Issue Description:

Farming station gets stuck with low power input

What happens:

when providing 60 RF/tick to the farming station with no capacitor results in the power level of the station hanging at 30 RF and no operations taking place. The station is lit up, and all of the power is being consumed, but somehow it never makes it past 30 in the energy bad and nothing else ever happens. If I disable the station and let power build up, then turn it on, it works fine until the power bar drains and then returns to this state.

What you expected to happen:

The power use is listed as 40 rf/tick, so I expect 60 rf/tick to work normally. Even if the power input was low, it should still perform an operation every time the power meter builds up to 40 rather than hanging at 30 forever.

Affected Versions (Do not use "latest"):

• EnderIO: 3.0.1.126
• EnderCore: 0.4.1.58
• Minecraft: 1.10.2
• Forge: 12.18.2.2124

I'd have to look at the code, but from memory I'd say it has just enough power to work the land but never can accumulate enough for a harvesting operation (those cost extra and cannot be expressed in those "per tick" numbers).

@gmoff01 use a redstone timer to turn the farming station on for a few ticks every few seconds - this greatly improves the efficiency of the farm. Unless you use some growth accelerator stuff doesn't grow that fast anyway.

I think I'll add an internal "minimum amount of energy in buffer to do anything" value to the farm. Lol, this will also make the code simpler as it doesn't have to check energy for every possible operation...

@gmoff01 The 40 RF/t passive energy consumption is only valid for a Farming Station without Capacitor upgrades. The Capacitor upgrades double and triple the passive energy consumption.

And yes, on top of that, you'd still need the extra energy (which is very little in comparison) to power the actual harvesting, planting and bone-mealing actions.

A tree farm that continuously runs on an EnderIO Stirling Generator and crafts charcoal for fuel out of the logs harvested can sustain itself because (Vanilla) saplings grow at a fast rate. Crops, however, do not and as such, a crop farm will waste a lot of energy when run continuously with the default configs.

As such, I would recommend you doing either what @MatthiasMann suggested, or editing the configs.

@HenryLoenwind I don't know why this issue is still open, because what the original poster reported isn't a bug per se, but if anything, the Farming Station is a lottle unbalanced when it comes to crop farming, so that would be worth keeping this issue open for.

My suggestions:

• Let the buffer of the farm increase up to the RF cost of the most expensive action + ¿twenty? times the passive RF/t before even allowing it to start consuming the passive RF/t (scanning cost), so it isn't ever scanning without being able to harvest anything anyway.
  Or even better: Let it scan until it finds a harvestable crop/tree. Then halt the scanning and the passive power consumption and wait until it has enough power to harvest. Then continue scanning after harvesting.
• Also, if it scans the whole field (or, let's say... three rows?^) without finding anything to harvest, maybe this should halt the scanning and passive power consumption for a certain number of seconds? Because there's no need for scanning if there's probably nothing to harvest.
  Or decrease the scan rate and passive power consumption whenever no harvestable crops are found (for a certain number of scans, related to the the Farm's action radius) and speed it up and increase once a harvestable crop is found.
• And finally, wouldn't it be better to have a cost in RF per scan action instead of passively per tick?

^two rows or less would incapacitate melon and pumpkin farms.