[Addon v1.112+] Liquid UU-Matter v0.7.12b (now officially retired)

1st Official Post


    Notice: this mod is officially retired! Explanations have been made in the official README, as well as on the project page on my website. If someone else wishes to take over, they should start a new thread (and maybe link this one, for historical reference).


    Original post follows:


    For fun and as an exercise in getting started in modding Minecraft, I have implemented Liquid UU-Matter. As I had expected (and stated in that thread), I couldn't really think of anything useful to do with liquid UUM, but it turned out kind of pretty so it could just sit around in a tank all day... but I wasn't really satisfied with that, and then FunnyMan3595 came up with excellent ideas!


    The first idea was using the Buildcraft refinery (with its two liquid inputs) to duplicate liquids at the cost of some UUM. Recipes for that are below:

    • 3 UU + 1 oil = 2 oil
    • 5 UU + 1 fuel = 2 fuel
    • 5 UU + 1 biofuel = 4 biofuel
    • 3 UU + 1 biomass = 13 biomass
    • 3 UU + 1 apple juice = 9 apple juice
    • 3 UU + 1 liquid honey = 9 liquid honey
    • 5 UU + 1 seed oil = 21 seed oil
    • 5 UU + 1 creosote oil = 31 creosote oil
    • 5 UU + 1 lava = 31 lava
    • 1 UU + 1 crushed ice = 2 crushed ice
    • 1 UU + 1 IC2 coolant = 3 IC2 coolant


    These recipes, and their energy costs, are mostly configurable -- the default MJ cost is 5 * UU-cost, and the recipes fall under three broad categories: burnable liquids that can be further processed, burnable liquids that cannot be further processed, and non-fuel liquids. The rationale for how these numbers were reached is publicly available, and I welcome comments and suggestions to further tweak them. I also have a personal request, for my own curiosity: if you change the conversion ratios, let me know what you changed and why. That's useful data.


    Please note that LiquidUU 0.7.10 and below had much less balanced conversion ratios. They are saved, for posterity, in the spoiler below:


    Getting UUM into a tank is extremely simple, just right-click the tank with a piece of UUM in your hand. Getting it back out again is the same process, but using empty cells. Note that you will lose the cell in doing so, but that was ultimately considered a trivial cost, well in line with the other uses of cells in IC2. You may also use the Forestry squeezer and bottler for these operations, if Forestry is available. Similarly, you can use Forestry cans (but *not* wax capsules of either kind) if you want to carry the liquid UU around.


    New in version 0.7, and the second excellent idea, is the Accelerator. This is a new machine, crafted like so:

    In case you can't see it very well (or don't recognize them), the items are a Buildcraft tank and hopper on the top row, a stone waterproof pipe and advanced circuit directly below them on the middle row, and a wooden transport pipe at the bottom, under the circuit.


    The accelerator is a highly advanced piece of machinery that will allow you to instantly smelt, macerate, extract, or compress, at the cost of a little bit of liquid UU-matter. The liquid UU can be inserted by Buildcraft liquid pipe (only UU will be accepted), or you can throw solid UUM or cans of UUM into the slot at the top-right of the UI (click image for fullscreen original):


    Here's an example setup of a small logistics pipe auto-crafting system capable of extracting rubber, compressing netherrack to nether bricks, and macerating iron ore and smelting the resulting iron dusts (again, click the image for the fullscreen original):


    All of these functions were briefly tested and seem to work just fine, but do report any problems you run into, I'm interested.


    Warning: there is currently (as of v0.7.12b, probably earlier versions, as well) a known item loss bug associated with using the keyboard shortcuts for moving things directly from your hotbar to another inventory slot -- specifically when used with the accelerator's UUM input slot.


    Please note that the accelerator texture is purely temporary, and the only matter considered important in making it was that you should be able to tell the face (that must face a machine) from the other sides. Further note that the accelerator does not consume EUs directly, rather it is capable of powering itself from the same process that allows liquid UUM to instantly produce two dusts out of an iron ore block.


    When you place the accelerator, it will be facing away from you -- which should help you integrate them easily with pre-placed machines. Also, it responds correctly to the IC2 wrenches, so if you place it and it's not quite looking the right way, just shift-right-click on the face opposite the machine, and it will turn to face that.


