Sprinklers Mod Feature Requests

[Jan5676]

Hi, this is the corresponding forum thread to my Sprinklers Mod. If you have any feature requests, please add them as a comment here. If you have any BUG reports, add them to the Github issue tracker instead.

I know something like a sprinkler mod might be a bit controversial because it automates an important aspect of the game away, but I still wanted to make it just to please impatient people like me or my friends.

The currently requested features/changes taken from the mod pages comments are:

Will most likely do:

• (added with v0.9.2) Remove the current 3 sprinkler Tiers, replacing them with directly upgradable copper based sprinklers. My approach for the upgrades is directly taken from Stardew Valley, but I understand that for the sake of realism and also ease of crafting, it would make more sense to make all the sprinklers based on copper, bronze, brass or lead. This change WILL break your current sprinklers placed in the world, so please be aware of that. The new Sprinkler tiers will just be called like their tier is (e.g. T1-Sprinkler) and keep the ranges of their previous counterparts. My idea for crafting those would be like this:
  • Tier 1: Takes any type of copper based metal, 1 rod, 8 nails and strips, 1 bucket, 2 rusty gears (Makes up for a total of 3 Ingots)
  • Tier 2: Replace the rod in the middle with the previous tier sprinkler and add 1 more gear, 1 bucket (Takes 40 Liters instead of 20)
  • Tier 3: Same as Tier 2 but instead of rusty gears, it will be a single temporal gear (Will take 60 Liters)
  • Tier 4: A little different approach, requiring Jonas parts and other stuff only to be found in the more dangerous and hidden places. I don't really have a concrete concept for a recipe for now, but they will require a Tier 3 sprinkler. Their range will be 8 and their capacity will be 100)
• (added with v0.9.4) Add more manual ways to add water to the sprinklers (e.g. buckets and jugs)
• (added with v1.0.0) Ceiling mounted Sprinklers. Similarly to the way you'd force slabs to stick to one direction, you can put a sprinkler into the crafting grid and turn it upside-down. This way you could mount them to a ceiling and make them water the blocks below. I am however not really sure how much downwards range they should probably have. I was thinking about them watering the same range but 3-4 blocks below. I would like to keep them on one height and not covering both, as that would require polling more blocks which could have an impact on performance

Sounds interesting, but will be more work:

• (optional) Sprinkler Wear. Add a durability to the sprinklers so they will need to be repaired from time to time. This will probably kill the convenience for most players, but I recognize this could be an interesting addition for some. I will implement this but gate it behind a config variable which defaults to false.
  • Questions for people who want this implemented: How should this work exactly?
    • Either have durability like a tool (which would need to carry over to the item version to prevent cheesing) or maybe a very low random chance of it breaking, with an animation of it acting up.
    • How should it be repaired? One suggestion I read is using a wrench on it, maybe there could be another failure where theres a pipe blockage only resolvable with some kind of chemical you'd have to mix together.
    • One way to prevent or slow wear could be putting sprinklers in a greenhouse where much less stuff is flying around able to block the pipes and stuff of them.

Probably won't do:

• Make those sprinklers be able to extinguish burning blocks. (This would require polling too many blocks in its area to actually be useful, because this increases the area from a plane to a cube, thus making the performance worse on a factor of 3)
• Make the sprinklers able to handle fast forwarding and time skipping. What I mean by that is that when you sleep or add time via a command, the sprinklers will not activate more often, they are bound to a certain game tick interval and ONLY if the chunks are loaded. If you leave a chunk and come back some time later, the crops may have decayed because the sprinklers only activate while loaded. (The reason for why I won't be doing this is because it would require all farmland to be paused and recalculated based on the remaining fluid in the sprinkler + time passed. To be honest, I am neither patient nor motivated enough to try figuring out the API to that extent. If you want to fix this yourself, feel free to open a Merge Request on Github)
  • The only way I could see this working is making plants invincible or acres not being able to drop under 5% moisture while chunks are not loaded.
• Add some sort of compatibility with pipes from other mods (e.g. "Vintage Engineering" or "Hydrate or Diedrate"). As far as I'm concerned and as the modding API is not as well documented as I'd like it to be, this is something I feel would be possible without making this mod dependent on one of the others. This would greatly decrease accessibility. Also, project setups like those are not within my ballpark, as I am usually a Java Developer where things work quite differently to C#. If someone wants compatibility regardless, feel free to fork my project from Github and get into contact with me once it is done. I will add it as a separate branch/release.

Again, if you have an interesting idea which could improve the mod, write a comment and I will add it somewhere in this list.

Currently, if anyone wants to help in mod development, if someone is willing to make a better model + animation for the sprinklers, I will thankfully take those. In that case, please DM me in the forum if you have a concept/realized model. Mine, to be perfectly honest, looks like a programmer placeholder at best

Edited December 28, 2025 by Jan5676

[artemax44]

What I would do is add lead as a lower tier. In the vanilla game, few things are crafted with lead, and it would be nice to have more uses for it. I'll leave it as a suggestion.

[jupiter878lorem]

Quite a neat mod. Is an activation/deactivation average moisture level config setting planned for later, or is it too difficult to implement at all?

[Jan5676]

@jupiter878lorem Can you elaborate on that?

What I assume is that you mean the 2 latching variables for when the sprinkler activates/hibernates right? In that case I could add 2 new vars:
minActivationThreshold=0.85 #Minimum 1%, as acres in code never TRULY reach 0% after their initial creation
maxActivationThreshold=0.95 #Would be capped at max 95% as otherwise it would cause some weird bugs with acre Percentages I had in the past

[jupiter878lorem]

8 hours ago, Jan5676 said:

@jupiter878lorem Can you elaborate on that?

What I assume is that you mean the 2 latching variables for when the sprinkler activates/hibernates right? In that case I could add 2 new vars:
minActivationThreshold=0.85 #Minimum 1%, as acres in code never TRULY reach 0% after their initial creation
maxActivationThreshold=0.95 #Would be capped at max 95% as otherwise it would cause some weird bugs with acre Percentages I had in the past

@Jan5676 Yep, that's pretty much all I want added for this mod. What sort of bugs did you experience when trying to set the max threshold above 95 percent?

[Jan5676]

@jupiter878lorem Okay that shouldn't be a problem to implement. The bugs mainly stem from acres either not actually reaching 100% (effectively as if the watering call on them was skipped) or them never going below 100% ever again. That's something that happened a while ago, maybe I accidentally fixed it with some other changes  I will cap it a 99% tho, because watering at 100% would make them never water again due to rounding.

[Jan5676]

Beware however, that acres placed near water blocks may prevent them from going below a certain hydration value, possibly preventing the lower of the variables from being reached.

[Jan5676]

@jupiter878lorem I released a new Mod Version which contains your requested variables. 

[jupiter878lorem]

@Jan5676 Thank you so much for the detailed explanation and the quick update. Much appreciated!