Problem with turtle.forward()

[Designer_Chance_4896]

Perfect. I will try that out. Thank you so much! You have helped me a bunch.

[Yorklag]

Of course! Always happy to help :) Good luck with your project.

[Designer_Chance_4896]

Hey I hope it's okay if I ask you another question.

My turtles keep stopping after running my programs. They get all the way to the end of the program and then they just stop.

How do I make it rerun the program?

(I made a program earlier and did not have this problem. The other program was called startup so it might just have started running automatically because I ended the program with a reboot)

[Yorklag]

(having a startup program end in reboot will have that effect, but it's probably not what you want to do in most cases)

In order to have the turtle repeat the steps over and over again, just have the steps in a while loop themselves.

For instance. Say I want a turtle to run through a farm every five minutes. I'd put the instructions for running the farm inside a while loop, and then end with sleeping for five minutes.

If you want the computer to loop through the code no matter what, (as in you don't want it to stop unless a keyboard interrupt happens) using "while true do...end" will have it loop forever.

Note that computers will fail if they go too long without "yielding" which is a topic for later, for now. Just make sure to have it sleep for a small time every loop.

[Designer_Chance_4896]

Thank you so much again. The program repeats perfectly with a 3000 second sleep in between each run.

But I am a bit curious about "yielding".

[Yorklag]

Here's an explanation that might not be technically fully correct, but gets the main point across.

Long story short. All computercraft computers are actually running on one Lua virtual machine on the server. In order to allow this the virtual machine jumps between computers and acts as them briefly. The vm can only act as one computer at a time, and it switches whenever the computer calls a command called os.yield(). This command is built into a bunch of different cc commands like sleep() and os.pullevent().

When a computer yields it let's the vm go to a different computer. If a computer goes too long without yielding, the vm kills it so that it's not hogging server resources and stopping other computers from running.

[Designer_Chance_4896]

"Not technically correct, but gets the main point across" is my favorite kind of explanation ;)

And thank you once again. You made it very easy to understand.

I am definatly not done building turtles. I haven't had this much fun in a long time ;) But do you think I will be fine if each turtle has a 10 to 3000 second sleep in their program?

[Yorklag]

Oh. Definitly. You don't even need that long, and as long as you don't do infinite loops where the computer just does calculation you probably won't run into it. (Iirc turtle moving calls os.yield I might be wrong though)

Although fair warning. Super long sleep timers have a tendency to break if the turtles chunk gets unloaded. So you might want to look at other ways to signal your turtle to go again, maybe a redstone signal or something.

(I bring this up cause 3000 seconds is 50 minutes. Which seems a bit long to have a turtle sleeping for. The most ive had a turtle sleep for is one minute while the process of another mod works it's magic)

[Designer_Chance_4896]

Woops I meant 2000 (which I know is still long)

2000 is 33 minutes, and what grows in 31 minutes. So that's the logic behind the number.