Posts by CraftyFellow

The AG heat exchanger is a great source of steam, demonic bees can bee a very impressive source of lava with some good breeding, if you're not running blood magic.

Hmm 80,000 per charcoal for survivalist, or 128,000 per 4 wood pulp for SynGas producer. But the SynGas producer also needs a source of steam (or it can be it's own source at the cost of more solid fuel.) I haven't crunched numbers on cheapest steam sources, because i get mine "free" using lava and water in AG's heat exchanger, the lava coming "free"from blood magic serenade of the nether + well of suffering.

Quote from Chocohead

I guess the first thing is whether you can even put IC2 crops sticks on it.

Good question. The answer seems to be no, but the question regarding what it can do for trees my still be very important, especially because I think we've overlooked something: The Reactant Dynamo

An efficiency augmented Reactant Dynamo can get just under 7,400 EU out of 1 sugar. Obviously that's less than most crop comparisons, however this would be enabling the reactant dynamo's VERY efficient use of biomass. Usually you can get 69.375 eu out of 1mb of biomass in a distiller, or if you're on gregtech 115.625 from a distillation tower. In the reactant dynamo you'd be getting 210.9

I've been breeding an excellent tree (I think it's as good as one can get on basic forestry, I cannot vouche for how it goes if you have mods that give more tree options)

It would be interesting if the most efficient use of land turned out to be:
Tree farm producing wood pulp for syngas, and apples and sapplings for great biomass, and a small sugar patch to enable biomass......We'll see, but I still doubt it'll beat pure IC2 crops in a MFR bioreactor.

Edit: Actually I'm not positive that the Syngas Producer is the best way to get energy from wood, it might not be.

Does anyone know the mechanics of this "fertile soil", and what exactly it could be expected to do for IC2 crops, or for trees? I've seen it mentioned that it's from different mods, but I think I'm getting it from MFR, I know that it uses MFR fertilizer as a crafting ingredient as well as podzol

1/8 of what you've guessed, I'm afraid
http://wiki.industrial-craft.net/index.php?title=Semifluid_Generator

Bioreactor would stl be more efficient per plant than biogas

Biogas production you net 30,000 eu per plant ( minus cost of macerator and canning machine usage )

Bioreactor to efficiency augmented compression dynamo = 37,000

Or to advanced generators gas turbine 32,000

I think it would be very cool if IC2 had a very expensive and very potent heat source for a fermenter. It still wouldn't be quite as efficient per plant, but that would be fine.

Quote from blub01

(And now, math!)

Yes, you are mostly right and I was mostly wrong. I've been meaning to correct this post, thank you for beating me to it. A caveat worth mentioning: MFR Bioreactor does not take sugar.

I'm currently setting up a bioreactor to use:
1. mushrooms
2. red mushrooms
3. carrots
4. potatoes
5. netherwart
6. melon seeds
7. pumpkin seeds
8. wheat seeds
9. cocoa beans

All of these will be provided by well bred IC2 crops, except for the wheat seeds, which I will probably get from a phytogenic isolator.

And yes Ragh, I like that set up too, it's a good setup. I've sort of got a goal of producing huge amounts of energy in relatively small amounts of space. That is why I like advanced generators so much. By the look of things, each MFR bioreactor supplying my Advanced Generator gas Turbines will supply about 400 eu/t. Not bad, and each gas turbine I have set up to be 1x1x53, stacked side by side. Each will generate 1,250 eu/t.

But if you're willing to sprawl out a huge number of semifluid heat generators and fermenters and semifluid generators, and all the piping and wiring, then yes, it's a potent tool.

MFR biofuel is probably not in front anymore, now that Advanced Generator's Syngas producer can take sugar charcoal.

9 sugar -> 9 sugar charcoal -> 1 block of sugar charcoal -> 4000 carbon in syngas producer (add small amount of steam) = 800 mb of syngas = 200,000 EU

so 1 sugar can basically get you 22,222 EU

The Syngas producer can also get 32,000 EU from a single piece of wood, if you use a carpenter to turn it into wood pulp first.

With an MFR Fertilizer, Harvestor and Planter, you can produce this wood pulp really fast, I have a setup like this in my base, I haven't finished breeding good sugar yet. The output from the wood is good, but we'd only need to produce sugar at 1.5x the speed of a single block of wood on the same land, should be easily doable, and I didn't even want to count the apples and the sapplings to make forestry biofuel, I set that up, and it's yield is a little disappointing.

Granted I could have better trees, but still. I'm looking forward to making lots of sugar into lots of Syngas.

Ok, so as a point of refference, would that put it on par with plains? Are they the starting point? ....Dessert -3 plains 0 swamp +3 jungle +3.....something like that?

What about Galacticraft planets? What biomes are they considered to be? What penalties or bonuses would they have?

Cool. So there's no substitute for growing nice and high, open space, in a swamp or jungle biome.

Thanks for such a great answer spawn. Two follow ups.

1. Pure force of fertilizer can overwhelm insufficient soil blocks and imperfect biome? Or it's something like Biome*Soil*fertilizer = nutrient value and each multiplier has it's own maximum.

