Alternate sources of Eu from other mods

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

Scalability, my friend. For the resources you put into producing 100 Eu/tic, I can produce 800 Eu/Tic. This continues to scale up as you continue to increase the size of your power supply to meet ever-increasing demands.

Oh! I feel stupid now. Of course we have different power demands. I'm more than satisfied with getting some UU out of the excess power from my 200 EU/t generation system and stopping there -- so for me it was just an exercise in "what's the most fun and new way of getting there". I'm afraid I don't see the point of accumulating UU just for the sake of having it, and beyond the amount needed to make three quantum suits (for all three regulars on my server), I didn't really feel like scaling EU generation up. I suppose it just ends up a difference in playing styles. Sorry for coming off a bit harsh.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

[...]Lava is free, man. Go to nether. Pump out lava. Done. With Thermal Expansion, it gets easier with 'Go to nether, collect netherrack, throw in Crucible for lava', since it is easier to automatically transport solids than liquids across dimensional boundaries.

Iron, on the other hand, is far less common than 'near infinite' and has actual uses other than being an energy source

This is true, but getting lava out of the nether is something I've done before and didn't really want to redo... although now that you mention it, when/if I plug Mystcraft into the server I'll probably set up a short portal track to autogather via tank carts -- just to keep my home lava storage topped off and maintain the ability to generate power even when the humus (and ingredients for it) run out.

More immediately, and purely for this one game, I had the iron a lot closer than the lava, so I used it. It was... less irritating than I thought, especially since I cheated a bit and pretended I had the Railcraft 6.7 recipe for two turbine casings instead of one. But still, it was a lot of up-front investment.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

Playing with steam is indeed fun, but not to generate Eu. At least not with a Turbine. You can run an entire Manufactorum on Steam.

Yes, I'm working up to a buildcraft/forestry room to use some of that excess I still have! Goodness, that max-size boiler makes a lot of steam.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

I'm a big fan of the Biofuel powered steam boiler. Sure, it may not be quite as efficient as running it on charcoal, but hey... it's still at a cost of 'some hummus'. The top tier steam engine can run the refinery, and one of the middle tier ones on your fermenter.

Does biofuel do that much better than biomass? I don't really have the option yet, as I'm still running 1.3.2, but I was under the impression the biomass to biofuel conversion was fairly energy-inefficient.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

Call me crazy, but I don't see 'spending eight times less to build something' as having a stick up my ass about efficiency. If it was less than twice... maybe. But that's a LOT of iron you're throwing down the toilet for very low return on investment.

There's that... but they don't really compare. Again, one-time costs neutralize themselves over time, so comparing them ends up a no-op after a few days. I can say I have yet to have to replace the turbine rotor in my oldest of two steam turbines, and I have the spare already cooked up and ready to go. That's... really good for maintenance, compared to the time I was putting into keeping all the farms and stuff going before I started automating with Logipipes.

Again, that scales differently in RC 6.7, where turbines die faster and don't return as much energy, but for this one game, it worked nicely. I don't think I'll be repeating it, but for anyone wanting a variation on EU generation, I'd recommend it at least once. Do you disagree?

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

Wut? Lava is free, man. Go to nether. Pump out lava. Done. With Thermal Expansion, it gets easier with 'Go to nether, collect netherrack, throw in Crucible for lava', since it is easier to automatically transport solids than liquids across dimensional boundaries.

or for the fun way to get lava to the overworld: mystcraft and railcraft. Mystcraft portals moving around railcraft tank carts.
Nearly pumped out a lava lake with a BC pump in 1.3.2 that way.

Quote from SpwnX

About iron not being "renewable", i have to disagree as you can make iron from UUM (although it is expensive, even more if you use GT) or use GT electrolyzer to obtain it from obsidian dust.

Well yeah it is renewable once you are able to alter the very fabric of spacetime, so you spawn in matter from pure energy.
For that to happen however you would either have to build some solar power plants covering a few thousand blocks or have one or two working nuclear reactors set up both of which would involve destroying the environment AND strip mining. My problem with any of these things is only that they render having a nice looking minecraft world virtually impossible.
And i don't know about you, but i prefer having my MC homes built in nice areas with the cables running behind walls instead of living in an industrial wasteland just so i can conjure up matter from thin air, so i can have more power generation, so i can have more power to conjure up some MORE matter...

