.

Having obtained some bees, you now need a place to house them. That’s called an Apiary. Remember that Carpenter we just made? Yea, we’re going to need that, and a BUNCH of seeds. That impregnated casting is going to need eight logs in the carpenter shaped like a chest, but it’s going to need seed oil to produce. Which means firing up that squeezer we just made, and piping it over to the carpenter.

Now we need to make the bees feel at home. There’s a few conditions that need to be met for bees to start working. First, it needs to be in a suitable climate. Forest and meadows bees work just fine in their respective biomes, but the desert would be too hot and dry, and the jungle too humid for them. Generally, they work best in the biome they are found in. Next, they need flowers to pollinate to produce their combs. However, not every bee just wants the red or yellow flowers commonly found. Desert bees, for example, like cactus. Jungle bees, however, prefer vines or ferns. This ‘flower’, whatever it might be, needs to be fairly close to the apiaries. Most bees also only function during the day, and they won’t leave the hive when it rains. You might be able to find exceptions, though.

You can pipe stuff out of apiaries, and put them in with pipes as well. However, they won’t produce very much without some frames. There’s two types you can make: Untreated and Impregnated. The former is just eight sticks around a piece of string, not too hard. The latter, however, requires a carpenter recipe. Two logs in a carpenter in a stick shape with seed oil makes the material to use. And yes, you still need eight of them around a piece of string. However, these last MUCH longer. You can put up to three frames into an apiary for maximum output. At least, for an apiary. There’s also a multi-block structure called an Alveary, but that requires a LOT of bee products that you probably don’t have yet (pollen and royal jelly), so I’ll let you discover those on your own.

Note: Frames cannot be piped into an Apiary.

Right. So, you’ve got some bees in their apiaries happily producing combs. What do you do with them? Well, for that, you need yet another machine… the Centrifuge (NOT to be confused with the Centrifuge Extractor, nor the Industrial Centrifuge, which are associated with different mods). Most of the combs you’ll be seeing right now are probably going to be producing beeswax and honey drops when spun out.

I won’t even begin to get into bee breeding, that’s a guide all to itself. Look up Florastar’s videos on Bee University if you are curious.

Farming
When Forestry updated for 1.4.x, Sengir also changed how farming works. Instead of having a farm and a couple of machines per resource, you just have one large Multiblock Farm that can accomidate up to FOUR different crops at any given time! Furthermore, it introduced passive farming such as Orchards, which are very useful for passively collecting various fruits for squeezing into fruit juice or even seed oil!

With additional functionality, however, comes a balancing increase in cost. Multiblock farms are particularly large, which means they take up a lot of Farm Blocks. What's a Farm Block? Look up the recipe in NEI. Two copper ingots and a tin electron tube are the main expensive components here, however I do want to bring to your particular attention the use of the various types of brick blocks in the top center slot.

You may freely use any of the listed types of blocks to build your Farm Blocks, and they are easily interchangable. You can even make rather attractive patterns or designs that way. However, you are going to want to have still more of those bricks to lay out in a triangle pattern from each of the sides of the multiblock farm so that the farm knows where to put the soil blocks. You can lay these out at ANY level of your farm. Therefore, if you wanted to bury your multiblock farm, you can lay your bricks out on the second from top layer, letting the soil be on the same level as the top of the farm, or if you are wanting the farm to be more visible, you can put it on the bottom layer. However, all of the triangles have to be on the same y level.

So, how big is this multiblock farm?

Well, all of them are four blocks 'tall', you can't change that. Then you can have either a 3x3, 3x4, 3x5, 4x4, 4x5, or 5x5. Generally, when people discuss their multiblock farms, they use these two measurements, since all farms are 4 blocks tall. This means that for the smallest farm of 3 x 3, you will need 36 farm blocks. For the largest, 5x5, you will need 100.

There are also three particular farm blocks you will need to create: The Farm Valve, the Farm Gearbox, and the Farm Hatch. Each of these is made with a farm block, and will replace a farm block in your multiblock farm, so you don't have to figure them into your calculations of how many farm blocks you will need to make. There is also a Farm Control block, which allows you to apply redstone signals to change which fields, if any, your Farm works on.

