Aurrin

Because God forbid that we make energy production automated in a technical modpack?

Any self-sustaining power-grid is going to be constructed from a few blocks that are place and forget. That's a completely irrational argument. Either you have maintenance-free power in the game, or you don't. It doesn't matter if it's one block, two, or ten. It had a high resource cost and a high time cost to create, which is really all you can add in the balance department. So, if you weren't just tired of the content, what reason is there to say something was wrong with them?

They didn't really create a problem, Teraku. What can it possibly matter to you if other people are making solar arrays? It's fundamentally no different from any other kind of self-sustaining power, save that it's possibly less laggy because there are fewer steps involved. You just got tired of the content, and wanted to see something new. Can we please just admit this and move on instead of trying to demonize solar panels as though there was something actually wrong with them?

It may be possible, in a sandbox game, to have something that's OP, but you'd have to try a lot harder than just packaging a lot of tools in the space required for one. What would even be the point of modding if you're not going to provide ease/convenience not found in the original game? If you don't want any of those new-fangled conveniences, don't use them, and quit whining about it here. If you don't want anyone else to have them, go play on a Vanilla server, and quit whining about it here. In either case, this is not the grind you're looking for, and it never will be.

That's how I've felt ever since people decided that EE2 was armageddon incarnate because it allowed you to do the unthinkable and have unlimited resources - for free! If you want to limit yourself for fun, be my guest. Just don't try to drag me down with you. Really, in a sandbox game, the tech progression misses the point. Achieving highest tier tech is not the end of the game, it's the beginning of the game. What kind of amazing creations can you make with that power? If you stop once you've got a fully-kitted workshop and one or two end-tier energy sinks, you've missed out on much of what minecraft has to offer. Being upset that people make it that far on a regular basis demonstrates a massive failure of imagination. Go watch a few Let's Build videos to get inspired and do something worthy of that power.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: There's always someone satisfied with less than you. 'Game balance' in minecraft is an absurd concept, and always listening to the people whining that it's too powerful will eventually lead you back to Vanilla. This is not EVE Online, it's not World of Warcraft. It's Minecraft. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to craft your way to invincible God-armor, omni-everything-forever-tools, and infinite resources. Sandbox games are like that.

When people talk about it being more expensive, what they really are referring to is the impression of higher expense due to lack of an entry-level tier and the longer train of prerequisites (machines and materials) to start manufacturing power systems. By the time you get to higher-tier systems, the actual resource costs per-item are mostly irrelevant, as you'll likely have bootstrapped your exponential resource gathering by then. I think that the make-shift energy cells and power conduits will go a long way toward easing that.

It might help to put a FAQ sticky with IC2 & RP2 being gone in the title to catch some of the people who would otherwise post these topics.

Only problem with dark-wire is that it resets the network, and stops any autocrafting jobs in progress. That's a real pain. :/

The solution I've heard is to use the ME Precision Export Bus, and tell it to export one of each of the types of item you want. (It should auto-refill them when they're consumed) But I haven't messed around with it, because I don't have a bunch of quartz crystals yet, and it was easier to just pipe tons of saplings.

That works too. A cow farm is good for mob essence, because you get leather (which you probably needed anyway in fairly large quantities) as a byproduct. However, a better design for cow farming uses two pens. One is the 'seed' population, on which you use a powered breeder supplied by a wheat farm. The other pen is the yield pen, and you use a chronotyper to move baby cows from the seed pen to the yield pen. Have the grinder face the yield pen, so when the cows grow up, they're insta-farmed. Don't forget to use liquiducts to grab the mob essence to feed an autospawner! Edit: Also, it was mentioned in another thread that melons and pumpkins can be farmed to feed a biofuel reactor, and they don't have to be replanted, just autocrafted into seeds. If you've got those already, they'd be an easier way to feed the reactor (not needing a planter and such), but if you don't, trees might be an easier start because they're everywhere.

