Trading Hall Open + Iron Farm

[LennyLen]

Looking it up I was wrong, it is just the spacing that is important not alternating for melons. I swear one of the crops it is more efficient to alternate but now I can't remember which.

It turns out alternating does matter, it just needs to be along a cardinal direction, not diagonally.

I switched the second two farms to the following format:



Then I redid the test and these were the results:

Melons Only



Mixed Melons and Pumpkins



Clearly it has performed far better than it did in the first configuration.

[Thorin]

Looking it up I was wrong, it is just the spacing that is important not alternating for melons. I swear one of the crops it is more efficient to alternate but now I can't remember which.

Wheat grows faster if alternated with potatoes or carrots, that might be what you're thinking of?

[LennyLen]

I finished the last two farms and converted the first two over to the new format, and ran them for an hour.

This produced 729 melons and 1217 pumpkins. With the five farmers I have, it's possible to trade up to 720 melons and 432 pumpkins an hour.  This is of course if you can manage to do all the harvesting, converting melon slices to melons, and physical trading within the time frame needed for efficient trading, so it's more likely you'll be able to trade up to around 600 melons and 300 pumpkins an hour.

So since it's bound to produce more melons and especially pumpkins than you can deal with, I've added a composting system to convert unwanted product into bonemeal.  It's more efficient to compost melon slices than to craft them into whole melons and compost those.

[Mr. Analog]

Incredible! This is quite the engineering feat