Magicthize

I had been using the Autocrafting tables as well but I found a much easier and tidier way of doing it. I'm using an ME Precision Export Bus to export my items to the BioReactor so I have it set to Always Active and Stack Mode (Move single items/craft). Because I have an ME Molecular Assembler Chamber running with the patterns [1 Melon = 1 Melon Seeds] and [1 Pumpkin = 4 Pumpkin Seeds] the system will craft and export these items when there is space in the BioReactor's inventory. This gets rid of the extra step of autocrafting tables entirely.

Version 1.1.7 is a "Latest build" and isn't necessarily stable or complete so you would use it at your own risk. It's a development build intended primarily for people to test to find bugs and problems. If you still want to use it you can find a download link in the forum post "Let's test 1.1.7". The version on the main website will only change when the "Latest build" gets promoted to a "recommended build" meaning it's stable and pretty much bug free.

Spawning mobs takes more essence than they give when harvested. I think the only exception to this is slimes which I'm pretty sure are at least self sustaining (and possibly create more than they use - I haven't tested it) - this is because when the slime is killed it spawns 2 more smaller slimes and so on. All other mobs will eventually use up all the mobs essence and the system will stop. As long as you are still breeding animals, however, you'll always have a source of essence for your mobs spawners.

Catch a Wither Skeleton in a Safari Net and throw it into an autospawner with it set to "Exact Copy: Yes". Job done.

The mob grinder collects all the items that the mobs drop when they're killed so you'll still get chicken, pork, beef, leather, feathers and wool. Kind of makes the slaughterhouse somewhat redundant. I don't need to enchant things that often but I do always carry a Diamond pick with Fortune (primarily to increase the drops from when I'm gathering lots of nether quartz but is also useful if I see Certus Quartz, Diamond, Redstone, etc) and a diamond Axe since treecapitator doesn't appear to work with the gauntlet and they need repaired every so often so having tons of mob essence is useful. I'm hoping MPS will allow enchants and stuff to be put on them at some point in the future though I'm not sure how that would be possible or if it wouldn't be even more OP.

Breeders, chronotypers, grinders and slaughterhouses only have a 5x5 range anyway so there's no point making them larger as that just means you'll just potentially run into the problem of animals never breeding or being slaughtered. I was always a little annoyed they couldn't be upgraded though I suppose a 21x21 grinder would be massively OP if used for something like base defence. To be honest I only added the slaughterhouse when I discovered the a future need for pink slimes (laser drill precharger in 1.1.5). I've always had more than enough food being produced by the slaughter of the animals for mob essence but I guess it's nice to have it as an option. So far all of my mob essence is being used in my mob grinder I don't really need mob drops that often so much of the time the breeders are inactive. I will need to set up an enchanting station at some point so I'll have a 2nd use for all the essence.

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to rectify this problem. As far as I can tell sheep are more prone to clipping through the walls as the baby sheep try and get back to their parents thereby causing an occasional adult to traverse back to the breeding pen and thus begin exacerbating the problem (perhaps it's also something to do with sheep growing faster when they're allowed to eat grass?). I don't have a 100% reliable solution but the way I've minimized the problem (I check maybe once a day and only rarely do I have more breeding sheep than intended) is to use walls not fences and I've also placed a double line (5x2) of conveyor belts to push the babies back into the pen, though really all that happens is they spend their entire lives running on a treadmill. I also make sure to only have 3 breeding pairs in each pen as that keeps the numbers manageable. I don't know if you're aware but you don't need a 3rd pen to slaughter the animals as a grinder/slaughterhouse won't kill babies. I have my system set up so that my mob grinder will run until it has filled its tanks then switch off and then the slaugherhouse takes over and des the same.

Totally worth it Ore + 1 Sand -> Induction Smelter -> 2 ingots + 10% chance of rich slag vs Ore -> Pulverizer -> 2 Pulverized Dust -> Furnace -> 2 Ingots I use my Rich slag to increase the outputs of rarer ores like Ferrous

Not true. There is rubber and rubber trees added by Minefactory Reloaded. Rubber you get from felling rubber trees, not from taps.

Increase the amount of RAM assigned to Tekkit to (I think) 2Gb by clicking on the cog beside the Tekkit icon on the launcher. Tekkit can also take while to fully load and can give the appearance of having crashed - even on my i7 with 16Gb of RAM it takes about 30 seconds.

They should be. If they're high ceilings they might not actually be illuminating as much as you think. F7 is your friend. It'll toggle an overlay to shows areas that mobs can spawn.

I have to agree with that although even if you had every possible pattern in Tekkit programmed into it I'm not sure it'd need to be that size :D

Our server has run maybe 20+ 64x64 quarries and we've never found a single Platinum ore. We've got all ours from pulverizing Ferrous. It's so rarely used that I haven't really considered it something about which to be concerned.

Strictly speaking do liquiducts have a direction of flow? I've never really made a pipe long enough to notice. Any time liquid enters it just seems to fill all of them up at exactly the same speed.

