Blaze Powder farm/regulator question.

[Sam6555]

Hi, I built a blaze powder farm which macerates a ton of blaze rods into blaze powder. I'm sure most are familiar with this, so I wont explain it any more.

I'm having a problem or two with it, and I want to automate it a little more. For a reference, here's a pic of it:

The three chests in the middle condense blaze powder into blaze rods which get sent back to the macerators. The top chests condense any leftover Blaze Powder into Red Matter.

My problem is, sometimes the middle chests can fill completely with Blaze Powder leaving no room for the condenser to make blaze rods. What I think would be a good idea is if there was a way to keep at least 1 Blaze Rod in each condenser to allow for condensing to happen so I don't have to manually do stuff to un-clog the system. I think a Regulator would allow me to do this, but I have no idea how a Regulator works. I've never used one and the redpower wiki just confuses me.

Also with the Condensers on the top, I keep 2 rows of just 1 RM in each spot, again so there's room to condense Powder into RM. I think I would like a similar system as above to keep just 1 RM in the condenser at all times and output all surplus RM.

On a completely unrelated note, is there a way to remove all protections made by a single player? A place was griefed on a server I am staff on, and the guy placed Furnaces everywhere, they were all rolled back but the protections remained on those blocks. So any block placed where a furnace was, even cobble, gets locked to the guy who griefed.

[BuccaneerRex]

if you're using LWC, you can use /admin purge <player> to remove all protections placed by a given player.

You have to use pneumatic tubes to use regulators. They are superior for things like this anyway. Regulators have 3 inventories: the left one is the input filter. it will allow only these items in these quantities in. The right side is the inventory filter. It will try to keep these items in these quantities in the inventory next to it. The middle one is the buffer, that stores excess items until they match the inventory filter. The mode button will change between ratio and match mode. It determines whether it should dump the buffer into the inventory as it receives items, or only when it matches exactly. on redpower machines, the large hole is always the input side, and the small hole is the output. use a screwdriver to change the orientation.

Tubes themseslves are pretty easy. Items travelling in a tube will always try to enter the closest valid inventory. Tube networks consist of all contiguous tubes. Machines will separate tube networks. Various things determine whether a tube path or inventory is valid. RP Tube machines can do various things when interacting with tubes:

Transposer: level 1 machine- can pull 1 item at a time from an inventory on redstone pulse. acts as one-way tube valve; If set to redstone high, blocks all items. Also sucks in loose items that hit the input face, or from a larger area on redstone pulse, when the input is not a tube.

Filter: Level 2 machine: Can pull up to 1 full stack per pulse from an inventory. has an inventory, and will try to pull items that match. can only pull one type of item from an inventory, but if connected inline, will only allow items matching the inventory through. Can paint items any one color. Also acts as valve if powered.

Retriever: Level 3, acts as a remote filter. can request items from anywhere on the input side. If no items in inventory, will pull full stacks of anything starting from the closest inventory, and moving stack to stack and inventory to inventory. I use them to pull completed items from the machines. But only pulls the closest inventory slot, so it can't always keep up with a high capacity processing network. use more than one, or separate your output networks into smaller cells.

And an even easier solution if you're going straight for red matter is just to drop a gem of eternal density into your condenser at the end. It will greatly accelerate your condensing.

[Sam6555]

Thanks for the purge command, it worked.

Also thanks for the suggestion of keeping a Density gem in a chest. Now I only need the 1 chest there rather than an array.

However I'm still none the wiser about regulators. XD

I am pretty proficient with most other things within redpower. I have a fully operational sorting system using all filters and what-not. So I have a good understanding of them.

Within my pic, where would I place the regulator(s) so it keeps x amount of blaze rods in the three middle condensers? What would I place in what slots inside the Regulators GUI? Also can they be placed instead of a Filter, or do I still need the Filter there? Do Regulators need a redstone pulse if there's no Filter?

In the picture, the Filters under the middle chests pull out 32 blaze rods every pulse when there's room in the Macerators. The filters behind pull out 16 Blaze Powder per pulse. I put these here to try and un-clog the middle chests and prevent them from filling up completely of Blaze Powder.

Thinking of repeating this machine on the other side of the room, but I wanna get the design perfect before I do this.

[BuccaneerRex]

Regulators belong directly next to the inventory to be regulated, with the small output hole facing the inventory. Regulators are passive, you just set up the number allowed in at a time in the left side, and the number you want kept in the inventory in the right. No redstone pulse needed. They will output a redstone pulse from the sides if the inventory matches the right hand filter.

Regulators don't play nice with condensers though, because they won't ever match the input/output filters correctly. You could make a self regulating system though, by putting an item detector set to 'output on overflow' on your blaze powder input line, and a filter pulling a full stack of powder out of your blazerod condenser. That way, if the chest ever fills up to the point where it can't accept any more, or condense any blaze rods, the item detector will output a redstone signal, triggering the filter to yank a stack of powder out and freeing up a slot. You could even use a counter to make it pull x number of stacks out, and send them off in some other direction, probably to your final condenser line.

Another option is to put a restriction tube that connects to your final condenser line between the macerator output and the condensers. It won't stop your chests from filling and blocking, but it will send overflow to the final condenser.

I don't usually do the macerator route, I use some different EMC generation styles. but for any EE/Redpower system, you can always take the excess stuff you're generating, and use restriction tubes to control overflow.

[thaile4ever]

Yea a regulator will not do what you want it to do. I think the best solution is to use a sorter and for every 5 blaze powder send 2 to be condense to blaze rod and 3 to condense to red matter.

