Posts by Irontygre

    Number of Ferru plants that aren't fully grown that have so far yielded seeds for me: 0. However, I will chalk that up to a retarded RNG.


    As for the rest of your points ... potential or not, *this* release is half-assed and not fun. It's annoying, tedious, and the time-reward ratio is completely off-kilter. I'm not clairvoyant, and as such I can't see future releases right now. Therefore, I'm making the statement that *this* implementation of agriculture is worthless.

    I can tell you I suggested Iron ore under plant to grow, and needed no source code to guess right. But yes, I agree with you that it needs some additions, like tooll to measure hyrdation and nutrition levels. On the other hand, you are trying to compare research with engineering. Well, fully automated farms and miners are ok, but how are you going to automate research ? Do you just want to be able to make machine, which discovers new plants for you ? Spending days to discover new things by yourself can be fun too in my opinion. I agree on some requirements for plants being little hardcore without proper equipment though.


    I think you missed my point. This is IndustrialCraft. Key word there: Industrial. To me, that means this is a primarily an engineering expansion mod. This is not ResearchCraft or ScienceCraft or BiologyCraft or some other variant. It is supposed to make Minecraft feel more like an Industrial environment. Not a research lab. Not a science project. An Industry. Industries take already well known science and applies them to the limit. It takes well researched fields and furthers them for profit. It does NOT explore entirely new fields of research for "why the hell not."


    Furthermore, I want to hear your logic as to why you chose to put an Iron Ore block under a random growing plant. What keyed you into Iron Ore instead of one of the other couple hundred blocks you chose? Until I can get a logical explanation for why you chose Iron, I'm not going to accept your anecdote as justification for this system (and for that matter, nor do I believe you got absolutely no help from source or someone in the know to come to that conclusion ... there I'll say it). Or maybe you're just crazy and decided to try all the combinations of 100 or so valid blocks in the 17 potential logical locations and somehow have compressed 10^36 growth trials into the span of a month?


    In all fairness, how do you think real crossbreeding works? Take two samples with properties you want to combine, combine them, hope for something good. That's what this does. It's not random, but there is a random element involved.


    It's rough, it's unpolished, the rewards don't fit the amount of time and effort required for the payoff, but it's a start, and it gives you something to do when you're bored.


    No, it is random and convoluted because I can get sticky reeds from crossbreeding 4 wheat. On that note, I can get significant amounts of Ferru by crossbreeding 4 stickyreed over and over again. The implementation of the random element is, for lack of a better phrase, half-assed. The only part of Crossbreeding that makes any sense is the Growth/Gain/Resistance values of seeds, and that's been negated by the concept that perfect seeds require perfect babysitting. This is INDUSTRY, the first thing any sane industrial civilization is going to do is breed crops that require LESS babysitting, not more! 1/1/1 Wheat is strictly better than 31/31/31 Wheat because it GROWS ANYWHERE with NO INTERVENTION.

    If everything was know/easy/automated, where would fun be ?


    Last I checked the name of this game is MineCraft. Not MineResearch.


    There's next to no engineering in this crop engineering, and what little progress there is ... is so small and fickle that the time vs reward of the system is completely skewed. Furthermore, I have to agree that there's absolutely no way that Ferru and Aurelia was discovered by someone who did not look at the source code or have help from someone who did. There's literally zero hint of what that plant is until AFTER the requisite ore is under the plant. On top of that, the lack of any sort of cue for hydration/fertilization is simply not fun. It's not random, it's not difficult. It's simply not FUN. Here's why, at least in a real scientific environment, there'd be clear visual cues as to the level of hydration in the soil (tactile dampness) and fertilization in the soil (the smell). Here, the plants just kind of sit there and either grow or disappear ... with no relevant link to how many times i click on it with crap or processed tin (PS, seriously? more tin sinks and still no renewable source of tin?).


    At least for me, this is a game about engineering. Spending (real) DAYS on a self-sufficient nuclear CASUC reactor? FUN! Designing the perfect zero-waste biofuel generation system using BC3/IC2/Forestry (Wow, using all the wastes in one farm to power the next is surprisingly compelling!)? FUN! RP2 Frames (whenever they come out)? Going to be a total BLAST. Spending (real) days on engineering the perfect wheat culture, only to discover that Alblaka in his/her infinite wisdom has decided perfect seeds require perfect babysitting (without measurement tools no less!)? Polar opposite of fun. The only reason I'd use Agriculture right now is to get Ferru and Aurelia, because they're convenient to have ... NOT because they're fun to make.

    I did a bit of research and reverse engineered the fuel recipe formula after burning a forest worth of saplings and killing a small nation worth of creepers (etc.).


