Don't hold your breath for RP2 for 1.32. She is already working on 1.42 and I don't think backdating to 1.32 is going to be a major thing on her list of stuff to do.
Yea, but *EVERYONE* is going to 1.42. Hopefully, there won't be yet another major change or obfuscation redux to make it still more difficult for them.
QuoteI'm a big fan of the Biofuel powered steam boiler. Sure, it may not be quite as efficient as running it on charcoal, but hey... it's still at a cost of 'some hummus'. The top tier steam engine can run the refinery, and one of the middle tier ones on your fermenter.
Does biofuel do that much better than biomass? I don't really have the option yet, as I'm still running 1.3.2, but I was under the impression the biomass to biofuel conversion was fairly energy-inefficient.
You can't put biomass in the liquid fueled boiler, it has to be biofuel, cresote, oil, or fuel.
Sure, refining biomass into biofuel can be an energy hog, but it's a completely green energy source. And with a max-size boiler, it's not like you don't have the steam to spare to power the refinery and the fermenter. Or just power your fermenter with a Biogas engine, and split the output between said biogas engine and the refinery. When the engine fills up, everything else goes to the refinery to get turned into biofuel for the boiler.
Considering how many steam engines you can have running at any given time off of one boiler, it's certainly energy efficient. Just be sure to have the Valve Pipe Mod for the cobblestone/gold waterproof pipes and the stone/gold waterproof pipes so you can have outputs going around without accidentally inter-connecting.
We'll have to agree to disagree about the Turbine. I don't think it is of any use at all. Heck, even Solar is strictly better than Turbines, and cheaper initial outlay for the same EU output. Wind just blows it away (pun intentional). Heck, even unmanned water towers take it out behind the woodshed.
We have differing opinions on this, and I think I know why: as far as I'm concerned, one-time costs don't exist, except as an initial hurdle. They do not factor into a long-term efficiency calculation because, given enough time, they tend to zero out. So comparing the one-time cost of 12 turbine casings to the one-time cost of five geothermal generators is a no-op for me: they're both zero.
Scalability, my friend. For the resources you put into producing 100 Eu/tic, I can produce 800 Eu/Tic. This continues to scale up as you continue to increase the size of your power supply to meet ever-increasing demands.
QuoteAs for running costs, I'm matching these to the contents of my storage, and I can tell you I have tons more iron ready to be turned into steel than I do lava ready to turn into EUs. As the boiler is effectively free (it makes its own fuel, given the occasional infusion of some humus for the tree farm), steel vs. lava is all that counts.
Wut? Lava is free, man. Go to nether. Pump out lava. Done. With Thermal Expansion, it gets easier with 'Go to nether, collect netherrack, throw in Crucible for lava', since it is easier to automatically transport solids than liquids across dimensional boundaries.
Iron, on the other hand, is far less common than 'near infinite' and has actual uses other than being an energy source
QuoteNow, if I had a stick up my ass about efficiency, I'd probably use that tree farm to make scaffolds to burn in regular generators -- their operating cost would thus drop to "just some humus every once in a while", which is extremely low. But I don't honestly care that much, and playing with steam is fun.
On that same note, I could probably go nuclear (I don't recall if I have two or three complete stacks of uranium), which would have even lower running costs, but honestly I got over my fear of using one piece of coal to smelt fewer than eight items a long time ago, and that's about the level of anal-retentiveness that would be necessary for me to forget the steam turbine altogether.
Playing with steam is indeed fun, but not to generate Eu. At least not with a Turbine. You can run an entire Manufactorum on Steam. I'm a big fan of the Biofuel powered steam boiler. Sure, it may not be quite as efficient as running it on charcoal, but hey... it's still at a cost of 'some hummus'. The top tier steam engine can run the refinery, and one of the middle tier ones on your fermenter.
Call me crazy, but I don't see 'spending eight times less to build something' as having a stick up my ass about efficiency. If it was less than twice... maybe. But that's a LOT of iron you're throwing down the toilet for very low return on investment.
I haven't much (read:any) experience with mass geothermals. How long can 1000 eu/t geothermal factory work, before it sucks all lava around?
That depends greatly on your access to the nether, which can net you effectively infinite lava, either through the truly staggering lava oceans or via Thermal Expansion's Magma Crucible to turn netherrack into lava, depending on your lag tolerance.
It also depends on your access to chunkloaders and waterproof teleport pipes.
