Posts by DuncanS

Just a thought - with MOX, if you can somehow measure how many EU/t the reactor is giving off, you effectively measure the temperature of it. Something that emits a redstone signal in the presence of too much EU/t could control a reactor temperature.
Something like an MFSU (set to emit EU to another MFSU with plenty of spare space) set to "emit when partially full" would be one way to do it.... Although I've seen those things lose their settings on reload sometimes.

One other thing - don't bother immersing the reactor in water any more - it no longer has any cooling effect.

Of course if that's not OP enough you can try using 4 miners at once. My upgraded miner set uses 4 miners at the corners of a square (9 blocks apart) with the transformers/power in the centre. The expensive part's the diamond cable to keep the setup simple...

This is by no means exceedingly expensive - the Q suit takes a broadly similar amount of resources to make. As such it's not actually expensive enough. In my previous game I had a breeder complex able to raise that much EU from 25 pieces of Uranium. And I had three full stacks of Uranium in storage.

However, this was the point at which I quit that world. I'd made the q suit. Twice. I had ten reactors. There wasn't that much left to try. So there is something to this suggestion, but the specific idea isn't quite there, I feel.

Certainly in the (U) breeding I've done, at 8k heat, it's not at all unusual to see an uneven distribution of cell charging, so that some of the cells need to be finished up after a run. I don't think you're doing anything wrong.

All the code for this is being rewritten from scratch for the next release, so who knows what will happen to this issue !

I'd like to see a few changes to make things more difficult.

The current wooden workbench makes things too easy. It's the only thing that doesn't take power. It's the only thing that allows you to instantaneously craft lots and lots of the same item all at once. I think we need to replace it with machines - probably several of them !

What kinds of machines? Wire extruders. Tin cell makers. Tin cell fillers. Nuclear reprocessors. Electronic circuit makers. Battery makers. Anytime you have a class of recipes made on the workbench, there's an argument for a machine which can make these things instead.

Obviously you have to bootstrap the process somehow - perhaps machines should be made on an electrical workbench, which is itself crafted on a regular workbench. Advanced machines need an advanced workbench, made on the electrical workbench. Maybe you can make copper wire inefficiently on a workbench. Maybe you can make a lousy one-use battery out of copper and a tin bucket of water until you can make a battery maker?

There's certainly scope for making the start more difficult.

I expect so - all existing reactor components are being written in terms of the API, so all new ones should be able to do the same things as the official ones. So, I expect it should be possible.

From what I can see, regular reactors are being buffed considerably. Where you used to have single U cells, you can now make quad cells. You can make cooling cells x6. It looks like you can improve that performance further with fan components. I don't think it should be too painful losing CASUC's.

To evaluate balance, you need to look at what you'd need to do if you didn't have CASUC to achieve the same result.

In this case, it's an array of 20 regular two chamber reactors to achieve 1600Eu/t. At a lower efficiency mark.

So yes, CASUC gives you an awful lot more power for less investment than any other strategy, and additionally is the highest output power available in the game. In other words, it's overpowered and needs nerfing.

What is known for certain so far....

Nuclear power is getting MORE complicated. Now there are only four possible parts, afterwards there appear to be at least three times that.

It seems that the trend is towards giving higher power output for regular reactors. CASUCs will be either very different or not possible.

Generally speaking, this appears to be a buff for nuclear. Nuclear appears to have three tiers of awesomeness, as you progress towards more expensive components.

Existing reactors may explode - take the uranium out of them before upgrading !

For a totally different style of doing things - I run EV cable, and then terminate it with an HV,MV and LV transformer. I then connect 4 miners up to it using diamond cable - you need about 20 pieces of cable so it's not a cheap solution, but it definitely simplifies the process of setting up and tearing down the temporary wiring.

What definitely helps when using cable is setting up four miners/pumps at once, and running cable into the centre of the square. Even using regular cabling you get much less cable setup when doing four at a time.

At the other end I've tended to use geothermal generators going into an MFSU, but since you need the equivalent of a small base to power 4 miners, you could put anything there.

The real answer to this is that quantity has a quality all its own. Build several reactors.

Obviously you can have as much power as you wish by building several. But there's another bonus too. Reactor power levels more or less depend on how much cooling you can provide, and for each new reactor you get an extra 25 or so cooling from surrounding water blocks. (Each of these blocks can be shared between reactors too!). Water is cheaper than cooling cells and the heat spreaders needed to drive them. So the optimal choice is usually a larger number of smaller reactors.

My current main reactor is an array of 4 3 chamber reactors in a 9x3x3 space. I was planning to upgrade this to eight 2 chamber reactors in a 9x5x3 space - I have the design, but will now wait for the new physics, which will probably change everything!

You'd have to have quite a few of those in the reactor to make it go pop unless you surrounded the reactor with stone or something like that.

Given that it happened on an SMP server, perhaps somebody else on the server decided it would be fun to put some U cells in it?

