MechaCrash

Here's some more numbers, at least as I keep them organized in my head. [li]Redstone engines output one MJ per complete animation cycle. Use one for moving things through pipes, or use four to run a pump.[/li] [li]Steam engines, peat engines on normal peat, combustion engines on lava, and biogas engines on water are one MJ per tick.[/li] [li]Peat engines on bituminous peat (single player only), combustion engines on oil, biogas engines on milk, and electric engines produce two MJ per tick.[/li] [li]Biogas engines on seed oil (latest Forestry, not in Technic yet) produce three MJ per tick.[/li] [li]Biogas engines on biomass or combustion engines on fuel or biofuel produce five MJ per tick.[/li] There's varying burn times of the assorted engines and fuels to take into account too, but I think "how long does it last" is less important than "how much power does it provide."

I know the solar hat dude wasn't a developer at the time, but I think he's part of the Industrialcraft team now, and his hats are now part of the core Industrialcraft mod. I didn't know about him actually getting to know the Technic team was the reason he changed his mind, though, so that's good.

One of Industrialcraft's developers is the guy who released a mod that crashed your game if it detected Technic. If Industrialcraft is still in the pack, I don't think Buildcraft is going away either.

Read the stickies.

Chunkloaders make sure that a section of the game, or "chunk," stays loaded. Which seems rather obvious, so I'll answer the followup question: when you first log into the game, or on a multiplayer server if nobody is near it, not all of the world is loaded into memory. If a piece of land isn't loaded into memory, nothing happens. In vanilla Minecraft, this is no big deal, because who gives a shit if time doesn't pass by a mountain? The worst that happens is a sapling won't turn into a tree. But with all the technical mods adding all kinds of machines, that's bad. It means your energy collectors aren't gathering power, your generator isn't making electricity, your quarry isn't digging, and so on. It is, in short, a way to smack the game upside the head and say "hey slapnuts, don't freeze time in this area to save on performance, I want shit to be happening here at all times." Once you put it down, hit F9 and look at the blue squares. Those represent chunks that will stay loaded in memory at all time. Make sure you use enough chunkloaders to keep all of your crap inside the blue squares. Humus, Bog Earth, Arboretums, and Turbaries are from Forestry. You'll have to go to that mod's wiki for full details, but the short version is that humus is the special dirt you have to give its tree farming machines, bog earth is the special dirt you have to give the peat making machine, arboretums are the tree planting machine, and the turbary is the peat collecting machine.

I bought a Minecraft account the day before the initial price hike from Alpha to Beta. I would've bought it sooner, but Notch had said he was setting stuff up with various banks so he could take credit cards and not have to deal with PayPal, which I was waiting for, because fuck PayPal. And then when it became clear that whatever he was going to do was not going to happen in time, I bought it anyway. I know that I played the hell out of Minecraft, and eventually got a bit bored with it. My interest was revitalized when a friend talked up Yogbox, so I played around with that for a while on whichever version was out for Beta 1.8.1. It was neat enough, but Equivalent Exchange really interested me. I did some looking around and eventually learned about Buildcraft and Industrialcraft, and knew I had to have them. Unfortunately, while I was able to install Buildcraft and get it working, I did not have the same amount of success with Industrialcraft. So I spent the time between when I did all that and the launch of Technic 4 practicing with Buildcraft's pipes and engines, making some rather nice self-sustaining glowstone reactors, if I do say so myself. But once I got started on Technic, it quickly became the only way I could play. Vanilla is just so shallow and boring, and I've got to have my fancy machines to string into needlessly complex mechanisms.

Re: How do I "uncharge" items in EE? Hold down the Sneak key (default Shift) and press the Charge key. This will lower the charge by one level.

The advanced machines actually do have a use. While it's true that they aren't as fast as a sufficiently overclocked basic machine, they use a hell of a lot less energy to do the same amount of work. A regular furnace will use about 300 EU per operation. An induction furnace will use 200 EU per operation. A heavily overclocked furnace will use 8,000 EU per operation.

I handle defenses by building all of my stuff underground, and keeping it very well lit. The only vulnerable points are my solar array and front door. The solar array can be protected by surrounding it with reinforced stone or construction foam, and then covering over the top with reinforced glass. The front door can trivially be protected with an interdiction torch, rune, or a mechanism to dump water in front of your door to push enemies away. You can use lava to kill them instead, but lava takes a while to clear up, so I do not suggest it except as an emergency "holy shit so many creepers" kind of thing. If you're feeling sufficiently ambitious and paranoid, you can install pillboxes connected by underground tunnels so that you can go to them and then use a bow or wand to take shots at things waiting to jump you as soon as you step outside. You can use a mining laser too, but if you're firing towards your house, this is probably a bad idea.