Peat burning is incredibly OP early game in forestry/buildcraft.
The initial investment is very low(30 copper or something in all, and some of this is for the machines required to make the engines), and requires no hard to find materials. one farm can supply 20 eu/t using the 2MJ to 5EU conversion ratio while only taking in a tiny amount of tin and some dirt and sand. It's not spacially economic compared to geo or nuclear, but it requires much less of an investment and can be automated easily.
Umm... no. Peat in peat-fired engines only produces 1 MJ/tic. You'd need Bituminous Peat for 2 MJ/tic, and that will eventually overheat the engine and force a cooldown. Besides, Bituminous Peat requires Propolus, which is NOT early-game.
A peat-fired engine requires 11 copper, 1 iron, and some cobble and wood and a piece of glass.
A peat bog and turbary, however, require vacuum tubes and circuit boards, which means a Thermionic Fabricator and Carpenter, both of which require a non-trivial amount of power (Thermionic Fabricator won't even get started without at least 2 MJ/tic, which means you can't just use the coal or peat engine). This generally means you need an already established source of Eu and use the Electric Engine built into Forestry to produce your MJ to the Thermionic Fabricator to get your vacuum tubes.
The tubes and circuit board also require Redstone, which means having gone down to near-bedrock levels and done some mining with an iron+ pick.
Automating it is also non-trivial, and generally requires logistics pipes, which have a diamond requirement and a VERY heavy gold requirement unless you're willing to put out even MORE diamonds into an Assembly Table. So yea, not something you can just do right off the bat.
By way of comparison, the Geothermal generator simply requires a generator, some refined iron, and some glass and can be kept filled with a pump.
So no. It is VASTLY easier to simply start off with a regular generator burning scaffolds.
QuoteDisplay MoreI
was playing with this recently and have achieved a scaffold-burning
max-size high-pressure Railcraft boiler getting its wood from a single
Forestry tree farm (it even makes some profit in logs once the boiler is
up to full heat). The boiler could run four turbines, and the tree
farm, and make a few extra MJ on the side. While the cost of a whole
bunch of steel every four days isn't completely ignorable, it's also
well within capacity for late-game automated resource collection.
As
a note, I'm doing this in Railcraft 6.5, and the turbines (and probably
boiler, as well) have been rebalanced in 6.7. However, I do suspect the
greatest cost in setting all that up is getting the turbine casings and
rotors in the first place. It's not really something that can be set up
in early game, but should be okay by the time you start thinking about
making UU.
Umm... no. Some four hundred plus STEEL (not Iron) to generate 100 Eu/tic is pathetic. By way of contrast, Geothermals produce 20 Eu/tic at only 10 refined iron. Some eight TIMES as efficient on iron, much less the blast furnace conversion into steel. Plus, yanno, NOT eating up 33 steel over time, which will need to be replaced.
Forge itself prevents Plants from growing on Grass, when its too dark. So its fixed.
I was referring to a Darkroom mob grinder with either a drop or a lava blade to kill mobs. Different beastie entirely.
I agree; however, every option you list here has been balanced....
Mushrooms bowls/soup is balanced. No Emc gain.
You realize this means you can exploit this going the other direction, right?
QuoteDarkrooms have been "shut down" Deployers no longer deploy bonemeal.
They cannot 'shut down' Darkrooms. They function on basic vanilla spawning code. Is the whole server on Peaceful or something? LIkewise, how can you prevent deployers from deploying Bonemeal?
Also, Mushrooms. Use a bone meal on a red mushroom. You end up with a bunch of red mushrooms. Rinse, wash, repeat. There is absolutely NO way to nerf this, unless you either nerf the drop rate of mushrooms from large mushroom blocks or if you declare EMC value of mushrooms ot be 0, in which case FREE FOOD! Either way, win. Simply set up a mob grinder around a skeleton spawner, and you've got enough bone meal that you don't need to make it via EMC. Don't forget to macerate it for more bone meal.
QuoteFlax has been reduced to only 1 per plant.
One what? One string?
QuoteEnderchests disabled, and there is a "resource world", for mining.
All that to say. I love this servers complications and survival elements. EE makes the game instantly easy. One map I was on I had 200 MFSUs and a Mass Fab system producing stacks of diamonds every 8mins. All of this was done with little effort.
