Reactor + Buildcraft

I'd love to, and am planning on doing so, but MCP isn't decompileing ic2 correctly right now. Can't mod if it won't recompile, and I don't know enough java/what the authors were doing to fix the problem. One guy made a patch to allow decompileing, but i think the forum mods locked the download because it has some of their source in it.

Eh, I figured it out. Decompile and recompile were successful, so I'm working on the ice machine now. I'd say how to fix the MCP decompile, but I get the feeling that'd get me banned.

You CAN, technically, create a fully automated snow collecting aggregate using BuildCraft. It requires a snow biome with frequent snowing and a lot of work to set up the fillers and obsidian pipes to automatically harvest snow. Not only that, but a filler that cannot find any block to destroy (if it is set in clear mode) will automatically shutdown and be unable to clear more tiles.

In short, this is just useless as of now.

Quote from Viktor_Berg

You CAN, technically, create a fully automated snow collecting aggregate using BuildCraft. It requires a snow biome with frequent snowing and a lot of work to set up the fillers and obsidian pipes to automatically harvest snow. Not only that, but a filler that cannot find any block to destroy (if it is set in clear mode) will automatically shutdown and be unable to clear more tiles.

In short, this is just useless as of now.

hmmm... I guess we're waiting on terraformers to make a reappearance.

I moded the compressor to add a recipe that turns a bucket of water into a cube of ice, and then spits the bucket out the front.
Started up minecraft, found it to worked, said "This is good".

Then I decided to automate it with buildcraft.

Nice little setup.

Compressor spits the bucket at an obsidian pipe.

pump collects water and sends it back.

Works, but slowly. But something still doesn't feel right..... I know, it's not big enough!

That's more like it!

3 pumps filling buckets continuously.

1 second sequencer to space the buckets of water out.

Accelerated insertion pipes(to make sure every bucket is accepted)

Bucket recollection points.

Empty bucket distributor.

Ice collection pipe.

Ice storage. (still have to build reactor)

Total ice? 1 block per second.
Enough to run a 320EU/t MarkV-A at a 33% duty cycle(584 heat buildup a second, 200 cooled a second by ice)

Redirected the ice flow down to my reactor.

Down down down

Reinforced stone and glass shield.

5 chamber reactor with ice feeder.

MarkV-A reactor with ice buildup.

Redpower logic duty cycle latch(set at 33%)

Craploads of power

Line running back up to surface...

providing power for ice factory.

Yay, closed loop ice system, All I have to do is swap out the uranium cells. Now to dig even deeper and set up a cobblestone recycling, mass fabricating, uranium cell factory.

If only we had a system for the reactor chamber that would allow you to automatically swap in new uranium cells as they run out.

I have InfiTools installed, one of the items you can make is an Ice Pickaxe, that mines Ice. The mod adds a ton of weapon and tool recipes and some of the tools have special abilities. One happens to be if you make an Ice Pickaxe head out of Ice blocks (its magic) when you mine an Ice block it will turn the surrounding water in a 3x3 into ice blocks. That would be my solution.
I think there is a food mod that has an icemaker as well.. I'll snoop around a bit.

You are using pomps from IC od BuildCraft?

the buildcraft addon for pumps, not the native buildcraft ones

For the record, all testing has been done with TMi up to this point.

Reactors running using additonal mods should probably have their own class. They dont necessarily have to play by the previous rules.

maybe mark-m (for modified)

When using buildcraft to inject ice, its important to remember the reactor fills from left to right, then top to bottom. So if there are cells depleting at the top and bottom, it will fill the top cells first, THEN the bottom ones after the top ones are full. If the cells at the top are depleting fast enough to absorb all the incomming Ice, the bottom ones will not be refilled.

Also, reactors will only pull one ice per stack per tick. so if your reactor is producing 1000 heat per tick, and you have all your ice in a single stack, its only going to pull them one at a time for 200 cooling per tick. Good luck dealing with the other 800 heat. This gets problematic when your reactor is only filling one of the stacks of ice, and is letting the other 4 empty out. I am pretty sure this is how I lost reactor 2.

