MektonZero

As it is you can get 200 EMC/s from a condenser, deployer, 2 filters, and some tubes; with the overall system needing an additional condenser, timer and some redstone. If you make it compact you can get to 12k EMC/s with just 10 cows. Of course the same goes for EU. Took about 2.5 months from a server restart on a Tekkit w/no EE before someone had so much power generation that they were giving away stacks of UU for free. Solar -> Mass Fab -> Factory Making Solars. Like EE it's a geometric progression, just as powerful, only a bit slower.

This isn't that hard of a trick to pull off in vanilla. A good sized cave can get you 1/2 those diamonds and a decent branch mine will get you the rest in short order. Sure, a Divining Rod helps, but isn't required. A nether portal requires one flint and steel, a single bucket, a few dirt and 8 lava lying around somewhere. It's entirely possible to get to the Nether within 5 minutes of world creation if you start near surface lava, a cave with some exposed iron ore and one tree; none of which are exactly rare in this game. Also keep in mind that item duplication is also a feature of Thaumcraft. Dump junk in, use a Thaumic Duplicator to get Diamonds, or whatever you want, out. Set up in the Nether to avoid any issues with Taint and use a cobble generator and pipes to feed your Crucibles; unlimited free diamonds with a rate limited by how big of a setup you want to create. Bit more of a startup curve, but the end result is is pretty much the same.

Unfortunately that only delays the issue rather than eliminate it and not by a factor of 20 either. The problem I see complained about the most isn't that you can turn 8,192 cobblestone into a diamond or vice versa, it's that you can easily start a self-sustaining process that requires very little investment that turns out infinite amounts of pretty much everything (except Uranium IIRC) at whatever rate you care to build up to with the free resources this process gives you. Even if drastically slowed down, this process requires no work other than stacking a few blocks and one could just set it up and every few hours expand production with almost no input at all while they did other things like mine or build. At some point you will have enough production to overcome any artificial reductions (even at 20 times slower and 50% loss for conversion I could still get a stack of diamonds every 8 hours by building 40 arrays). This also wouldn't take 40 times as long due to the geometric progression involved and frankly would just add to server lag for no real good reason. From what I've seen, a lot of people who have a problem with this are often the people who wouldn't blink twice at building a couple of dozen compact HV solars, cobble generators and recyclers to feed mass fabricators to turn out UU to turn into diamonds and other stuff. It's merely a matter of the perceived work involved in setting up whatever their chosen system is for getting the free stuff. The only way to stop it would be to eliminate the Energy Collector, leaving players to do things like create an entire building full of compact cobble generators to feed a Condenser. Worst case scenario this they do it with a transmutation table and a Klein Star, but even then it wouldn't be hard, just take longer. You can also seriously put the brakes on by eliminating the Mk2 and Mk3 versions of the Energy Collector and Anti-Matter Relay but it will only be a matter of time before someone just piles on enough low level arrays to get their former output.

All upping the cost will do is add a slight delay before you get the higher end stuff. Same with slowing down collector speed. You just keep expanding your collector array until you get the output you want. Given the geometric returns of EE, it's not possible to put a realistic check on it by increasing the cost. Even making it 10 times more expensive would only add an hour or two into how long it takes me to set up my standard array. Even making it 100 times as expensive (or 100 times as slow); it would only take 7 times as long to set up 100 of them. At that point the only thing you're really adding to is server load. Red Matter already costs 57 diamonds. My normal array does make collecting everything simple, stack a couple of blocks where the middle of the array will be. Put a sequencer on top, surround the sequencer with transposers with tubes running down and into a condenser (to make it easy to output exactly what you want). Put 4 condensers on top of the transposers (set for diamond), surround those condensers with relays and surround the relays with collectors. At level 3 they make enough light that you don't need any extra light, but what the heck, glowstone is cheap enough to duplicate if you need to make it look pretty. Cut away view cut down to show the center sequencer. This array will output 8 diamonds in a bit over a minute. A full night of building and you can make an entire stack of Red Matter.

Use item detector tubes from Redpower and feed the signal into a Computercraft computer. The Computer boots with a single program, it loads a three minute timer to shut down the reactor and resets the timer every time it gets a pulse from the detector tube. For extra credit, link it to a big monitor which displays a normal status message like :Ice: Normal Water: Normal. Should the timer ever go under 290 seconds, change to a warning about which system has failed and below that put a countdown timer until system shut down. You can also output a redstone signal to a redstone repeater surrounded by lamps to give you flashing warning lights. I'd be sure to use the IC2Reactor simulator to check though, you might not be able to go a whole 3 mins without coolant before it goes critical. :)

Be sure to come back and tell us how long it takes before someone sets up a large scale automated operation to feed a condenser. Should take about a day to build one that generates a diamond per minute. :)

Re: Ho do i become self sustaining? from the start... Not necessarily. Investing in EE with about 12 diamonds or so (along with a few other goodies you find along the way) eventually gives you free stacks of everything but Uranium with nothing else invested but sitting around. EE also makes finding those dozen diamonds a trivial exercise since you quickly gain the ability to spot them through 64 squares of rock. Lacking EE, I often go for a Forestry production chain of Wheat Farm, Tree Farm and Peat Bog tied together with either buildcraft pipes or redpower tubes to a couple of carpenters, a pump and a moistener, with buildcraft being cheaper but less flexible. Automated production of wheat, wood, peat (which provides huge amounts of buildcraft power, same amount as a steam engine but a stack of peat burns for more than 4 hours of real time), send your extra saplings to a couple of fermenters and a still and you can run a combustion engine or two as well. It's self-sustaining and can be almost entirely automated with just pipes. I build peasant huts around the centers of my farms and such, run the pipes underground and place it all next to a castle. A standard IC2 start works just as well since power converters are part of the mod. You can easily run your buildcraft stuff off of electric power and a starting nuclear plant is pretty cheap to make considering you can double your metal production with a macerator. 70 Copper, 40 Tin, 35 Bronze, 65 Iron or so (you only have to mine half that) along with a dozen each of lapis and glowstone and you've got a working nuclear plant once you build your basic machines. Such a starting plant can easily output 40 EU/t without building up heat so your only limitation is fuel and Uranium is pretty plentiful.