Ah, the dream of getting your turtles to harvest materials for (and perhaps even build!) your base for you.
Ultimately you end up with something that boils down to the cheesy blocks from MFR, Buildcraft, etc; there for those who aren't quite yet willing to admit that they'd rather be playing in creative mode. But there's a certain satisfaction in having "earned" such a setup by way of coding it yourself!
Regarding the wood chopper, I've taken a liking to this tessellated pattern when planting:
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
The turtle need only chop up the center of each tree, spinning on its axis as it goes and chopping all leaves/logs encountered. Although "coring" in this manner leaves a lot of wood behind, it'll be collected later when chopping the
other trees in the grid, and this is also sufficient to yield a positive income of saplings. The denser plantation coupled with fewer unnecessary movements results in a great amount of wood production. I pretty much ran my entire base's energy needs off the charcoal output from a 16x16 grid once upon a time (… in no small part due to my use of a very high capacity energy cell to act as a buffer, but still, that and a single steam dynamo let me run whatever I wanted whenever I wanted).
A problem with all wood plantations is that only oak trees are happy to grow when in close quarters with other trees. Fortunately a "coring" turtle can still harvest indefinitely with other varieties, as it'll always get enough saplings (even if they aren't growing as densely).
Well, that's assuming you stick with vanilla trees. Many trees from mods are happy to grow in the manner oak does. BOP's sakura, in particular, produces a
stupendous amount of wood - I had a turtle chop +20k overnight - but there's a catch; last I tried it, most trees from mods will grow
over turtles, deleting them from the world if they happen to be in close proximity. That includes "vanilla" trees which've been in contact with Forestry's butterflies.
(Which led to me programming a system to detect and replace destroyed wood chopping turtles, which led to me finding yet
another bug which crashed my server…)
MFR rubber trees work well - happily growing over each other, leaving turtles alone, and producing tons of rubber to boot (which can be used to craft torches, among other things). Unfortunately they don't grow as tall and produce only three jungle planks per log. You just can't beat oak!
(Psst - if you remove the "s" from that "https", the forum software will automatically turn that YouTube link into an embedded video.)