I lost the first reactor due to a poorly placed mfsu. I was testing how high i could push the output. I finally put enough uranium to go over 512 output, it popped the cable and blew up a nearby mfsu. That took out the ice feeder lines, and things went bad before i could hook them back up.

reactor two lasted much longer and featured a design where if i popped an mfsu, iy wouldn't blow up anything else that was critical. but i didnt keep a good eye on it, and i am pretty sure it ran out of ice.

using equivalent exchange + build craft to convert lapis into groups of 16, 32 or 48 ice. This allows for MUCH faster refills off of a single pulling pipe. without it you need several chests pumping materials to get the necessary volume, and it gets laggy in the pipes.

Reactor 3 was when i figured out the lapis trick with eqex. It ran very well (748 continuous output)for many hours. Then the cells started to deplete and for reasons i cant identify, the whole thing exploded. But not before filling up 20 mfsu.

A question on "health bars" of things in the reactor. For cooling cells and plating, im pretty sure the health is how much heat they are currently holding. the closer they are to overheating, the less health they have.

But for uranium, i think its the amount of time left until they switch to "depleted" If i am wrong, it could explain a few things.

Yeah, cooling components(plating, coolant cells, and IHDs) show heat on the "damage" bar. Uranium cells show usage, and Isotope cells show reenrichment status.
Usually when testing, I have an unconnected IHD to allow me to see the reactor hull temp easier. Bear in mind that it won't keep up with the reactor hull if you start overheating quickly, it only matches at 25 heat a second. The whole "will only load one cell at a time" is why I designed my overflow activated cycle system. Once it's overflowing, you can be sure that there's lots of individual stacks of ice. It is a rather complex system though.

Quote from Vendan

Yeah, cooling components(plating, coolant cells, and IHDs) show heat on the "damage" bar. Uranium cells show usage, and Isotope cells show reenrichment status.
Usually when testing, I have an unconnected IHD to allow me to see the reactor hull temp easier. Bear in mind that it won't keep up with the reactor hull if you start overheating quickly, it only matches at 25 heat a second. The whole "will only load one cell at a time" is why I designed my overflow activated cycle system. Once it's overflowing, you can be sure that there's lots of individual stacks of ice. It is a rather complex system though.

I dont have overflow detection, but since i had EqEx running anyway, i placed an alchemical chest with a blackhole band in it, that pumped ice back into the source chest.

the same could probably be done with obsidian pipes though.

Just set it up so that the pumping from the overflow chest goes through a redstone pipe(addon to buildcraft) Same basic idea, but i think the blackhole band has much better grab range then the obsidian pipe. Also, i'd set the overflow chest to just redirect back to the reactor, i.e. through an iron pipe. That would increase the total ice/second, allowing you to run longer if you do setup an overflow triggered cycle system. I'd have done it to mine, but i tried to extend the cycle to long with my timer, and the reactor went critical. Big enough boom to kill me, and hit my 3 reactors running in my underground base. Only thing left was a MASSIVE hole in the ground.

Just place the pomp above water, put into some empty cells, battery or sth else and chest next to it.

I am fairly certain that you can use the Better Than Wolves mod (If you get it working with Industrialcraft) to get a sort of ice producing machine. I've seen the little "suck in the block in front of me" device be used to make infinite cobble (Which will be scrap for the matter generator you'll be directing all this power to). I think changing it up so that two waterblocks (lit up carefully) and separated by an empty block in a snow biome can produce ice, because they generate a water block that will turn to ice, and maybe, if this thing DOES collect ice, it will suck it up and be useable.

Also in 1.8 and after you have to have ice next to water to make more ice, so remember that.

uumatter to make snow right? so wire in power to your mass fab, pipe your mass fab to a filler. have another filler break the snow, have an obsidian pipe collect the snowballs. send the snowballs to some compressors, output the compressors into your reactor. I tried doing this but before I finished setting every thing up my reactor blew because I accidentally left it running. left a crater where the setup was. lol.