Iron is renewable even in vanilla. Kill some villager golems

Quote from Requia

Kill some villager golems

Lol yeah talk about realism.
And provided they don't fix that with some update soon. If i remember correctly someone from the dev-team even commented on infini-iron being not intended and way too OP for vanilla minecraft.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

-snip-snip-

Witty (and admittedly funny) IT insults and general insults aside, it would be really nice of you to point out any actual problem you had with my post.
Apart of course from the almighty "balancing", a concept every single IC2 user seems really fond of and yet has little to no idea about.

Please correct me if i'm wrong, but you are virtually not able to get to tech tier 3 without completely ruining parts of the landscape.
This is all i am going on and on about, since being renewable and "green" in minecraft is basically only about not having to rape the landscape for that bit of oil/coal/uranium.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

You are a GOTO in the code of reality.

This is my new favorite insult.

The problem is that my homes tend to be, for example, to a large part underground and in large caves. Placing dirt blocks over a hole and using tunnel bores instead still leaves you with the hole underneath.
This is why I generally like my mining to be as least intrusive as possible.

And the mass fab argument is again ridiculous since i was talking about
>get to tech tier 3
Your arguments are all fair and square once you actually HAVE a massfab.
But once you have that, any point mining had is negated too.

And if all you do is argue that there are methods of mining that are not ALL that destructive, why do you think renewable energy sources have been introduced in the first place?

And using IC2 miners below ground level is a valid option to gather minerals (if you forget about me utilizing parts of the underground structures too), but that's just something to get all the resources with the least possible trade-off. You STILL have to mine huge areas to get enough iron, and copper and so on and then there's the EU issue that started all this discussion.

So again: getting to tech level 3 necessarily involves destroying the landscape. If that is an essential part of minecraft for you i seriously don't get you.

Solar panels and other 'green' sources of energy should be good for people who want to have a fairly nice looking environment with just enough energy output to have everything running smoothly. If you end up covering the sky with them and hollowing out the world for the resources it takes to build them, what's the point?
You could be mining for uranium with the same or less effort.

Quote from ShneekeyTheLost

Also, nether lava is a pathetically easy resource to acquire. One lava lake can provide billions of EU. And Liquid Tesseracts trivialize the hassle involved. If you can't manage to put up a basic structure in the Nether... go back and play vanilla until you learn how to play the game.

Furthermore... Mystcraft. Now you don't need to destroy your own lands, you can go destroy some random age.

IF you are using tesseracts, lava transportation is really trivialized, but if you can transport stuff from one universe to the other without any problems and fully automated too, who are you to argue about something being too OP?
And my general problem with the geothermal generator is that geothermal energy IRL is as renewable as you can get. Instead of nerfing geo generators by making them consume lava without any output, they should have been nerfed by having energy outputs closer to half of that of a solar panel right now.
Which would effectively made them... like solar panels... only underground!
Think about it for a second. It would not be unbalanced, because of the extremely low energy output, and the risky environment they need, but it would be a lot less annoying. I am actually thinking about suggesting something like this.


And having Mystcraft added is indeed a very valid option for not destroying your own home world, but that STILL only settles the mining thing. The issue that led to this discussion however was supposedly renewable EU sources involving the destruction of a world by either having to mine a lot OR by needing huge megastructures.
And is it really all that unthinkable that someone who has solved the creation of matter from pure energy and has an armor that can theoretically withstand falls from 3 kilometers high up and swimming in lava, would have found a way to make more efficient solar panels along the way too?

I'm not saying that all of this should be available from the very first moment. It could require some advanced machinery to make for example. But having an EU source that costs you DOZENS OF STACKS full of copper cable and produces only moderate amounts of energy more compact is not really that much to ask ihmo.

