Posts by Zjarek

Cable losses? For solar panel you may use only up to 4 copper wires (or 39 tin wires).

Well, before I was talking about charcoal ;). You can make automatic tree farms also with RP, so even without forestry charcoal is easy to get automatically. Of course there is a question, why would you like to use blast furnace for this, when there is so much tracks to build ;).

@XFmax you can't make coke from charcoal, but you can use coke or charcoal in blast furnace (just not dirty bituminous coal). Also coke ovens work on wood, but give smaller creosote oil production (however TFcraft has the best way for charcoal production, I would love to see some balanced automation in it). You can get magma cream about the same time you get glowstone for pstone, so I would be careful with this RM overflowing thing. For nether you just need 3 iron/tin and lava pool.

Edit: And magma cream is a lot faster to get, than slimeball. Cubes spawn quite often in the nether (definitely easier to spot, than endermen in the overworld).

Currently I'm using Thermal Expansion cobble gens (^v Igneous Extruder). It is machine, which gives you one cobble per 2,5 s. It may seem OP, but after building 20 different cobble gens there are really more fun things to do, than construct another one (and I don't think, that with 12 non-overclocked recyclers for scrapboxes I'm overusing TE). However I would feel more comfortable, if it would take diamond block in recipe, 2 MJ/t, or consume lava. On the other hand RP2 machines are really cheap and cobble gen is not the most complicated thing to make. If you are bored with making cobble gens, use TE.

Let me cite wiki from one of the best mods I'm using ;): "Now, Minecraft has three Elements. Mine, mine and craft.1. Mine = it's YOUR world". Many mods have exploits. For example Railcraft is overall very well balanced, on a more conservative scale. But with RedPower you can change 4 charcoal into 1 iron, which is not balanced. IC2 with redpower give you a way to convert tin into iron, or bronze into iron, which gets worse with forestry (cheaper bronze). IC2 with compact solars give you similar exponential growth to EE (a little bit more expensive, but with 1 HV array you can just idle). Mining laser and nether ores is also very OP. In mystcraft multiple dense ores ages with forestry backpacks you can get more resources than you will ever need. While idling near them, Endenic bees grant you enough XP to equip your whole family with enchanted equipment. With a little amount of work you can make frame quarry, which will devour your whole world in no time, exercising only your sorting systems.

These leave one question. Why?

It is a lot better to use these features of multiple mods, which make your game fun. It is "your world", if you want to be god, you can be, but if you want to have fun, you can't be to greedy. This is sandbox game, you get objectives from yourself. Discussions about which mod is too OP are a bit pointless, you use these mods as tools to make a fun game for yourself. This is a thing, which I like the most in MC modding scene.

You are looking for lesser known mods, so I have one for you:
Factorization by neptunpink ( http://www.minecraftforum.net/…051-electrically-charged/ )

When I found it yesterday on mods section in mc forums I was amazed how such a great mod can go unnoticed. It includes small things, like portable crafting, or great balanced multistep autocrafting which works with tubes, but also original energy system, with very fun looking (I haven't tested it yet) ore processing. There are also whole bunch of nether extending things, including "pocket demons", item router (piping system without pipes, but with many upgrades), bags. Mecha armor also looks very promising.

I can't say with such limited testing, if this mod is bugfree on a long run, but for now it feels very polished. 1.2.5 version works great with other mods (BC, RP2, IC2) and 1.3.2 version is ready. This mod needs more love, because 3 pages on MC forums are in big contrast with number of features it provides.

There are a few good things about EE. First of all it provides good balance for a short game when you focus mainly on EE. It also allow beginners to get to know other mods better. EE construction makes maps like FTB possible, which is awesome challenge impossible if EE would be balanced with other mods in normal gameplay.

