[GregTech-5][1.7.10-FORGE-1355+][Unofficial but approved Port][Stable] Even GT5 Experimental is slowly getting stable.

Here are some numbers regarding the time:
methane production in an LV centrifuge is 4 ticks/L at the fastest (foods vary in how much methane they produce, but not how fast, except for foods that output additional items, e.g. golden carrots/apples, which are slower)
biogas production in an LV distillery is 1.25 ticks/L
biogas production in a distillation tower running at minimum voltage is 32 L/tick.
I think biogas has a big advantage in terms of net EU per item - 4 pumpkins is enough to make 1000 mB biomass in an IC2 fluid/solid canning machine (after macerating to bio chaff), which eventually becomes 32000 L biogas in the distillery, or 8000 L biogas per pumpkin, compared to 72 mB methane per potato (or 96 if you use a poisonous potato)

Edit: net EU gains, ignoring transfer losses, and using FTB wiki numbers for gas turbine actual output (which might be based on 5.08 default efficiencies):
poisonous potato = 96 L methane = 3648 EU
processing cost = 1920 EU
net = 1728 EU per poisonous potato, 19 sec = 126 EU/s or 6.3 EU/t with a constant supply of the item
A regular potato nets about 1296 EU.

4 pumpkins = 32000 biogas = 841600 EU fuel value
processing cost:
macerate 16 pumpkin seeds to 1 bio chaff = 800 EU (2 EU/t for 400 ticks)
fluid enrich water with 1 bio chaff = 800 EU (4 EU/t for 200 ticks)
distill 1 L biomass to 32 L biogas 1000 times = 640000 EU
net = 201600 EU per 4 pumpkins, or 50400 per pumpkin (49600 per pumpkin if you use a second macerator to convert the pumpkins to seeds to allow buffering the pumpkins in a chest instead of the seeds)

Edit 2: just for the sake of comparison, here's charcoal to steam via large bronze boiler at 5.08 efficiencies (admittedly automating wood harvesting is impractical without other mods - I've heard about players pulling it off with an imprisoned Wither iirc, but that sounds absurdly dangerous to me - and automating logs to charcoal is mid-game by default in 5.09):
1 charcoal = 16000 L steam (at full heat) / 2 * 0.66 = 5280 EU
wood to charcoal in LV electric furnace = 512 EU (4 EU/t for 128 ticks)
net = 4768 EU per charcoal

Quote from willis936

How much power are you getting out of the turbines? If you have 3 IV dynamo hatches you aren't necessarily sending an amp from each dynamo hatch every tick. There's some randomness there and you may or may not ever have a tick where all three output an amp at the same time. I would wire it such that two of them are on a 2x cable and the third is on a separate 1x or you combine it and go to 4x.

Turns out it ended up burning the wire enventually (atleast...sporadically.) I came to edit my message but you already replyed :p

Nice, that was extremely helpful, Mauve.
Hmm, seems that I just need one ic2 machine to make biogas? I will check that at home, as I don't want to depend too much on Non-GT machines.
It will be a interesting chain to automatize, pumpkins to biogas.

Quote from Drawfox

Nice, that was extremely helpful, Mauve.
Hmm, seems that I just need one ic2 machine to make biogas? I will check that at home, as I don't want to depend too much on Non-GT machines.
It will be a interesting chain to automatize, pumpkins to biogas.

I can confirm from personal experience that the fluid/solid canning machine is the only IC2 machine needed to make biogas, and once you can make a pyrolyse oven, you can use that instead to further reduce dependency on non-GT machines (higher EU cost though - 9000 EU to make 5000 L biomass compared to 4000 EU for the IC2 fluid/solid canning machine, though it only needs 4 bio chaff to make that much, which complicates the calculations). You'd still need something like an ic2 crop harvester or a Forestry multifarm if you want to automate harvesting the pumpkins, though.

Note that other crops can also be used in biogas production, but the reason I chose pumpkins is that it is low tier (so it grows fairly quickly even without breeding for stats), has no light level requirements, and is consistent about what it drops (potato crop will drop poisonous potato unless harvested early, and the poisonous kind isn't usable for biogas production; melon crop drops a mixture of melon blocks and melon slices)

Yeah, I was looking at the Pyrolyse oven right now.
I got the pumpkin part, It yields more, while using less space too, which means less logistics.
(Water) Melons seems to yield a lot too, I would need only two to get a biochaff, but they require an extra step on the macerator when it drops a whole melon.
For some reason, I don't have a problem with the Ic2 harvester. Maybe because there's no GT machine that does what it does, or because it stays out of my sight most of time.

