theMij

If you can give us screenshots, we can probably troubleshoot it better.

Oh, hey, I was right! My internet is borked right now, so I can't actually check buildcraft's wiki. If so I'd probably have copy-pasted. Still can post here because thanks comcast. /me shrugs Anyway, combustion engines are a pain to manage. You've gotta track down oil to make fuel for them and they don't actually output much power. When they do output power, you need to make absolutely sure they always have somewhere to output that power, or else they end up exploding when your RECs fill up. And if you put fuel nearby, you end up with a GIANT GODDAMN CRATER where your house used to be. If you're not convinced, then either be really, really careful or just do what I did and build a fission reactor in the crater. ^_^

Check the buildcraft wiki for more info on buildcraft objects. It's very handy in figuring (some) parts of it out. Combustion engines can run on lava, oil or fuel, each with different power outputs and burn time. Lava: 1MJ/t, Oil: 2MJ/t, Fuel: 6MJ/t edit: apparently 4... that actually makes a lot more sense as for why my SMP world's fuel powered combustion bank is not performing as well as i'd hoped. Magmatic is the way of the future then! edit2: actually 6MJ/t. yay editwar XD

For tree farms, I have a great deal of respect for steve's carts now, gotta say. MFR ones are quicker, but way less interesting to me. One thing to keep in mind is that it will require more space. That's manageable, but plan ahead. Far as handling lag goes, I've never had harvesters lag for me. Might be the tree thing as Jakalth says. For the ghasts targeting, it could be a height issue. One way to test this would be to set up a column of grinders to see if that fixes it.

Oh, that's pretty awesome. I look forward to the changes! In the meantime, I had a Eureka! moment a little bit ago: you can have a steam efficient turbine setup without having the ideal number of turbines! This is important for trying to get your reactor setup if you try a little too early in survival. My testing previously discovered that the ideal number of turbines was about 18 for steam efficiency (copper or uranium/deuterium efficiency look elsewhere ). I was wrong - it's not the ideal number of turbines, it's the ideal number of liquiduct outputs. Obviously at least one of those outputs needs to head to a turbine, but the rest can happily head back into your single liquid manager buffer. A quick test of this theory shows: OUTPUTS# REC Difference ________________________ 4 106429 18 389269 +282840 What does this mean? Early on, when it's far easier to get glass and iron than copper (minium shards!) you can make an excess of liquid managers to hold your buffer and run your reactor in small batches and maintain similar efficiency as having the max number of turbines. It's not exact, but it's within a few thousand MJ. And for extremely low numbers of turbines the increase in MJ stored is nearly threefold, which is significant. How does this work? Recovery ---------- Buffer | ^ | | | Output -------> Turbines | Buffer | ^ | | Reactor---> Storage Bank All storage options here are liquid managers to manage the steam. The reason this works is because there the Output Buffer restricts the total input into the Turbines/Recovery Buffer section to 100 mB/t. Since steam engines will consume more steam than they need, we just need to provide enough outputs to lower their actual input down. In theory if you were trying to get as efficient as possible you play with distances between Recovery Buffer and turbines, since the closer outputs from the input get more liquid (and thus steam), but I haven't done that. To use this: i = ideal number of turbines = 18 (currently) c = your current number of turbines d = liquiduct inputs into Recovery buffer i - c = d For my SMP setup, I have 4 turbines, so mine was: 18-4=14 inputs. Remember to have an equal or greater number of outputs from your Recovery Buffer leading into your Storage Bank or you will end up with basically a timer before your setup reverts to poor efficiency again. A key thing to note is that using this system will require a *lot* more liquid managers to work properly. My setup is designed to be run in small batches. I fill up the storage bank, then pull out the fission rod and let it go until it's depleted. If you plan to run constantly, you need more turbines or it'll back up eventually, so this isn't as useful to you. And much of this could be useless in the next version, depending on how efficient the water+MJ -> fusion -> steam -> power is, and how steam piping changes. It may be applicable early game still, but we will see Edit: I didn't actually explain how to add inputs comparative to turbines. Fixed.

Because of this thread I decided to give MPS a shot, and I am in love! Something else to keep in mind is that you can carry a full REC and use its charge as a backup. I keep one in my backpack just in case I forget to charge my tool, since it'll only deplete when it's in your regular inventory.

