Posts by Drashian

We start at 250 and go down from there. Version 0.9 should be using from 225 to 250.

Quote from M11xStryker

At least in the Beta, there are no scrap boxes. I am unsure if Alblaka has plans of putting scrap boxes into v1.00 or not.

Yes! We just added them last night, in fact.

Exactly, on 3000 heat it should take 2 fresh uranium cells to enrich a single depleted one. For outward cooling, anything that's not water or air provides precisely zilch. Nearby fire and lava are particularly bad, they actually reduce outward cooling (although never to the point where the reactor gains heat from the outside). The cooling values for those are -2 (fire) and -3 (lava) if you want them. I guess they might be useful in rare situations for creating an exactly temperature-stable reactor, so there you go.

I do like the idea of being able to boost the output of a geothermal generator by feeding it additional resources. Choices are cool, and make things wonderfully engaging (see nuclear reactors!). Let me try to address the balancing of it.

First off, the EU output when running directly off stored lava is 10EU/s, so we'll have to boost our advanced generation mode past that. As you pointed out, steam is actually the primary currency of geothermal electricity generation. Looking through an article linked from the one you gave us (Geothermal electricity), we may be able to draw inspiration from the three types of geothermal plants listed there, making our choice by which type of cell we feed into the generator. First, I'm going to assume that our generator's design is based on the standard magic Minecraft physics. Since lava stays hot forever in Minecraft, we store it up in a chamber inside the generator and then use a simple cycle of exposing water to it (stealing its heat and using it up), using the steam to power turbines, giving the water time to cool, and repeating the process. From there, our versions of the modes of operation on that page would be something like:

• "Dry steam" mode. This is the closest to what we have right now, using geothermal energy directly, so this is our standard 10EU/t mode just running off the generator's lava storage.
• "Flash steam" mode. Feeding additional water into the generator, either in buckets (no material cost) or cells (costs tin but is stackable), we eliminate the need to let our internal water supply cool, and can just vent out the extra steam when we're done with it. Running constantly, energy generation is greatly increased (doubled?), but of course the consumption of lava is increased by the same rate.
• "Binary cycle" mode. The basis of this mode is replacing the water with a liquid that has a much lower boiling point. For us, that means less lava used to produce energy at the same rate, increasing (doubling?) the amount of time the generator's storage will last. Coolant cells would be an appropriate choice for the liquid component, but they can't be stacked so they're not really practical for this application. So let's say we activate this mode by feeding it coalfuel cells. Coalfuel is a hydrocarbon. And that also means that we're cutting a theoretically limited resource (lava) with another (coal dust), so it helps preserve balance.

Maybe when we reach the mythical Tier 4, there will be another level of the suit with charger plugs on the legs, high-velocity levitation engines on the boots, a massive laser cannon on the chest, and night vision / x-ray on the helmet.

That would actually be really awesome.

But I have no idea how that could possibly balance on a pvp server. Even the existing advanced nanosuit / quantum suit sounded like it was problematic.

...I think I got a little off track there. Yeah, I would like one way or another to be able to have my mining drill last longer on mining trips without having to swap to the batpack or carry around a fistful of batteries. But maybe all we really want is tier 2 tools. Even without further functionality, I would definitely spend the diamonds to upgrade my diamond drill to a crystal battery.

If I understand explosion resistance correctly, a 2-block wall of reinforced material (any combination of the alloy-enhanced stone, glass, and doors) or a 3-block wall of obsidian should be enough to keep you safe from even the most awesome of nuclear meltdowns. And I'm going to just leave this here, because it's relevant to the topic and awesome.

That's not a bad idea, just a couple "here's one that keeps itself cool with coolant cells, here's a sample of using a disperser" sorts of basic tutorial reactors. The same designs could be handy to have on the wiki, too.

You can pack your rubber trees tightly if you remove all the leaves above the sapling before it grows - it can only grow up through empty air.

Axes will harvest rubber trees quite a bit more quickly in the next release, as MC Forge has allowed us to register them as effective.

About what you'd expect. Constant 128EU/t output, draining the MFE at a net rate of 65EU/t.

