Posts by petrus4

At least I didn't get banned, as a result of this. I am grateful for that.

This is a somewhat strange type of suggestion, perhaps. It is for IC2, yes; but more, it is for its' designer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXt9HT50X1c

If he is willing, I very much want Alblaka to watch this film. It is a film about planned obsolescence within the real world economy; about engineers who deliberately sabotage their work, in order to make products which arbitrarily fail, for the sake of selling more.

The reason why this is relevant to IndustrialCraft, is because I have noticed more and more recently, that among a number of mod developers, there is an obsession with what they refer to as "balance," but which in reality, is an entirely arbitrary enforcement of defectiveness and scarcity. "Balance," is considered more important than creativity.

With IC2, the wrench is a case in point. With ComputerCraft, it seems that dan200 has finally caved in to numerous demands for coal to be used as a fuel source for Turtles in 1.4, where previously they were fuelless.

As an engineer, at least within this game, I do not believe in designing devices to fail. I use, as a staple power source, a hybrid geothermal generator which consists of a generator from IC2, and a Volcanite Amulet and Energy Condenser from Equivalent Exchange. I do this with complete belief in my own integrity; I do not believe that it is cheating, if I do not wish to be limited by arbitrary scarcity. I also do not play multiplayer, so nobody else has to be subjected to my own choice in this matter. I do not seek to dominate the perspectives of others, if balance is important to them. I only wish to maintain a scenario where my own choice, is given equal consideration; and I fear that I am approaching a scenario where it is not.

I understand that I will receive opposition for making this post; I may even be banned from this forum for doing so. If that is the case, I accept it. If a single person here, and most hopefully, Alblaka himself, is able to hear my cry, then I will accept whatever happens to me as a consequence.

Quote from NuclearStudent

I also literally dumped in 20 something diamonds and transmutated it into to TNT, which I used to craft into sticky dynamite to help control a taint infection caused by the massive amounts of taint I was creating.

This is the reason why I don't use Thaumcraft. Its' only unique functionality is the Thaumic Repairer. Literally everything else, I can get with another mod, and with said other mods, I don't have taint to deal with.

For me, the proverbial holy trinity of design are simplicity, transparency, and redundancy. That last one is relevant, here.

What I mean by this is, let's say you've got a single, centralised power station, and it gets visited by 2-3 creepers. All of your machines have then lost power. If you're running multiple generators, however, and one of them gets hit, then depending on what kind one of the others is, you can divert power from it to your other local machines, either from your storage, or from the generator itself.

At the same time, you don't generally want to put a single generator on a single machine, because you'll probably run into inefficiency issues there as well. So my own strategy, in most cases, would be to devote probably four machines to a single generator/storage pair, depending on what type of generator you use. Given that I generally only use geothermal so far, I can do that. Wind or solar would probably need a bit more figuring out in order to do; I haven't seen anyone on YouTube only using a single wind generator. People usually seem to build farms of them. I've experimented with water a bit, but only small scale, and not much. Water again seems pretty horrible unless you either put a lot of them in, or use a looping Redpower2 setup with a deployer and buckets, which I wouldn't mind doing myself, but which a lot of people around here would probably consider cheating, given the opinions I've seen on using other mods with IC in this forum.

So, yeah. The design of the natural generators (except maybe solar) seems to be biased in favour of centralisation, in the sense that you usually have to put in a multi-node farm of them to get any really decent amount of power. As I've said, geothermal power is the only form I've used so far, because from what I've seen, the resource cost to output ratio of just about anything else, comparitively speaking, really doesn't seem worth my time.

Quote from GregoriusT

I know EE only from Direwolf so i cant say how much Uranium costs but they said 6 Diamonds.

Diamonds are worth 8192 EMC each. Uranium is worth about 45K EMC per piece. Uranium is the third most EMC valuable object in the game that I know of, after Red and Dark Matter. One piece of Uranium during the early game will just about set me up for a BC pump/geotherm setup, including the iron from my first three mining runs or so; so yes, it probably is a little bit OP.

EE still gets too much abuse from people though, in my opinion. EE 2 has been rebalanced a lot, and I still can't get solar replicator arrays in less than 15 real world hours of play.

