Posts by ctate

Encouraging more time spent on wiring design is the opposite of preventing confusion amongst newcomers.

In the new regime, it's much easier to accidentally screw up your grid than in the previous system. That is also not good for preventing confusion amongst newcomers.

Why is building a wall full of geothermal generators inherently bad, by the way? That's a serious question. You at least have to build the infrastructure for getting lava to them, and that's hardly trivial.

That question aside, making the whole power grid system significantly more problematic and fragile doesn't exactly strike me as the best approach to nerfing geothermal generators....

Quote from SpwnX

For example, 3 generators will output 30 EU/t together and thats it. Add another generator and a batbox will blow up as 40 EU/t exceeds the 32 EU/t maximum acceptance.

That, in a nutshell, is why this change is so freaking problematic.

Previously, all you had to know was which tier of power a given piece of equipment could withstand, and not plug it into a higher-juice line than it could take. You could add generation capacity at will without having to touch any of the rest of your network.

NOW, things are vastly more complicated. Adding generation capacity requires also running around to at least part of -- and potentially ALL of -- your entire power grid, bumping up the power capacity on every block on the line. In this particular example, wow, you have a lot of work to do: you've been using a batbox as storage/smoothing but now you're overdriving it so you need to replace it with a CFSU or better, but a CFSU emits higher power downstream than the batbox did so now you also have to upgrade everything downstream of it as well. Maybe you're lucky and that just means putting a new transformer upgrade into every single machine that was downstream of your batbox-turned-CFSU. Maybe you're less lucky and it means rewiring the whole thing as well because you used tin (in spec for downstream of a batbox!). Either way, adding one freaking generator just required you to also upgrade a ton of equipment in parallel.

I totally agree with Strill on this. This whole new situation is a lot HARDER to manage than the old one. What was the goal, really? The concrete complaints in this thread have all had to do with how silly it is to run a billion EU/t through a cable rated for 32 EU/p -- and the right way to address *that* is to explicitly limit cable capacity, not to throw out the baby with the bathwater and force everything to be explicitly managed by the player. YUCK.

Okay, rant over. Time for a concrete suggestion, on the assumption that the new "EU/t is all" regime is here to stay:

Cause all of the storage blocks (Batbox, CFSU, MFE, all of them) to behave as implicit transformers. That is, make it okay to plug 40 EU/t of upstream generation into a batbox without it blowing up; but it'll only deliver 32 EU/t downstream as before. Let it track tier thresholds too; why not? Plug 127 EU/t into a batbox, no problem but you only get 32 EU/t downstream of it. Plug 129 EU/t into it and let it pop as is currently the case with > 32 EU/t. (This would basically just make implicit and easy the workarounds that people will wind up using anyway, of always pairing a storage block with an appropriate transformer just to get the overpower protection. If everybody is going to be doing it anyway, that's a clear argument for building it into the model.)

If you do this, then adding that 4th generator causes you no problems downstream of the batbox; you're just wasting a little bit of capacity upstream of it. You run into actual issues when you want to pump up beyond your current tier's cabling & storage/transformer limits, but that's much more manageable. This cannot be stated enough: if you are making your users reconsider their entire networks just to add generation capacity, then your approach is bad.

Quote from GregoriusT

Pretty much the same as Simple Design 2, but needs Gold Vents and only 2 Chambers:
Cheaper Version of Simple Design 2 by Talonius
Produces: 56.000.000 EU at 56 EU/t with Eff 7
Runs forever * /

This is the cheaper version? Dear Ghu. Do people really think of "cheaper" as applicable to designs using iridium neutron reflectors? I think of them as beginning at "expensive" and progressing rapidly to "obscene...."

The six iridium neutron reflectors used in this design take 48 beryllium cells to produce, which by my reckoning means processing either 768 ender pearls or, by the mineral route, a bare minimum of 310 emerald *ore*, processed in an Industrial Grinder to get the 464 emerald dust needed.

How does a GT-oriented Minecraft world expect people to acquire these sorts of raw-material supplies?

Just throwing this out there; as far as I can tell, IC2/GregTech nuclear power is severely underpowered compared to conventional energy sources, by real world standards [citing Lawrence Berkeley Lab here]:

Quote

The fission of 1 g of uranium or plutonium ... liberates about 1 MW. This is the energy equivalent of 3 tons of coal or about 600 gallons of fuel oil

Does anyone have good thorium breeder designs for GregTech 3.08b+? The change to thorium behavior seems to have greatly reduced its ability to breed, alas, so the lovely 6-chamber single thorium breeder linked near the start of this thread is, alas, no longer so lovely in practice....

Edit: I'm talkabout Thutmose's "Thorium based safe breeder," http://www.talonfiremage.pwp.b…1bxaa9hjxgzi03cjhjpokja84

It is indeed safe, and does breed, but I'm seeing a yield of more like 50 re-enriched uranium cells per cycle, not the 400 he describes getting out of it.

Probably a terribly dumb question, but...

Not sure what version of GregTech I'm using; it's whatever is currently bundled in Feed-The-Beast Ultimate 1.5.2 beta 0.7. There's nothing in the console log that says what version it is, alas.

So, I'm trying to run the stupidly-simple breeder reactor that I've seen mentioned here: one thorium cell surrounded by four near-depleted uranium cells, with one OC heat vent tucked off in the corner to keep the reactor stable. Now, allegedly this breeder will re-enrich about 20 uranium cells over the course of its run-time. HOWEVER, what I'm seeing in practice is that the reactor is pulsing off and on by itself [edit: on about a 5-second cycle; 1 second on, 4 off, repeat], despite having a constant redstone signal applied, and doesn't seem to be making any progress on the breeding front.

