Posts by Two

After spending some days with the agriculture system I would summarize it as flawed, but definitely not crap.

The trampling is... let's say a friend wanted to check my crops, hovered in with his jetpack, failed to aim properly as usual and wiped out 2 crop setups trying to land. But I think this has been mentioned often enough.

The other things that annoy me are for once that on some plants (e.g. Ferrum) you cannot tell whether it is fully grown or not, and for second the crossbreeding of plants is way too random. For example I setup a farm of melons and pumpkins crossbreeding, and in 5 setups not a single one produced either melons nor pumpkins. As far as I can tell there is no reproducible rule on what happens if you crossbreed two plants, you always get either the first or the second plant, or something completely random.

The general problem with Agriculture (as well as with the entire IC2 mod) is that nothing that you generate through the system is useful for anything, you just breed plants to breed more plants. There are some useful outcomes, but the time it takes to breed these into a reasonable shape is so huge, that you would have already masses of it if you created it the vanilla way. I would love to see some plants being able to create basic materials to make it an alternative for running around mining, or EU-creation plants as a literally green way of producing energy. Other ideas would be ladder-plants that if placed on the ground quickly grow into a ladder, or redstone sensitive plants that can be used as alternate circuit setups. Things that are useful and an alternative to the usual way of doing things, so you don't feel like you wasted days of your life and all you got was some flowers.

Hi, some bugs I noticed so far:

• Lava generator seems to run indefinitely even if the lava window no longer shows any remaining lava. It eventually stopped for me after a long time (>10 minutes) after the display showed that it was empty.
• EC-Meter reports that 14 water mills (at maximum setup) were producing 0.4 - 0.5 EU/t. Measurement was done between two Batboxes, one receiving the water mill's input, the other one was empty and got filled up by the first Batbox. The income display in the first Batbox reported about the same rate (32EU in 4 seconds). That would translate to about 0.024 EU/t per water mill instead of the 0.24 EU/t we had before.

Edit: After a few world reloads the issue with the water mills seem to have solved itself. It was however definitely present when I placed them the first time.
As far as I can tell the issue with the lava generator seems to be purely visual, as they always turn off after a long time.

Quote from RichardG

On solars and RP covers, we use the vanilla Minecraft method (skylight at the block) to detect the line of sight to the sky. Writing our own iterator will make the already bad CPU issues with solars even worse.

Do you use the on block update or do you check periodically?

Quote from I don't now

I suppose it's because glass fibre cables can't transport EV, only HV or lower.

Sounds reasonable.

Quote from SpwnX

If you want to mass wind mills using towers, EV is not the best thing to do. [You would need one HV transformer for each tower. Instead you would have to use glass fiber cables which increases cost ALOT]

You still haven't explained to me why HV is better than EV. Mind doing that?

First of all: please don't mix in other mods in this discussion. Yes I know many ppl use RP out there but in the end fixing things by adding another mod does not fix the initial problem it just hides it.

Quote from Nanomanz

Wind: Pros: Good energy gen if placed right, cheap. Cons: Breaks, takes lots of cable to bring to ground

A well placed wind mill does not break and outputs around 1.5 EU average (even more if you build higher). You need about 150 cables to wire the stuff down, which is about 38 iron (not that much) and 450 rubber (which is much but a renewable resource). So the con breaks down to: you need lots of rubber.
On the other comment: I don't think you can count in player death in this one, as for once it is the player's own fault not to press the shift button and for second you don't really loose any resources through dieing unless you do something stupid, in which case it is the player's fault again. I as well don't find it very complicated to place the wire, all you need is jumping and repeatedly pressing the left mouse button.

Quote from Nanomanz

Solar: Pros: Easy to place and use, unlimited. Cons: Stops working at night and rain, needs view of sky

A solar generator outputs about 0.5 EU/t on average, actually slightly less if you calculate the rain time into that.

Quote from Nanomanz

Unmanned Water: Pros: Unlimited. Cons: Lowest energy gen of any generator

Beside that they are currently broken and therefore sometimes just won't work at all, they output 0.5 EU/t (considering that you get 2). Compared to the additional iron cost for wind generators, you get for the cost of a wind mill about 0.75 EU/t through water generators.

In general that means that the wind mill currently has the least disadvantages (you need lots of rubber) while having the highest average EU output (twice as much as water, 3 times as much as solar). If all those green generators are supposed to be about equal, wind mill energy needs to be cut in half.

Quote from SpwnX

Or you can make each wind tower [64] have a reverted MV transformer sending HV through glass fiber cables to ground :
The best way for minimal loss is HV + glass fiber cables and NOT EV

Not sure why HV is supposed to be better than EV regarding the loss, however the point is: yes you can use glass fiber cables for minimal loss and have a wind tower setup like yours that produces around 10k EU per tick, but if you would have created the same setup with EV transformers and iron cables it would produce something like 9.5k EU. It would still be more than enough for almost everything. So you cannot say that glass fiber cable are a requirement for wind mill setups, they are just the final perfection for it if you have the diamonds to spare.