You can't also forget EE items, no more going around with inventory full of buckets just to make space optimal reed farm (used with forestry for biofuel). Swiftwolf is a lot better at flying then jetpack ( in your scale). Philosopher's stone is great, providing easier mob farming (e.g. ender pearls, slimeballs), crafting on the go and changing your cobblestone into smooth stone, or grass into sand to plant cacti for bees. Mercurial eye is invaluable while building, or changing your base. Destruction catalyst is great for clearing large amounts of land (but OP if you use it for mining). RM axe is my tool of choice every time I see a jungle. Last but not the least, bags are awesome, when you use many mods, standard inventory (even with forestry backpacks) is just to small.

However if you want to have long game, using EE in its full potential makes your game boring. Why would I mine (or construct frame quarries), construct automatic farms, make massive cobblegens for recyclers -> scrapboxes, experiment with crops, be an apiarist; if I could just transmute everything from EMC spilling everywhere? In current game I don't use transmutation tablet and energy condenser at all, this way getting items like evertide amulet feels like an achievement. The only pstone transmutation I use is charcoal from forestry treefarm to coal to make diamonds, but I don't think it is OP in SSP (but taking gold from scrapboxes and transmuting it to diamonds IMO would be OP).

So maybe you should just go deeper?

We need Ultimate MFSU with 100 bilion storage!!

Honestly I wouldn't suggest it. Why you need so much energy? Mass fab can use any amount (in 512 EU packets). There is nothing else which would take so much energy in reasonable time.
You can also use electrolysers, one block with hydrogen cells in chests stores 3 times the capacity of mfsu, and really sick amounts with diamond chests. Unfortunately they discharge slowly. If you are rich you could alternatively use lapotron crystals.

So, maybe just go with basic reactor setup (ideal mixing, ignore most of the fluid mechanisc and advanced thermodynamics models), but including one important concept in chemical engineering, that many reactions are reversible. In laboratory conditions you can just ignore it and throw excess into the river, but not when you are producing something. In minecraft, due to lack of economy, some kind of polution system would be needed (see TC2). A quick course of the basics:

This may sound complicated, but it would result in about about 50 - 100 FP operations per tick per reactor which is nothing, unless you have 10^6 reactors. There are also many more realistic models, still not computational costly, but resulting mod would then possibly be good masters thesis ;). Catalyst can be very easily incorporated into Arrhenius equation, by decreasing activation energy. Of course these model also work with one way reactions, I remember one, which was correctly simulated using arrhenius equation with Ea less than 0. I'm sorry if there is any error which is not a result of simplification.

Edit: BTW, this complication is only on modder side, player can only see effect. Higher temperature makes reaction faster, but if reaction is exothermic, it will cause lower maximum reaction yield. Similar with pressure (not included in this short theoretical fragment), if gases (eg A -> 2B) are produced yield will be better with lower pressure (but also lower pressure -> smaller number of actual reagents) and if volume of products is smaller than substrates (A + B -> C), high pressure will be better (you just normalise K to be unitless, IIRC in gas phase by multiplying/dividing by 1 bar or 1,013 bar, in water using 1 mol dm^-3).

Overall I prefer railcraft, because it is the most fun to build considering other alternatives (magtubes, ender chests or cables). When railcraft will get routing I will probably just play minecraft like TTD.

It is just my thing, that I would like to see realistic chemical reactor simulation from the first time I started playing modded minecraft. It just feels like the best medium for this. I have some experience in writing chemical simulations, but more in depth and in smaller scale (about 1 nm wide cube with periodic boundaries, one polymer, a few nanoseconds, days of computation time). About water, it is just your idea of reactor "black box" that I don't like. In my opinion reactor should be multi block structure, because they are awesome and using efficient reactors should require making complicated multi elements structures, they are a lot of fun to build. I would love to see technological extension to TerraFirmaCraft, but unfortunately tech mods are incompatible with it (I mean balance, not just getting it to work together).