I quite like the hint given in the original 'leaked' diagram.
"Need durable plating!"

I suggest the P has to be plating. D might be durable or dense (given it's compressed, and is apparently in the earlier list.)

Dense Copper Plating?

Also that the stuff is used everywhere, and therefore ought to be reasonably affordable. People seem to have too much copper, and copper already has a use as a heat spreading tech in IC2. So that's my guess.

I have a simpler approach. If the teleport doesn't lead to the chunk being unloaded, just use a button.

If it does lead to the chunk being unloaded, just set the MFSU that powers the thing to "Emit when full". The teleporter turns off immediately you jump, and stays off until you get back.

Except my Minecraft world only has one mod - IC2 - nothing else.
I figured it out. In SSP, chunks apparently don't get unloaded until you exit. And that's how I'm playing. Doubtless this will all change when we move to 1.3.x... So reactors just keep on running.

It's possible they aren't being reloaded on world load. It could easily be block updates - I have six reactors all in one chunk, all of which boil water from time to time. And a complex redstone circuit in the basement in the same chunk.

However, this doesn't entirely add up. I have my teleporters set next to MFSU's that emit when full - this has the effect of turning off the teleporter immediately after you use it - and so when you later jump back to it, you don't end up being teleported back and forth. However, once you get back, the MFSU's are refilled off the energy grid and re-enable after a while. This process works with no problems. Also, although my reactors are using up their fuel and cooling off, their energy doesn't seem to appear.

Puzzled - I shall have to do some experiments and find out the truth....

I've recently been playing with establishing a satellite base on a mushroom island linked (via nether-based teleporters) to my main base some 16,000 blocks away.

I recently returned to my main base (using said teleporters) to discover my breeder reactors had all used their fuel up and started to cool. (Mine are set to automatically maintain 8k heat - long story, but it works well.)

I also noticed that on loading up the game at the mushroom island site, I heard the sound of a reactor for a fraction of a second.

It seems as if the chunk isn't being unloaded despite the distance. Relevant factors may be....

There may be quite a lot of block updates going on as the reactors are often above the temperature where they evaporate water.

There's another teleporter (overworld based this time) only a few chunks away.

I have plenty of memory available to minecraft, and there's probably no compelling reason to unload the chunks....

Any thoughts about what might be happening?

This is a very neat and innovative approach to breeding - I may well give this a try !

I like the way this leverages the capabilities of Eu based timers. However, if you don't feel like building the timers, there's nothing to stop you doing this in a cruder way.

Instead of the timers, just connect a redstone torch and repeater in a circle to make an oscillator. And send the output from the torch into the back of the reactor. You can then use a lever connected just before the torch in the oscillator loop to stop the oscillator with the power to the reactor off. (This is a really simple circuit.)

Load the reactor, including 9 reactor plating, and stand next to it until it starts hurting you. When it does, switch the lever, and walk away.

And come back after a reactor cycle and pick up your reward.

Quote from baturinsky

Thnks a lot, but those seems not that effective...
If I pre-heat reactor and parts, and they are stable temp, can they be used repeatedly, or I'll have to repeat full process from the scratch for each pair/four of depleted cells?

Yes, if you pre-heat a reactor, it will keep its heat, and you can run multiple sets of cells one after another. The key thing here is to not leave the reactor for a long time after it's completed, as then it will cool down and you'll need more lava to heat it up again.

The chief advantage of the first approach is that you don't need to worry about timing or babying of the reactor at all. It isn't most efficient in terms of reactor time, but in terms of its use of your time, it's hard to beat, in fact.

Well, auto-mining's pretty easy, and yields plenty of Uranium for most. By the look of it, the two easiest methods are this one...

The easiest way to breed - Run the reactor twice from cold to get your Uranium converted.

and this one.

Cheap, Instant, Cold start breeder - Heat it with 5 buckets of lava, then start it. Much faster to convert, but you'll need some lava...

Personally I create two classes of reactor - breeders and power reactors. Obviously the breeders make some power, and it's worth collecting it, but the problem with breeders is that you want to maintain them at a high temperature where possible. Because of that, it's not as easy to turn them off, so you're going to get the power they make whether you want it or not.

On the other hand there's no problem at all with letting power reactors go cold (or even with building them so they never get hot at all, as I tend to.) So you can switch them on and off whenever you need them.

That's why I avoid making power in breeders.

To be honest, there's no particular need to breed in your first reactor. There's plenty of Uranium to be mined, and the power you get is more than enough to run all your machines at first. It's only when you start looking at mass fabrication, terraforming and teleporting - all of which use incredible amounts of energy - that breeding your Uranium starts to look attractive.

Even then it's mostly for the fun of it. Breeding U cells is fun, but digging Uranium with a mining setup is just as easy to do. (That's why I'm now sitting on a stockpile of 3 stacks of Uranium, which with my current setup could be burnt for around 8 Billion Eu).