Biofuel Struggle

[Gildan27]

I'm a lurker, but thought I'd chime in.

I think the ratio is pretty high, I could do some testing later to see. I had two Biofuel Reactors running with 9 items each, and I had 48 Biofuel Generators running on that and no matter how much power I pulled, I couldn't make the levels in my tanks drop (two quarries, a plant farm, a large ME network, and a quarry processing area, etc.). Although, 48 Biofuel Generators is a lot of power, so perhaps the levels never went down because there was no way to use all the power/biofuel without running a much larger amount of power than I actually am. I added another set of 48 Biofuel Generators last night, and then I started having problems keeping enough Biofuel.

I'll do some tests this afternoon in Creative and see if I can help answer this question. I'd think a good test would be to make a system that is pulling all the power generated by a set of Biofuel Generators, and then seeing what it takes to keep up.

[Karaktar]

hmmm i bet the best way to do this would be to hook up a mining laser to the system given that it can pull out like 10000/mj fo each ore

i think i may try that tonight after work probably start with one reactor working at max efficiency and then see how many gens i can run off it before lvls drop

[Gildan27]

I have concluded that ratio is 1 Bio Reactor for every 10 Biofuel Generators.

Here were my findings:

First, we need to establish a system that draws the maximum power provided by a set of Biofuel Generators. I have created the following to do this:

If you fill the Biofuel Generators with Biofuel and set the inputs and outputs of both Energy Cells to 90 with this setup, the middle one does not have any net gain or loss, and the one on the right charges up. It therefore has 90MJ/t going in and 90MJ/t going out with no net gain or loss of MJ. If you add another Biofuel Generator, the middle one will see a gain, and if you take one away, the middle one will see a loss. If you change the inputs/outputs to 95, the middle one sees a net loss.

Therefore, I conclude that six Biofuel Generators produce an effective 90MJ/t, or an effective 15MJ/t each. I say "effective" because we are losing some power to the cables. There will always be cables.

In any case, this setup pulls off all the power generated by the Biofuel Generators.

Now we add a Bio Reactor with nine types of items in it, and pipes and let the system fill fully with Biofuel:

Letting this run, we see that the buffer in the Bio Reactor never drops below 5000, and the internal Biofuel storage is never touched. We therefore need to scale this out until the internal Biofuel storage in the Bio Reactor starts to see a drop (that is, there is no longer enough Biofuel to run the system).

Adding a second one of these (12 Biofuel Generators), it is clear that the internal Biofuel storage starts to operate at a loss, with the number continuing to drop slowly, so the magic number is somewhere between 6 and 12:

Now that we know that 6 Biofuel Generators can produce 90MJ/t, as long as we attempt to pull more than that, we can simply remove Biofuel Generators and know that we're still pulling the maximum that we can. Removing one still operated at a loss, but removing the second one causes the internal storage of the Bio Reactor to go up and down +/- 100MB, but never having any overall net gain or loss.

Therefore, I conclude that one Bio Reactor can produce enough Biofuel to keep 10 Biofuel Generators fully stocked at maximum power output. This produces 130MJ/t.

[Prototype958]

That is awesome Gilden... And holy hell I'm doing things soooo wrong it's not even funny. Lol...

Thanks for putting the time into researching that, I'll see what I can do in terms of adjustments to my setup now.

[Gildan27]

No problem. I had previously done some math wrong and thought that Biofuel Generators produce 30MJ/t instead of 15MJ/t, so this was helpful for me as well.

If it's useful to you or the OP or anyone, here's a quick runthrough of my power generation system: http://imgur.com/a/1StxZ

[Prototype958]

OH my god, I just had a nerd-gasm from that set up! Holy shit that's amazing. What I really need to start working on next is that Level Manager system you have. Right now I just have a bunch of monitors that I try to keep an eye on while I manually swap the needed materials in and out of my farms... Miserable work right there... And I actually feel like I'm going through saplings way faster now that I've managed to jack up the efficiency on my reactors with the Percision Exports feeding them. Or maybe it's just that I'm actually watching the levels more closely now...

