Mapping row breaks

Gaps in rows — power poles, frost fans, roads, and streams — and how Archer suggests, confirms and auto-fills break points.

Platform: Mobile (the Archer app)

Real rows have holes in them. A power pole sits in the row and a couple of bays were never planted around it. A frost fan needs a long clearance, so the row stops well short and picks up again on the other side. A farm road or a stream cuts across the corner of a block and every row it touches is interrupted.

Archer models all of these the same way: a row break — a gap in a row where the vines stop and then resume. Most of the time you won't have to mark them by hand: Archer spots the gap from the outline you mark and suggests the breaks for you. This page covers how a break is modelled, how suggested breaks work, and the manual tools for the gaps Archer can't see.

How a break is modelled

A break is a pair of points on the same row: one where the row stops, one where it resumes. Anything between the pair is treated as a gap — no vines, no bays, no plant counts.

The gap is exactly as long as you make it, which is how the same tool covers both common cases:

Power pole — a short gap: the two break points sit a bay or so apart, either side of the pole.
Frost fan — a long gap: the two break points sit at the last vine before the fan's clearance and the first vine after it. The pair can span as many bays as the fan needs.

Because breaks come in pairs, an unpaired break point is a mapping error — the review dialog lists it as a blocker ("Row(s) N have odd number of break points (must be in pairs)") and the outline can't be confirmed until it's fixed.

One distinction worth being clear on: a break is for a row that stops and resumes. If a row simply ends early — say it runs into a dam and there's nothing on the other side — that's not a break. Mark the posts along that edge and the row's end follows the outline.

Suggested breaks — the normal case

When you mark the posts around a block, the outline you make has the gap in it: the posts on either side of the road, or the clearance around the line of fans. Archer reads that outline and mints a pair of break points on every row that crosses the gap. They appear on the map in light red, labelled Suggested Breaks in the legend, as distinct from the darker red Break Points you place yourself.

To accept a suggestion, do nothing. Suggested breaks behave as ordinary break points from then on — the row draws with its gap, counts exclude it, and the pair passes the completion check.
To reject one, tap either point of the pair and turn Row break point off in the Edit Point dialog. Archer deletes both points of the suggested pair and confirms with "Row N's break removed — it won't be suggested again" — it remembers the rejection, so later geometry passes won't put it back.

So the everyday workflow for a line of frost fans or a road is: mark the block's posts as usual, including the posts either side of the gap on your first and last rows, confirm the outline, and check the suggested breaks look right on the map.

Marking a single break by hand

For a gap the outline can't show — one pole in the middle of one row, say — mark it yourself:

Go to one side of the gap and add a point as normal.
Tap the point to open the Edit Point dialog and turn on Row break point.
Go to the other side of the gap and repeat.

That's it for a one-off obstacle. Archer attaches the pair to the row it lies on, and the row renders with a gap between them. Turning a hand-placed break point off again is a plain change of mind — it goes back to being an ordinary post.

Auto-fill — a run of breaks the outline missed

Sometimes a run of breaks crosses many rows but doesn't show in the outline — a line of poles well inside the block, for instance. Surveying two break points on every affected row would take all day, so Archer can fill in the intermediate rows for you from the first and last rows of the run. Auto-fill works one side of the gap at a time:

On the first affected row, add your break point, open its Edit Point dialog, turn on Row break point, and also turn on Auto-fill Start Point ("Start point for auto-filling breaks").
Go to the last affected row and add the matching break point on the same side of the gap. Turn on Row break point — because an auto-fill start is active, an Auto-fill button appears in the dialog.
Tap Auto-fill. Archer creates a break point on every intermediate row, positioned along the line between your two surveyed points, and confirms with "Auto-filled N break points". The generated points draw in light red, like suggested breaks.
Repeat steps 1–3 for the other side of the gap.

Two passes — near side, far side — and the whole run is done. Only one auto-fill start can be active at a time; if you open a break point while another start is set, the dialog warns you ("Another point is auto-fill start (Row N)") and the switch reads Transfer Auto-fill Start so you can move it here instead.

Because the intermediate points are interpolated along the line between your two surveyed points, the run doesn't have to be square to the rows — a road crossing the block diagonally works fine. If one row's gap doesn't quite follow the line, tap that row's generated point and turn Row break point off to remove the pair for that row; it won't be re-suggested.

Worked example: a stream cutting into a block

Here's a realistic messy one. A block runs downhill; a stream cuts in from one side, part-way up. Below the stream there are a few short rows; the stream interrupts the middle band of rows, which resume on the other side; above the cut, the rows run full length again.

Survey it like this:

Map the block's first and last rows as normal — they define the overall geometry, exactly as in Mapping a block.
Mark the stream bank. Drop a post at the end of each short row where the vines actually stop, and at the posts either side of the stream on the interrupted rows. That puts the stream's shape into the outline.
Confirm the outline. The short rows below the stream simply end at the bank — that's not a break, and their ends come from the outline. The band of rows the stream cuts through get suggested breaks at both banks. The stream runs diagonally — that's fine, the suggestions follow the outline you marked.
Check the map. If a suggested pair sits on a row the stream doesn't really cross, turn it off. If the outline didn't pick up a gap, mark it with auto-fill as above.

The result is one block whose plant counts, row lengths, and work surfaces all understand the stream: short rows count only what's planted, interrupted rows exclude the gap, and nothing pretends there are vines in the water.

Gotchas

Breaks come in pairs, on the same row. A lone break point trips the "must be in pairs" blocker; the review dialog names the row.
Auto-fill needs the outermost rows of the run. It fills strictly between your start point's row and the row you tap Auto-fill on — the two rows you survey are the ends of the run.
Don't leave a stray auto-fill start active. If you set a start point and never complete the pass, it stays flagged; the dialog's warning banner will tell you where it is.
Rejecting a break is remembered. If you turn a suggested pair off and later decide the gap is real, mark it by hand — Archer won't suggest it again.
Undo auto-fill (in the ⋮ menu, once the outline is confirmed) removes all generated posts, breaks included, and keeps every post you marked. See Fixing mapping mistakes.