Posts by quantumleaf7895

Running IC2 version 1.64 with Buildcraft 2.2.12 and all required mods (modloader, forge, and modloadermp) on a mac platform (OS X 10.6.8).

My toolbox is working fine, besides crashing the game a la the toolbox crasher bug, but oddly when loaded with tools it's name in my inventory is that of one of the tools inside. The sprite is always correct, and when empty the game calls it a toolbox, but when I load it with, say a batpack, chainsaw, laser, and diamond drill, its name in the inventory is "batpack." I believe that name corresponds to the tool that was leftmost in my hotbar when I loaded the toolbox, but I'm not 100% sure (for example, right now Minecraft's calling it a drill).

Quote from sirbrandino

Very interesting, now my question is:
Replace cobblestone with an automatic cactus farm. Should I convert the cactus to scrap,burn it to aid in energy, or have a balance of the two?

My instinct is to use the cactus to produce scrap and power the mass fab with a nuclear reactor, although using cacti to power the recycler seems interesting. 1 cactus can be burned into 125 EU, so you'd need (35•8÷125) 2.24 Cacti to produce a single piece of scrap.

My suggestions for two more modules:

Heat Recapture Module:
Designed for early-game use, this device decreases the energy needed to run a machine and is low-cost, but has a strong element of diminishing returns.
Crafting: Uses 4 tin cable, 1 RE battery, 1 copper cable in the pattern


Where = Tin cable, = (Insulated) copper cable, and = RE battery.
Effects: The heat recapture module reduces energy consumption based on the square root of the number of modules in the machine (I believe the overclocker has a similar effect), such that 1 Heat Recapture = 1 EU/t reduction, 2-4 Heat Recapture = 2 EU/t reduction, 5-9 Heat Recapture = 3 EU/t, and so forth. (IE, take the square root of the number of modules, and round up to the nearest whole number).
I originally named it the heat recapture module because I imagine it generating energy from waste heat produced during machine operation, but reducing energy consumption is probably much simpler to implement.

Efficiency Upgrade Module:
Designed for very late-game (think nuclear reactor, or later), this module greatly increases energy consumption of a processor but has a very low chance of increasing its output.
It is unstackable.
Crafting: Uses 4 advanced circuits, 1 Recycler, 2 Advanced Alloy, and 2 Reinforced Glass in the pattern



Where = Reinforced Glass, = Advanced Alloy and = Recycler (Although replacing the glass with iridium wouldn't be that bad of an idea. . .)

Effects: Every time a processor (Compressor, Macerator, ect.) processes an item, it has a 1 in 32 chance of producing an extra item for every Efficiency Upgrade. For example, 32 Iron Ore + 1 Efficiency module can be macerated into 65 Iron dust on average. However, the effiency upgrade is very energy intensive; each one will add between 5 and 20 EU/t to the machine's energy consumption.

Quote from Alblaka

That's why i consider enchantments imbalanced.

So it does work? Huh, the next time I reach level 25 I might want to try it.

But would there be a way to code cf so that the item that is compressed into a cf pellet is different from the item spawned in the world? Maybe CF could be coded so that, like a door, it is an item in the inventory that spawns a block when placed in the world.

I've had the same extreme-damage with my bronze armor, too. A four-block fall recently nearly depleted a single set of bronze leggings (but left my bronze helmet unaffected. . .)

Luckily, I crafted myself a set of nano armor recently, and that's holding up well. Two creeper blasts haven't even dented the stuff.

direwolf20 did an episode dedicated to IC2 1.62? Many thanks, I hadn't known that.

Hmmm, I'm gonna have to get me one of them overclockers. . .

Unhardened construction foam in one's inventory can be compressed into a cf pellet, and used to create 26 unhardened construction foam blocks (2 uses of a cf sprayer) in the world. Because these blocks don't drop anything, they can't be recovered to create 26 more cf pellets.

However, the silk touch enchantment guarantees that a mined block will drop itself, even if the block wouldn't normally drop anything. Since I can't seem to get any luck getting my picks silk touch, I pose the question: am I right? Can silk touch be used to create a near-infinite supply of construction foam, by compressing it into cf pellets and spraying it again?

A mass fabricator can be used to create the versatile uu-matter, but is a complex and resource-intensive process.

Here's a way to make it simpler.