I know I can use liquiducts but I have the auto spawner embedded in the floor with all the wiring and so forth underneath. Based on the way I have it set up at the moment it just makes more sense to use waterproof pipes as it reduces the amount of clutter as if I used liquiduct I'd also need to lay alot more structure pipe with wiring or rednet cabling to get the signal to where it's needed. Plus liquiduct currently doesn't play as well with microblocks when it comes to covering up all the horribleness.

Okay I need some creative input from you lovely people so I can try and finally lay my mob grinder setup to bed. I've tried a number of different solutions but none of them have worked as well as I would like or have had significant flaws in their design. The overall remit is as follows: to connect my existing automated slaughterhouse at location A to my mob grinder at location B such that the Mob Grinder will ideally use up its reserves of mob essence before draining the slaughterhouse. The Slaughterhouse runs until it has filled X number of tanks with mob essence. The Mob grinder has a reserve of Y number of tanks which are connected to 12 auto-spawners/grinders which are turned off when the required number of mob drops has been reached. The two locations are connected with waterproof pipes. I've mostly been trying to resolve the design using gates, so if an auto-spawner has room in its internal tank it will send a red wire signal to the autarchic gates at the tanks. The autospawners are connected in series and the pipes are looped so that any excess will naturally drain back into the tanks. This sort of works but I find the autarchic gates are buggy as hell and even if their conditions haven't been met they can still drain a tank. I also can't seem to figure out how to correctly set up the conditions such that it's not immediately going to be fulfilled or cause the system to rapidly switch on and off eg if I set the Mob Grinder's tanks to send a signal to the Slaughterhouse when the tanks are empty, as soon as even a little amount of liquid appears in the tank the condition is met and it will stop the transfer OR if I set it so that it will turn on the pumps if there's room for liquid because of the distance it has to travel it will fill the tanks and then leave a massive amount of liquid in the pipes that was in transit when the pumps were switched off. I tried setting up a Flip switch using a PRC such that if the tank was empty it would send a signal to the Slaughterhouse to start pumping. As soon as the tank was full it would send another signal and turn off the pump. The problem with this is that when the Mob Grinder's were active the tanks would be partially drained and then refilled with the excess mob essence thereby triggering the "tank is full" condition and turning on the slaughterhouse pumps. It also annoys me that in order to ensure a one way direction of flow I'm having to use Iron Waterproof pipes which massively slows down the transfer given that the rest of the system is using Gold. I've also considered using liquiducts to improve the speed/flow but given that I need (?) a gate to detect the level of the tanks it seems counter productive. So, any thoughts? :)

Oh jesus not this again.

It's pretty safe to say that all plugins add nothing "new" to the game but rather manipulate what's already available in the default game. Mods are adding something new, something that the client doesn't have access to by default. If the server has a mod installed that adds a new block the client doesn't know what to do with that information because it can't find it. It would either have to consult the server every time it needed that block (as would every other client connected to the server) OR the mod also gets installed locally, saving everyone a lot of bother. I would love the ability to have the server automatically download any necessary missing files to the client but Minecraft is pretty cobbled together as it is so we work with what we've got. As it is Tekkit runs really pretty tightly and easily. If you don't want to "force" people to play a modded game that's fine but expecting people to be able to play a significant amount of new content with the default program is just naive. Also, what Maxis010 said.

Every other game does it. Tekkit is DLC. You can "turn on" Tekkit on your server or you can "turn it off" and run vanilla Minecraft. Anyone connecting to the game needs to have the same files as the server otherwise it doesn't work. The Tekkit Launcher is ensuring that the players have the correct files. What you seem to be wanting is to be able to have Tekkit as optional in-game without having to download anything other than the default Minecraft client. If you were playing any other game and you didn't have the map that the server was running would you expect to be able to play on it without having to download something?

That's a bit of a confused rationale. Installing any mods is changing the game. Install enough and you're effectively playing a different game. If you want to play the original game, cool. If you want to play a different version of that game, also cool. But it's a bit odd that you'd expect to be able to have your cake and eat it. Is it stupid to "force" people to install CounterStrike if you were running a CounterStrike server and they wanted to play Half Life 2 Deathmatch?

True, but once it's set up BioFuel is just as passive and a better power source. It takes up alot of time/space and resources to get completely automated so I see Solar needing to have the same amount of investment in order to be even somewhat balanced. The only was I see them being a viable in game resource is if they were, for example, slightly more powerful than redstone engines and take up a ton of space. It would also be a necessity to set up a large energy storage grid as they obviously wouldn't work at night.

Solar Panels would be fine if they were so ridiculously overpowered. I'm all for their reintroduction but they should provide low output and require a large array in order to do any significant amount of work.

In the early game stage when you're going to have to maintain your set up to a greater degree I'd be more likely to use a bunch of hoppers sat on top of the engines and just throw some more fuel in every so often. To be honest I can't see it taking overly long before you can (and should) be upgrading to a more powerful system of energy generation so spending too much time on what's inevitably going to be a temporary measure is just false economy.

I just watched direwolf's spotlight on mffs. Looks like they should be hella fun! Hope 1.1.5 doesn't need much longer in the oven :D