Lead cost of a 5x5 fluid reactor is too high

albijoe · May 6th 2016

To begin: I am playing Vanilla 1.89+IC2+JEI, survival. My goal is to suggest the Reactor Pressure Vessel block be made out of less lead. I would even be fine if it was made out of reinforced stone instead of lead, or mixing gold in with the lead. Gold might be less minecraft-rare and more nuclear-ly effective than lead, now that I think about it.

I decided to try to build a fluid reactor... and I can't even get a floor done.

A hollow 5x5 cube is 98 blocks. Each block takes 5 lead.

The cost of a containment wall alone with no ports is 490 lead.

The cost of adding the nuclear reactor, 1 access hatch, 1 fluid port and 1 redstone port is a total of 667 lead.

1 Lead ore = 2 lead. Assume for the moment that washing uranium provides 7 lead at the point you might want to make a fluid reactor.
330 ore needs to be mined.
I'm using an OV miner at level 50. I've mined 37 times and gotten enough lead for 21 RCP blocks, so 105 lead -> about 45 blocks after uranium purifiaction. Perhaps 2 per 9x9 mining column, on a good day.
This means I have 285 lead remaining to make a basic reactor.
This means I need to mine over 200 times to get the remaining lead ore.

If each mining operation takes 5 minutes, I need to play over 16 hours of only mining to get enough lead to make my fluid reactor, and I will have covered something like 60 world chunks, just to mine. I will likely start recycling otherwise "valuable" ore to fuel Lead Ore uu-creation, because it will be that valuable after hour 5 or so.

One lead ore block takes about 10.7 mB of uu-matter, so I will only need the power-equivalent of 3B of uu-matter to make the lead I need. I'm expecting to only spend 1.2B or so, reducing my mining to only 10 hours, roughly.

MauveCloud · May 6th 2016

I hope the 1.8.9 version of IC2 isn't forcing you to use the fluid reactors instead of EU reactors (I haven't played it myself). I feel the same way about the excessive lead cost, as I mentioned here: The new 5x5 IC² Reactor
It takes almost 5 times as much lead to make a fluid reactor as an EU reactor, yet even the best fluid reactor designs barely provide double the EU output when using superheated steam (which also seems excessively difficult to set up) as one can get with a good EU reactor.

Chocohead · May 6th 2016

It might not even be that the lead costs are too low, it could just be lead ore is too rare. But the output and spawn rates can be increased if wanted in the configs.

And 1.8.9 doesn't force you to make a fluid reactor in anyway.

_Tim_ · May 7th 2016

At least it's a use for lead? Doesn't seem to do much else.

WTB hardcore reactor recipes.

Chocohead · May 7th 2016

It was only added to world gen for the sake of another material to replace the old reactor recipes, so I suppose it not being used for anything else is a side effect of that.

albijoe · May 7th 2016

Fluid reactors are not required in 1.8.9. I have a few reasons to build a fluid reactor:
1. I've never built one. This is learning.
2. I like to maximize the efficiency of my reactors. 100% additional efficiency is pretty big.
3. I like tech. I want to build all the things.

All that being said, this is kinda impossible to build. Increasing the amount of lead per chunk would work. My goal is to have things properly set for the whole of IC; I would rather this be "fixed" in a version of IC2 than fix it myself every time a new version comes out.

Increasing the lead per chunk will be kinda annoying in my current world, of course... I've explored a good bit, I'd have to travel to far away lands just to spawn new chunks.

Waz · Sep 8th 2016

The trouble with making lead more common is that plain EU reactors then become too cheap (lead is the main ingredient). What I've done is use Minetweaker/CraftTweaker to change the recipe for RPV:

Code

recipes.remove(<ic2:resource:14>);recipes.addShaped(<ic2:resource:14> * 12, [[ <ore:plateLead>, <ore:plateLead>, <ore:plateLead> ],  [ <ore:plateLead>, <minecraft:stone:*>, <ore:plateLead> ],  [ <ore:plateLead>, <ore:plateLead>, <ore:plateLead> ]]);

(yes, I changed it to a single stone surrounded by lead, to remind myself that this wasn't the original, you could instead just make it *8 for about the same change)

Omicron · Sep 8th 2016

I'm currently playing in 1.10.2, and I have no mods other than IC2 that spawn lead. I'm running two normal miners in parallel; each one pulls up a two-digit amount of lead ore per run. I'm using standard ore density settings. Why are you getting so much less lead?

It should probably be noted that I'm mining from the surface, so around y=70, not 50. Lead ore does spawn this high up; I'm getting it at all altitudes, much like uranium (just more of it). Maybe you need to place your miners higher up.

Also, the OV scanner in my game reports a range of "12 blocks" (actually 13), not 9 like it used to. The wiki doesn't reflect it, but the tooltip of the scanner ingame says so - and when I tested it in a creative world, I found that the miner indeed digs 6 blocks out in all directions, not 4 blocks like it used to in the past. Because of how surface area works, this is a huge increase: 9x9 = 81, 13x13 = 169. The miner now reaches slightly more than twice the area in one run. If your build also has these enlarged scanners, and you keep spacing the miners apart by 9 blocks instead of 13, that means that a significant part of the miner's area is overlapping the already depleted previous area, and you're getting less ore per run. Check your scanner stats and if necessary, space your mining runs further apart.

Also, I built large reactors in survival mode several times in the past. It's not nearly as impossible as you make it sound... you just need a big enough mining operation.

In 1.6.x, I built a combo-wombo piece made out of eight individual three-chamber reactors, which I dubbed The Heart Of The Mountain. Now that gobbled up some lead, I tell you!
It even ran MOX too - eight times this design: 000C0A0C0A0C0000000C0A140A140A0000000A1404050A0C0000000C0A0505140A0000000A140A140A0C0000000C0A0C0A0C00000000
Anyone crying for diamonds yet? Was worth it though, this thing pumped out over 4,700 EU/t with all eight units under heat, which is why I had to have four parallel HV cable lines terminating in a dedicated MFSU each (because I clearly hadn't used enough diamonds yet) followed by a massive array of voltage transformers splitting and routing the power around my various consumers. Also, you know how you get hurt a little bit when approaching a reactor above 7000 degrees? This miniature sun of mine would hurt you eight times per pulse. A friend made the mistake of ignoring the array of visitor hazmat suits I lined up along the heavily secured entrance tunnel, as well as the big warning sign and the Nuclear Control displays clearly showing the temperature readings. He was dead before he realized what was happening

In 1.7.x, I built a full scale fluid reactor running on this classic design: 030C0D140D0D0C0D00000C0D0D0C0D0D030D000D030D0D030D0D0C0C0D0D0C0D0D0C0D000D030D0D030D0D030D000D0C000D0C000D0C
Along with the necessary heat exchanger setup, of course. Used stirling generators because the steam turbines were buggy at the time. I didn't play long enough on that server to get enough plutonium for a six-chamber MOX setup though...

Omicron · Sep 8th 2016

Oh, looks like the dev team ended up agreeing on the cost issue:

"Fixed reactor pressure casings being 4x too expensive" - from a build on September 1st

Share