Lamenting Liquid Logistics

[Magicthize]

Okay I need some creative input from you lovely people so I can try and finally lay my mob grinder setup to bed. I've tried a number of different solutions but none of them have worked as well as I would like or have had significant flaws in their design.

The overall remit is as follows: to connect my existing automated slaughterhouse at location A to my mob grinder at location B such that the Mob Grinder will ideally use up its reserves of mob essence before draining the slaughterhouse.

The Slaughterhouse runs until it has filled X number of tanks with mob essence.

The Mob grinder has a reserve of Y number of tanks which are connected to 12 auto-spawners/grinders which are turned off when the required number of mob drops has been reached.

The two locations are connected with waterproof pipes.

I've mostly been trying to resolve the design using gates, so if an auto-spawner has room in its internal tank it will send a red wire signal to the autarchic gates at the tanks. The autospawners are connected in series and the pipes are looped so that any excess will naturally drain back into the tanks. This sort of works but I find the autarchic gates are buggy as hell and even if their conditions haven't been met they can still drain a tank.

I also can't seem to figure out how to correctly set up the conditions such that it's not immediately going to be fulfilled or cause the system to rapidly switch on and off eg if I set the Mob Grinder's tanks to send a signal to the Slaughterhouse when the tanks are empty, as soon as even a little amount of liquid appears in the tank the condition is met and it will stop the transfer OR if I set it so that it will turn on the pumps if there's room for liquid because of the distance it has to travel it will fill the tanks and then leave a massive amount of liquid in the pipes that was in transit when the pumps were switched off.

I tried setting up a Flip switch using a PRC such that if the tank was empty it would send a signal to the Slaughterhouse to start pumping. As soon as the tank was full it would send another signal and turn off the pump. The problem with this is that when the Mob Grinder's were active the tanks would be partially drained and then refilled with the excess mob essence thereby triggering the "tank is full" condition and turning on the slaughterhouse pumps.

It also annoys me that in order to ensure a one way direction of flow I'm having to use Iron Waterproof pipes which massively slows down the transfer given that the rest of the system is using Gold.

I've also considered using liquiducts to improve the speed/flow but given that I need (?) a gate to detect the level of the tanks it seems counter productive.

So, any thoughts? :)

[Viktor_Berg]

First off, you can still use liquiducts - simply use a Structure pipe with a gate on it for any gate logistics, and then trigger the liquiduct pumping by making the gate emit redstone signal upon necessary conditions.

Second, a memory or state cell is what you definitely need. You can either use Computercraft, or, for more reliability, some kind of piston-based memory cell (check the minecraft wiki for relevant designs, I am no expert on vanilla redstone). The second option ensures that your memory cell is in the proper position even in case of map reload (if playing on SSP) or chunk unload. You can also possibly use a PRC for memory storage, but I have no idea how to achieve that, having never played with RedNet logics before.

Could you post screenshots of your setup so that it's easier for us other people to analyze it and provide input on controlling it?

[Magicthize]

I know I can use liquiducts but I have the auto spawner embedded in the floor with all the wiring and so forth underneath. Based on the way I have it set up at the moment it just makes more sense to use waterproof pipes as it reduces the amount of clutter as if I used liquiduct I'd also need to lay alot more structure pipe with wiring or rednet cabling to get the signal to where it's needed.

Plus liquiduct currently doesn't play as well with microblocks when it comes to covering up all the horribleness.

[Viktor_Berg]

Then I guess you have to accept the limitations of waterproof pipes, as well as their bugginess. Can't really help you there.

[Magicthize]

Strictly speaking do liquiducts have a direction of flow? I've never really made a pipe long enough to notice. Any time liquid enters it just seems to fill all of them up at exactly the same speed.

[Viktor_Berg]

I am pretty sure they only work based on liquid destinations and sources. I.e. the network is saturated more or less evenly, but I haven't really done any tests on this, so I am not entirely sure.

[Daemon_Eleuel]

I can tell that it's possible to set the input/output with a wrench, but I found out it gives more problems than it solves.

Personally I only use liquiducts for the biofuel and sewage and all I did was just put the liquiducts in place.

Wrenching them changes the input-output, but since most machines will not accept input/output on the same side it doesn't really matter.

[Viktor_Berg]

No, it's omni-output. Liquiducts are weird in a way that some machines auto-eject into them, and thus you have to use the omnidirectional mode to accept the liquid. Other times, you need to pump it out in output mode using a redstone signal.