Replicated with the setup below. I'm not too familiar with the energy net code yet, so I don't immediately have a solution in mind, but I did at least figure out why it was happening.

• Tick 1: The MFE is full, and sends out a pulse of 128. Receives its 63 EU from the generators. Power level is 599935.
• Tick 2: The MFE is not full, so does not pulse. Receives 63 EU, power level is 599998.
• Tick 3: The MFE is not full, so does not pulse. Receives 2 EU (because that's all it demands), power level is 600000.
• Tick 4: Same as tick 1, the MFE finally pulses again.

At first I was like 8|.
Then I was like :D.

There's something just really, really funny about that explosion pattern. I don't know what it is. It looks like a squashed spider or something. I love it.

Now, on the subject of the reactor itself, that is of course the most uranium-efficient reactor design possible. >_> According to my sim, if only used in single-reactor-pulse bursts and with long enough cooldowns to keep the heat below the point of any danger (active time will be 1.35%), it will produce an average of 16.22 EU/t over 205.5 real life hours(!).

You'll have to wire it to an HV transformer, though, because it outputs 1200EU/t!

Too low active time for Mark IV, as I understand the classifications, so I guess this goes under Mark V - for mad scientists and people with very precise redstone timers only.

And yeah, that explosion. So awesome.

Nope, the default action of the transformer will give you what you want - receiving (potentially, but not necessarily, higher) voltage into the three-dotted side, and outputting normal voltage out the others. Redstone reverses it and makes it gather energy from its other sides and output it as the next voltage level.

I'll do scrapboxes & diamonds before I head to bed.

I'll take a shot at this since I've written one myself in Perl. (You probably don't want it. It has no real UI, it's just a quick mock-up of the underlying code. Works, though.)

• A nice shortcut to external cooling is 1 + 2*chambers + (26-chambers). Assumes each surrounding cell is water, as you did. The exception of course is if there are no extra chambers, they'll have to use one of those cells up for a cable. But it sounds like you already got that part.
• As Viktor said, only the three you listed count as true cooling elements. They're the only ones that uranium cells will consider when generating heat.
• Reactor plating will, assuming it has any cooling elements around it, divide out the entire heat pulse it receives. It will round up to make the amount evenly divisible by pulling heat from itself (if there is no heat to be pulled, it'll make some up - I don't know off hand if it sticks at zero or goes negative when it does that).
• When a reactor plating receives a pulse from a uranium cell, it spreads the heat without the "no more pulses" flag. Receiving it from any other source (another plating or a disperser), the flag is set, and the pulses it sends out go directly to the stored heat of whatever it sends it to. So in the case of two plates next to each other, the original pulse and the second pulse would be the only two which occurred.
• All items are currently processed in a single loop, in reading order I think.
• Enrichment of depleted cell in a 3000-heat reactor takes about 20,000 uranium pulses. It's based on a random chance, so mileage may vary slightly, but for simulation purposes it can be modeled as a constant increase.
• The one heat per pulse that the depleted and enriched cells output goes straight to the reactor hull.
• The system heat for the purposes of breeding is measured from the reactor hull.
• Dispersers interact with nearby components first, then balance with the hull.

Hope that helps, good luck with the simulator!

Batboxes can only ever emit power from their dotted side. But applying redstone to an LV-transformer in its place (3-dots up) should have the effect you want. Alternately, just split the cable four ways and put the batbox above the junction.

Hah, guess we know who didn't check his Google Reader today. Thanks for pointing that out!

I'm thinking, even if we don't do 1.00 yet, we should pack up a new release for our lovely beta testers. There've been lots of improvements made by all involved, and the Bugs forum is starting to get repetitive.

I tried this in vanilla Minecraft (nothing but TMI) and couldn't get the TNT to move. Picture of my setup below.

Bug located and eliminated.

The miner does charge its tools while it's running, that's intended. They do get discharged as it mines, so it draws additional energy to fill them back up so that you don't have to do it manually.

I don't know about the geothermal being laggy (the box I run Minecraft on is pretty beefy), but the constant switching on and off at least is going to be fixed in the next release. Hopefully that's the source of your problems with it.