Your first fish farm
Build an Aquifer and an Ecotone, and set up a pair of cod and a crop that look after each other.
The
Ecotone is the heart of Enthalpy: a small tank where fish and crops feed
each other. Here you'll build one with a pair of cod and some wheat. It won't make iron yet (that needs a
bred species, which comes next), but it will teach you how the Ecotone works and keep you in fish and
Fish Meal.
You'll need
- 4
Machine Chassis - 4
Glass - 3
Raw Cod
Wheat Seeds
Water Bucket- a
Calibration Tablet - power: two engines, or one engine and a store of FE
- Build an Aquifer.
It makes water from nothing, with no power, and pushes it into whatever is beside it.
Aquifer
Crafting Table







- Craft the Ecotone.
Ecotone
Crafting Table





- Build the structure.
Place the Ecotone and three Machine Chassis in a flat 2×2, then four glass blocks in a 2×2 directly underneath. Until it's complete, the Ecotone shows faint ghosts of the missing blocks. When it forms, the chassis become planter beds and the glass becomes a tank.
- Set up ports.
The Ecotone has no side panel: its outer faces are ports, and every port starts off. Right-click a face with the Calibration Tablet to cycle it to Input. Place the Aquifer against an input port for water, and an engine's front against another for power.
- Add fish and a crop.
Put two cod in the first row's fish slots, one each, and wheat seeds in that row's crop slot. The status changes to Running. Every 10 s the pair breeds another cod into the fish output, and every 24 s the wheat is harvested, with one seed kept back to replant.
- Read the nutrients gauge.
Two fish and one crop is balanced: the gauge sits in the middle. More fish than crops makes the water rich, so crops grow faster and fish breed slower; more crops than fish does the reverse. You'll tune this later; for now, balanced is fine.
- Keep it running at night.
At night the Ecotone stops with Dark: needs Lumen. A Lumen Module lights it so it carries on, at double the power.
Lumen Module
Crafting Table





- Turn spare fish into Fish Meal.
Take cod from the fish output and grind them in a
Triturator. Fish Meal works
like bone meal, and resource fish yield more while they're fed it.Fish Meal
Triturator
2
What you built#
A working Ecotone with water, power and light. Swap the cod for a resource fish and it becomes a mine that breeds.
Where next#
- Your first new species: breed a Ferric Cod, then farm iron.
- Ecotone: every detail.