Quote from Nobody_Important

Sorry for reviving old, long dead threads, but the posts in here made me create this account in the first place.
I would like to ask everyone to apply some basic logic to a few matters:

1: Compact solars
This mod is awesome and a lot more realistic than basic IC solar panels. The fact that EUs generated by a single normal panel are not even enough to GET PAST THE FIRST FEW METER OF CABLE is absolutely nerfing solar panes in favor of much more "exciting" methods of EU generation (like a nuclear powerplant) .
Furthermore, crafting a single High Voltage solar panel requires 512 regular solar panels. That is 1024 circuits, which 6144 copper cable, not counting the transformers. That is over 3 INVENTORIES full of copper cable.
Anyone who thinks that a fairly decent power generator requiring that many resources is "too OP" is either a masochist or a fool.

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No. The essential balancing factor for standard Solars are not of material, but of space. Standard Solars require 1 block space per EU/t on default settings, and 1 tin cable. That is all well and good, until you spam solars, where the 40 block limit comes in.

Quote from Nobody_Important

2: Geothermal generators
Geothermal generators are the most unrealistic thing about IC. A generator CONSUMING lava is insane enough. If you combine this with lava not regenerating at all, you are as far away from what a real geothermal generator is, as with a combustion engine. Finding about about this concept had me stop playing minecraft for a while.

Lava in the nether is ALSO not an excuse for this, since you would end up having to move huge distances in an essentially hostile environment, because lava is, again, NOT RENEWABLE.

@First part: I wonder why you don't ragequit from floating trees and dirt blocks.
Lava in the nether? Not infinite? It's practically infinite. The overworld is 6.4 million blocks wide. Since the Nether is 1/8th of that, that would be 800 000 blocks wide. Eight hundered thousand blocks wide would be 640 billion blocks in width. Assuming 35% of the Nether is covered in lava, that would be 224 billion blocks. Say that the Nether lava seas are on average, 25 blocks deep. That would be 5.6 trillion lava blocks. Which can produce 1.12 x 10^17 (112 quadrillion) EU.

Additionally, with multi-mod implements nowadays, a nether pump is extremely simple to relocate. The pump itself, 4 redstone engines (or an Energy Tesseract), a Liquid Tesseract (or an Ender Tank) and a chunk loader of your choice.

Oh, and server lag due to Nether pumping? Not anymore. GregTech's Advanced Pump, the Mining Pipes, an AESU, a Lapotronic Energy Orb, the Liquid Tesseract or Ender Tank and a chunk loader.

Alternatively, quarry the nether (or use IC2 miner) for netherrack and dump it in a Magma Crucible.

EDIT: Hostile environment? My extra hazmat suit says no.

Quote from Nobody_Important

3: (Not really) Renewable energy sources
Having only EU generation options that require a massive amount of non-renewable resources is bad enough, having non renewable and rare resources as parts that wear off, is madness. >steam turbine
I would like to remind everyone that being able to destroy metal without it regenerating or going back into the environment is unrealistic enough, even without basing generators on this concept.
Iron being the non renewable and damn rare thing it is in minecraft, and with IC relying on 'realistic' amounts of iron for its infrastructure creates an imbalance i would expect mods to fix and not further worsen.

For Iron: Zombie/Iron Golem farm. Or UU-Matter, I think it's a 5:4 ratio.
For Coal: Wither Skeleton farm. Or UU-Matter, I think it's a 1:7 ratio.
Alternatively, you can repair routers by adding 8 turbine blades to a damaged router. So it's 24 steel per repair.

Quote from Nobody_Important

4: Really renewable energy sources
These would be some that don't require ANYTHING that you can't regrow or regenerate over time.
This would still not be too OP, since it would counteract the fact that using resources in minecraft inevitably leads to them effectively disappearing from the part of the world you can get to in reasonable times.
Any arguments with the notion that minecraft is about exploring the world are mute, since you're supposed to explore the world to find new resources to build and craft with and not to strip mine everything down to bedrock with space age mining lasers.
But since that is effectively what BC & IC are about, you would expect these mods to provide ways that would enable you to preserve SOME of the landscape.
With you having to strip-mine everything or having to install a Dyson-sphere out of solar arrays for you to be able to industrialize your stuff a bit, a lot of the beauty of building stuff into a landscape vanishes from minecraft.
This is precisely why i would love some decent renewable EU sources.

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Ask MatLaPatate for more information on why more non-renewable EU sources, not renewable ones. He's been suggesting more non-renewable EU sources for quite... a long time?

