So I'm two paragraphs in and wanted to just state at the top of this that I'm going to list what I do when I'm modding so you can get an idea of how to do it yourself.
If someone were to make a tutorial for making the mod they'll probably just make the mod and wouldn't be interested in you sharing their work. Modding is pretty easy and there is already A LOT of documentation.
Anyway, I made myself a farm mod and attempted to do the same thing. Made an entity, crop, and research for a new type of corn I called "Mega Corn"; may make a mega crop mod actually to release on the forums, and anyway you'd have to do this but then remove the worker bonus from the crops before creating an automated farm. I did make an automated farm but the crops aren't grown due to the fact that the crops have a worker bonus, which I'm actually not sure at this point in time whether the worker bonus is bound to the crop or the farm itself.
I overthought my idea to make it automated. I chose to make it automated with the farm automation research, which was wrong. No workers = no crops due to no worker bonus. You simply have to turn on the automation feature in the building options in the mod system and set it to whatever. I'm going to test this out real quick with two different mods to see how the automation system affects the corn.
Okay, so, with workers you can easily get corn to grow as much as 300 food per cycle. Without workers it's stuck at whatever you set the automation performance to.
I save the mod, open the mod folder, and open the items lua for my mod with notepad++ so I can edit this a bit more quickly. You're going to have to learn some LUA stuff and familiarize yourself with text interface to be able to do this a bit easier. It's really simple. Way faster but way less easy in comparison to the mod editor. But for this you wouldn't really have to program by hand and could just use the mod editor.
I copy and paste my automated farm mod and rename farm2 to farm2 as well as turn off the hide feature on the second farm. The hide feature simply forces the game to overwrite the building instead of creating a new building. A new building is created if you don't use the hide feature. In farm2 I change the automation performance too 200 to see if the higher performance affects the crops. I also change the upgrade to remove 6 slots from farm2.
So then I start surviving mars and open cheat engine up and align it with surviving mars and enable the speed hack so I can test this in a few minutes rather than an hour to get to where I can support a farm. It would be cool if surviving mars had a 4x or 5x speed so I wouldn't have to use cheat engine, but whatever.
Okay, so what I learned is that the bonus food is tied directly to the building performance. So, ((outcome)/100))/(building performance). and that the automation performance is equivalent to worker performance. For the automation upgrade to work removing all workers building automation also needs to be enabled other else no food will be produced.
So, given the information we just learned I would make two researchable technologies to add to bio research to upgrade the automatic farm. Have the automatic farm start with 20% performance so as that it isn't overpowered, then add 130 for the first upgrade and 150 for the second upgrade to reach the highest outcome I've had personally of 300 food per run.
Now, I need to check that this is a trait we can affect real quick.
So, I do the same as I did previous except add the mods and technologies to the game.
Start up the game to test and.... it's gone. (southpark joke)
Kidding. It worked. I just made a working autofarm starting with 20 percent performance that is upgraded twice to reach a total of 300 building performance. My math above was wrong as soil quality affects building performance, but I got it worked out.
Now I'm going to go back to blender. Learning how to 3d model so I can make more mods. I'm also slowly creating an ease of life mod and a mega buildings mod. Mega buildings as in, for example, the arcology now holds 1000 dudes instead of ~35 or whatever. I just like my megadome to actually be.. well.. mega. Takes a lot of the fun out of the game though because you don't end up making a billion domes, but still cool. My other mods will be more balanced though if I ever finish them. I mean, I could just randomly quit and do something else - but this is fun for now.
Anyway, yeah, there ya go. It's not a great guide but I'm not going to just give you literally all of the answers. The documentation is there. They actually did a great job with their modding documentation.
