wondering about biofuel

[Karaktar]

so i keep hearing about how amazing bio fuel is does anyone have a design or a tort i can watch to see how it works im thinking of switching from magmatics

[Aurrin]

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).

[Karaktar]

oh ok i am way off base then i have been trying to do it with a small wheat farm planter harvester and fertilizer next to a cow farm that has a slaughter house attached using the sewers and composter to make fetilzer only problem is the slaughterhouse (which is there to keep over crowding down ) well the cows seem to like to hang out there which thins the herd to much i think i will try your set up instead

[street_carp]

Wheat isn't the best thing to start off with because the bioreactor can only accept the seeds, not the wheat itself, and the seed yield is crap compared to other crop yields. The best and simplest things to start off with are potatoes and carrots, with those you only have to worry about splitting the output between your planter and your reactor.

[Aurrin]

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.

[TokiWartooth]

also One generator will make fuel for IN EXCESS of 12 reactors at pretty heavy output, as others have mentioned trees and wheat work but have by products to manage. personally I think it is worth the investment to have upwards of 6 planters doing different crops and one massively upgraded harvester doing all the harvesting. having multiple kinds of seeds increases the value of each seed by a bunch. my reactors regular cycle has a min efficancy of like 900 with like 6 kinds of seeds/veggies where as base eff. is 80.

[Karaktar]

yeah i went with the tree set up and it running nice now lots of wood but im sure i can find a use for it down the line probably gonna upgrade to carrots and maybe mellons and pumpkins that could be a pretty good setup i think does fertilizer work on melons

[Doomstarr]

hi, this is pretty on-topic too, so instead of making another thread....

do you have any idea how to export biofuel materials from an AE system into the bioreactor?

i tried pumping out of an ME interface but it would just export 1 type of material.

[Aurrin]

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.

[Karaktar]

fuzzy one is cheaper and just as good i was using that with diff saplins i had and it worked

[street_carp]

The precision export bus doesn't appear to operate in a "round robin" way, rather, it will output the first item in the hotbar until that item is depleted. The best way I have found to keep all bioreactor materials topped up evenly is to set up DSU's for the individual items with sender item tesseracts that feed into a single receiver tesseract next to the bioreactor. You can keep a buffer of bioreactor materials by having your harvesters feed into your ME system and then having precision export buses set up with level emitters to feed into the DSU when the ME inventory is only above a set amount. This setup is certainly end-game but it's the most reliable method I've found.

[TokiWartooth]

I run 4 basic export busses behind a dark wire and an emitter so when my carrots reach a threshold of say 2 stacks in reserve it starts pumping one of each item per tick till it is back below the threshold.

[Aurrin]

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

[TokiWartooth]

Ehh I'm willing to put in the the legwork to manual craft the watermelon and pumpkin or are you running your farm on the same network as your main network? Because I run them as 2 separate networks and locations.

[Euphoreich]

also One generator will make fuel for IN EXCESS of 12 reactors at pretty heavy output, as others have mentioned trees and wheat work but have by products to manage. personally I think it is worth the investment to have upwards of 6 planters doing different crops and one massively upgraded harvester doing all the harvesting. having multiple kinds of seeds increases the value of each seed by a bunch. my reactors regular cycle has a min efficancy of like 900 with like 6 kinds of seeds/veggies where as base eff. is 80.

You don't need 6 planters, 1 planter can plant 9 different types of crop, each square on that grid corresponds to a ninth of the planting space the planter has.

[TokiWartooth]

Eh Im lazy and want a bigger failsafe of seeds in case of errors. I know I dont "need" to do it this way but w/e.

[Euphoreich]

Eh Im lazy and want a bigger failsafe of seeds in case of errors. I know I dont "need" to do it this way but w/e.

But you should try to use different types of crops anyway. A single crop produces .08 buckets of biofuel per (?) 9 different crops produce 1.44 buckets per (?).

[gfb]

Well, keeping in mind that 1.44 bucket is produced by 9 crops (one each of the crops in the reactor is consumed to produce the 1.44 buckets). So while a single crop produced .08 buckets, the efficiency of a fully diverse reactor is actually 1.44/9 = 0.16 per crop consumed. That's still worth doing (double the efficiency), but just trying to make sure we don't overstate the benefit.

As for managing the crops in the reactor, I find a precision export bus from a crop AE system (not my main system) does the job quite well. I maintain a DSU for each crop seed (just two in my case currently: pumpkin and melon - planning to add more as my settlement gets larger), and autocrafting tables convert the pumpkins and melons into seeds (this avoids having to set up the huge autocrafting AE system for this little, remote AE system). The DSUs are connected to the system with storage buses, so seed stores can be monitored and harvesters (individual for each crop) can be switched on or off to maintain appropriate stored quantities. Filling the reactors (just two for now) is done with a precision export bus set to export stacks. I find that's quite fast enough to ensure both crops get inserted.

