i sped it up the spreading stage was too slow. all the stages except tree were running properly all i did was speed them up they were too slow. as you can see here the cell is tapped but there is no way to make it do anything and there are no blue cells around. the water and sugar ticking isn't doing anything. i started the game over and im going to avoid speeding it up
Your water supply is fine, even without a direct source, there is a small amount of water in the soil itself, same for the basic nutrients like K and P
As you can see you get X amount per minute already
It is possible that the speedup broke some mechanism.
Also in the beginning you can only build 1 thing at a time, if you built too much canopy but don't have enough sugar for it, it will block the root development
With the X you can stop all the planned ones
Try to build 4 roots and 4 leaves in the canopy first
Then when you get some sunlight in, roots are more important
The tree doesn't grow idle, it only grows on planned cells
Nutrients pile up idle though.
And you can plan ahead and the tree will keep going while offline, assuming you put seeds into speed of light.
You can plan ahead a lot, there is no limit
You can give it hundreds of cells to grow into and then go offline
But it'll stop if you hit a cell you currently can't grow into. E.g. air in the beginning, hard minerals, lava....