Teleport pipes, then. If you have Mystcraft in there somewhere, it gets even easier with Railcraft + Mystcraft, since mining is by default in a different 'world'. Worlds are effectively infinite. Get far
enough away, and you can simply mass-mine for EMC generation.
QuoteDisplay MoreWhat I am looking for here is a more viable option to produce the EU to have at least 1 mass fabricator going steady while I am loading the chunk.
Right now I am working on possibly a windmill farm or working through the lava cell geothermal plant.
I could Breed cells, yet the effort seems to not be efficient in terms of the time/profit ratio. Correct me if I am wrong in that. My old simple set up was: 8 Reactors - 45x8 cells 9x8 stacks of Ice in mk5 Casuc's - producing 7880 eu/t. These could run 2 mass fabs at 3584 eu/t; leaving me 800 eu/t for my sorting machines and advanced items machines (Solar Panel factory, MFSU factory, etc etc)
This time around, reset map, 1 Uranium is 8192 (If condensed) and Ice is 2 emc (condensed) - cobble is 2 (condenced) in the Mass Fabricator factory.
If there are any other suggestions I invite them!
And thank you for all the input! You guys rock at electrical engineering!
Run your geothermals like one used to run the old bucket brigade water mill setup, using RP2 for a retriever, transposer, filter, and pnumatic tubes.
EE just has too many ways to get Free Stuff (tm), it's impossible to nerf it without completely removing it entirely.
Mooshroom farms (turning bowls into mushroom soup) using RP2 are hilariously efficient, even with a 50% nerf, you'll be producing more than a battery of Energy Collectors Mk 3.
Darkroom mob grinder is also ridiculously good at generating EMC, just use a Transposer where they land to pick up the stuff and tube it to your Energy Condenser to produce lava cells. Plus, it also makes the environment much safer to run around in, because it steals most of the mob spawns.
There's also the Flax Capacitor. Basically, you've got some Transposers with bone meal and flax seeds, and some transposers to pull the resulting flax out, making more seeds and a bunch of string, which then goes to your energy condenser.
Then there's always the option of setting up your Frame Quarry's output (via enderchest) to a simple sorting system. If it is an ore, it gets macerated and smelted. Otherwise, it goes straight to your Condenser. Well, I suppose if you still need scrap production, you could have cobble/dirt/sand sent to the recyclers, ore to be macerated/smelted then sent to your Condenser.
Do Lava Cells still have the same EU value as Coal? Energy Condenser cranking out lava cells can power a whole tower of geothermals. Even at half output, that's still 10 Eu/tic each, so if you set up a tower of them for fantastic Eu output. Resource investment shouldn't be more than a wind tower, with some five times the energy output...
Yea, Luminators have a 10k energy buffer. So each one down the line in the basement will try to fill it up before the basement's batbox can fill up. Which is a major energy draw, and could be why your top floors aren't lighting up.
Also, double check to ensure you don't have energy loss between your water towers and your basement. It's very easy to end up with an entire tower outputting 0 Eu/tic if you get your length calculations off by even one block.
I would suggest Glowstone Lamps, as they do not require Eu to keep lit, and can be turned off at will.
So it looks like Forge is really trying to up the game and it seems from what I been hearing CPW is trying to get mod devs to in fact have their mods done ahead of time and ready for the launch of new versions. What do you think of it and are you a player or a server owner?
I personally love it even if they are not stable. I mean it gets to the point where you wait almost 2 months for a mod to release and then it never even shows up but having forge encourage developers to try to release their mods the day of a release I think is great and even more since we get the pre releases to really get a head start.
I doubt and this is only personal judgement that IC will be ready anytime since to many the devs been busy in real life and that's fine it sucks for us but they are allowed lives too :P, but I can tell you that BuildCraft has already been updated and a few others have been claiming their ready so its going be exciting even if its not close to home here but just watching the mods all crank up at once.
I think this is precisely the point of the entire Forge and FML project since day one. And, barring the enormous curveball that 1.3.x threw at the devs, it seems to be working.
As of right now, Forge is updated, BC and IC2 have beta versions out, Forestry is in closed beta development, most of the dependent mods are either done or almost done. Really, only RP2 is lagging, and that's because Elo had to go and COMPLETELY rewrite microblocks and like half her mod to get it to work with 1.3.x, plus put in new content as well. Other than that, the only mods that I'm waiting for are ones in initial development (Thaumcraft 3 being the notable one, but also EE3 if it doesn't completely break other mods like EE2 did).
