Food Factory Ideas?

[reptar]

So in the interest of moving away from EE on my server, I'm trying to design an efficient food production system. I want to not have to rely on EE, and I think it would be cool to have a McDonald's-esque cow killing machine. Any thoughts?

[reptar]

my main issue is that cow breeding doesn't work like it used to

also bump

[Neowulf]

You could build an automated chicken coop. I saw it as a computercraft project.

2x2 with transposers as the floor, deployers with flint&steel setup to burn all 4 floor squares, and a dispenser at the top that shoots collected eggs at the wall above to spawn more chickens.

Sort the transposer output so eggs go through an item detector then into the dispenser. Track your egg count with a computer, have it fire another egg every X seconds/minutes if the count is above a certain amount, and fire off the deployers at the bottom to kill the chickens and harvest the meat/feathers if the count reaches a certain higher amount.

[reptar]

Thats a good idea, but dont the chickens have to grow up to lay eggs?

[Neowulf]

They will over time.

That's why you have it use eggs at a set pace (while keeping a reserve) and only killing the chickens once egg output exceeds your usage. At that point you know you have atleast enough adults to put out more eggs than you have it set to use.

Also, have it save the egg count to a file periodically and setup the manager program as the startup program, then it'll be chunk-unload fault tolerant.

[reptar]

I see, thats pretty clever. One more thing, how do i keep the chickens from despawning?

[LazDude2012]

You can't, not really.

If I were you, I'd setup some sort of proximity system that warns you when you leave the 32-block radius, and possibly kills the chickens and sets the program to start over with fresh eggs.