Edit: The Pyrolyse requires a Sh*t tons of iron, 8 stacks only on casings (assuming I make then on the assembler). I will have to use the IC2 canning machine for now (It is so cheap compared with GT machines, that I fell like cheating).

Edit2: THe harvester thought, got expensive as hell. It's HV now, I didn't expected that.

I've decided to give GT 5.10 more of a try, but since I currently can't use IC2 crops (the IC2 builds that include them crash with GT 5.10), I might need to re-evaluate what to use for that when the time comes. Curiously, it looks like it will allow me to craft 8 sugar cane into a plantball (as well as wheat, cactus, leaves, saplings, ferns/grass, or wheat seeds); 5.09 only allows wheat for making plantballs via the crafting table.

Edit: I might actually try some oil drilling this time. I just noticed that refinery gas has the same fuel value as diesel, and it's much simpler to process from natural gas than diesel is from oil, so if I can find a decent source of it, it might work.

The jar didn't work, but transplanting the class file seems to have worked - I'm at least able to enter the game with IC2 build 169. The crop harvester and crop matron show up with recipes now. The seed bags, however, show neither recipe nor usage in JEI, so I'm wondering if the ability to put them through the GT scanner was (temporarily) removed from GT 5.10.

Quote from Chocohead

There's a decent chance the code is just commented out, worth a look to see how easy it would be to get working.

Looking at the code, I found this:
https://github.com/Blood-Asp/GT5-…er.java#L73-L90
which suggests that scanning a seed bag would work in 5.10 (though I'd need to switch to creative or something to check - I'm pre-steam in my survival world), but I haven't found where a recipe would be registered to NEI/JEI to make it show up that way.

Edit: tried in creative mode with a JEI cheat-mode redwheat seed bag (since the seed bags don't show up in the creative inventory), and it didn't process. If I'm reading that code correctly, a pre-scanned seed bag (such as one I cheated in) should zip through in 1 tick. With that apparently not working, I don't know where to look for code to uncomment (or otherwise edit) to get it working.

I'm having some issues transporting things to and from the Nether.

I've got an Advanced Miner II up and running in the Nether over the Nether Quartz vein. It's not strictly necessary, since I've physically visited the vein now, and I can probably wall it off if I wanted to harvest it by hand. I'd prefer to make the Miner viable for a variety of reasons.

The problem is drilling fluid, which I'm transporting by hand. It doesn't last long, and since it's the Nether, I can't gather water locally to make it on site.

With my oil rig, I've got an automated Railcraft system that I like quite well. It only transports 32,000 liters of Heavy Oil or Nitro Diesel at a time, but it to does it completely automatically on demand, and it's had no trouble keeping up with my usage.

I just spent a little time messing with carts going through Nether Portals, and I'm unhappy with the results. Trains decouple and turn into individual carts. I tried putting down some coupler track on the other side to re-link the train, but the carts ended up on different tracks. This despite having anchors down so the carts should have had time to move. I believe part of the issue is that carts lose all momentum on traveling through the portal.

Trains rather than individual carts are pretty important. The locomotive allows Railcraft to do routing, and the Anchor Cart means it keeps moving. Without anchor carts I'd have to put down anchors covering the entire route from the portal to the Nether Quartz miner.

I'm not sure it can be done with vanilla portals. Any suggestions? I'm thinking about experimenting with other mods that have better portal support. I've seen mention here and there that Mystcraft portals will transport trains intact, or possibly Enchanced Portals 3.

Mystcraft is frankly fairly "heavy" in my mind, it adds a lot of things I probably don't want, if all I'm using it for is a Nether Portal alternative.

EDIT: I've watched a couple of videos of people using Mystcraft to solve this sort of problem, and it seems a little... cheaty. No routing or trains needed, and only very short lengths of track, because you can put the spawn point for the portal anywhere. Thus you link the portal directly to the liquid unloader for whatever fluid you're moving. Two kinds of liquid? No problem, just set up separate portal pairs.

Vanilla Nether portals don't let you choose your destination, though you can move Overworld portals a fair distance and have get them to link to a fixed Nether-side portal. Moving the Nether side of course ends up moving the link point a long distance in the Overworld, so this sort of instant-transport shenanigans isn't possible.

I may go the Mystcraft route anyway, but implement a house rule that says I can't do that. That I have to place the spawn point more-or-less where a vanilla Nether portal link would go. Thus pretending the Mystcraft portals are just better behaved Nether portals.