Quote from Nobody_Important

5. Balancing
Should therefore NEITHER be done by changing the recipes of the EU generation methods so that it is essentially impossible to afford and thus cutting off any entry point into industrialization, NOR by having to disfigure the landscape so much that you have to build your house a thousand blocks away to not fall down to bedrock, get roasted by radiation, or live in the constant shadow of your solar Dyson-sphere... or cube... or whatever.
Renewable energy sources should be difficult to get, because of
-the huge time investments or huge infrastructure required (>charcoal based)
-their small energy output and difficulty to build, (>geothermal)
-the incredible resource requirements if you want to have it compact (>solar)
and not because of anything else.
It should be because of these reasons that the players would be forced to first base their infrastructure on non renewable EU sources, before finally transitioning to renewable ones with industrial progress.

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With multi-mod implements (I'm talking FtB) nowadays,

• Charcoal-based energy fuel sources are extremely cheap to come by, with Steve's Carts and Forestry. Short on Apatite? Find another vein, and you're set again.
• Automatic blaze rod farms are near-possible in vanilla, and are enhanced by mods. Blaze-rod burning is not a thing of the future anymore.
• Geothermals, on the contrary, are the first/second/third choice to power. (First may be Compact Solars/Advanced Solars or fusion reactor, depending on context).
• Solars, see above.

I don't think there's any shortage of renewable energy sources when using many mods, except during that first week of using GregTech.

Quote from Nobody_Important

6: Conclusion
If anything, IC and any other related or compatible mods are unrealistic because of the amount of difficulty they add, and not because of them making MC too easy.
Industry could flower in the real world because we had an advanced society with hundreds of thousands of people and a history of a dozen millenniums, so that we could gather resources and build infrastructure. Since we don't have either of these on the average minecraft server, and the IC team still wants the player to be able to get from punching trees to building nuclear reactors, you do have to add a few things to make industrial advances easier.
The next time you want to complain about something being too OP, generate a new world and try to alter the landscape as little as possible and check whether it is REALLY all that easy to get stuff done.


All in all, if anything, methods of EU generation coming from other mods and included in IC itself are too difficult, but in general still provide a fairly enjoyable game experience

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Quote from Epic Lulz

No. The essential balancing factor for standard Solars are not of material, but of space. Standard Solars require 1 block space per EU/t on default settings, and 1 tin cable. That is all well and good, until you spam solars, where the 40 block limit comes in.

No, that is not all well and good which was the entire point of all of my posts. It is nerfing solar panles in favor of other bullshit and nerfing them in the wrong way.

Quote from Epic Lulz

It's practically infinite.

That is not actually infinite for me, since it involves me having to venture down into the nether and build new pipes to new places that are even further away, and if i wanted mass fabrication i could obviously not base it on this.
Generally INFINITE for me means, that there should be a way to automate harvesting. To have one less little thing to worry about.
And yeah floating trees and blocks do bug me a lot.
All the methods of mining the nether are fine but it DOES involve completely fucking up that world, and is NOT feasible on lower tech levels.

Quote from Epic Lulz

Zombie/Iron Golem farm.

Iron golem iron drops are going to be nerfed according to the MC dev team as i have said before.
Zombies have iron droppings set so rare that massfabricating iron seems more efficient.
And steel requires iron, etc.

Quote from Epic Lulz

Ask MatLaPatate for more information on why more non-renewable EU sources, not renewable ones.

Any of his arguments for more non renewable EU sources leave the huge counter argument i proposed out of view. Mainly that with renewable EU sources you don't have to fuck up your minecraft world for constant energy production.

Quote from Epic Lulz

Charcoal-based energy fuel sources are extremely cheap to come by,

That is true, but having a tree farm, and the charcoal being transported to the generators requires massive infrastructure.
Blaze rod farming involves a lot of luck findind the right place first of all.

Quote from Epic Lulz

Geothermals, on the contrary, are the first/second/third choice to power.

But they should be a lot less powerful. Having geothermal generators not being renewable but output a huge amount of energy is simply bullshit.
Having them act as underground solar arrays would be a lot better.