As far as Bukkit... I hear there's development on Simple Server mods on the Forge forums which brings some moderator tools that could easily replace Bukkit when finished.
I guess my friends and I just play this game differently than most people. We're trying to build a living, breathing community and invest in public works projects that will endure for the long term. The mods have been balanced so that there is no "end game" for us. We've built a massive rail network with switching stations, and a mail system based off buildcraft pipes with a serialized communication system for dialing addresses, a high energy corridor for power sharing, huge artistic works, and so on. There's only a handful of us and we just don't have the time to go back and re-do major projects any time there's a minor change to something fundamental. Mojang and the IC2 guys are building a canvas upon which to create remarkable works, but it's like they periodically change the cloth in a way that we lose a whole color. I don't really get it.
I don't mind the nuclear update overall, since the internal mechanics of the reactor don't really affect anything. Sure, it renders certain design elements (falling water, ice pumps) unnecessary, but what really gets me is that the fundamental means of control was totally reversed without any option to keep it the same. If I'd built my reactor control system on a different server, the operator would've probably updated, started the server, and two minutes later I'd be living in a massive crater because my four Mark 5 reactors would all have turned on. What can the justification possibly be for doing that to people?
Because a Mk I reactor now outputs more Eu/Tic than an oldschool Mk V reactor. Really, you should look at it. Resources mostly switched to Copper for most of the Nuclear components, which means it actually takes less valuable resources to build up a Mk I reactor that generates 420 Eu/tic. The only resource which is scarce that you need to put in it is the Uranium itself.
The new reactor components are overall an upgrade. CASUC needed to die in a fire anyways, this just gives you the ability for about the same Eu output, but actually expending resources (like tons of lapis).
Also, IC2 people tried to let everyone know to turn off their reactors, that the redstone usage was going to flip, and even sent out a config change to default turn off all reactors so that everyone could get their reactors set up properly.
Heck, even the mods like Nuclear Control flipped their redstone application to match.
QuoteI still want someone to accept my deal, I make a $10 donation and they make reactor redstone input a configurable choice going forward. It's worth it to me to continue playing this game without feeling like an idiot for wasting 40 hours of my life on a design that was rendered obsolete the very same week.
Install a NOT gate, done. this is how it works with vanilla, or you can use RP2 to do it. Reactors aren't going to change much going forward.
You sound like you just got caught in one of the biggest changes Minecraft has gone through. Everything changed with 1.3.2. You just got hit by some of the backlash. Now it is done, and you don't have to worry about it again.
This happened mostly because of CASUC reactors being basically exploits, and the devs wanted to remove them, and do some tweaking in the process.
Also, I think you may be playing the wrong game. This game is dynamic. It is constantly changing. Expecting a world to be the same for two years is simply unrealistic, unless you simply don't update the server.
I've experienced no problems with it and I'm not only running Firefox, I'm on a Linux OS.
Could it be that you have flash/java disabled? I think they may be by default, which would keep it from working for you.
I've not been insulted like that in years. Just watched the Green Mile and after such a movie you start to question the of life. After that you don't expect to check a forum just before you go to bed only to be called a 'spambot'. Please stop saying people are bots, its like you don't exist in this world and are unnecessary. If you say something like that then you should first of all check the posted link which lead to a breeder reactor and the other just links to another post on this forum made by Rick ([OFFICIAL] List of good reactor designs). Maybe you should also take a look at the other 61 posts I produced in which I tried to be as human like as possible.
I don't have anything against you, just watch what you say on this forum, some people might read it.
I believe he was referring to the post you responded to, not to your post.
And it does look suspiciously like a mash-bot. It's got parts of two sentences and a bold and large font title within the OP which exactly matches a thread title, with no real clear point to the thread. The fact that it is the first post, and the other post the account made is clearly a spambot with links and everything.
I think it's just the latest design bot designed to try and establish themselves as a legitimate user before starting to spam.
With the plethora of mods out there, you've got several of them which have ways of producing Eu. The question here is... are they really worth it? These are simply my opinions, and others are free to chime in with their discoveries and/or opinions. Please keep it clean and flame-free, though.
Forestry has the Biomass Generator. Produces 8 eu/tic on biomass and twice that on biofuel. However, biofuel requires the Refinery, which takes up two diamond gears, so rather expensive, and eats up its own BC power requirements. Honestly, two biomass generators on biomass is probably going to be more cost efficient than one running on biofuel.