Try fluid cells, made from steel. They are stackable, each is equivalent to 16 buckets (if I remember correctly). There are also tungstensteel cells, which are even better.

Ah, I wish I was home now, this train/portal problem seems fun...
I think I tried once, but I gave up, as it wasn't important.

Quote from laurynasl

Try fluid cells, made from steel.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it doesn't seem to be Gregtech. There's nothing in NEI about an alternate fluid cell, beyond the normal one (made from tin) and the legacy IC2 Universal Fluid Cell (also made from tin). On the off chance there was an unregistered recipe, I tried using my Cell mold for the extruder with steel ingots, and nothing happened.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it doesn't seem to be Gregtech. There's nothing in NEI about an alternate fluid cell, beyond the normal one (made from tin) and the legacy IC2 Universal Fluid Cell (also made from tin). On the off chance there was an unregistered recipe, I tried using my Cell mold for the extruder with steel ingots, and nothing happened.

I don't remember exact name. It's from GregTech 5, added by Greg, buffed by BloodAsp. What I remember about crafting it: tier 2 assembler, needs steel rings and some thickness steel plates.

It is gregtech, yes.
The steel one holds 16, and the tungstensteel 64 buckets.

Found it. Double Steel plate + 2x Steel Ring = Large Steel Fluid Cell. I had no idea it existed, and it has no recipes in NEI. It does, however, work in the fluid canner, and holds Drilling Fluid. Which, it's interesting to say, the standard Gregtech cell do not - I had to use IC2 Universal Fluid Cells to transport my drilling fluid.

It's 2.5 steel per cell, vs. 2 tin for the basic cells, so it's much more cost efficient than the basic fluid cells. Modulo the value of steel vs. tin, of course.

Quote from Chocohead

had a dig around and https://github.com/Blood-Asp/GT5-Unoffic…Proxy.java#L321 registers the seed bags as coffee instead, so that would probably explain why it didn't work.

This should fix both issues properly, it's actually a patcher rather than just a fixed file.

Seems to work, at least in creative mode.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

Found it. Double Steel plate + 2x Steel Ring = Large Steel Fluid Cell. I had no idea it existed, and it has no recipes in NEI. It does, however, work in the fluid canner, and holds Drilling Fluid. Which, it's interesting to say, the standard Gregtech cell do not - I had to use IC2 Universal Fluid Cells to transport my drilling fluid.

It's 2.5 steel per cell, vs. 2 tin for the basic cells, so it's much more cost efficient than the basic fluid cells. Modulo the value of steel vs. tin, of course.

A couple things to point out, just in case you're not already aware of them: 1. (tungsten)steel fluid cells only stack to 16, though that still gives you 4 times as much fluid per stack for the steel cells compared to UFCs. 2. you can also fill (or empty) various fluid containers in input or output hatches (which don't have to be part of multiblocks for this) at zero EU cost, and lower crafting cost compared to a fluid canner (though filling/emptying tungstensteel fluid cells this way requires a ZPMV hatch, whereas doing it with a fluid canner only requires EV tier)

A couple of options for portable fluid storage from other mods I'm aware of:
1. the Certus Quartz Tank from Extra Cells (bit of a misnomer, really, since it's made from quartz glass, which could be made with either certus quartz dust or nether quartz dust, and sometimes I've even added a Minetweaker script to allow making quartz glass with quartzite dust) which holds 32000 L per block and can be filled in an MV fluid canner or HV input/output hatch, or filled externally and then picked up by sneak+right click with nether/certus quartz wrench.
2. drums from Extra Utilities - however, 11 iron and 6 steel for 256000 L capacity for the standard drum seems much too cheap to me for use with GregTech.

Edit: I realized that if you decide to use Extra Cells, you could even use fluid import/export buses and a Quantum Network Bridge. Since the QNB has a much higher crafting cost than a Mystcraft Portal as well as an upkeep cost to keep it running, it probably won't feel as cheaty.

Yeah, I found out that they stack in groups of 16, not 64. But still, 256 buckets per stack is better than 64.

I'm using a fluid canner at the mining rig. The energy cost isn't high, and when combined with a chest buffer and a chest for empty cells, it means I can leave a lot more than one input hatch's worth of fluid at the rig.

I'm not going to install Extra Utilities, for pretty much the reason you state. It's always a balancing act, deciding when something from another mod is unbalanced because it's too cheap or too good.

I want to run trains into the Nether, just because. I just want something that's reliable and doesn't have that balance problem.