2. Where does the "irrigation" terraformer fit into all of this? It says that it makes crops grow faster, but is that merely a matter of "hydration" that can be satisfied by crop-matrons anyway?

Spawn what about this business of "air quality"? Supposedly crops positioned way up high, and crops with x amount of open air spaces above them have better air quality.
1.What are the rules on this?
2.What bonus does it give?
3.Can low air quality be nullified with enough water and fertilizer in crop-matron, or this is separate?

I have a little over 100 of those

In an efficiency optimized Compression Dynamo one bucket of biofuel produces 925,000. Depending on what modpack, version a MFR biofuel generator produces from 1,500,000 to 233,000 per bucket.


And I'm pretty sure that the bioreactor does have redstone control, I'll have to check.


Maybe if you have a supply of excellent sapplings, fruit, fruit juices the forestry fermenter could outpace an MFR bioreactor, but I don't think you could begin to produce those tree goods at the same volume per acre you can with IC2 crops. Plus the forestry fermenter is only making biomass, you'll need to refine that into ethanol (same as biofuel)


As far as the IC2 fermenter, it provides 1.6 times the power you put into it, but the problem is one of volume. A fermenter can only be attached to one heat source, and there are few practical powerful sources of heat for it. The solid heat generator is too slow, the semifluid is pretty slow too. The Electrical runs at a loss. Hot coolant is decent, but even then, I would say that IC2 fermenters are a great way to get a lot of power out of a nuclear reactor, I would not say they are a competitive means to get a lot of power out of plants.

Quote from Max Shen

How are you converting your RF to EU?

I tend to use rednet energy cables, or if you meant numerically, I'm considering 1 EU to be 4 RF, that's what the cables do, and I understand that to be a "standard" conversion value, although of course there are lots of conversion methods that can bend those rules.

Quote from Max Shen

Have you factored in the cost of using the Magma Crucible, and the cost of using sugar for a Reactant Dynamo? Sugar can also be used to make a MFR charcoal, right?

Yes, no, yes

Quote from Max Shen

Now you need to ensure that the Bioreactor always has 9 ingredients in it.

Yes, I think early game a lot of people only turn the Bioreactor on in short bursts before they have the volume of plants to keep it more regular. I think your idea would work, but that we could likely hash out something a bit more compact and simple with Buildcraft logic gates, haven't tried yet.

Quote from Max Shen

Speed is also a factor

Yes. You can pump out and use that Biofuel energy full blast, but you'll need a lot of infrastructure to do it. A lot of dynamo's with a lot of augments and piping, or if you're willing to take a hit on efficiency a lot of boilers. Certainly there's something to be said for the simplicity of just dumping in redstone.

Quote from Max Shen

For a railcraft boiler, you will have to do some serious calculations to find an optimal setup...

Sure would, that's where this guy comes in:
http://calculator.towerofawesome.org/

Quote from Max Shen

I wonder if Redwheat farms are efficient?

• 1 Redstone Dust = 800 EU

Actually you can get a lot more juice out of it than that. You can net 24,750 if you're also running Thermal Expansion, by running the redstone through a magma crucible, then an efficiency augmented Reactant Dynamo.

Regarding concern of red wheat and lighting. I remember some dude talking about how cool cargo rockets are (galacticraft), and he had made reference to "a shipment of redwheat coming in from mars". Maybe he had discovered that the lighting on mars is excellent for mass producing red wheat.

Now the question is how does the efficiency compare to what is probably the front runner for getting power out of IC2 crops: The MFR BioReactor.

One bucket of it's biofuel can produce 231,250 EU in an efficency optimized compression dynamo ( or 174,000 in a railcraft boiler). With 9 ingredients in it the bioreactor produces 150mb per plant item.

So 231,250 *.15 = 34,687

34, 687 from MFR's bioreactor > than best energy use (that I can think of) for redstone. Plus, to put the redstone to use we'd have to supply the reactant dynamo with sugar as a reactant. You'd probably want to go wtih sugar, so much easier to get than all the other solid reactants, and it would take 3.7 sugar to match each redstone.

so Biofuel = 34, 687 per plant
Redwheat = 24,750 / 4.7 =5,266 per plant

MFR Biofuel is still the pony to beat.

Yep, only problem with that is that each pair of machines (and their piping) only nets 9.6EU. Very sustainable, but pretty low volume.

If you've got 16 fermenters powered by 16 semi fluid heaters you're fermenting with 512 hu/t

I've got a fluid nuclear reactor feeding 1056 hu/t to 16 fermenter, (not enough heat for them to work at full capacity)
But my point is they are massively over supplied by a small patch of vanilla sugar. So the potential for your well bred sugar is very high.

Great, thank you

Is there a limit to fertilizers ability to counteract this? Because I'm set up to make a metric ton of that stuff.

And I'm sorry you're language is a little unclear to me, does "cross breed" as you say it include cross breeding two plants of the same species? Or only two plants of different species?