What am I missing and/or misunderstanding?

Quote from MagusUnion

From what I understand of GT, the "proper" progression is from solid fuel Generator to liquid fuel Generator (be it Oil/Fuel or Lava). While those options are pretty robust, it does make gameplay highly linear, as renewable applications are unwelcome...

There is a strong difference between 'base IC2 style of play' and 'GT style of play'. The meta-game confusions between these two are part of the reason Gregtech is a very polarizing mod in terms to how players respond to it.

I can totally respect that. When I was musing about this in another forum, I suggested that the Forestry Bio Generator's EU output level be brought into line with its MJ-side output [i.e. increased by a factor of ~ 12x] *but* that this be balanced by having GregTech rewrite the recipe for it to be more expensive, moving it from early-game-achievable to midgame+.

Oil/Fuel dependence is tricky because of its worldgen dependence and the lack of real transport infrastructure for liquids. In the game I'm playing the nearest oil deposits I've found are small offshore gushers about 2000 blocks away from my existing workings. I guess the hardcore answer is to pick up and move, but UGH.

Here in the real world, biofuel generation (by which I mean turning mixed organic waste into Texas light crude) is only upper-medium tech -- certainly nowhere as sophisticated as nuclear plant design & construction -- and is *power positive*, i.e. after you've bootstrapped the processing stack it produces net power, partly from utilizing the extra heat and partly by tapping the emitted NG/methane and using that in generators. I'd love to see that kind of tech expressed in Minecraft alongside the hard-mineral tech that's currently so dominant.

Quote from Vyrebird

The fuelcans, like the single-use batteries, seem mostly a relic of another era to me. They're occasionally useful when just starting out (if you've got an unusual set of available resources, or are just trying something 'different'), but from a raw-efficiency perspective (or min-max, powergaming, etc) they're pretty much ignorable. It's unfortunate, since they've got some nice flavor and the multi-step manufacturing would make for some nice automation setups.

When you're "just starting out" you don't have a generator and a compressor and an extractor and a canning machine.

I'm playing in a GregTech-enabled modpack, and was hoping that biofuel would be a good second-tier power source approach, because GT makes the leap from generator+scaffolding to anything better [even basic solar] *extremely* expensive in terms of both infrastructure and rare mined materials. If the basic answer is "don't bother with bio fuels, just grow trees and chop them up into scaffolding" then the mod's power progression is broken; that's just not how the world works.

(A lot of the weird emergent costs would go away if the EU generation output of various wooden items were fixed. It really ought to be a more reasonable continuum; say 1500 EU for burning a log, 400 for planks, 150 for a stick. With those numbers make a scaffold the same output as a log, 1500 EU -- its component parts would add up to that individually, but require slightly more than 1 log to produce.)

Quote from MatLaPatate

Agreed. Even with GT it's not efficient enough to be useful ... and Forestry one is much more efficient, so guess what mods most of players are using

As far as I can tell, the Forestry Bio Generator is broken. If you're driving a Forestry biofuel plant with EU run through optimized Forestry Electrical Engines at the nominally-ideal 2.5 EU:MJ conversion ratio, a Bio Generator running off the output doesn't produce enough EU to actually run the machines. If there's supposed to be a 2.5 EU:MJ conversion ratio, then the Bio Generator's output is more than an order of magnitude too low to be comparable to the MJ side of things.

I'm doing some back-of-envelope calculations and I'm coming up with IC2 bio fuel potentially costing more EU power to manufacture than it produces in generators. What am I missing?

A bio fuel can produces 26k EU. Making one involves starting with 24 saplings [or 48 cane/wheat], from which you make 6 plantballs [shaped crafting, no power]. The plantballs then need to be run through a Compressor [EU cost] to make compressed plant balls. Those get put into cells [crafting] to make bio cells, when in turn get run through an Extractor [a second EU cost] to make biofuel cells. The biofuel cells then need to be run through a Canning Machine [a third EU cost] to produce the filled bio fuel can.

I haven't put it on the bench to measure the EU cost of each of the power-consuming steps, but the gross yield at the end is ~ 1083 EU/sapling, or 542 EU/cane. With that kind of return there's basically no point in attempting biofuel; the power yield for farming wood, turning it into charcoal, and burning that is what, an order of magnitude higher?

This just feels off. What am I missing?

I get the impression that IC2 wants rubber trees to be at least somewhat plentiful, but ExtrabiomesXL sort of steps on that. I should probably bring this up to the EBXL folks, too....

A bunch of friends just spun up a new world using a FtB-like pack of mods, and we've noticed that rubber trees are proving awfully hard to locate. I see that the IC2 wiki describes them as "extremely abundant in Swamp, Forest and Taiga biomes" -- but that leads to some speculation. Using ExtremebiomesXL tends to fill the world with other biomes, not the vanilla ones. That seems like it could be rather a destabilizing interaction; if rubber is unobtainable (or even nearly), then IC2 becomes largely pointless.


Has anyone looked into whether this is a real effect? Are we just getting incredibly unlucky?


(We are certainly having config issues w.r.t. ores; in particular, we've got three different varieties each of tin & copper. They all seem compatible, fortunately, but it's imbalancing in the other direction: when you're swimming in copper, IC2 parts get awfully cheap. )