How to manage/prioritize energy flows?

kamre · May 21st 2013

Hello everyone! I have only recently started to play with IC2 and have a simple question.

Suppose I have a geothermal generator for powering my machines. After upgrading to Induction Furnace it is required to supply 1Eu/t for keeping the furnace at 100%. I don't like wasting geothermal energy for that and would like to build a simple watermills generator. But the problem is that after I connect batbox from watermills to the furnace it still uses energy from geothermal generator. How can I fix this, so that furnace uses energy from geothermal generator only when watermills batbox is empty?

gone · May 21st 2013

Batbox redstone settings: Emit when empty.

That redstone signal gets inverted by a NOT gate, when turns the Splitter cable between the geothermals and the furnace off, allowing the geothernals to run.

It may also work if you set the batbox redstone settings on 'Emit when partially filled' and skip the NOT gate entirely. The redstone signal goes straight to the splitter cable in this method.

kamre · May 22nd 2013

Quote from Industrial Miner

That redstone signal gets inverted by a NOT gate, when turns the Splitter cable between the geothermals and the furnace off, allowing the geothernals to run.

Thank you, that worked! Haven't used Splitter Cable before.

But I would also like to know how the game choses which batbox to use as power supply when there are two connected to the same machine. And why in my setup always a batbox with geothermal was chosen.

gone · May 22nd 2013

It has all to do with how you set the batboxes up with redstone. You could set the one up with splitter/detector cables to fill one batbox up and not drain it until it's full and only allow power to flow from the full one when the other batbox is empty. There are probably tutorials on youtube or on this forum on how to do that.

kamre · May 22nd 2013

Quote from Industrial Miner

It has all to do with how you set the batboxes up with redstone.

The last question was about the game mechanics without redstone control. Why in the following absolutely symmetric setup only right generator is used? What is the logic?

skavier470 · May 22nd 2013

minecraft.

the way it loads the chunks and blocks.

idk exactly how minecraft calculate this.

but the geothermal reactor is entirly suffecient to power the furnace thus the other geo doesnt need to power on

kamre · May 22nd 2013

Quote from skavier470

but the geothermal reactor is entirly suffecient to power the furnace thus the other geo doesnt need to power on

Hm, my original question was about setup with watermills for just keeping the Induction Furnace at 100%. If I change right generator with watermills than suddenly furnace start to consume power from left batbox. Can't catch the logic here (batboxes are exactly the same as in the previous picture)...

skavier470 · May 22nd 2013

how many watermills are down there?
you need many watermills for consistent power. over 1eu

kamre · May 22nd 2013

Here is the tower of watermills:

But initially there is enough energy inside the batbox, so I still can't understand why furnace switches to the left one.
Is it possible to predict in which order energy sources will be used if there are several of them connected to the wiring?

And it seems that it works as I need in this setup:

GregoriusT · May 22nd 2013

This is a Chunk load thing. Its purely directional. You need to place the Boxes at a certain direction from each other to have the correct Energy Flow direction.

gone · May 22nd 2013

Would that chunkload thing still matter if all of it was inside one chunk? And if it's not, what side exactly gives the best flow?

GregoriusT · May 22nd 2013

Yes it would still be directional, as one of the Batboxes gets processed first.

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