[Karaktar]

hmm i got a tree farm running on a gold upgrader it made 20k saps in 2 days so i now have switched it to spruce and once thats up there i will switch to birch and by the time thats done i will go back to oak again this gives me three types of saps and i think it was 300 efficiency now of course its a bit of work swaping over every couple days but i could just as easily run three farms.

of course the problem with that is they over produce saps and of course i still have to find somthing to do with all the wood im considering throwing them into a furnace and running the coal to steam engines that i can use for remote bases instead of energy tesseracts thus avoiding the -25% loss however i couldnt power much that way either way seems like trees are the easiest option

crops need fertilizer to be productive btw anyone know what you do with the meat ingots do you just eat them or do they need further processing im thinking of going full out farm to power the bio fuel or add to it at least

[Viktor_Berg]

I just void pipe all excess wood and saplings. My Tekkit is slightly modified with FZ, so I use regular barrels to store some of the stuff - which is 64 stacks of each logs and saplings. Once I switch to DSUs, I will not have to void them until MUCH later.

[Dewfire]

Just make a Deep Storage Unit (DSU) for anything you aren't going to use at that time. I use mine to make lots of Charcoal, and Obsidian. Also, who knows when I may want to build a massive log house in the future.

best things about DSU's in no power needed, easily moved with contents and practically unlimited storage.

But in my setup I simply have an Oak Farm and Spruce farm and I have more Bio Fuel then I can burn with 8 Generators.

[Euphoreich]

Well, keeping in mind that 1.44 bucket is produced by 9 crops (one each of the crops in the reactor is consumed to produce the 1.44 buckets). So while a single crop produced .08 buckets, the efficiency of a fully diverse reactor is actually 1.44/9 = 0.16 per crop consumed. That's still worth doing (double the efficiency), but just trying to make sure we don't overstate the benefit.

As for managing the crops in the reactor, I find a precision export bus from a crop AE system (not my main system) does the job quite well. I maintain a DSU for each crop seed (just two in my case currently: pumpkin and melon - planning to add more as my settlement gets larger), and autocrafting tables convert the pumpkins and melons into seeds (this avoids having to set up the huge autocrafting AE system for this little, remote AE system). The DSUs are connected to the system with storage buses, so seed stores can be monitored and harvesters (individual for each crop) can be switched on or off to maintain appropriate stored quantities. Filling the reactors (just two for now) is done with a precision export bus set to export stacks. I find that's quite fast enough to ensure both crops get inserted.

Is there any reason that you don't hook it up from your main system? Just don't want to scroll through the crops?

[Dash16]

Likely because he is generating 10s (if not 100s) of thousands of materials, and it is far cheaper to build a Storage Bus and DSU than it is to build 64k ME Storage modules.

[Karaktar]

Likely because he is generating 10s (if not 100s) of thousands of materials, and it is far cheaper to build a Storage Bus and DSU than it is to build 64k ME Storage modules.

i think its more about somthing i read somewhere on here about resetting the whole network when making some sort of change also i read a couple times ppl not sure how to feed the reactor i am using a fuzzy export bus on my reactor with no problem far as i can tell the reactor only accepts one id per box in the slot so no matter which way you pump things into it nothing will over write somthing in there as long as you still have some pumping into it im pumping three types of saplins into mine and it only uses three slots it doesnt put anything in the other slots so in theory i could pump 9 different items in and even if i screw up and put somthing in the it cant use it wont go in so nothing can go wrong

i am currently producing 150 mj/t with 10 gens and one reactor my plan is to up it untill i am producing around 500 mj/t which is what the energy enfuser can use

[gfb]

Is there any reason that you don't hook it up from your main system? Just don't want to scroll through the crops?

Because my farm is not part of my main base. It's at my original base. You know: the one we all build to hold off the creeper horde long enough for us to really get going? It's there. And there's no need to move it. It works perfectly right where it is. It has a Dimensional Anchor to keep it loaded and with no AE storage at all (using only storage buses) and its size (it's like 10 blocks all told, buried under the harvesters) its power consumption is miniscule. That's why it's not part of my main system.

And no, I'm not generating 10s or 100s of thousands of materials currently. I have level emitters that shut off my harvesters at >1000 of each seed. That keeps me with a sufficient buffer for biofuel production for now. I may expand later when (if) my power requirements go up, but it's entirely adequate for now. DSUs are total overkill for that amount of item storage, but I knew I would only be storing a very few item types (two, currently) and DSUs are cheap as hell (the chest recipe is just wood for chests, rubber for plastic, and cooked stone for MFR machine blocks), so my reason for using DSUs was more due to the question: why wouldn't I? I was also experimenting with how AE storage buses interact with DSUs at the time. Turns out they work perfectly, correctly reading the amount of items in the DSU, but I partly made the system using DSUs so I could determine that.