Another point to understand is that only raw materials (and with rare exceptions, only *vanilla* raw materials) are replicable at all; and iron and above are sufficiently expensive that it's not worth doing unless you're at the replicator stage. The old scam of large enough cobble generator = win has been fixed; it's not worth doing at all, any more. There is no real way to make it work.

If I want to make machines, I still have to build them the same as anyone else. EE's factory blocks are directly replicable, but most of its' tools and weapons aren't.

Quote from Yellow 13

With the exception of sticky resin to make rubber.

Resin can be replicated with EE. Thank you also, for the tip on bread making vis in Thaumcraft. I've been replicating charcoal, currently.

Quote from Fickle

No such luck, boss. I tried this with the 75, 81, and 84 builds of Forge 3.

So in other words, Alblaka's going to have to refactor IC2 to use the now-native Forge support, for whatever it is that ModloaderMP used to do. Hopefully that shouldn't be too difficult.

Quote from ANATOMICA_3rd

ee isnt cheating, if it was then why do lots o people who ddont like cheating use it eh... cant break that logic can you.

I define cheating in probably two ways.

a} If you don't have to do any work setting something up, but just type in a command to get something.
b} If as a result of a}, what you're getting is not due to any in-game mechanics.

Equivalent Exchange does require work in setting up infrastructure, and it also apparently has a set of internal mechanics which it follows. So logically to me it isn't cheating; although in the case of item duping, it certainly can feel like it. If the mod allows a chest full of lava cells to be duped, then I would hope there is some serious work that you actually have to do to get that result, and that there is a coherent reason for why it works, in game terms.

Quote from sirbrandino

I recently decided to supplement my solars with geothermal, as I had a ravine nearby with a lava lake inside it. I pumped the lava up to 2 geos, when I realized I needed a few more as the lava was piling up. I ended up with 7 geos all being fed, pumping some serious power. I will always use geothermal from now on.

The reason why I love a buildcraft pump attached to a geothermal, is because there is no maintenance involved. I do occasionally have to flip a lever to refill one of the tanks, or pump from the tanks into the geo, but apart from that I can completely forget about it, which I consider wonderful.

Quote from SpwnX

I like windmills for power as they generate a constant energy without the need to feed any fuel.
I have a setup with 1600 windmills using 32x20x32 (XYZ) generating 2k-6kEu/t

I will need to try this tomorrow, SpwnX. How do you transfer the power from the windmills, down to your base or wherever else? I admit I'm a newb.

Quote from jppk1

If you would want to transfer a full MFSU worth of energy via a line of batboxes and/or transformers it would take almost four and half hours, so if you would have any EU production at all it would take ridiculously long. Even with MV you'd be better of just by going mining and making a new power plant or transferring it with a lapotron.

OK. This makes sense.

I've never actually done this yet, so correct me if I'm wrong; but for the aforementioned 300 block example, would anyone here be willing to use copper cable and batbox repeaters as mentioned, and transform the power all the way down to LV, and simply AFK or do something else in-game while the power transferred, even if it took an hour or so? It just seems as though that would still be a (relatively) cheap way of doing it, resource wise, and there is no current loss at all then, either.

Quote from Ook

woudln't exactly call them overpowered as one has to track down the lava to use in them. Unless one is using Equivalent Cheater Exchange lava isn't a renewable resource.

This is true. Being reliant on geothermal power is a lot like surfing; you have to go where the waves are...glowing orange waves, that is. IC 2 doesn't exactly lend itself to being nomadic, either. Generally once I put my machines down, I tend to want to settle in for a while, at a given site. It's just too much bother to have to pick up everything and move every five minutes, not to mention the energy cost with the lossless electric wrench.

Quote from MagusUnion

More proof that Geothermal is the most underused and OP energy generator in the game, lol...

Yep. Geothermal for the win. I'm terrible at Minecraft in most other respects; I installed Mo'Creatures not long ago, and have lost massive amounts of resources due to being repeatedly slaughtered by werewolves. However, one thing I did figure out very quickly, was that once I go underground and find a large enough lava lake, I've got constant power for close to a real time week. Put the generator and the pumps in, and Bob's your jolly uncle, to quote GameChap.

No explosions, and no other fuss. It just works. I'm not up to the point of making a nuclear reactor yet, but given my discovery of geothermal, I've got no idea why I'd bother, to tell the truth. Geothermal power might be a lot slower, sure; but it is constant, it's stable, and it is much, much safer.