Sprinkler

alaindustrial:sprinkler

AgricultureImplementedagricultureautomationfarmingnutrient-solutionfluid_inputber

Summary

The Sprinkler is the end of the mod's organic chain. Litter from the garden bed is fermented in the fermenter into biofuel, the biofuel is distilled into nutrient solution, and the solution comes back to that same garden bed through this block. The head on the mast spins, three copper nozzles fling droplets in an arc, and everything growing around ripens faster.

Mini-example: a pipe from the distillation column runs to a sprinkler in the middle of a wheat field. Nothing else is needed — no cable, no hopper, no supervision.

Energy

The sprinkler consumes no EU/FE at all. This is not "zero while idle" but the complete absence of energy as a mechanic.

That is a deliberate decision. The greenhouse already has two axes of acceleration — water and power — and a block that asked for both a cable and a pipe would charge twice for one effect and blur the line with the garden drone station: that one is exactly the farm block that runs on EU/FE. The sprinkler has a single currency, and it is the solution. A cable that reached the block and delivered not one unit would look like a working connection — precisely the lie the mod already removed from the wind turbines and the water mill.

Hence, too, the absence of an upgrade panel: every upgrade in the mod trades energy for speed, and here there is nothing to trade — four dead slots would leave the player guessing.

Fluid

The tank can be filled four ways: with a bucket or a vacuum capsule in hand on the block, with the same container into the fill slot on the screen, with a hopper into that same slot, and with a pipe from any face. A full tank is 80 firings, that is about 80 seconds of continuous work. It is rarely continuous: only a spray that lands is paid for, so on a grown-out plot the tank stands still.

Processing

The sprinkler is not a recipe machine: once every it makes a single watering attempt.

It pays only for work that actually happened. An empty tank, or a zone where everything has already grown, costs zero millilitres: a failed attempt writes nothing off — the same demand-driven contract as the garden drone station and the electric heater.

Growth is given the vanilla bone-meal way (BonemealableBlock — the same interface the trellis and the garden drone use), not by a forced random tick. A random tick on somebody else's block is an arbitrary side effect: it melts ice and spreads fire. So the sprinkler speeds up exactly what bone meal in the player's hand would have affected, and nothing else.

Targets are picked out of order. The list of suitable cells in the zone (9×9 across, 3 layers standing and 4 hanging, minus its own position) is rebuilt every 100 ticks — on its own cadence rather than the spray's: the zone changes when a player plants something, not once a second. The walk starts at a random place in the list: with a fixed order all the solution would go into one corner of the plot while the rest of the field stood still. Unloaded chunks are skipped — a periodic sweep never forces a synchronous load.

The ±1 height is there because a garden bed is rarely perfectly flat: a block on a step reaches both the row below and the row above.

A hanging one looks three blocks down and none up. The symmetric box is right for a sprinkler standing among the crops and wrong for one hanging over them: a ceiling is rarely exactly one block above the soil, so at ±1 a hung sprinkler would water the ceiling it is screwed to. Three blocks down cover the usual head-height room; there is nothing to reach for above, that is where the ceiling is.

The crystal greenhouse

Inside a sealed greenhouse the sprinkler works differently. Crystal seedbeds are not bone-mealable, and its own aura does not reach them — instead the greenhouse controller finds the sprinkler in the room itself and counts it as a third axis of acceleration, alongside water and power.

The solution buys crystals, not dice rolls — exactly the way EU/FE does. An accelerator whose tank is empty simply does not count: the room grows on the remaining two axes.

Inventory

There is no upgrade panel (see "Energy"). A hopper may only put things into slot 0 and take from slot 1.

Interface

The smallest screen in the mod: one solution gauge and a pair of container slots. There is no energy bar — the block does not consume any, and a permanently empty bar would read as a fault. The tank level is visible three ways: on the gauge in the menu, by the spin of the head in the world, and through a pipe or tooltip from outside.

A click with an empty hand opens the screen; a click with a bucket or a capsule fills the tank right where it stands.

Block Properties

Not a full cube: a low base of 10×3×10 pixels and a 4×9×4 mast above it. The head with its three nozzles is block-entity renderer geometry — it has neither collision nor hitbox.

It mounts on a ceiling too. The hanging property is chosen the way a lantern's is: a click on the bottom face of the block above and the sprinkler hangs, any other click and it stands. A roofed plot or a greenhouse has a ceiling and no room for a mast, and a sprinkler hung over the field is exactly what is wanted there. Nothing else changes: the head spins, the spray falls downwards, and the zone is still centred on the block.

The head spins for as long as there is something in the tank to spray, not only on the tick when a watering happened: a mechanism that twitched once every five seconds would read as broken.

The spray is a droplet particle of its own, with gravity and drag. The droplets leave the nozzles the player can see and fall in an arc rather than scattering across the radius: where a droplet lands follows from how hard it was thrown. The throw strength is tuned to the zone radius, so the visible coverage and the circle actually served coincide.

Recipes

The top row is two copper plates with a gold gear between them; the middle of the grid holds a lone iron plate; the bottom row is two more iron plates around a machine casing.

The gear at the top is the spinning head, the lone plate in the middle is the mast. The block has no processing recipes.

Progression

Tier: none (no energy is used). The craft is nonetheless a fully LV one: a machine casing and a gold gear are not starter components. It is placed as the last link of the chain: fermenter → biofuel → distillation column → nutrient solution → sprinkler. The only consumer of the solution in the mod.

Related

Nutrient Solution — the block's only fuel. Fermenter — the start of the chain. Distillation Column — makes the solution out of biofuel. Crystal Greenhouse — the third axis of acceleration. Garden Drone Station — the neighbouring agriculture block, the one that runs on EU/FE: they complement each other rather than compete. Vacuum Capsule — a portable container for the solution.

Crafting

Shaped Crafting

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Sprinkler