New base/automation build (Low lag edition)

I wanted to play with some SSP-only mods, so that means a new map & base build... I decided to try a new method to reduce lag in the main base area. Basically, I put the bare minimum of machinery here, and put the rest in various locations out of render range of the main house and each other, then linked them with TP pipes and Thaumcraft portals, so it still works/feels like it's all in the same place (well, mostly... the unfortunate side effect of TP pipes is that RedPower suffers a lot with the inability to maintain item coloring between areas. And they're expensive.).

Anyway, on to the screenshots.

Main house from the outside. You can see the shop through the windows (nice ocean view from the crafting area!). The wheat/flax farm on the roof is from very early in the map, and will soon be replaced by a computer/control room.

Shop area. There are half-slabs in front of the project/auto-crafting tables to allow access to the request and crafting pipes. Most of the auto-crafting is done in the factory area, but this table is handy for one-off runs of random stuff. The relay & sorting machine are the manual input and configuration for sending stuff to the factory for processing. The gold chest is the default route for Logistics Pipes, and all of the processed stuff that doesn't go to the warehouse ends up there. Standing on the pressure plate in front of the right-most project table opens access in the wall to an MFSU for charging equipment.

BC assembly table and portal area, and assembly table power system. Not in the main shop area, since I didn't want combustion engines anywhere near the logistics pipe hub and other important/fragile stuff. Still haven't gotten around to setting up an automatic refueling for it, since it still hasn't used up the fuel I put in for initial testing.

Basement with machinery. Aside from a CASUC breeder in a sub-basement (which doesn't run often) and the above assembly table (which doesn't run often, either), this is it for mechanicals in the main house. Left is the main interconnect for all of the remote areas, and right is a geothermal power station. Still haven't used up all the lava below the base, but when it's gone I'll probably replace it with a small reactor if the output from the breeder isn't enough (unlikely... There are no IC2 machines here, so the only power usage is charging equipment). Once the power storage fills up, there's an enforced 60-second shutdown of the geo-gen. Quick on/off cycles generate lots of lag. The epic kludge in the far corner is the only way I could come up with to have a sorting machine here put stuff in the correct machines on the other side of a TP pipe.

My breeder (Neutral 6/48 CASUC). The only way to get the required 1.2 buckets/sec is to have both a 1 sec timer and a 5 sec timer giving you the occasional extra bucket. I'm being a cheap bastard and using the same deployer/filter setup on both timers, but the timing is VERY close, and not something I'd try if you try to build this in SMP... Haven't had any drama from it in SSP yet, though. Automatically shuts down after 5000 seconds to allow for cell swap. It will maintain heat when switched off, so it can be started stopped at will if you don't mind a smoking reactor sitting around in your basement (or it can be once the reactor redstone bug is fixed, anyway)

Some other non-functional areas of the main house:

Still to come: factory, warehouse, thaumatorium, and frame quarry The Great Evil Lag Monster From Hell.

Quote from NuclearStudent

Cool! So you haven't done anything in TC, or you are ready to show us? Do you have a Q room yet? You house looks so retro and modernistic at the same time, it's cool! A modern layout, but the sandstone has a sharp contrast.

Funny you should mention Thaumcraft... Here's a pic from my thaumatorium:

The reason I haven't posted more pics and the reason the glass is broken are the same. In case you're wondering what a Minecraft Superfund site looks like:

Every one of those stacks of dawn totems is a separate chunk. That was over 10 stacks of silverwood logs... Don't think there are any silverwoods left anywhere except for the ones near my bases that I don't like to cut down. Unfortunately, every open surface from sea level to bedrock was tainted, so every vis crystal is, also, which means there's a lot of lingering taint charge. I've been wanting to try a new frame quarry design, so I think I'll just build it here, and scrape the whole area to bedrock.

Interesting note: It was spreading so fast that even IC2 nukes couldn't destroy it fast enough.

Factory time... I wandered around and found a spot out of lag range of the main house that had 3 oil geysers in the same place, and figured it was as good a spot as any for a factory. The building is slightly smaller than 3x3 chunks, so I know that anything in, on, or under it will be in range of the chunk loader. Eventually want to build a rail terminal on the roof to link up quarries and for liquid deliveries.

Overview from the inside:

Biomass production. The fermenter is set up to only run when it has everything it needs, and there's space in the tank on the roof. The bottler packages biomass into wax capsules on demand. One Forestry tree farm produces more than enough extra saplings to keep 6 biogas engines running continuously.

Automatic bee analysis and centrifugification of bee products. The TP pipe on the bottom left comes from the apiary, and analyzed bees are sent to the main house out the top. The squeezer keeps the analyzer full of liquid honey. Oil refinery in the back. Like the fermenter, it comes on automatically if it has oil and there's space in the fuel tank.

Autocrafting walls and auto-alloy furnaces. Nothing too special here, although I wish there was a way to get RP saws & drawplates to work in auto-crafting tables, since the inability to saw silicon boules into wafers kind of breaks that whole production chain.

Processing machines. The four TP pipes come from the sorting machine at the main house. Behind the red p-tube are some relays and another sorting machine that handle input from quarries and the rest of the logistics network. The four Ender chests are input from my second frame quarry, since the three relays on the normal quarry input can't handle the output (avg. 80 or so blocks/sec).

Recycling and mass fabrication. It would probably take a whole room full of recylers to keep up with my frame quarries, so once the scrap storage fills (gold chest), it opens the transposer and vents the recycler input into the energy condenser to make gold ingots, which get burned up to charge my klein star. Wood gets terminated at the coke ovens, and the resulting charcoal is terminated at supplemental generators attached to various storage blocks. Wood that doesn't fit in there, along with excess saplings, sugar cane, cactus and apples go to the EE relay for klein star charging. The mass fab is normally powered by two LV solar arrays, but a full scrap storage also triggers a splitter cable between the MF and the MFSU, which dumps power to it until there's space in the chest again.

Reactor & power room. The reactor design I'm using was posted by raGan, I think. The logic allows it to run at 200 EU/t for 15 minutes before gating it to 5 sec on/15 sec off, which slowly cools the reactor. Every 15 seconds spent off allows an additional 5 seconds of continuous run time. This setup works really well for burst-y power usage like running advanced machines or the occasional few seconds of 512EU/t output when scrap storage fills up. There's a single LV solar array that provides some power to make up for keeping 8 advanced machines spun up.

Frame door to the power room in the midst of opening and deploying the stairs.

Buildcraft engine room. Still need to update the combustion engines with gates to keep them from blowing up when the chunk loader messes up the water mechanics.