Note that the following tutorial makes the following assumptions:
-You are powering your fabricator using a nuclear reactor. I'm using Rick's cheap MK 1 design on the 'useful reactor designs' sticky in the nuclear engineering forum as a baseline; it's a very useful design.
-You are using buildcraft -- the most efficient cobble -> scrap recipe was created by buildcraft, and the mod has a bunch of useful tools for automating scrap production.
-Overclockers are not being used; I might edit this post later if I learn the formula dictating how overclockers affect energy usage.
-The decimal point is represented by a period, not a comma -- just in case.
-Finally, You are comfortable with math.

Let's begin.

According to the wiki, making a single UU matter at the lowest possible efficiency uses 1 Million EU. Luckily, there is a much better way to create matter: scrap. Adding scrap to a mass fabricator will make it work six times faster, and reduce energy usage likewise. A scrap-powered mass fab will only use up 166,666 EU per matter, but producing matter at this pace requires 34 scrap. Scrap can be produced at a recycler, but on average, it takes 8 recycler operations (35 EU without an overclocker) to produce a single scrap. I takes an additional (34•8•35) 9520 EU to produce matter at optimal efficiency, for a total of 176,186 EU/matter, and creating a single matter consumes (34•8 ) 272 blocks/items. That's a lot of stuff.

The best material for recycler food is cobblestone -- it's widely available, quick to mine, and using lava, infinitely renewable. Again, however, 272 blocks of cobble are required to make even a single piece of uu matter -- but luckily, there is a way to multiply the number of recycler operations you get from a piece of cobble by 8/3 -- 3 cobble can be crafted into 8 buildcraft cobble pipes, meaning that only (272•3÷8 ) 102 blocks of cobble are necessary to create uu-matter, less than two stacks.

But, you say, does the pipe recipe not require glass? That it does, but luckily there is a way to create glass from cobble. Cobble can be macerated into sand at a cost of 625 EU, and smelted in an induction furnace at the cost of an additional 208 EU (For simplicity's sake, I'm assuming that you have a solar panel wired up to the induction furnace to keep it at maximum temperature). One glass is used to create 8 pipes; as a result, using this method to create 34 scrap consumes an additional (34•[625+208]÷8 ) 3,540 EU, for a total of 179,726 EU per UU matter.

As a result, 1 UU matter can be created from 179,726 EU and 102 cobblestone by:
1. Macerating 34 cobble into glass, then smelting it (in an induction furnace) into 34 glass (costs 3,540 EU total)
2. Using your cobble and glass to craft 272 buildcraft cobble pipes
3. Feeding those pipes into a recycler to produce 34 scrap (Costs 9,520 EU total)
4. Feeding 166,666 EU and 34 scrap into a mass fabricator to produce a single UU matter.
For ideal sorting of cobble so that 1/3 of the cobble becomes glass, use a diamond pipe with two cobble in one output slot feeding an automatic crafting table, and 1 cobble in a different output slot feeding a macerator -> furnace -> original crafting table.

Using a 40 EU/t reactor, and powering everything except the mass fab using renewable energy/(geo)generators, a total of (4 million ÷ 166,666) 24 UU matter can be created from (102 • 24) 2,448 cobble (38 stacks plus 16, about 2/3 the capacity of a double chest)

Note: Using diamond pipes, cobble can be easily sorted to make exactly 1/3 of it go to the macerators -- either route cobble out of three inputs, only one of which leads to maceration, or route cobble out of two inputs, one of which has twice as much stacks of cobble as the other -- cobble will be twice as likely to go down that route.

Quote from Bluehorazon

So 0 Overclockers need 625 EU per Cycle and 8 Overclockers need 2223,6 for one cycle (almost 400% of basis-value). So you could actually decrease the necessary energy by using more overclockers, because there is a maximum-energy-usage (it's a parabola).

Why are you assuming that overclockers use an inverted-parabola (-x^2) model? All we know is the overclocker increases energy usage at a faster pace than time usage.

So I just noticed that my macerators, compresssors, and extractors have an additional four slots to the far right of the normal GUI. Is this related to the new module system, or is it a buildcraft/redpower compatibility thing, or what?

In my world, I downloaded the new IC2 version, got up a whole bunch of crossbreeders going, and thought to myself "This is going to take a while. Wasn't there an abandoned mineshaft not far from my workshop?" So I get my tools together, charge into the mineshaft, suffer many close shaves, stayed a bit longer than is probably healthy, but emerge from the experience all the wiser (literally, I gained several levels), and with oodles of melon and pumpkins seeds to boot.