It's fairly simple, if you look up the crafting recipes. You'll need the following: Saplings 1 Biofuel Reactor 2+ Biofuel Generators 1 Planter 1 Harvester 2 Range upgrades (I find gold upgrades to be best bang-for-buck) Redstone Energy Cell (Not strictly required, but very helpful) Redstone Conduits (Medium Expense) Liquiducts (Medium Expense) Transport Pipes (Cheap) Optional: Deep Storage Unit The biofuel setup needs two parts, the farm and the power plant. The farm: You'll need to figure out where you want to plant your farm. The gold upgrade for the planter will create a 17-by17 square field, centered on the planter. Level the area, leaving 1 layer of dirt for the planter. I recommend marking the edge with stone or similar to make it easier to spot. Put the planter underneath the dirt in the dead-center of the field, and run redstone conduit out to it. (You can use tessaracts if you don't want to run that much conduit - whatever your preference.) Put the harvester at the edge of the field, centered along the edge, and run redstone conduit to it, but be sure not to use the side that's opposite the teeth on the harvester, as that's where the goods come out. Run a transport pipe from the harvester, and use a diamond transport pipe to seperate saplings from wood. Route the wood back to your base, and the saplings *around* the outside of the planter - it should be relatively easy to make the pipe input to the planter on three sides, which will give the saplings an 87.5% chance to jump back into the planter, but only if there's actually room for them. After the pipe goes around the planter, bring it back and hook it up to the wood return line, with an iron pipe to make sure it goes the right way. If you followed this correctly, you should have a farm which needs only a power input and gives a steady supply of wood and saplings. The power plant: This part is relatively straightforward. Bring the pipe from the farm (either directly or by tessaract) into your power plant, and seperate the saplings from the wood. The wood is a byproduct, and you can do whatever you want with it. A deep storage unit will keep it handy in case you figure something out later, but you could pipe it straight to lava if you don't want it. The saplings should be piped to the biofuel reactor. You can use the same pipe-around-the-block trick and dump the excess saplings into a DSU or lava pool if you like, or just let them overflow. Now, use the liquiducts to take fuel from the top of the reactor into any side (including the top) of the biofuel generators. Use redstone conduits to carry the power from the generators to the redstone cell, which will act as a buffer for excess power (and you'll probably have quite a bit of that soon). Just remember to use a wrench and right-click on the conduit to set it to extract power from the generators (default is input). Now pipe power from the redstone power cell back out to the farm to complete the loop. The powerplant powers the farm fuels the powerplant. Extra energy can be piped to anything else you want to power, on the same circuit as the farm. You'll need to boot-strap the loop with a small pile of saplings in the bioreactor or an existing energy input, but once it's started, it should run indefinitely. It's also fairly easy to scale up with more farms, reactors, and generators when you need to. There's probably some room for improvement in that setup, but it's a good basic foundation for powering your base(s).

After looking closer at the page, looks like the whole FAQ section just got bulk-commented out, which incidentally hid the only link to the guide. Not a big deal, and we can clean it up later. I was just worried about people not being able to find it.

Heeeere we go again. "OP! OP! OP!" There's always someone satisfied with less, so we just keep on sliding down the slope...

Hope you don't mind, I put the IC2/RP2 replacement guide link back on the front page - that's what a lot of people are looking for right now.

You know if you hear that, then three days later CovertJaguar will find you and k

Yeah, really, what's the point if you're just going to itemban back to vanilla?

The main reason was that IC2 is lagging in development, slowing releases of Tekkit. The secondary reason is that some people were bored with the tech tree and wanted a different one. Prettymuch all of the 'balance' or 'everyone did it X way' or 'too much energy' complaints are just rationalizations. Nothing wrong with wanting to change it up, but let's call it what it is - there's nothing actually wrong with the way it was, a lot of people were just tired of it.

Which begs the question: Why isn't there a link to the wiki readily available on the website? You shouldn't have to dig through fora posts to find it, and the harder it is to find, the less likely people are to contribute.

O_o I think I'll just stick to whitelist.

I think the void pipe will destroy items, or you could use it with a buildcraft filler to close the QUARRY HOLES OF DOOM. Smelt some of it into smooth stone and make bricks (you can now make white bricks and black bricks too!) I'd ice the rest in a deep freeze personally, because you never know what will be added later. But given the existence of the igneous extruder, perhaps I'm just being too pack-rat.

That's okay. It's a bit non-intuitive, because the book item is inside it's own interface. It confused me at first too.

Yeah, but it's not nearly as quick or easy (or cheap) to set up as linkbooks, which is why I suggested them first. You should be able to right-click the book, then on the left-hand side, there's an inventory with a single slot, and the book's in it. Just take the book item out instead of clicking on the rectangle to use it. If you're having trouble, I believe shift-rightclick will access the inventory directly, but I can't check that until tomorrow.

Linkbooks are an entry-level thing you can do easily with mystcraft. Unfortunately, to get much more out of it requires a lot of exploration and trade to find 'pages'. That's the part you use to create your own, new dimensions. I'm hoping they scale that back down in difficulty a bit soon. But the linkbooks are fairly easy entry-level, and yet so much better than portals. They'll also work from within pocket dimensions (though perhaps not one to the other) and the End.

Of course. How else would you know what hotkey to press to get the tool you need? I haven't messed with enchantments much at all. I should probably try that now. I've been using an autospawner with safari nets and harvester to get all of the mob drops I need. Also havent played with TC in quite a while - I miss it now.