Are Water Mills as useless as they seem to be?

1st Official Post

    I've got a mining base at about layer 12, and I need power. currently, I have a geothermal generator set up, and it runs my small collection of tier 1 machines ok. However, trying to charge a batpack takes forever, and, of course, the occasional trips to the nearest (shrinking) lava lake are annoying. So, I decided to set up some maintenance free energy. My choices are wind, which won't work because I'm about 100 meters too low, solar, which would require knocking a 50 meter or so deep hole in my ceiling, which I'd MUCH rather not do, or water. Water would look like the best choice here... except it appears to be completely useless. Unless you want to be lugging buckets around (which defeats the purpose anyway) the best any one water mill appears to produce is about .25 EU, and about .21 or so realistically. Really?


    So, to get the 10 EU/t I get from my geothermal generator I'd need 40 water mills? What? And if I wanted real power I'd need HUNDREDS of the things.


    Is it just me, or is using water mills just a complete waste of time and resources?

    I would say, they are. I have yet to see any pratical way to use them, and their output is simply weak. Even if they do give .21 constantly, they req. almost the same materials as Solars, which give 1 EU/daytime (lets say .55-.60 EU/day cycle) is still alot better than Water. In your case, if you have the materials, I would go Nuclear. Or store EU from a Solar Farm topside in Crystals and manually carry them down, once in a while.

    Yeah, I was afraid of that.


    Actually, i had a semi-bright idea, more for the fun of setting it up than anything else. Like most people, I have buildcraft set up alongside IC2, so I am setting up an automatic reed farm topside. Reeds to plant clumps, to compressed plants to biocells to biofuel cells to a canning machine for filled fuel tanks. Kinda complicated, but should be fun to set up. I am thinking I should be able to get like 10 or so filled fuel tanks at a run, or 160,000 EU, more than enough to run my small set up downstairs for a few days each trip. Should get me by until I get the materials gathered for a nuclear reactor, I think?


    I WISH there was a better way to fill lava cells, because I have some massive lava lakes near my base. Neither buildcraft nor IC2 pumps do much with lava, unfortunately. You can move a few bucketfuls at a time, not nearly enough.

    this looks really interesting. I haven't dealt much with plant based power, however i have a heap of experience with Buildcraft now.


    I know you didn't want to know a 50 block hole from the surface, but for your system, as long as it is fully automatic, i would really recommend it, not for a cable, (as you would lose heaps of power or need a whole heap of batboxes to keep it from being lost), but for a pipe. you could then get your fuel cans piped down. and if you were feeling energetic you could pipe the empties right back up the same pipe, using the diamond pipe as splitter at the top and bottom.


    this makes me want to do this myself, so exciting!. I am a big user of solar panels so i would just hammer out 20 - 30 batboxes (10 or so for 50 blocks if you want to be precise :P ) and make the cable. but a plant farm with fuel cans I haven't done before.


    Oh, a quick comment on Nuclear reactors. They are really, really expensive. Anything above 50 or 60EU/t requires a low efficency and/or cool-down times/items (water buckets, ice etc). it requires babysitting if you want to run them at higher power levels. I am no expert on reactors, but i have made a couple, so by no means am i the last word on these things. I much prefer a power system i can forget about and then concentrate on whatever else.


    now off to work out how to make an automatic sugar cane harvesting farm!

    Hell, prove me wrong, Happy to be so 99% of the time, then I can learn stuff :)

    It seems like you've already figured out a solution, but people seem to forget the standard generator (even though it's the base for all the other generators including the water mill).


    You could have set-up an underground tree farm then wood -> charcoal -> generator. 1 stack of charcoal would be more power then 12 buckets of lava. (Though there's also the time to cut wood / smelt charcoal)


    As far as slow bat-pack recharge. You could place a batbox (or two) along the cable between your generator(s) and machines [or just supply them with redstone so they'd fill up].