It's a novel concept, and biomass is a renewable resource (compost and saplings are what I use). Requires a bit more infrastructure than a regular Generator to get going, but that infrastructure can support several generators. I'd probably call it on par with a generator, but can't match the Geothermal.
Compact Solars is an addon for IC2, and pretty much is a space-saver. If you like Solars, you'll really like Compact Solars.
Transformers does what it says on the tin... converts BC MJ into IC2 Eu and vice versa. However, the conversion ratio does not favor Eu, and producing significant quantities of Eu with BC power doesn't seem very cost efficient. about 13 MJ for 32 Eu'Tic. That's roughly three Biogas Engines or Combustion Engines. You could also use a pair of Commercial Steam Engines with Railcraft, but that requires a whole infrastructure of its own.
Railcraft just came out with the Steam Turbine which produces a whopping 100 Eu/Tic! Only... there's a few problems. First, the turbine itself requires a massive 486 steel! It is also a 2x2x3 block megastructure, and requires about four separate gold waterproof pipes to keep it supplied with steam, and a fairly large boiler to produce that much steam. But wait... there's more! In addition to this enormous material investment in the infrastructure and in the bloody thing itself, you've also got a turbine rotor, that's another 33 steel, which slowly takes damage and eventually needs to be replaced! Now you're effectively burning steel for power. Not worth it, in my opinion. If you want to use steam for Eu, use about seven Commercial Steam Engines and hook them up to a MV Pnumatic Generator from Transformers for 128 Eu/Tic. Sure, you've got a massive investment in infrastructure, lots of steel and blaze powder and magma cream to get it going, but at least those are mostly one-time investments. Your only real ongoing costs is fuel for the boiler.
One of my favorite things about chainsaws is that they can shear sheep. Unfortunately, when I right click a sheep with my chainsaw, it doesn't get sheared. This makes me a sad panda.
Running IC2 1.106 with Forge build 303
Infinite XP farms are already around in vanilla. It's called a Mobavator. Generally, you build it around a mob spawner, then you have alternating water and sign up a pipe, with water pushing them across, then down a 20ish height. It doesn't kill them, just drops them to 1/2 heart, letting you punch them to death for as much xp as you like. Even better, using either a thrown potion of harm (or, for zombies and skeletons, thrown potion of healing), you can hit a TON of them at once.
I'm still trying to get Stickweed... I was trying Reeds and Pumpkins, starting to think I might try Reeds and Cocoa next to see if I can get lucky...
It could, but it is like generating energy from nowhere (you get more energy from watermills than using to pump water into it).
Anyway there is PowerConverters which can "break" that physics law since it adds waterstrainers (accepts only piped water to generate energy).
Hint : use Thermal Expansion Aqueous accumulator for infinite water into those strainers.
I could never get PowerConverters to work for 1.3.2 (the only one I could find was only compatible with BC 2.x and not 3.x), kept getting errors. Not surprising since it was basically a fan-update. And yea, Power Strainers were at least less laggy than the Bucket Brigade, and more compact as well. EU output was quite nice. Not Endgame-nice, but still very good as a supplementary power source, or to power remote locations (like a Quarry + Electric Engines).
As for myself it really depends on the mods they are installed.
No RP and no Forestry =>
for endless supply (would it be arrays or not)
RP =>(harvesting trees =>
for charcoal)
Forestry => Bees => Free lava =>=> profit ?
With EE2+compact solar, it's definitively solar arrays as I get the "god" state really fast.
With EE2, just hook up an Energy Collector Mk. 3 to an Energy Condenser set to producing 
for your battery of . No fuss, no muss.
With Thermal Expansion, you can use Netherrack to produce a bucket of Lava for very low cost, making it less laggy to obtain infinite lava from the Nether.
The Water Mill Brigade got nerfed, and it was kind of laggy for any serious EU output, but it was a very strong mid-game setup for maintaining all of your Advanced Machines, before you started with your MassFab. Not so much anymore, of course, since the EU output got halved, and it was never an end-game power solution.
I've never been a big fan of Solar Panels. They cost quite a lot and have very low energy returns per unit. Plus, they shut down at night and during storms. I might consider using them as an interim power source before I get my geothermal groove going, as an alternative to the water mill brigade, but probably not as a serious late-game power source.