    The TL;DR Ultimate Fuels List:



    For those of you who want to know the exact formula:


    AkhkharuXul is absolutely correct. The pulses are for desynchronization and not to prevent engine overheat. Actually, loss of heat from the desynchronization pulses is an unfortunate and unwanted side-effect, which is why I tuned my system to send out pulses as infrequently as possible. Having all the engines hooked up to the same pulse generator is useless, since while they may not overheat in that situation, they stay synchronized (hence the use of an RP2 sequencer).


    As for chaining engines together ... I found that in my experiments chaining does not increase bucket extraction rate. Please, if you could, have your friend give you or upload a world file where this phenomenon is observable. Of course, there's the other issue that driving a redstone engine with another 140 engines behind it is going to cause a bunch of your engines to explode anyway.


    To answer your question about adding more than four inflow pumps. The reason there's only four is because even a nearly full 5 chamber reactor with 40 Uranium cells only outputs 1740 heat / second. There's no need for more than four inflow pumps since each can supply about 500 heat / second in cooling.


    On the bucket loss subject ... BuildCraft is 'leaky' compared to RP2 pneumatics. You absolutely MUST use Obsidian vacuum pipes to recover leaks and losses. The vacuum design is going to be dependent on each individual configuration. If you don't use the reference design *exactly*, then the vacuum recovery system will have to be redesigned from the ground up to match whatever design modifications you make.


    Due to the circuit complexity involved in making the sequencer work, my friend and I who are going to use this reactor in our SMP server are not going to be removing RP2 logic from our mod stack (There's simply no room in our base to install the redstone circuitry required to replicate the circuits we have built using RP2 logic). However, I'd be more than happy to give you periodic tips and pointers on how to get your own design off the ground and working without RP2 alltogether. I'm a strong believer in more options and competing designs!

    So what you are saying is that BC has some code that makes engines cool down if supplied with high frequency redstone signal?


    Well, there's no need for special code for the high frequency case, but yes ... redstone engines tend to stay cold if driven with a high frequency signal.


    Ok, so the reason I use a sequencer is so that when a desynchronization pulse is sent, it is sent at different times to each of up to four engines working any given extraction pipe. The way my circuitry is set up, they receive a negative pulse of length 1 tick every 10.4 seconds (So effectively a signal that is on for 207 ticks, and off for 1 tick). I know this does not cool down after several hours for many reasons. One, I've conducted overnight tests on the system to see if it is stable. Two, the engines actually heat up to a bright red equilibrium from start.


    I don't know for certain if it's optimal, but I'm pretty sure it's darn close. The engines stay desynchronized, and operate at about as high a temperature they can before I run into synchronization issues. I was unable to get 4 redstone engines to operate at an extraction rate of 12 buckets / second, and I don't think it's even theoretically possible to get them past 4 buckets / second. But if you can do it, I'd be very interested to see how you managed it ... and with your permission integrate it into a Rev. C.


    Also, I will note that the engines DO need to be desynchronized. Even blue state engines that are perfectly synched will not extract buckets properly.

    At 8 ticks your desynchronizer pulses are hitting much to quickly. You'll note that in my setup I have my RP2 sequencer set to 2.6 seconds per pulse, which means each engine actually gets a desynchronization every 10.4 seconds. Much faster than about 9 seconds per desynch pulse and the engines lose core temperature.


    And to answer your other question ... yes my design requres the redstone engines to be running bright red (maroon red is bad, because all engines automatically synch when they get that hot).


    Pretty sure anyone who's designed a CASUC reactor from scratch has done this.

    In the absolute perfect setup (perfect breeder coupled with an efficiency 5 reactor) you will get 36 million EU per Uranium Ore. At 25% returns, you get an additional multiplier of 4/3 (read up on geometric series summations to find where I get this number) on that which gives you a total of 48 million EU per ore.


    Using an efficiency 4.0 reactor means you will get (1 + 4.0*7) * 4/3 = 38.7 million EU per ore.

    Not at high-end CASUC speeds. You need to produce Ice at a rate exceeding 7 blocks / second for a high power CASUC reactor, and that's a wee bit hard to do in survival using a compressor. The entire process also consumes tin at frightening rates.


    Hmm, good to know. I'll have to try and reproduce this myself and fix the bug in the system. I know it's not a survival mode issue, since I have to switch to survival to use the EU meter as well.


    Also, which couplers? There's a LOT of parts in the system and I'm not sure which you're referring to.


    EDIT: Rev. A or Rev. B?

    Ah... I see. So with the design you posted, you'd have to swap isotope cells touching one U-cell halfway through the cycle, the ones touching two 1/4 way through the cycle, etc.? Basically you get 2x the recharged cells per unit time, but the same per input u-cell (in return for micromanagement).


    Bingo.


    Personally, I plan on running a 4k breeder because it's simple, easy to set up (if you already have a CASUC reactor working), and requires no attention once running. But if you're willing to expend the effort for the micro, the returns are quite sizeable.