Posts by MauveCloud

Quote from Blood Asp

Should GT Crops need stuff like blocks below them? Like Diareed needs a Diamond Block below the farmland? Only the ones that have some block that fits and also only the crops producing expensive stuff...

I'm not sure I like that idea, but I think I could endure it, at least when the material to make the blocks can also be obtained from ore veins. I play in peaceful mode, so it's important to be able to get items from crops that would otherwise only drop from hostile mobs (e.g. blaze rods, ghast tears).

http://ftb.gamepedia.com/GregTech_5/Mining_and_Processing includes an explanation of how to modify the ore generation (it mainly involves finding the metadata for the ore you want and adding it to custom mix veins, though custom small veins are fairly easy to configure as well). I'm not sure silicon ore is really necessary for those mods, though, since you can already process glass dust in GT machines to get silicon dust.

Seems like a good idea. Once I've bred my stickreeds up to high stats, I should have a good supply of reeds and weeds for making biogas and fertilizer.

I'm not using Railcraft, and I'm not sure you understand the scale I'm talking about - I had 48 crop-matrons, each above the center of a 9x9 field designated for a specific crop, and I think a total of over 800 meters each of tin cables (connected to RTGs along the west wall) and tiny copper fluid pipes (connected to medium copper fluid pipes and drains above the walkways between fields).

I've already dealt with the height (walking on the farmland has my feet at y 130), skylight (except for redwheat), biome (all above swampland, no rivers interrupting), and dirt below (with partial exceptions for ferru and aurelia), and I was planning on aiming for 21/31/any (resistance is also useless because of http://bt.industrial-craft.net/view.php?id=1608), though I had forgotten the value of improving the stats with a mid-tier crop first. I held off on making crop-matrons because in a previous game I set up a bunch of them with copper fluid pipes and drains to collect rainwater for use with them, and was experiencing severe lag even in single-player, and I don't have fertilizer at the moment. Also, if I'm understanding things correctly, they only speed up the effective growth of existing crops, they don't improve stats or make the crossbred crops appear faster.

I'm a bit confused by your suggestion of several 2x2 plots with 2 breeding spots each though - how is that better than my diagonal line of 4 crops with 6 breeding spots?

I've been working on breeding some enderblooms with better stats with the following strategy (I've got other crops that I might eventually breed higher stats for, but currently I'm focusing on this one):
1. I have a diagonal line of 4 "parent" crops with 6 crossbreeding plots around them
2. If a "child" crop starts growing with weak stats (worse than the parents, or equal but not already at the maximum (safe) value), I remove the crop and make it a crossbreeding plot again.
3. When a good "child" crop is full grown, I try to collect the seeds and start or add them to a new diagonal line of crops, clockwise around the central water block (of a 9x9 plot of farmland)
4. Once I have 4 better crops in the new diagonal line (and they've grown sufficiently for breeding), I get rid of the old "parent" crops, and start crossbreeding with the new ones.

However, I've been wondering whether it would be faster to use larger batches (e.g. 40 crops checkerboarded with crossbreeding plots), and discard the worst of each batch at the end instead of stopping weak crops early. Does anybody know which is faster? Or have alternate strategies to suggest?

If there was a way to automate collecting seeds from specified crop locations once the crops there had finished growing, that would make the large-batch strategy a lot more attractive, but I'm not aware of any addon that allows that.

For the central structure in Blood Asp's image, my guess would be oil derrick.

They're separate from the nuclear reactor. The Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) gives a constant 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, or 32 EU/t output depending on how many pellets are added, and the pellets aren't consumed. The Radioisotope Heat Generator (RHG) outputs heat instead, which iirc gives the same effective EU/t outputs when used with a stirling generator, though alternatively the heat can be used for a fermenter or blast furnace.

Quote from willis936

Ah so if I have a huge pipe connected to two small pipes and a huge pipe then more than 1/3 of the fluid will go to the huge pipe?

As long as the first huge pipe is full enough, I think so. It will still try to divide the fluid evenly, but once the small pipes are full, more fluid should go into the other huge pipe.

Quote from willis936

So if I wanted to feed a large number of machines I would want to make a network of splitters. Could I instead use a large number of pumps on series to prevent even distribution to the faces?

Technically that should work, but it could make it a lot more complicated to get the distribution you want. Also remember that you can add a plate or foil on the side of a pipe to prevent it from connecting to an adjacent pipe (or machine) on that side, and you can connect different-capacity pipes together to affect flow rates.

Quote from willis936

Ah that makes sense.

Also while we're on the steam topic: I have a few questions that have bugged me for a while.

1. Are steam machines one way valves for steam? Put another way can a steam machines internal buffer output to adjacent pipes?

2. What happens at pipe intersections? How is the amount of liquid to go to the two or three adjacent pipes/machines calculated? How do pumps affect this? How about fluid in adjacent tanks?

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1. afaik, steam machines can only take steam as input, not output it.
2. There's a fairly thorough explanation of pipe mechanics here: http://ftb.gamepedia.com/Fluid_Pipe_%28GregTech%29

Quote from PaladinOne

Strange through it is, it's not a bug or a misreporting, it's an actual mechanic. When Steam enters a GT Steam Machine, half of it is deleted and the other half enters machine storage. That Steam is then consumed as if it was EU.