    But wait, there's more: if you're a modder and would like your machine to work with the accelerator, take a look at ro.narc.liquiduu.InstantRecipe and .IAcceleratorFriend -- with these two classes you can control everything the accelerator can do with your machine, and even have your machine get notified when an operation is taking place so you can consume whatever resources you may require as part of normal operation! We won't be throwing in those Ginsu knives free of charge, though.


    Downloads


    License
    This mod is open-source under the MMPL -- source is included in the .zip, and available at the LiquidUU github. Anyone wanting to use it for any purpose may do so, including mod packs or whatever, as long the source, or links to the source, are also provided -- the zip itself will do that for you, but linking to this thread or the github would probably be best. Speaking personally, I'd also appreciate being notified, but other than that, it's all yours.


    Parts of this mod (namely, the Liquid Electrolyzer face textures) were provided by Zerrens (and we are all profoundly grateful not to be subjected to my lack of artistic skill). LiquidUU art assets are released under the Creative Commons Attribution license.


    What's this "Liquid Electrolyzer" thingy that doesn't have a crafting recipe?
    The next version of LiquidUU -- v0.8 -- will finalize this machine: it has basically the same function as the standard IC2 Electrolyzer, but will work on liquid water and liquid electrolyzed water provided in adjacent tanks. Liquid electrolyzed water is already available, but the machine doesn't have a working GUI yet, nor does it actually operate. It was just too much unnecessary effort to remove it from the 0.7.12 release.


    Something to test, for those of you who like that: play with the wrench on the liquid electrolyzer, and try to make it turn in such a way that the faces don't quite follow your wrench. This shouldn't be possible, and I haven't been able to manage it, but if lots of us try, someone might find the way (and tell me how they did it). I also have a report that in one setup it's possible to obtain a full stack of 64 LEs when using the wrench on it -- I really want to know if anyone can reproduce that, and how. I can't do it.


    There's also a configuration change in v0.7.11: the config key "accelerator" in the block section has been replaced with a key named "machine". When LiquidUU reads a config with the old key present, it should mark it as obsolete -- please make sure that happens. Note that LiquidUU will not remove the obsolete key from your configuration, it'll just ignore it when the new key is present. This should provide maximum backwards compatibility, but if something goes wrong, I'll want to know what happened.

    Edited 47 times, last by narc: Official retirement notice. ().

    Right as Narc was posting, I had a bit of an epiphany for another way to use this. Anyone who's used LogisticsPipes with BuildCraft and IC2 has probably noted the occasional (but persistent) annoyance of needing a way to smelt, grind, or otherwise machine-process an input on-demand. A recipe for stone bricks, for instance, may need to smelt the cobblestone from your quarry into the smoothstone it needs. Or your recipe for machine blocks may be blocked by a lack of refined iron even though you've got stack after stack of ordinary iron handy.


    There are ways to solve the problem. You can pre-fabricate some of the target material (though doing it automatically gets hairy). You can use a satellite crafting pipe to turn an entire bank of machines into one moderately-slow "crafting" operation. Or you can just do it by hand whenever your request gets denied. But all of the solutions are just... eh. None of them really feel like true solutions, just workarounds.


    Enter liquid UU and a custom machine (or some form of extension of existing ones, a la the hopper). For a small (but significant) amount of liquid UU, it allows you to perform the operation instantly, meaning that a simple crafting logistics pipe is all you need. Raw materials come in, the internal UU tank goes down a bit, and the final product pops out immediately.


    For numbers, right now we're looking at 0.002 UU per smelt, or 0.003 UU for any other operation. Assuming your mass fabricator doesn't have scrap, that works out to an effective cost of 2000 EU/smelt or 3000 EU/other operation. (With scrap, it's 1/6th of that, plus 0.07/0.10 scrap.) Not sure if we like those numbers yet; we'd probably have to see it in practice first.

    DZCreeper: Okay, that's one vote for Forestry liquids, I'll be looking into it.


    Now, as to our discussion on using fractions of UU for insta-processing, we looked at current processing costs, which are 390 EU (over 130 ticks) for smelting, and 800 EU (over 400 ticks). This is more than double for a macerator compared to a furnace, and seems like a fairly strong difference. Our idea has morphed to trying to use UUM proportional to these costs, and after some number-crunching* came to values like 5 millibuckets per smelt (in the electric furnace) and 32 millibuckets per maceration/compression/extraction.