    :Geothermal Generator:
    :Cable: :Batbox: (dot facing away from cable)
    :Cable:
    :Induction Furnace: (machines)


    [A simplified example of a bat-pack charging batbox]

    Yeah, I'll be using standard generators. 6 of them, probably. Fueled by biofuel filled fuel tanks at 16,000 EU each. With a batbox or two to act as a buffer should hold things together for a while.


    Recycle my geothermal generator as a mobile charging station for my miner. I'm thinking instead of starting from the surface, since I'm already down here, I'll just dig a long tunnel at layer 20 or so and use the miner to scoop up all the diamonds and redstone, should take significantly less power that way. I won't get as much iron and tin that way, mind, but I need diamonds more anyway, so I can get a quarry going.

    The water mill generator is bit lacking compared to the other generators but you could put buckets of water in and it will output 2eu/t for a little while. Can easily make/find a infinite supply of water. Only takes quite a bit of upkeep to keep them going. In theory you could build an automated BC factory that fills buckets and puts them in the water mill. But that sure is more effort per eu than a bio farm. Normal/Geo generators, a high voltage line or batteries/crystals do make it more easy to move your base.


    I personally like the high voltage line solution, just to have a high voltage solution and cables everywhere.

    Rick, could you make a screenshot how you set it up? Am curious as most of the time it's solar setups. More wind generators setups would be nice. Though Wind generators tend to look more ugly in mass with their space requirements. I've been thinking about hiding them in/on trees.

    Thanks. That's pretty impressive. Suppose if you build them lower to the ground the outputs get reduced a lot. But 80eu/t is very nice indeed. And then day& night. Yup, it's better solar, if you can/want to build that high.

    I personally go for Solar Panels, then for Advanced Solar panels to conserve space, but I think if you are willing to spend some time to work on your power production burning charcoal is perfect. It regrows fast, is available everywhere and costs nearly nothing to setup.

    Ive just got 4x 32 Solar Flowers on my roof, in a 2x2 square, that's 15x15 blocks. 128 EU/t is pretty fine for now. :)

    My windgen farm produces more (ye i expanded it a 'bit'). 125 when wind is at highest and i havent seen it drop below 60-70. Thats like almost 100 on average/tick. More than the 64/tick (solars dont work at night) your solar farm produces and also alot cheaper :) (36 windgens vs 128 solars...i think the 36 windgens are cheaper :))

    Quote from Rick

    Watermills need buff and windgens need a nerf (i got 16 windgens making as much as a nuclear reactor...)


    Nulcear power generation is relative, the comparison is meaningless, unless you actually say the output of said nuclear reactor. (in which case why not just say the output?)

    Ever seen a nuclear reactor making 90-100 eu average without blowing up or using a ridiculous big ice block cooling system? 60 eu/tick is pretty much the max you can get from a nuclear reactor without letting it blow up before it ends its cycle or using a ton of uranium (which results in low eff). Yes you can make some mk5 which produces 2000 eu/tick but then you have to put a redstone timer on it and the average production will drop to like 20 eu/tick.


    On top of that my windgens are WAYYY cheaper than a nuclear reactor and they dont require any fuel or maintenance once build. If i only discovered this before i made my multi core nuclear reactor :).

    Quote from Zudguard

    -snip-


    Oh, a quick comment on Nuclear reactors. They are really, really expensive. Anything above 50 or 60EU/t requires a low efficency and/or cool-down times/items (water buckets, ice etc). it requires babysitting if you want to run them at higher power levels. I am no expert on reactors, but i have made a couple, so by no means am i the last word on these things. I much prefer a power system i can forget about and then concentrate on whatever else.


    -snip

    here is a Mark II (no babysitting) reactor which produces 90 EU/t
    http://test.vendaria.net/index…HCCUHUCCHCCUCCUUCCHHCCHCC


    @ Iskandar: you know that you could pump the lava from the lake into a tank next to your geothermal generator and then you can manually bucket lava into it
    (you can fill buckets from tanks) it is still a bit of a hassle but eaiser than lugging buckets manually