Need for long distance energy travel

1st Official Post

    Due to the purposefully inefficient (albeit awesome) looking design of my treehouse I am in some hefty need of having my cables go over some rather long distances. I know that eventually there starts to become some energy loss. I currently have copper cables for everything, but I have the resources to make over a hundred fibre cables which I intend to do.

    I don't know how long my wire line is/will need to be but currently it is roughly 40 tiles from the generator to the batbox. Yaaaaa. I COULD make it more efficent by moving things closer, but I would need to do that also with my solar panel which is roughly half the distance to the batbox and in this can efficiency can be ugly. AND MY BASE MUST BE BEAUTIFUL! (Albiet flammable)

    I'm fairly new to Industrial Craft, so I'm kinda learning on the way. Luckily, I didn't have to worry about personally discovering that things can be explosive at times. I figure that explosions could have something to do with this somehow and I would also like to know how to prevent that disaster. I cannot afford to have my thaumaturgical laboratory explode due to the cables running under it.

    • Official Post

    All cables have to be loaded in order for power to be able to flow down them, it produces problems to try and simulate unloaded things. Using transformers in up transforming mode to increase the power tier is the best way to avoid cable loss as the larger less frequent packets lose less as a proportion than smaller more frequent ones. Remember to down transform back again before plugging into your machines though ;)

    145 Mods isn't too many. 9 types of copper and 8 types of tin aren't too many. 3 types of coffee though?

    I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realise that what you read was not what I meant.


    ---- Minecraft Crash Report ----
    // I just don't know what went wrong :(


    I see this too much.

    I replaced all my wiring with fibre cables (Cuz stacks of diamond blocks) so presumably it takes longer for energy loss or that I lose less. When does energy loss start to happen on different types of cables? And how much do you start to lose? Is there a better type of cable than fibre?

    I'm kinda confused as to what you mean with the transformer package thing. And if you place a transformer the wrong way can it explode or something?


    Something I noticed is that despite me having replaced all my wiring with fibre cable my batbox still isn't getting any energy, presumably due to distance. My solar panel can't seem to reach it either. I double checked that I placed all the cables the correct way.

    • Official Post

    Energy is sent in packets, the size of the packet determines the tier (and thus whether a machine can accept it or a cable can transfer it). A solar panel produces ~1EU so you'll have 1 EU sized packets sent down the cable. With floored loss turned on (which is the default), every time the packet has travelled so many blocks of cable, it will lose 1 EU. Thus with your solar panel, it's going most of the way down the long cable then completely disappearing due to loss in the cable (as 1 - 1 = 0).


    A transformer allows you to increase the size of the packet, so that when it loses 1 EU you'll still have some left. For a single solar panel, feeding it into an LV-Transformer will mean after thirty-two 1 EU packets the transformer will send one 32 EU packet (which is LV tier) which would then be able to go 32x further than a 1 EU packet could. Thus if you used an MV-Transformer (which outputs in 128 EU packets) you could go 128x the distance before all the power is lost.


    Normally you use transformers for stepping down power tier, as a higher output generator such as a nuclear reactor will output above tier 1 which any tier 1 machine would explode if it received. Thus a transformer can be used to break up those bigger packets into multiple smaller ones. Transformers can be reversed to increase the tier however for the purpose you want, to allow it to go further with less loss. With this your LV-Transformer can do 128 EU packets and your MV-Transformer 512 EU. You can set this setting in a transformer's GUI, or giving it a redstone signal.

    The point of a high and low value is what the transformer can accept up to from it's input faces and what it will output. In the normal step down mode the triple dot face will accept up to the high value, and output packets exactly the size of the low value from the other 5 single dot faces. In step up mode the single dot faces take up to the low value, and the triple dot face will output packets exactly the size of the high value.



    If you're not sure still I recommend trying things out in creative so you don't have to remake anything if it goes wrong ;)

    145 Mods isn't too many. 9 types of copper and 8 types of tin aren't too many. 3 types of coffee though?

    I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realise that what you read was not what I meant.


    ---- Minecraft Crash Report ----
    // I just don't know what went wrong :(


    I see this too much.

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