The Sprinkler

Since crops will soon require water to grow, I would like to suggest a new item: the Sprinkler. The UI for the Sprinkler will look much like that of the ship's fuel tank, except it will take Water instead of Liquid Erchius. When the Sprinkler detects dry farmland within a certain distance from it, it will use up some water from its storage to automatically water those blocks.

 

Just came back from seeing the post about farms needing water, and I was JUST about to suggest this. But seriously, I find farming TEDIOUS and ANNOYING and UNREWARDING as it is. if i have to go back to the planet every 10 minutes to water them, i am DEFINITELY not doing any farming ever again. so please add sprinklers that do it for me. <-- lol, they just added Dr. Zoidberg to the faces.

 

People on the Starbound subreddit have already experimented with and presented solutions for automatic and semi-automatic farmland irrigation and all of that without some specialised sprinkler item. Although the automatic version DID involve gun turrets armed with water guns, so you might as well call that a "sprinkler". ;-)

Semi-automatic: http://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/comments/3e797t/semiautomated_farming/
Automatic: http://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/comments/3e83pr/fully_automatic_irrigation_systemdoesnt_use_rain/

In my opinion the farming update and necessity to irrigate regularly is much more of a opportunity and test of ingenuity than a burden.
This will tickle the creative minds to come up with efficient and beautiful farming systems and guides and standard procedures will be available in the future.
So, even if the devs did include sprinkler systems, the means to automate are in our hands right NOW! :-D

 

I think they added the need to irrigate to begin making "full-time farmer" an involved job so you're not just standing around waiting.

 

I never even thought of that... That's GENIUS!

 

Although:
The information seems to be outdated. Irrigation has been changed to only work if water hits dirt from above and devs have announced they plan on introducing some sort of device to make irrigation more convenient.
Sooo, a proper "sprinkler" might not be out of the question right now.

 

I was thinking more of a pipe-like blocks craftable from ores to run under the farm

 

thread necro . anyway, http://community.playstarbound.com/resources/automatic-irrigator.3127/ or http://community.playstarbound.com/resources/gardenbot-2-0-rebooted.3036/ both work.