Sorry, I'm not following your logic there. Presence does not prove intent. If you can point me to a post that indicates that was done deliberately, I'll accept it as not a bug.

nanitozo's image (in post #1048 ) was using something other than the portable/debug scanner to show the steam amount (some addon for Waila/Wawla maybe?), so it seems more likely that the machine itself is misreporting how much steam it contains than it being a scanner bug.

Quote from PaladinOne

It's not a bug and it's not different, it's just something people tend to forget because it's a weird way of doing it.

I have to disagree about whether it's a bug. It's not just a weird way of doing it, it makes no sense (especially since steam machines only vent steam after processing).

I notice some of the achievements still only trigger upon picking up the relevant item from the ground, even though the normal way of getting it would be as the output from a machine - for example, the "Better Circuits" achievement.

Quote from willis936

I've seen this 2048L quoted before but during recent testing it was observed that each wood -> charcoal operation takes 1024L of steam.

My testing conflicts with that. Just now, I tried in creative mode with a lithium battery in a basic electric furnace, and one wood -> charcoal operation reduced the battery from 99274 EU to 98746 EU, which is a difference of 528 EU (fairly close to the predicted 512 EU). For the steam furnace, I set up a certus quartz tank (from Extra Cells, since I don't have BuildCraft installed atm) and added steam from some universal fluid cells, set up a pipe and LV pump to send it to the steam furnace. Once the steam level stabilized at 8600 mB in the tank, I put one birch wood (in case that makes a difference) in the furnace, and after it finished, the steam level in the tank was 6552 mB, a difference of exactly 2048 mB. How are you coming up with a figure of 1024L? Also, have you checked how much EU it takes in an electric furnace with your set of mods? (in case another mod or a config option is affecting the steam consumption of that recipe, and might also affect the EU consumption)

Quote from *error user name found*

I think you can wrench or screwdriver electric furnaces into an "import allow export" mode but I might be wrong about that.

That wasn't mentioned in the wiki page for the screwdriver, but I just tried it, and there is an "Input from Output Side allowed" mode. Cool.

I'll presume that the power is connected (I haven't done much with construction foam, but it looks like your glass fibre cable is connected through the block below, possibly using cfoam and an obscurator to disguise the block as something else), but those might be vanilla crops (planted directly in the farmland) rather than IC2 crops (planted with crop sticks), and the crop harvester only works with IC2 crops. I'm not sure about the more common crop there, since you seem to be using a texture/resource pack I'm not familiar with, but the sugar cane near the back right definitely isn't an IC2 crop, since those don't get more than one block high.

Quote from willis936

From a balance perspective I'd say it's not imbalanced because the conveyor modules should do what they describe and more compact designs should be rewarded with lower material costs. I have and am considering switching to electric furnaces. While less efficient it would eliminate a lot of these headaches and allow for easy scaling up to multiple boilers (only 3-4 necessary per boiler).

1. The tooltip description for an LV conveyor module says "1 stack every 20 secs". Thus one could argue that it is doing what it describes.
2. How are electric furnaces less efficient? A steam furnace uses 2048 L steam per item, while an electric furnace uses 512 EU per item (4 EU/t for 128 ticks), which at the default 66% efficiency for an LV steam turbine would take about 1552 L before considering cable losses, but I doubt the cable losses would push it up to 2048 L.

Quote from willis936

It's going to a locked JABBA barrel with an LV conveyor module (import)/electrum item pipe running down the middle of the furnaces. Each furnace has a conveyor module facing it configured to import allow export.

I hadn't thought of that possibility. I would anticipate some potential issues with that if wood was going into the furnace on the same tick that the conveyor module wants to pull some charcoal out, but if your setup works with MV conveyors, maybe that isn't as much of a problem as I'd expect. However, iirc electric furnaces won't accept input from their auto-output face, so they might not help as much as I'd thought as far as removing the need for conveyor modules.

Quote from willis936

If they run into a collision they should have some sort of 1 tick hold off though. You may save a few CPU cycles but you end up breaking functionality of the block. You won't be saving any CPU cycles when you say fuck this and switch to using 12 hoppers and a few item pipes.

I can somewhat see your point there, but I have a couple of questions:
1. if you're so intent on keeping it as compact as in that picture, what do you have against using MV conveyor modules? (seems like being able to do that with only LV conveyor modules might affect game balance) or electric furnaces, which can be set to auto-output the result items without even needing conveyor modules?
2. Presuming you're using those steam furnaces to make charcoal to power that large boiler, how are you supplying the wood to them? The front side and the vent side need to be kept clear, it looks like they've each got one side occupied by the pipe providing steam and one occupied by the pipe using conveyor modules to pull out the charcoal, and most have another furnace above and/or below, making the top and bottom unavailable for accepting wood.

Quote from willis936

That shouldn't be necessary though because each conveyor should only need to pull a single item every 12.8 seconds.

Conveyor modules don't just pull single items. According to the Wiki page about them, they try to pull full stacks every so many ticks (400 for LV, 100 for MV), and I'm guessing that they were deliberately set to run synchronously to minimize multiplayer lag.