This solves the blaze condenser from filling up as the ratio for blaze powder to blaze rod will remain the same.

[BuccaneerRex]

Yea a regulator will not do what you want it to do. I think the best solution is to use a sorter and for every 5 blaze powder send 2 to be condense to blaze rod and 3 to condense to red matter.

This solves the blaze condenser from filling up as the ratio for blaze powder to blaze rod will remain the same.

This is the best solution, just be careful to set it on ALL STACK sequential mode. I think thats the second click on the mode button. You'll also need tube paints.

[Sam6555]

Alrighty, I'll try out the sorting machine idea. Thanks. :)

[Sam6555]

Okay so I made a similar system on the other side of the room, this time incorporating a sorting system. So far I have only put in one Blaze Rod, but the resultant Blaze Powder is just bouncing between to the Filter that pulled it out and the Sorting Machine. I'm going to assume a Sorting Machine cannot split stacks?

If this is the case, I will have to put 10 to go the orange route, and 15 to go the white route I think. Pic:

I forsee I may have a problem when the machine gets to full capacity. There's 14 Macerators and take about a half second to macerate one rod, so that's 70 powder every 0.5 assuming that's how long it takes. 2/5 of that is 28, so a condenser must be able to condense 28 Blaze Powder in o.5 seconds, which will probably never happen on any server. I don't know what condensing speed it supposed to be when there's no lag at all. I don't play SSP. If too much Blaze Powder does get through, I can just add a second Blaze Rod condenser and split the 5 output powder as 5/5/15? (1:1:3)

[xtrasyn]

Over clocked rotary macerators sure as hell don't need half a second. Hell even an over clocked regular macerator will macerate in one tick.

[Torezu]

Condensers are supposed to extract up to 10 items/second out of their inventory to condense into things. They seem to be able to produce nearly an unlimited number of items quickly, given the proper fuel (I've seen a condenser change a single red matter into about 50 stacks of lava cells in a heartbeat before, though that may have changed).

[xtrasyn]

Yeah it depends what way it goes. If you make red matter out of furnaces, it will 'eat' them at 1 per tick. Knowing how much you need for 1 RM it will take a good while. At 1/t the emc value of the furnace will be added towards the rm.

If you make furnaces out of rm, it will break down the rm at 1/t (giving you all the emc value of the rm) and transmute it towards furnaces in the same tick. So that will create you a whatever number if furnaces in one tick.

[Sam6555]

So I have tried running the machine for a bit, but I don't think the Sorting Machines know how to deal with either stacks of items, or the same item going to different colours. i.e two Blaze Powder set to Orange, and three set to White. The Sorting Machine is set to ''Allstack Sequential: The sliders moves from column to column and waits until it receives all the items in that column before moving to the next.''

I'd very much like to avoid BC pipes, so a diamond pipe is out of the question.

[BuccaneerRex]

Inline sorting does NOT like identical items in multiple columns. I think though that in all stack sequential mode it wants to PULL from an inventory and mark it that way. If column one has 3 blaze powder, and column 2 has 2 blaze powder, in allstack sequential mode it will pull 3 and then 2 alternating between colors. If you're producing more than that, you can do multiples of 3 and 2 in each stack, or add multiple columns. It's a far more expensive build, but try putting sorting machines with 3/2 columns on each macerator. that way it will pull from that inventory, mark it with the appropriate color, and send it down the line each redstone pulse. Since they're all next to each other, you don't need bluewire. Use redstone tubing for the pulse, and put a battery box at one end to your bluetricity generation.

[Sam6555]

So wait....sorting machines remotely pull items like a retriever? Hmmm, I've always pushed stuff into the sorting machines with fiters. I'll definitely have to try that out tomorrow.

[BuccaneerRex]

they don't pull items, but they will push items like a filter if they are right next to the inventory. If they push, you can paint identical items different colors. So you can use a sorter to distribute items for autocrafting. I usually set up an energy condenser targeting Iron, for example, and then I can send iron in various sized stacks to 8 different colored tubes to feed to various recipes.

In this case you can set your blaze powder ratios in your sorting machine. I think you could put, for example 3 full stacks in one column, and 2 stacks in the next, and paint them different colors. I don't know if it likes to deal with multiple stacks of the same item in the same column though, I know regulators don't deal with that well.

[Sam6555]

Brb, gonna make 28 sorting machines for testing purposes. :P

[BuccaneerRex]

Brb, gonna make 28 sorting machines for testing purposes.

If it doesn't work, you could have a really elaborate storage area with per-item sorting.

[Sam6555]

Well I tested with 3 sorting machines I had just to make sure it worked before making 28 of them. It worked. Coloured everything as it should have been coloured, and the Blaze Rod condenser was coping quite well with Blaze Powder output of 3 RMacerators. Will just have to see how it copes with output from 14 RMacerators at once. If it still keeps up, perhaps I should look into overclocking the RMAcs. Is there a list anywhere of how many Overclockers/Energy Storage upgrades I can place in the machines? Sort of like how a recycler can be maxed out with 1 ES upgrade and 10 Overclockers to Recycle objects 1 per tick.

[BuccaneerRex]

I found a spreadsheet on the industrial craft forum thread about the addon machines.

[Sam6555]

So, I think I finalised my design considering non-overclocked machines.

Each Sorting Machine sorts 5/5/15 as I found that 1 condenser making Blaze Rods wasn't quite fast enough. Now it's completely self-sustainable, and the Blaze Rod chests will never have more in because there's always the same EMC-worth in Rods/Powder circling through the RMacerators.