You can become a Patreon sponsor where you can get some additional cheats. Beyond that, simply upgrade all of the attractions to maximize your income. It takes time to accomplish.
You can also advance time cycling through a whole bunch of days in a row, but you might as well draw new attractions at the same time.
I strongly recommend using a mallet with an apple tree though, since it drops apples and you don't need to wait for the tree to regrow to harvest more apples. It also separates the log harvesting from apple harvests.
I've tried the strictly apple tree farming like you suggest, but I soon ended up with more apples than I could use and needed to make an incinerator to keep the supply from making mountains of apples. They don't despawn (like tree seeds/acorns do) and have other problems even if you are making apple pies... where the largest hold up to making more pies is actually getting enough milk from cows.
It also creates other imbalances if you don't need logs but need apples. I've also had the apple pie production halt due to a lack of apples when my log storage containers were full and comparatively few logs were being used. A real late game issue to be sure, but something to think about.
The mallet solves those issues as it gives you a reliable source of apples that you can start and stop at any time. What I do instead is simply get a few apple trees in a smaller patch of tree soil and have one worker bot per tree pounding at that tree with the mallet for apple production.
I've heard it said that as a developer you need to put in somewhere close to a hundred hours or more for about an hour of content for players.... assuming you are not making the base game engine and really only adding just content. I admit that the modding community can help a bit in that regard if you are talking about doing stuff like making new items in a game or new "crafting" recipes.
I don't know how hard it would be to extend that out for comparatively easy user mods (meaning it is easy to create those mods), but opening up an API is not as easy as you are suggesting either. I agree it would be a pleasant thing to see being done... but demanding it happens isn't a good thing either. Note that Minecraft was released in 2009 and only just barely got something even resembling a formal official API just this past week (and incomplete at that).
Give Gary and Aaron a break here, as they are really doing a good job under the circumstances. In the meantime, if you really want to see them get more content sooner..... make a donation to their development effort and put in a few bucks/quid into their tip jar. They do deserve it.
Here are some example test files which demonstrate this bug:
This is a large scale production of clay pots that I'm doing (with support bots leading the production chain... I'm doing clay pots to show it more clearly). Here you will see several workerbots making raw clay pots simultaneously, and when it hits the storage peak, all but one will stop. If I ramp up production of the clay pots after the storage containers are full, all of the bots but one are glitched out.
Another situation is here:
Here I have multiple bots both consuming and making raw clay pots. The production of raw clay posts is slightly higher, so one or more of the bots are going to glitch out but the others will continue afterward. A situation like this can have a second or third bot eventually glitch out. If you aren't closely paying attention to the situation, what will happen is that the glitched out item production will gradually start to fall until the storage containers eventually go empty.
I hope that helps you out in seeing a test condition to catch this bug.
It doesn't necessarily need to happen simultaneously though. Like I said, I can have a dozen bots all at very different stages in the processing of an item type (such as running threshers with cereal) and all but one of the bots will have this glitch. It seems to be something to do with how they are reacting to the storage unit once it is full. If I had to guess, it was a boundary condition you are using with the test for a full storage container, where you are currently only looking at if the bot put in the last item.
Those logic bugs are the kind that tear your hair out, so I completely understand and am sympathetic with why it exists.
I even get a sort of weird situation where due to the fact it isn't completely simultaneous that some arbitrary number of bots won't necessarily glitch out. What I think is happening there is that due to the heavy demand of that item to and from multiple storage containers, that the bots who glitch out slow down production thus allowing the other bots who are consuming that item (like making bread) to catch up and make space available to some of these bots who aren't glitching to put items into storage. If for some reason the consumption of items from the whole production chain is halted (as is the case sometimes when setting up a completely unrelated production chain), I have this happen to all but one of the bots without fail. I can easily reproduce this situation every time it fits this criteria.
I have two bugs to report:
#1: Nested "Times" loops - If you have two of these loops inside of each other, it proceeds to complete the loop the first time but then jumps to the outer loop rather than looping through the inner loop. I was trying to use a bench saw with an arm load of planks to make poles and have the workerbot grab four poles at a time four times. There is a "work around" to use the "Until hands full" loop instead, but it is none the less a bug.
#2 Simultaneous production of same item stalls out - If I have multiple production areas for the same item, such as three worker bots all making metal bars, there is a glitch after the first bot deposits resources into storage when the storage buildings are full. The first bot to attempt to store the item simply stops and waits until the storage unit empties from its use elsewhere (like another production chain making metal plates) but the subsequent bots all attempting to put items into storage proceed to the next instruction while carrying the item they were intending to put into storage. In this case, they still have their hands full of metal bars while trying to grab some metal ore from another storage container.
Like I said, if it is a solitary production chain I don't have any problems, but only when there are multiple bots involved with the same time all trying to put items into storage at the same time or shortly after the storage fills up. This also isn't isolated to just metal bars but also happens with cereal seed and every other production chain I've built where I've had a bot using multiple item types. Obviously it doesn't matter if for example I have a workerbot picking up cereal and just taking it to a storage chest, because the one extra piece of cereal is what they are trying to grab anyway. It does matter if it is a different kind of item though and more complex instructions for those bots.
What I'm doing right now is to manually go around the map and stop each worker bot on these stalled production chains, collect all of the items including any items they may have left on the ground due to the stalled production, and then restart them one by one when the storage container is empty or almost empty. Having many storage containers of the same time helps in terms of a buffer, but I have some (like the cereal seed) with over 10k storage space that has been completely full and then emptied completely from other production areas before I need to run all over the map and restart production again.
I would love to have the situation where all of the workerbots simply wait when the storage is full until there is some empty space in the storage unit. I would imagine prioritizing a dozen bots who are trying to simultaneously put something like cereal seed into storage (which I have done) is not an easy thing to work out though on your part. Best of luck trying to solve this bug.
Anyway, thank you for your efforts Denki Games, and I am really enjoying this game.
You can plant acorns directly in the ground without the seedling tray. Still, if you insist upon using the tray, you need to add fertilizer, which you get from cows where their dung is then put into fertilizer storage and then turned into fertilizer. The cows need to be milked before they will produce dung though.
In other words, there are several steps to get the whole process going. Using the seedling trays gives you some extra seedlings compared to simply planting acorns in the ground, so it is worth the hassle.
I'd suggest when you are starting though, just build a general storage container to hold acorns that one bot collects and then another one takes out of that container to plant.
