Can crops beat out MFR and Forestry tree farms for energy production?

  • And if I have a super crop, and I right click to harvest from it, then I place those sugar on crop sticks. Will that just make "dumb" sugar, with normal beginner stats? Or will it carry the stats it came from. Obviously that'd be a great way to propagate a good seed across a whole field if it works.

  • Word is high resistance stat on plants also boosts their chance of supplying multiple seed bags per left click. It's this true? That might also be very helpful for filling a fiel.


    Another question about resistance. Does it inhibit a crop's ability to:


    A. Create a hybrid plant with any neighboring crop (including it's own species)
    B. Decrease it's ability to make a hybrid of another species with a neighboring plant of another species
    C. Decrease it's ability to get mutation into new crops of a different species

    • Official Post

    after a certain resistance it will slow down the crossbreed. I don't remember the number now.


    Also crops with higher overall stats (with resistance being the most useless one) consume more "nutrients" from the soil, requiring a better environment to safely grow.
    Increasing resistance is really not required at all.

  • Is there a limit to fertilizers ability to counteract this? Because I'm set up to make a metric ton of that stuff.


    And I'm sorry you're language is a little unclear to me, does "cross breed" as you say it include cross breeding two plants of the same species? Or only two plants of different species?

    • Official Post

    by crossbreeding I mean the double cropsticks. Two crops, whatever they are, to produce a third.


    Fertilizer and hydration in the crop (best provided by a cropmatron) will significantly boost the maturation speed of a crop.
    If the crop have a high growth stat said boost is even higher (they multiply each other).


    That said, the crops have a maximum amount of fertilizer and hydration that it can stock and will use over time (the cropmatron will replenish it provided it has the resources to).
    The boost provided by them is dependant on how close to the maximum amount the crop has, the cropmatron will keep it at those levels.

  • I hadn't noticed that hydration and fertilizer made much difference so in my current world I just bred up reeds until their stats were in the teens, and I think I only have half a dozen of them with a crop harvester ( no crop matron ), and that is having no trouble feeding 16 fermenters/heaters powering 8 semifluid generators pumping out 128 eu/t. The setup was fairly expensive to build but it's maintenance free energy. I augmented that with wind power until I started cranking out nuclear reactors. I currently have 4 windmills, that biofuel setup, and 6 reactors generating a combined ~2300 eu/t.

  • If you've got 16 fermenters powered by 16 semi fluid heaters you're fermenting with 512 hu/t


    I've got a fluid nuclear reactor feeding 1056 hu/t to 16 fermenter, (not enough heat for them to work at full capacity)
    But my point is they are massively over supplied by a small patch of vanilla sugar. So the potential for your well bred sugar is very high.

  • I generate the heat also using the biogas with fluid heat generators. You can just stack pairs of heaters/fermenters row after row, swapping their position back and forth every other row and fill them all with fluid ejector upgrades. I also misspoke before: the crops don't have all of their stats in the teens, but rather the sum of all three stats are in the teens, so they are each in the range of 3-9. In other words, they are by far not the best crops and still enough to make all of that biogas.

  • I wonder if Redwheat farms are efficient?

    • 1 Redstone Dust = 800 EU, at a rate of 800 EU/t/Battery Block (lossless). = 800 * avg. drops * quantity (should be 11^2) EU/avg. growth time (in ticks) = 800 * d * q/ T EU/t

    • Crop Harvester consumes 1EU/t = 800 * d * q / T - T EU/t

    • Crop Harvester also consumes 100 EU per drop (another 100 EU if the cropnalyzer is in) = 600 * d * q / T - T EU/t

  • if you breed them up high enough, probably. also, thaumcraft golems might be able to harvest crops, and these don't require energy.

    Native language german, please point out mistakes to me. forget it, my english is better than that of a good deal of people on the forums anyway.


    IC Related Quotes thread. If you ever need some good puns.

  • I wonder if Redwheat farms are efficient?

    • 1 Redstone Dust = 800 EU, at a rate of 800 EU/t/Battery Block (lossless). = 800 * avg. drops * quantity (should be 11^2) EU/avg. growth time (in ticks) = 800 * d * q/ T EU/t (values are only for daytime, when crops grow best)
    • Crop Harvester consumes 1EU/t = 800 * d * q/ T - T EU/t
    • Crop Harvester also consumes 100 EU per drop (another 100 EU if the cropnalyzer is in) = 600 * d / T - T EU/t


    According to http://ftb.gamepedia.com/Crop_…g_%28IndustrialCraft_2%29, redwheat only grows in light levels between 5 and 10 inclusive, so it's an exception to daytime being when crops grow best - if it's open to the sky, it won't grow while the sun is out (not sure about during rain or thunderstorms). Also, afaik some crops like reed (aka sugar cane) and stickreed grow equally well at night as in the daytime.

  • Whoops, I forgot to get rid of that. I was going to suggest a solar panel + daylight sensor, but then I remembered the nature of redwheat.

  • right, it'd be a lot of effort to get the farm going with the lighting and stuff. but wouldn't a high ceiling do it as well? And wouldn't biomass be more effective?(I really have no idea on that one, as i haven't played any IC² in like, 3 months or so)

    Native language german, please point out mistakes to me. forget it, my english is better than that of a good deal of people on the forums anyway.


    IC Related Quotes thread. If you ever need some good puns.

    Edited once, last by blub01 ().

  • I wonder if Redwheat farms are efficient?