Quote from z3rO

Wouldn't it be cheaper to set up some watermills? You'll waste even more making those HV's, for random output.

You need 2 HV transformers, one that converts up to EV and one that converts back. That is 2 diamonds, which is imo not too expensive. You can run that setup with just an MV transformer, however that will increase the loss by a good amount, but it will still produce more than a similar setup of water mills.

Quote from z3rO

Thats about iron cable. If you'll ever use copper youll loose 1EU every 5 blocks.
And for windmill generating random EU it is way much. Only asking god for thunderstorm.

That copper things was just an exaggerated example.

The way an HV Transformer works, it will first collect all incoming EU till it has stored 2048 EU and then send the whole 2048 over the line as one packet. So no matter how much or few EU the generator generates, the packet send will always be 2048, so you have the minimal possible loss on the line. In addition the way packets are send over the cable allow to hook up an huge amount of wind mills on one tin cable and connect that one to the HV Transformer. Although the combined EU of all wind mills can exceed the possible 5 EU a tin cable can handle by far, it will still not vaporize as each individual wind mill EU packet is less than 5 EU.

That effectively allows to send huge amounts of EU from the wind mills to the HV Transformer using cheap tin cables and then send the entire packet down the line with minimal loss thanks to the way the transformer handles packets.

Quote from z3rO

Its almost 24 diamonds, if you used glass fibre, and you probably did because of the length...
Would it be easier to place some watermills? It would be cheaper as you use wood, and in wiring cost, and you don't have to fuck with windmill placement.

It is not really necessary to send down the EU with diamond cables. The most obvious reason is that there is no resource cost involved in producing the EU, so even if you would use copper cable to transmit the power and in the end there is only 1 EU arriving at your box, that one would still be for free. On the other hand transmitting EV over 3x isolated iron cable will loose only around 6% of the power (assuming ~150 blocks of cable), compared to a diamond cable which is about 0.2% loss on the same distance.

So if you are willing to spent the diamonds for the additional 5.8% power that will of course increase the gain of the power generated, however it will not at all increase the efficiency as that would require any kind of material loss to actually calculate the efficiency of that loss.

Quote from MagusUnion

Save it... if people don't have the backbone to be in forums, then they shouldn't post in them. IC has existed LONG before it was popular, and a single person was in charge with the progression of ideas and development. Want to know what's changed with that? Nothing. Alba has/is in charge of the mod's development. NOTHING will change that, and it's his direction for the mod that centers its development. You mistake his generosity for allowing suggestions as your 'ability' to influence mod design...

So unless you want to code your own version of this industrial mod, hten I SUGGEST that you deal with that fact...

According to your logic it is absolutely ok to frequently insult people, as their sheer presence in this forum is harassment, and the suggestion forum isn't for suggestions anyways, just so the dev can bath in their holiness. You have a strange perception of forum communication. Oo

Quote from Snyke

In onTickInGame you can see once every 128 ticks updateWind() is called:

Thanks, have to check that when I am back home.

However the code looks a bit strange to me. For once the upChance is still 1 at max wind (19 - 20 = 1), so the wind strength can reach up to 31. For second there are two individual rolls on changing the wind strength, which in general favors an increase of wind strength.

I tried that saturation thing with the cans, however I can't really see much difference to stacks of bread (although I wasn't monitoring it that closely). In the end bread still is easier to create and more conveniently to use imo.

Regarding the cost argument: if you have way too much tin to spent, well yeah that it doesn't matter how much the tin cans cost. It could be 20 ingots or 1, you still would have too much tin afterwards. However at the start of the game tin is very valuable and not that common. If I have to decide whether I spent that tin on a single can, or create 20 cells with it to power my generator to generate 400,000 EU , I will probably use it for the generator. At the point however where you no longer need that much tin, you usually have other ways of generating food at hand (otherwise you would have been starved to death long time ago), which makes can food irrelevant.

Quote from Snyke

You didn't calculate in the weather (x1.5 when it's thundering).
Plus a wind mills output isn't constant.
Plus the average isn't 3.33 but 1.66.
http://forum.industrial-craft.…ad&postID=56732#post56732

First line of the link says "There's a random value from 0-30 which represents the windstrength." According to the code it says "windStrength = 10 + Random.nextInt(10)" which is a value between 10-19.
So there is either more hidden mechanic that I wasn't able to find or your information is outdated.

Quote from FenixR

You people have been jumping on the gun way too much when someone even so much mention anything related to a nerf (Especially when a green gen its involved) and its getting annoying.