I don't know why you want pH as a basic reaction property, water based reactions are only a small part of chemical technology. I was thinking about something in these lines, based on metal pipes (in different cost/ heat and pressure, maybe corrosion resistance), reactor parts like stirrer, valve, heater or plating (think forestry aviary, but with any rectangular shape), catalysts. Also separators are needed, maybe simple for start (e.g. SO2 goes to the left, SO3 to the right), but laterwith some rectification columns or distribution systems based on Nernst Law. The best way would be to model reactions as realistically as possible (with correct enthalpy, entropy and rate, but scaled to minecraft/fun timing), with special reactor blocks with catalyst, where reaction occurs, with diffusion and flow simulation. It could make all basic reactors design possible, even with more complex cascade systems.

Buildcraft Oil raffination could be a good place to start, processing oil would be a source of a lot of products, including sulfur, sulfuric acid (to make for example rubber from sticky resin), all kind of plastics with different properties, fuel and practically any simple organic compound. It would need a shitload of research and work to get it right/fun, but with addition of more realistic ore processing it could make a great timewaster and educational tool.

I don't think that mods should duplicate exactly each other functionality. Similar, but different is OK (tubes vs pipes), but this just doesn't feel like a part of IC. It could be made as a completely separate mini mod, or a part of other mod (maybe BC, in spirit of builder/architect table).

Quote from karolk

WARNING! NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!

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Problem?

Note: i don't own a mac and i didin't do this so don't ask.

Well, Linus Torvalds uses apple laptop (with linux of course).

I use Windows for leisure: web, minecraft, movies, music (fb2k is awesome and didn't work 100 % correctly under Wine last time I checked) and Arch Linux (on VM) with xmonad for work. Tilling windows manager that you can use only with keyboard is really efficient for work, pairing it with vim only makes it better.

Too little energy use, it shouldn't be charge and forget. Maybe it could have smaller internal storage, like tools too force using it together with BatPack. I think one RE battery for storage and 200 EU per craft would feel OK (50 crafts possible without charging/backpacks).

Also why not just use EE. You don't have to use transmutation tablet and energy condensers, without them it really feels balanced. Even when making diamonds from wood (my setup -> forestry tree farm, 12 coke ovens, philosopher's stone, macerator, 2 compressors, flint from RC rock crusher, obsidian from RP pump in the Nether) making OP items is an achievement. Unfortunately in EE fun items (swiftwolf, mercurial eye, water/lava amulets, philosopher's stone) are together with game breaking ones (destruction catalysts, red katar, tablet, condenser, etc.).

Forestry already provides machine, which does exactly this. Forestry cans cost exactly the same and are also stackable (unfortunately they don't work in IC2 recipes).

My latest adventures in flatcore with mystcraft world:
1. Kill chickens for description books
2. Visit some ages and do some mining before instability kills that world.
3. Hate slimes with all your heart.
4. Decide to write stable age, realize that only weather option so far are eternal rain, eternal snow and eternal storm.
5. Hate rain with all your heart.
6. Use carpenter for wood pulp and eventually paper (no reeds were found)
7. Finally get normal weather symbol, start new flat mystcraft world with essential bees biomes and caves.
8. Gather more resource, made rubber farm.
9. Make macerator, extractor, electric furnace, compressor, quarry, peat bog, a few apiaries and couple of coke ovens.
10. Fall into quarry, survive with half of heart, start using rubber boots.
11. Make diamond drill, chainsaw and batpack.
12. Macerate some coal for nano suit.
13. Realize need for some more diamonds for nano suit.
14. Find diamonds in a cave.
15. Dig down.
16. Lava.
17. World deleted.

Actually my first solar power factory (while I was learning RP) used retriver connected from the sides with filter/chest loop and from the output to feedback item detector. Item detector pulse moved needed items from retriver inventory to chests and after short delay pulsed retriver. This way you can simulate first mode of sorting machine with many input chests. It needed manual restart if some items were lacking, but overall it was quite foolproof.

5 solar panels will always produce 5 packets of 1 EU per tick. Packets won't combine into one on a cable.