Quote from Epic Lulz

(First may be Compact Solars/

... Dude, if you have no problem with compact solars what are we even arguing about?
Half of my post and all of my subsequent arguments were directed against the people claiming that compact solars is ridiculously OP and integrating anything like that into base IC would be a mortal sin.
The rest went against the notion that people seemed okay with having to drill through half the world to get to tech lvl 3(because even creating a separate mine-able dimension in mystcraft is only LATE gameplay).
These were the only things that made me upset.
Because i do like to keep my landscape changed as little as possible to be able to integrate structures into it.

For this i need
-methods of eu generation that don't involve hollowing out the map beyond a kilometer,
(which, unfortunately neither IC nor mainstream mods provide)
-and methods that don't involve darkening the sky with solar panels
(which ic does not provide either, but luckily compact solars DOES)

This is why i was defending those stances.

Quote from Epic Lulz

except during that first week of using GregTech.

Which was basically the entire setting of my arguments. Sure, everything is nice and easy once you have your first massfab set up, but for you being able to do that you would've had to pillage the world up to that point. Which essentially renders the use of renewable energy sources futile, since once you have dug through half the landscape you might as well go for the rest and get that uranium for your nuclear reactor. Set up autocrafting, auto rail deploying, deploying of chunck loaders, auto mining and item relaying, and you can strip mine away to the farlands.

It's just that you don't really have an option to NOT dig up the world before finding mystcraft runes to create new worlds, because renewable Eu is resource intensive, just like oil refineries.

PS If you mean to suggest something for IC2, then this is probably not the place. There's a suggestion forum.
So you want more greengens for early gameplay that do not require massive amounts of mining (either manual or automatic), do not prevent sunlight from reaching the ground and do not require massive infrastructure.

Without GregTech, there's quite a variety.

• Manned watermills. You can even make them work underground. Yes, they've been nerfed, but so what? One watermill is much cheaper than a Solar Panel, and produces 1 EU/t. If you have glass to burn, 2 EU/t. Works day and night, underground. Infrastrucutre? The original RedPower prototype uses only 1 Deployer (1 iron, 2 redstone), 2 Filters (one for the retriever; 4 gold, 2 iron, 8 redstone, requires 2 diamonds and an alloy furnace), 1 Retriever (2 brass, 1 leather, 2 ender pearls, 2 iron, 1 silver, 4 nikolite), 1 Thermopile (4 copper, 2 tin, 12 nikolite and 1 silver), a timer (8 redstone?), 2 vanilla redstone pixie wiring (2 redstone dust) and 8 tubes at the maximum. (2 brass). You don't even need a battery box, but you can add that later.
  

  
  

  For the basic supporting infrastrucutre, that's 5 iron, 20 redstone, 2 gold, 4 brass (3 copper + 1 tin), 1 leather, 2 ender pearls, 1 silver, 16 nikolite, 4 copper, 2 tin and a few easily gotten resources, with a final requirement of 2 diamonds and 8 clay blocks. The majority can be gotten on a moderately successful mining trip. Leather - you probably kill cows before you even go mining. Ender pearls - probably the only hard part, but get an athame (1 silver) and wander about at night. Clay could be gotten during the same time.

  
  

  As for the watermill themselves, that's 4 iron, 2 tin and 1/4 copper. Plus some sticky resin, but if you can't find resin, you probably won't do IC2 in the first place. Additionally, tin cabling is also cheap.

• Solar panels. After all, early game, the maximum you'll probably need is 6. That's relatively cheap.
• Wind generators. A bit more complex to set up, (after all eacch wind gen costs 12 iron and 4 tin) but I'm sure SpwnX could find a way around it.
• Generators. Yes, that's it. Chop forests down and burn them! With Forestry, you can get a very powerful fuel source also known as peat, to burn. With Railcraft, you can spend some time to wait on coal to burn into coal coke, and the creosote oil can be used later.

That's a rather wide variety.

As when you have GregTech, that's a different story. You're not supposed to be able to get a sustainable energy system during that first week. Nope. If vanilla IC2 adds a new one, Greg would probably nerf it to oblivion. If you find that irritating, GregTech is probably not the mod for you (without extreme configuration).

At half a stack of coal (or alternatively, 72 charcoal and a lot of infrastructure) per windmill those are pretty effectively nerfed too. Silicon I at least get as a byproduct.