Running your farm

Farms need a minimum of three things to function: Power, Water, and Fertilizer. No, not mulch, not compost... Fertilizer made specifically from Apatite. Other mods may make something which is compatible, however the fertilizer made from Apatite is the ONLY fertilizer in Forestry itself which will work in your Multiblock Farm. It won't consume fertilizer very rapidly, the precise amount will depend on the crops you are farming, but it will slowly but surely consume fertilizer. Fortunately, Apatite now occurs in very large veins, is affected by a Fortune enhancement pickaxe, and can produce stacks and stacks of Apatite per vein. This will only really be a problem in the very late game, and even then, only if you don't have some method of automated mining.

Power comes in the form of Buildcraft's MJ, and needs to be piped in through the Gearbox. It won't generally require a great amount of MJ, but it will be a slow, steady trickle. It might be easily possible to build yourself an isolated power network with a couple of engines built specifically to power the farm.

Water will need to be piped into the Farm Valve. Just set up a pump on a 3 x 3 water source with appropriate power supply. Set and forget.

Hatches are used to automate the input or output of resources to and from the farm. For example, the 'default' configuration of Arboretum requires an input of Dirt and Saplings to plant. It will output Sand, Logs, and Saplings of the appropriate trees you have given it to plant. It will automatically plant saplings BEFORE permitting a hatch to carry them away. Therefore, when starting an arboretum, you might not get saplings from the farm for quite some time, because it will try to plant a sapling on each available block before it will export them.

Configuring your farm

To configure a farm, you're going to need a Soldering Iron and a Circuit Board. While you can technically use any size circuit board, if you want to configure all four sides, you will need an Intricate Circuit Board. Both the Soldering Iron and the Circuit Board are made in a Carpenter. See NEI for recipes.

Now then, your first choice will be Managed or Manual, this will determine how the farm works with the crops it is planting and harvesting.

Managed crops are generally taken down and re-planted periodically, and will also automatically plant the correct soil for the crop. An example would be the Arboretum, which will use Fertilizer and Dirt to create the Humus and plant saplings on the humus. It will then cut down the trees grown, remove the resulting sand, then repeat this process.

Manual farms will tend the crops without really changing anything. An example would be the Orchard. You would have to manually plant the trees you want to grow in the Orchard. They will not be cut down when grown. However, when a leaf block 'matures' it will harvest that leaf block for the fruit, and will keep doing so indefinitely.

Using a soldering iron on a circuit board brings up an interface that will permit you to customize which type of farm it is, depending on which electron tube is put in that slot.

Managed

Manual

Green Energy
Renewable fuel sources for the sustainability-minded

You’ve seen oil, but you also know that every oil spawn has its bottom. What if you run out? What if there aren’t any oil spawns nearby? Well, don’t worry, we have a 100% renewable fuel source. So, let’s get started by building a few more machines.

First, the Fermenter. It’s going to require Fertilizer or Compost, plus either water or liquid honey, plus something to ferment. Honestly, the best thing is just saplings, but if you don’t have a lot of those, grabbing a chainsaw or a pair of shears can net you a lot of leaves which you can turn into plantballs. Don’t bother with any of the other plantball recipes though, because it’s best to just use the item itself in the fermenter. If you use liquid honey, it’ll produce 50% more biomass. However, it eats up a LOT of honey to do so, therefore to begin with, you are probably just going to stick an Aqueous Accumulator from Thermal Expansion under your Fermenter and call it a day. This produces Biomass.

So what is Biomass good for? Well, it can run in a Biogas Engine, which uses Bronze to create. It produces 4 Eu/t, and NEVER explodes. However, you need some lava to start it up from a cold start. Not too shabby. It can also be refined in a Still (I guess you *could* use a Refinery, but that’s awfully expensive) to make Biofuel, which can go into Combustion engines, or even Liquid Fueled Firebox for a Steam Boiler from Railcraft. It can also go into a Bio Generator to produce EU, biofuel produces more EU than biomass does. Biofuel does NOT go in a Biogas engine, ONLY biomass (the green stuff) will.

In short, Forestry is a great mod for anyone. Yes, even mad scientists and evil geniuses can benefit from this mod. Heck, even necromancers go green. After all, reduce, reuse, reanimate. Every zombie and skeleton is 100% post-consumer product!