    We also have some presentation ideas: the machine that actually does the work is a separate block that needs to be placed next to whichever machine normally does the operation, and requires that that machine (e.g. the furnace) have an upgrade inside it "to connect to it". The new machine has an internal storage for liquid UU, as well as one input and one output slot for the items that actually get produced. It is important to note that the operation itself does not cost energy from the IC2 energy net -- the energy is supplied by the UU-Matter. The machine that's supposedly doing it can be just unpowered and buried in a wall, out of sight.


    * The number-crunching previously mentioned: take the amount of EU for one operation, multiply by number of ticks for the same operation, then divide by 10,000. It's all a bit arbitrary, but can be applied to other machines, as well.


    For the electric furnace, we get: 390 (EU for one operation) * 130 (ticks per operation) = 50,700 EU, divided by 10,000 = 5.07. We can round that to 5 millibuckets per operation, or 200 operations per piece of UU.


    For the macerator (or compressor, or extractor), we get: 800 * 400 = 320,000, which gives us exactly 32 millibuckets per operation, or almost 32 operations per piece of UU.

    Maybe you could provide an UUM Generator? 1 uum = 120 k Eu (133k cost it to make uum with scrap) with this we could use the uum as an energy storage (and with a big tank von railcraft we would have an awesome looking energy storage)


    With 1000 millibuckeds/uum could an ~9 000 000 Railcraft Tank (9*9*7) store 1 080 000 000 EU in form of liquid matter :D


    I would say for an uum gen is 512 eu/t an good choice


    Greetz Fenrir

    Fenrir that Idea is really nice.


    @Author you could use maybe the Forestry Bio Generator (Plugins for Forestry uses that way to furn his liquids to eu?) but use a config value because we use GregTech on our Server and 1 UUM cost on my SMP 25.000.000 EU ;)


    I can definitly see people powering Mass Fabs out of this. 'burn UU to make UU". Great job on the texture for the liquid UU. I definetly think you should make this compatible with forestry (with Extra Bees please). I also think Xycraft will be adding in liquids as well. Food for thought

    Quote from Fenrir

    Maybe you could provide an UUM Generator? 1 uum = 120 k Eu [...]

    I might be missing the point of this, but don't we already have a UUM generator called "Mass Fabricator"?


    Wait, wait, I think I get it -- you'd like to see a generator that uses UUM to make EUs again. I'm not interested in writing that, but if you get someone else to do it (or do it yourself), feel free to make a pull request on github.


    FunnyMan3595 suggests turning electrolyzed water into a liquid, storable in tanks. This may be a better solution to your problem, since that's actually designed to be energy storage.


    Edit to add:


    Quote from Blaster

    [...]I definetly think you should make this compatible with forestry (with Extra Bees please).

    You know, I've never used the ExtraBees addon, does it add new liquid containers? Or new liquids? I'll look into it either way, but if you could give me some more specific idea of what you'd like me to do there, I'd appreciate it.

    Yes i meant it as an generator witch uses uum as Fuel. And Yes electrolyzed water would also be good but it only provides 10k eu per bucket when 1 cell = 1000 millibucket.
    I think the code isn't to hard but im currently working on my mod so i have no time.


    But it was only a suggestion ^^ You said that you are searching for purposes :D

    Quote from Fenrir

    Yes i meant it as an generator witch uses uum as Fuel. [...]But it was only a suggestion ^^ You said that you are searching for purposes :D

    I don't want you to think I didn't like the suggestion, I just don't think I want to write that. In my mind, making UUM is pretty much one-directional as far as energy is concerned -- you could use it to create something that could be burned for EUs, but it should be really inefficient to do so.

    Kind of, but the point of it is more along the lines of performing an operation instantly at massive EU cost -- sort of like an impossibly large array of overclockers (actual overclockers can't do it, there is a minimum operation time for the electric machines).

    Quote from <br><woltlab-metacode-marker data-name=

    I definetly think you should make this compatible with forestry (with Extra Bees please).

    You know, I've never used the ExtraBees addon, does it add new liquid containers? Or new liquids? I'll look into it either way, but if you could give me some more specific idea of what you'd like me to do there, I'd appreciate it.