And come home to find out that weeds have destroyed my entire farm.

Quote from DrenDran

Loaded? What exactly does this mean?
They're defninitly out of sight.

Minecraft generates terrain in 'chunks' of (iirc) 16 x 16 x 128 blocks. When you move a far enough distance away from a chunk, the game will 'unload' it, basically freezing the chunk in time until you come back. If you are far away enough from your power source/destination (and with a distance of over 2000 blocks, you almost certainly are) minecraft pretty much forgets that the source/destination exists, and sees no way/need for energy to run through the cable. I've heard that some people use 'chunk loaders' to make sure that ludicrously large projects keep running without needing the player to be within a certain distance, but I'm not sure how to build one.

I'll be the first to admit that my current setup is microscopic compared to others (I only have four macerators!), but I use a small group of solar flowers to power my machines, and a small group of water mills under my house to power the lights and induction furnace (the room also acts as a passage between my house and workshop). Some day I plan on adding some wind generators for a rainy day (literally :P) and to power my mass fab, but I'm afraid that building a cable up to the surface of the world will become a bit of an eyesore (that, and my nuclear reactor's almost set up to power the fab).

When you account for packet size, gold has 1/2 the distance loss of copper, and Iron has 1/4 the distance loss of gold (only 1/2 if HV transformers are unavailable).Here's the math:
Let's say that you need 2048 EU's sent over a 20 block length: You could send
-64 packets of 32 EU using copper cable (1 EU lost over 5 blocks),
-16 packets of 128 EU using gold cable (1 EU lost over 2.5 blocks),
-4 packets of 512 EU using ref. Iron cable (1 EU lost over 1.25 blocks), or
-1 packet of 2048 using ref. Iron cable (see above).

The copper cable will lose (20/5)=4 EU per packet -- 4 EU times 64 packets equals 256 energy lost, over 10% of the total.
The gold cable will lose (20/2.5)=8 EU per packet -- 8 EU times 16 packets equals only 128 energy lost, half that of copper.
The Iron cable will lose (20/1.25)=16 EU per packet -- but because only 4 packets are sent at high voltage, only 64 EUs are lost.
Spend the diamonds to get HV transformers, and only 1 packet has to be sent, meaning that only 16 EUs are lost.

Of course, you could skip all this and lose no energy by using glass fiber cables, but that comes with a high cost in diamonds -- you'd need 8 diamonds to cover 24 blocks, much less than the 2 you'd need for a pair of HV transformers.

This should work -- but keep sure to keep your water source blocks at least 3 blocks away from the reactor -- else they could evaporate when the reactor reaches 50% heat.

Quote from streetstar5

How do i control my nuclear reactor via switch - like how can i turn it off and on at will...whenever i put components in my 6 chamber reactor it auto starts heating up

According to the wiki, and I think alblaka's sticky in the nuclear engineering forum, applying a redstone current to a reactor or reactor chamber will shut down the reaction. Haven't tested it yet, though. I think they work like splitter cables in that way.

I've only really exploded nukes in creative mode. . . First, I accidentally wired a 40 EU/t reactor directly to a macerator, and produced a small crater. Then, I deliberately melted down the reactor, and was surprised by the size of crater it made.

Then I activated a nuke, got bored when it took a while to explode, then turned around and discovered exactly how powerful those bombs are. Makes me wonder how often they are used in pvp industrialcraft. . .

Apparently, when an EU packet reaches its destination, the packet's size is rounded up to the nearest whole number -- I run a 32 EU packet through 4 copper cable to batobox, and the packet it loses (.2 • 4 ) .8 EU on its journey, which is rounded down to the nearest whole number, here 0. My question is: must EU packets always come in whole numbers? The wiki says, for example, that the max EU/t outputted by a water mill is .25 EU/t -- does this mean the generator outputs a single 1 EU packet every four ticks, or a .25 EU packet every tick?

(Related second question: The wiki says that a wind mill outputs 0-4 EU/tick, multiplied by 1.5 in a thunderstorm -- does this mean that a wind mill in a thunderstorm has a good chance of melting any connected tin cable it's connected to ? (4 EU •1.5 = 6 EU, capacity of tin cable is 5 EU))

What exactly does this have to do with IC2?