You don't have to shut off all of RedPower World. You can just disable the rubber tree spawning. In the RedPower directory, open up RedPower.cfg and scroll to the bottom. It shows if it generates the various gems, and copper, and all that other shit. Change "rubbertree=1" to "rubbertree=0" and you can get rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and tungsten, and not have to deal with those stupid bullshit trees.

If you right click on a piece of scaffolding while holding sticks, it'll use up two of them to reinforce the scaffolding. Then you can have the scaffold extend five blocks. You get the sticks back, along with everything else, when you break the scaffolding.

You can't make uranium with either Equivalent Exchange or Industrialcraft means. You can, however, duplicate it in a Thaumcraft duplicator. I know you can get better EMC -> Vis conversion rates than obsidian, such as with leaf blocks, but I'm still looking for items that do so with a reasonable amount of stacks. But one diamond turned into obsidian gets enough vis to duplicate a piece of uranium fifteen times, so running out of uranium shouldn't be an issue. There is one note about potential reactor blueprints, though: Buildcraft doesn't seem to be able to handle them correctly. It'll put down the reactor chambers first, which notice that they aren't attached to a nuclear reactor, and pop right off. I would suggest using wooden planks or dirt or something where the reactor should go, and the end user will have to remove the dirt or wood to manually set up the reactor.

Another option is to make an Anti-Matter Relay, put an Energy Condenser next to it, and put as many Energy Collectors as you can afford on the other five faces of the Relay. Then put a piece of ice in the target slot for the Condenser. It's more expensive to set up, it's true, but the resulting machine is a lot faster and more compact.

Okay, I've got to ask. Why were you trying to fill a MFSU with a single solar panel?

You can start by looking at the stickies.

One slight issue with your post, though: you can't use UU-Matter to make uranium, and you can't make it with Equivalent Exchange, either. You can duplicate it with Thaumcraft, but as stated, it doesn't have a SMP version.

The tent is from Forestry, and it's meant to act as a one-shot bed, but it doesn't actually work. It was probably easier to disable the recipe than remove it entirely. I would disagree about the utility of the pick and shovel. Making them requires a carpenter, and you have to make cartons, and all you get are tools that stack until you take them out of the box. I'm not sure how many uses they have, but I'm going to guess that "stack of boxed picks and shovels" is not as good as "mining drill and batpack." The drill and batpack also have the advantages of only needing to be made once and not requiring a bunch of other machines.

Connecting the nuclear reactor directly to the miner is a bad idea, even if you do properly step the voltage down with transformers. Reactors can generate a lot of power over their lifetime, far more than a single miner can use. You'll want to hook the reactor up to power storage, and then link the miner to that.

You should definitely read the thing Bmandk linked to, because it will prevent this sort of thing in the future, but for the immediate answer, your miner is exploding because it can't handle that much power. Run the current through a medium voltage transformer, and then a low voltage transformer, and then into the miner.

This is not true in the current version of EE. You can only convert between iron, gold, and diamonds. Actually getting stuff in the first place is so enormously expensive that you're better off going down to the mines and finding this crap yourself.

You're one stupid motherfucker, aren't you?

When it's done, I assume.

It's true that building and setting up IC2's mass fabricator is a lot faster and cheaper, but setting up the kind of power infrastructure required to run it is a lot more time and resource intensive. Mass fabricators are also a lot less versatile than "build an Anti-Matter Relay and Energy Condenser, shovel in your garbage, take out what you need."

The gates that go on pipes are only in the 3.X branch of Buildcraft, which does not have a multiplayer version. The version of Buildcraft in Tekkit is the 2.X branch. However, Additional Pipes is enabled, so there's the Redstone Pipes that detect when stuff is going through them. It's not as elegant, but you can rig things so that the engines are controlled by an AND gate, and have one of the inputs linked to a lever, and the other input linked to a waterproof redstone pipe. That way, if there's no water flowing through the pipe, the engines shut down. A bit more paranoid than the gates, and it can take up a lot more space depending on specifics (I suggest using Wireless Redstone so you don't have redstone strung all over your engine room), but it certainly gets the job done.

Making diamonds isn't that easy. One diamond costs 8,192 EMC. Gold is 2,048, so you need four to make a diamond like before. Iron is 256, so you need eight per gold, or 32 per diamond. Cobble is worth one each. I'm sure you can do the math on that. So it's actually worth going out and mining, instead of sitting around your base tending the machines.