    It adds in just liquids. there are three new liquids. Acid, Poison and Glacial Water. as far as new capsules.the only mod im aware of was Vis Bees, which i hope updates for 1.4.2

    Quote from Blaster

    Great job on the texture for the liquid UU.


    We didn't really make a "texture" at all, just a set of color parameters for Buildcraft's own liquid rendering to use. Still, we do appreciate the intent of the complement (even if you're a bit off on the technical details) because we *did* spend some time on it. It went through several iterations, starting with some weird machinations in GIMP to figure out an approximate range for the colors of the UU-matter icon, and then tweaking it by hand. Eventually it was close enough that we stopped caring about the difference, which is where it stayed.

    Quote from Fenrir

    Yes i meant it as an generator witch uses uum as Fuel. And Yes electrolyzed water would also be good but it only provides 10k eu per bucket when 1 cell = 1000 millibucket.
    I think the code isn't to hard but im currently working on my mod so i have no time.


    But it was only a suggestion ^^ You said that you are searching for purposes :D


    I'd actually call the UU-powered generator an antimatter reactor, because matter-antimatter annihilation is the opposite of making matter from energy. You always create matter and antimatter in equal amounts, so UU-matter is most likely some kind of inexplicably-stable matter-antimatter composite, and thus a reactor would just have to destabilize it to trigger the reaction. (How this composite can be manipulated by hand to form wood is left as an exercise for the reader.)


    Further, I'll temper Narc's comment by saying that neither of us is interested in implementing it *now*, but we're also both worn out from the 5.5 or so hours of solid development it took to go from nothing to the released version. No guarantees, but it may sound more interesting later, when we're not making rude gestures in the general direction of "effort".

    Quote from Blaster

    [ExtraBees] adds in just liquids. there are three new liquids. Acid, Poison and Glacial Water. As far as new capsules, the only mod im aware of was Vis Bees, which i hope updates for 1.4.2

    M'kay, I'll have a look at that, then, along with maybe UU-filled glass bottles. Thanks for the info!

    I think something like using the forestry squeezer (If forestry is installed) as the only way to get the liquid would be incredible, really make the mod feel like it is integrated into other mods.


    Have you thought about liquid UU as a means to replicate all other types of liquid ingame using a custom machine?


    Just a thought.

    You know you are going to have to add either a machine to accept UU-Matter to create items, or integration with Greg Tech's UU Assembler :P


    Either way, this is very neat. Nice work!

    Would anyone like to try a Slowpoke Tail?! Only 1 Million Yen!


    Quote

    this isn't about arrogance or ego, I have a block that I put a lot of freaking work into


    Every Mod Author, in existence. And yet, you STILL say otherwise.

    Quote from Quintine

    I think something like using the forestry squeezer (If forestry is installed) as the only way to get the liquid would be incredible, really make the mod feel like it is integrated into other mods.

    Hmm... I actually considered that for the initial release, but decided it was better to have something to play with immediately than wait to figure out integration. I'd still want to keep the current method when Forestry is unavailable, of course. But otherwise, yes, that sounds reasonable to me.


    Quote from Quintine

    Have you thought about liquid UU as a means to replicate all other types of liquid ingame using a custom machine?

    Yes... but I'm not convinced I need a custom machine. I'm binding very tightly against Buildcraft, so I can rely on the Refinery always being available. I may end up making a custom machine, though, due to that Buildcraft bug I linked in the OP.



    Quote from MagusUnion

    You know you are going to have to add either a machine to accept UU-Matter to create items, or integration with Greg Tech's UU Assembler :P

    That's another neat add-on I haven't played with at all. However, allow me to point out that you can get solid UU back out of a liquid tank, and that just about any kind of auto-crafting table can handle making stuff out of that, so I'm not likely to make any UU assembler a priority. I'll keep it in mind, though.


    Quote from MagusUnion

    Either way, this is very neat. Nice work!

    Hey, thanks! It was great fun working with Forge, especially with FunnyMan's help.


    Now that I think of it, though, I might look into a bottler/unbottler. I know Forestry has the bottler already, but nothing comes to mind that could easily do the reverse operation (well, Railcraft iron tanks might). Plus, it would give me a chance to play in the IC2 powernet.