    • 1 Redstone Dust = 800 EU

    Actually you can get a lot more juice out of it than that. You can net 24,750 if you're also running Thermal Expansion, by running the redstone through a magma crucible, then an efficiency augmented Reactant Dynamo.


    Regarding concern of red wheat and lighting. I remember some dude talking about how cool cargo rockets are (galacticraft), and he had made reference to "a shipment of redwheat coming in from mars". Maybe he had discovered that the lighting on mars is excellent for mass producing red wheat.


    Now the question is how does the efficiency compare to what is probably the front runner for getting power out of IC2 crops: The MFR BioReactor.


    One bucket of it's biofuel can produce 231,250 EU in an efficency optimized compression dynamo ( or 174,000 in a railcraft boiler). With 9 ingredients in it the bioreactor produces 150mb per plant item.


    So 231,250 *.15 = 34,687


    34, 687 from MFR's bioreactor > than best energy use (that I can think of) for redstone. Plus, to put the redstone to use we'd have to supply the reactant dynamo with sugar as a reactant. You'd probably want to go wtih sugar, so much easier to get than all the other solid reactants, and it would take 3.7 sugar to match each redstone.


    so Biofuel = 34, 687 per plant
    Redwheat = 24,750 / 4.7 =5,266 per plant


    MFR Biofuel is still the pony to beat.

  • How are you converting your RF to EU?


    24,750


    Have you factored in the cost of using the Magma Crucible, and the cost of using sugar for a Reactant Dynamo? Sugar can also be used to make a MFR charcoal, right?


    With 9 ingredients in it the bioreactor produces 150mb per plant item.


    Now you need to ensure that the Bioreactor always has 9 ingredients in it, or risk the loss of efficiency because the reactor is most definitely faster than your puny cropfield can sustain. I guess one way to solve this problem is by using a chest for each plant, then comparators on the chests and a 9-way AND gate which powers hoppers/item pipes to fill the reactor, and after a delay turns the reactor on or something.


    231,250 EU in an efficency optimized compression dynamo ( or 174,000 in a railcraft boiler)


    Speed is also a factor, for example 231,250 EU may not be as useful at 80 EU/t (assuming 1:1 EU:RF, apparently 80 RF is the bottleneck of a dynamo) as an instant 800EU/t from Redstone Dust. Obviously it depends on how fast the biofuel is coming in, which ultimately depends on how fast the crops are harvested. Remember that the time it takes to grow the actual crops is shared between all of these methods. I wish I had a good statistic for growth times or a formula to calculate them, but I have no idea how long it takes to grow IC2 crops. There should be a threshold at which it is more efficient to use a series of dynamos than simply harvesting Redstone Dust, given a constant crop field size.


    For a railcraft boiler, you will have to do some serious calculations to find an optimal setup since there are the additional steps of converting biofuel to steam, and steam to whatever form of energy you can squeeze from it. I would imagine most steam-powered generators require a steady supply of steam to operate efficiently.

  • How are you converting your RF to EU?

    I tend to use rednet energy cables, or if you meant numerically, I'm considering 1 EU to be 4 RF, that's what the cables do, and I understand that to be a "standard" conversion value, although of course there are lots of conversion methods that can bend those rules.

    Have you factored in the cost of using the Magma Crucible, and the cost of using sugar for a Reactant Dynamo? Sugar can also be used to make a MFR charcoal, right?

    Yes, no, yes

    Now you need to ensure that the Bioreactor always has 9 ingredients in it.

    Yes, I think early game a lot of people only turn the Bioreactor on in short bursts before they have the volume of plants to keep it more regular. I think your idea would work, but that we could likely hash out something a bit more compact and simple with Buildcraft logic gates, haven't tried yet.

    Speed is also a factor

    Yes. You can pump out and use that Biofuel energy full blast, but you'll need a lot of infrastructure to do it. A lot of dynamo's with a lot of augments and piping, or if you're willing to take a hit on efficiency a lot of boilers. Certainly there's something to be said for the simplicity of just dumping in redstone.

    For a railcraft boiler, you will have to do some serious calculations to find an optimal setup...

    Sure would, that's where this guy comes in:
    http://calculator.towerofawesome.org/

  • Now you need to ensure that the Bioreactor always has 9 ingredients in it, or risk the loss of efficiency because the reactor is most definitely faster than your puny cropfield can sustain. I guess one way to solve this problem is by using a chest for each plant, then comparators on the chests and a 9-way AND gate which powers hoppers/item pipes to fill the reactor, and after a delay turns the reactor on or something.


    If you breed the crops high enough, that isn't an issue at all. otherwise, you can use less generators, which will use less biofuel, that means the bioreactor doesn't make as much and thus doesn't use as many plants. I don't think the reactor has redstone control, anyway. but a relatively small field of crops with very good stats(it might actually be possible to power the reactor of one crop per plant type, if they are bred high enough). a 27*27 field of (normal) plants can supply one reactor easily, that means one 9*9 field per plant type, ore 80 plants. with a GGR of 21 21 something, you gain 21 drops per harvest(i think), and grows crazy fast(21 times?), that should easily deck a reactor. Oh, and is there a mechanic where a plant can essentially copy itself to an adjacent double cropstick? there is a mod called agricraft which essentially copies IC² crops(and only those), that has this feature, and i think it would make both sense and crops a bit less grindy, not having to breed every crop up separately.


    Also, how much energy do you get from one bucket biofuel in the mfr biogenerator?

    Native language german, please point out mistakes to me. forget it, my english is better than that of a good deal of people on the forums anyway.


    IC Related Quotes thread. If you ever need some good puns.