Absolutely second that! This seems to be a major issue with this forum. My suggestion is a suggestion. It will not force the devs to implement that, not even to read it if they don't want to. They can take it as a hint and check whether or not it is true and even if it is true, they still decide how they want the game to be. If they want wind mills to be very powerful then thats they way it will be. If they don't want that but feel that 1.5 is not the right number, they will use a different one. The idea that the devs are mindlessly implementing every suggestion on this forum as written is disturbing and kind of insulting.

If everyone pick up their guns and shoot at every suggestion made in this forum, people with less "shitstorm" resistance will never show up in this forum ever again. The result will be less ideas, less advancement of IC2 and in the end less fun for everyone. If you would instead give constructive feedback, like presenting a calculation why I am wrong or probably right, this would help the idea to evolve (or be dumped in case I am wrong) and save time from the devs they would have to spent on evaluating the idea.

Step 1: Decompile IC2 code
Step 2: Look up formula for wind mills in the code
Step 3: do reverse math to figure out that the optimal height for a wind mill is 195
Step 4: Build a wind tower of 12 mills and measure the EU output to be 40 EU/t avg as expected.
Step 5: Learn that wind mills are indeed very powerful and post about in the forum
Step 6: Wonder if I will get a diamond for every poster in this forum who posts "get a clue!" without having a clue themselves and where to build that diamond palace...

Currently Wind Mills are the endgame power generators: they cost only 6 iron ore and 2 tin ore (plus some other stuff you usually have plenty off) and produce 3.33 EU/t if placed at the correct height at zero cost beside the initial cable line and HV transformer. Compared to a nuclear power plant, you need about 21 wind mills to generate the same output as a Mk I reactor, but once you have them, you will never have to pay any kind of cost to keep them running, in contrast to the reactor which requires a constant supply of uranium.

While I like wind mills in general, I think the average output is too high. But instead of lowering them in general I think just lowering the effective EU at which they have a chance to break down to 1.5 EU would bring them in line with the other generators. This would have a safe wind mill produce about 1 EU on average, which feels right compared to solar/water generators, but still give you the option to have them produce more. But if you do, you need to repair them every now and then which effectively gives them a resource they "consume" to generate power beyond that point.

Single-Use Batteries are used - if ever - extremely early in the game when you have almost no resources to produce EU through a generator. Now while coal and redstone can be found easily, you usually have a definite lack of rubber at the start of the game. Changing the recipe to take uninsulated copper cable would make it more useful at the start of the game.

In addition it might probably make sense as well to use coal instead of coal dust, as usually by the time you have a macerator you usually have a way of generating power through a generator, rendering the single-use battery useless. Besides: it effectively removes 625 EU from the 5000 EU these batteries generate as you have to power the macerator.

Wouldn't the setting "Emit power if full" do the same?

I am playing 1.95b and yes I know that you do not loose the cans.

The reason for the change is simple: there is currently no reason to use canned food as bread is easier to produce and gives you back more hearts. The high cost to produce the tin cans initially is another point against them. Usually you are in need of food only very early at the game and at this time you are not swimming in resources. Now wasting the few tin bars you have at that time would be stupid, and later when you have the tin to spare, you no longer need any food machines are you probably have one or more wheat fields available.

I like the destructive way of the LAZER. I mean it's a laser and we are mad scientists... of _course_ accidents happen!

Me: "Let me just super-heat those cobble blocks inside your huge redstone wiring chamber, looks ugly this way..."
*2 minutes later*
Me: "Do you happen to have a backup of your redstone wiring? There is a slight chance that I confused the super-heating setting with explosive..."

The canning machine currently is capable of producing any kind of food by packaging it into Tin Cans, which is convenient, there are however two issues with this:

- A single Tin Can currently requires 5/4 tin bars (5 tin bars = 4 Tin Cans) which is extremely expensive, given that 4 tin bars equal 16 cells.
- A filled Tin Can restores only 1 heart, which makes it very time consuming to bring up your health bar.

In general this makes bread a much more convenient resource, as it is easy to acquire, does not consume any materials (as wheat regrows) and bread restores 2.5 hearts each.

I suggest the following change:
- Change recipe for tin cans to use only 2 tin bars (same recipe as making a stick out of wood) and return 8 tin cans. This would transform tin into cans at the same rate as cells.
- Have a filled tin can restore 2.5 hearts (same as bread).
- Change some of the canning recipes accordingly to keep them in line with the increased heart restoring, e.g. it would require 2 rotten flesh now to fill up one tin can or 3 melon slices.

With this change the canning machine would be a nice yet not overpowering alternative to create food for a player. The benefit of it would be that any kind of food can be transformed into edible food and can be stacked, while on the other hand it is more complex to generate this food and requires EU to produce it.