Thanks for the detailed response! I found the same video and it does a great job of explaining the concept, but unfortunately the deployer block was from RP2. I am unaware of a replacement. Without something like that, we might need to rely on mob weakening setups and manually attack them.

So I've done quite a bit of googling and haven't managed to find any solution to minium shard farming that works in Tekkit Main. I understand this is definitely by design, but hey, most of the fun in this game is figuring out how to do things that are complex and kinda OP right? So the core of the issue is that mobs killed by anything but a player will not generate minium shards, and supposedly this includes everything from lava to block suffocation to dispensers. I've read that turtles used to work but currently don't. I want to say any critters spawned by an autospawner also do not work, although I don't have a source for that. I remember playing with a spawner setup months ago and noticing that slimes were the only things I seemed to get shards from, although that could easily be due to me killing more slimes than anything else since they split. Also the most common lead I've found for these is using a railgun and a deployer, which I don't believe exists in the current version (from the redpower mod?). Anyway, does anyone have any ideas to build an automatic farm for this? How about setups to simply reduce effort involved?

Actually, your research there was invaluable to mine! I used your info that too many connections reduced power output in my design and intentionally limited each LT to a single liquiduct input. I said in my post that I hadn't heard the question asked, what I actually meant was that I hadn't seen it answered for default config, I just didn't say that hehe >.> Actually, now that I think about it, your single input testing backs up my conclusion - LTs with multiple inputs will accept steam beyond their minimum input, which reduces their efficiency. If liquiducts follow the same style of tank filling as conduit powers RECs, where the first one in the line gets a little more than the second than the third, etc, then that means a perfectly steam efficient turbine setup would actually have to balance the order and number of connections you give each LT. That would take a lot of testing to figure out the ratio each successive input is at, though, and I doubt it would be worth it. We really need a mod which adds a decent tracker for how much power/fluid is moving through a pipe over time. Something like the rednet historian would be great. Can computercraft sensors get flow/throughput information, out of curiosity? Perhaps we set up a computer to monitor power/liquid networks.

Okay, so I did a bunch of testing. Putting here here to consolidate it, really, but I'll split it into a different thread if you guys think it's best. The question I asked (and don't remember seeing on the forums yet) is "how much power can you get from a bucket of steam?" I don't have the answer yet because large turbines will happily accept more steam than is optimal for them. From the information I was getting my question changed to "what is the optimal number of large turbines per liquid manager?" Scenario: fission reactor producing steam bottlenecked by 1 liquid manager. Manually placed/removed liquiducts to ensure exactly 128 buckets per test. 1 output connection from LM and exactly one centrally located steam input from below each LT. Exactly one centrally located power conduit from the top of each LT, merged them all together and input with 6 faces on a redstone energy conduit. Variable: # of large turbines receiving steam. LT# = Number of large turbines REC = total power in MJ of Redstone Energy Conduit after power generation stops Difference = REC value on that line - REC value down one line Note: all MJ values +/-1000 MJ. This was figured out by doing the same test 6 different times and getting results within 1000 each time (sorry, don't have data to back that up) LT# REC Difference ________________________ 21 243009 -121803 20 364812 -33099 19 397911 -10775 18 408686 +12462 17 396184 -12502 16 382270 -13914 15 365984 -16286 14 345998 -19986 My conclusion is that LTs will take more than they absolutely need, reducing steam efficiency. For a single liquid manager, 18 LTs is the magic number. If you have to vary from this, less is better than more, because the dropoff is more significant about 18. This leads me to believe that either there is a small spinup time where there's less steam efficiency or LTs can consume steam without generating power when given small values. Edit: Whoops, forgot part of it. Specifically, this is useful because an LM with one output pulls 100mB/t. So we can give a rough calculation that the optimal mB of steam/tick to each LT is ~ 5.5 = (100 mB/t from LM) / (18 Large Turbines). This isn't exact. I would wager that the actual number is 5 or 6 mB/t, because even numbers are what I would use when designing a power generator. Anyway, using 5.5 you can get a rough estimate of how many turbines you need. If someone puts any of this into use, agrees or disagrees with me, or has more data they wanna share I would love to hear it!

I tend to prefer using survival mode with cheat mode in NEI for testing things out, as I find the creative tabs pretty confusing. To do it my way, simply set the difficulty to peaceful then.... 1)Set difficulty to peaceful. 2) Hit 'e' 3) if you don't see the save buttons on the left, hit the 'Options' button in the lower left. 3a) Press button in the upper right until it says 'Cheat Mode'. The other two options it has are 'Recipe Mode' and 'Utility Mode' 3b) Press 'Done' button at the bottom. 4)You should be back to inventory now. Click 'Item SubSets' button on top of screen. It should expand as long as you keep it highlighted. 5)Highlight 'Mods' button. It should expand again. 6)Use scrollbar on the left to find and double-click 'Modular Force Field System'. This forces NEI to only show blocks from that mod when searching. 7)Move mouse away from those tabs to make them disappear. 8)Click the text bar in the bottom of the screen and clear out anything that's in it. 9) when you need different blocks from NEI, just double-click the 'Item SubSets' button at the top of the inventory screen again. That'll expand your NEI searches to all blocks and items again. At this point you should have all the blocks and items from the MFFS mod. Now you can follow along with a video. I don't actually know how to set one up or I'd just tell you, but there are resources out there for you.

Yeah, I messed with it a little bit and noticed that as well. From the CJ's video on the new conductive pipes system I think he said something along the lines that the balance was that machines require higher maintenance now. It could be an intentional thing. *shrugs* Hopefully it's configurable as that seems like it was going a bit too quickly for my tastes.

You know, it took me a long time to figure that out because the source I used to learn the mod wasn't worded very clearly. My first power networks with conduits were all about maximum efficiency for no practical purpose hehe. I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. I too like Tekkit. I'm not encouraging people to not use it, I'm just looking forward to when this update gets added to it. It's gonna be a fairly dramatic change for how people set up networks now, as BC appears to have noticed that people move away from conductive pipes asap in older versions. Now it'll be a more viable option for established players. In fact, since you can use lower tier pipes to limit power without losing any, I can easily see this mechanic being fairly heavily used in the end game as a core part of designs.

Heya! I just noticed this yesterday: http://www.mod-buildcraft.com/2013/06/22/buildcraft-3-7-1-for-minecraft-1-5-2/ From the wiki: The gist of it, as I understand it, is that they're overhauling the way conductive pipes work. If there's a loop, it's not a critical issue anymore (although I think it still traps power in there, from what it looked like in the video on it by CovertJaguar here: ). Also, the horrible loss of power from using conductive pipes is no longer a thing. Instead, we have tiers for each of the power types. According to the wiki they are: 8 Cobblestone 16 Stone 64 Quartz 256 Gold 1024 Diamond This refers to the max MJ/t that can flow through them. The really cool thing about this is that it lets us do all number of clever things with our system. For example, your main power cores can output to a diamond pipe that holds all the power you can produce. You can then segment it off with gold pipes to make sure half your power goes to one area and half to another. When you get closer to a machine, you can switch from gold down to Quartz or Stone to throttle the power and conserve resources. Personally, I've been frustrated in how redstone conduits have been basically our only functional option for power transfer. I'm interested to see how this interacts now. I suppose some balance aspects are out now, as the 5% per connection thing is now unmatched by BC. Anyway, I'm really excited about this update, and can't wait until it's in Tekkit Main. Just wanted to share the thingy I noticed in case some of you haven't noticed.

Nifty, thanks! I'll have to fiddle with 'em. Maybe I'll end up with something worth posting here. ^_^

Dewfire, what are those pretty displays in your biofuel reactor? I've seen them around, but haven't been able to figure out what they are. I have a suspicion that it's from the ME stuff, which I haven't messed with extensively (at all >.>). I'm working on a logistics pipe system now and I figure I'll branch out afterwards.

I am kinda sad I didn't get a chance to muck with nuclear power before switching to tekkit main and I'd love to see an option along those lines in the pack in the future. Interesting and somewhat complicated stuff to tweak and get just right is what I love about Tekkit. Please do! There are so many things in here that I'm very sure I haven't seen a bunch of them. Your questions might be able to show me a solution to a problem I didn't know I had ^_^

Threads along these lines might be mitigated by stickying a locked explanation thread or a combined ranting thread about mods people want back. As for power generation, I've managed to set up some decent systems that are almost entirely untouched by me and can run indefinitely. The only reason they're not fully self sustaining is that I'm still pretty new to using modded minecraft in general. The simpler one would be to set up a jungle tree farm -> charcoal -> steam engine. A more complicated one would be a farm or two with a few crops -> biofuel reactor -> biofuel generator. And a solution for the pipes requiring tons of diamonds: try using insertion pipes + deep storage units. You can have a row of them and use a single diamond pipe to sort the appropriate things into them, then use insertion pipes at each deep storage unit. If you're worried about overflow, direct it to a few chests just in case. This system can be done over and over again with a single diamond pipe per row, or you can simply have the pipes zig zag through and not use them at all. It's not perfect, but it works well enough for a quarry, where you know what items you're gonna be getting a lot of. The rest go to a chest, which you can sort through when you need materials. Alternately, you can have the ones that are good sort into a chest and the ones that need processing sort into pulverizers, furnaces, etc via insertion pipes, then output back to your chests. Edit: whoops, sat around for like 30 mins doing other stuff before I realized I was typing an answer, so I didn't notice your post there XD

So, did some testing. Oil does work, kinda, but you need to constantly monitor it since the drill doesn't like drilling through oil that's over a certain depth. I've read a thing where someone automated the process with turtles. In theory if you could get the timing right you could just use a simple redstone machine and a sticky piston. At that point though, it probably is easier to just use a turtle. Oh well!

I'd prefer to use quarries if at all possible. I get that turtles might be a simple solution, but my goal here is to see if I can do it hehe

Decided to take a break from devastating the natural landscape and see about swapping to unnatural landscape devastating. Sadly, the lava is really proving to be a hassle. I can't seem to get more than about 20-30 blocks down before my quarry gives up. The ice trick from previous tekkit versions doesn't seem to be working. I tried with mob essence but the quarry got distracted eating the liquid blocks. Anyone have a trick to deal with the lava? I suppose I could use pumps and a void pipe. Or just massive storage areas for lava. Both of those aren't exactly ideal, though. Hmm.

I had a ticking block exception happen due to the item tesseract bug. I don't recall exactly what it was named, but the TE wiki says that it's Buildcraft's bug so it might be the same one you've got. If so, what caused mine was having two tesseracts connected with a single buildcraft pipe. It doesn't like that it can loop infinitely, or something. Solution for me was to keep popping into the game until i could break the pipe real quick, then set the tesseracts to send only, so they didn't try receiving from one another. Basically I just had to beat the item from making it to the tesseract. I lucked out in that I had an extra way for items to go, so it bought me some time. If this is the same issue you're having, the advice from TE is to change the block ID for tesseracts. Makes it a little less annoying to figure out how much you've lost and where it all goes, if nothing else. Good luck!

Use a bucket to place some on the ground, then slurp it up. Not sure if there's a quicker way of doing it. Can you drink it from glass bottles, maybe?

I don't have the answer to your question, but I'm interested to hear it if someone else has it. What I can tell you is some things I do to mitigate the effects of this same basic problem (and some drawbacks). First off, you can make an offshoot of your main pipe loop back into the chest, so that it has a 50% chance of not making it to the destination. You can add more of these to change the odds if you want it to be really slow. Pros: Easy and resource lite. Cons: Inconsistent - it randomly decides a path, not alternates, so sometimes you end up with little hiccups of 5+ items in a row going one way or the other. Second, you can use insertion pipes to make sure items don't try to go somewhere they can't. Just make the whole thing a big loop and it'll place the item in the first one it sees. Better yet, you don't have to have all items go the same way. Leading out of a chest, then splitting in two and looping around means that you'll get items to both sides of, say, a row of furnaces. Pros: Moderately cheap, looks cool, no lost items. Cons: takes a bit more space, might complicate a design a bit more, if you don't design it to not do that, chance of items drifting endlessly in the loop

Hey there! Loving tekkit main so far. Sadly documentation is difficult track down. I had a question about the critters I keep spotting in the nether when digging out netherrack. Couldn't find any info about it when I was poking through the mod list. Looks like a silverfish. Does it mean I'm near a nether fortress? Or are they just kinda randomly scattered about?