Few things I was wondering though if you don't mind, Gildan:

1) What the hell could you possibly be powering with 96 generators?? =P

2) I noticed your farms don't utilize the full 3x3 space that the planters have by default. Looks like some of your trees are single blocks, I think I see a 1x3 wheat farm and what I believe is a 1x3 potato farm? What's the reason you set it up like that? I think I can understand the trees because I'm definitely noticing different saplings only want to grow on specific spots of the planter's 3x3 grid... The solution I was going to use(literally right after I left the forums tonight) was to move my tree farm, drop a few upgrades in the planter/harvester/fertilizer and make the whole layout bigger, not smaller.

3) Edit:: I had something here about your compost farm, but I figured it out on my own. =P

[TokiWartooth]

he could be powering a mining drill and still be down power. The trees things may be because of the way some of the trees grow, and whether he is harvesting on demand or when all trees in a set are full grown.

[Gildan27]

Yeah, this is I think the third iteration of this design; the second versions ran off of potatoes and oak saplings, and it was constantly needing babysitting (taking items in and out), and having my two quarries run out of power all the time. This setup was created and designed to solve these problems.

To answer the questions:

1). This was designed prior to my having any grasp of how much power was too much, and I figured that more was better (of course). Right now, it powers the power plant (aka, the farm), three quarries, a resource management area (pulverizes ores, makes ingots while maintaining certain dust levels, and maintains certain levels of other things like sand and glass), two ME networks, and two work areas. I'll be adding a rapid armor charging station and some kind of backup power grid (haven't worked that out yet), an automatic crafting area, and some kind of mob-killer, with which I hope to get a steady supply of Shards of Minium, with which I hope to auto-mass convert the hundreds of thousands of wood blocks from the plant to diamonds via EE3. I don't know if this will be possible, but that's the eventual plan. But all that is probably all less than 100MJ/t. My original design actually was set up to have four of those "power cores," but I don't think I will make them at this point, now that I see how much power things actually need...

2). Ah yes... the original idea was to have 1x1 farms for each item in the following pattern: wxwxwxwxwxwxwxw ... where w is wood and x is dirt/planted item.

The reason for 1x1 farms is because of fertilizer. Fertilizer is the backbone of the system: the sheep need to produce enough sewage per tick to create enough fertilizer to run the plant and not have a net loss of fertilizer. 23 sheep for one sewer/composter is enough to keep one tree going constantly (plant, fertilize, harvest) without a net loss in fertilizer or waiting for anything. I believe (but did not fully test) that Fertilizers fertilize faster than Harvesters harvest, so having more trees would upset the 23 sheep to 1 tree balance. One of the Wikis says that a sewer can't handle more than 8 animals, but that is incorrect (it's easily testable and disprovable). It's 23-24 sheep per sewer max if you don't connect the sewer to the composter with pipes.

While I have enough space for 10 PETA-unfriendly pods of sheep, I don't have them all full. I think only 6 of them are full. The reason for this is, that breeding 240 sheep and moving them in there with Safari Nets is horribly time-consuming and boring, and also, I have set the levels for fertilizer to be so high that even if the system ran all night, it wouldn't deplete what I have in store. This would probably solve the 1 tree to 23 sheep balance problem as well, but this was a later revelation and the building was already sized and built. If I'm correct about fertilizer, you might be able to produce more items in less time, but you'd need more fertilizer. If I'm not correct, then I don't think a larger farm would accumulate items any faster than a 1x1 one. More testing would be needed.

I did have to expand it as you see because some of the trees (spruce and birch, I think), don't want to grow if there are non-transparent blocks (aka, other trees) within a certain radius. So I took the whole thing back out and made it bigger, separating the ones that don't want to grow near each other with the other items (seeds, netherwart, potatoes, carrots). The structure was already sized at this point and I did not explore other designs with larger farms. The thing with seeds, netherwart, potatoes, and carrots is that they don't grow instantly, they have three or four levels until they are ready to be harvested, unlike saplings, which use one fertilizer to be fully grown. So those items go through three or four times the fertilizer as the saplings. Seeds further complicate this because I do not think they always drop more seeds when you harvest them. As a result, my seed production lagged a little. I added the strip of seeds (the 1x3) to see if it would accumulate faster, and I think it does, because as said above, I think that Fertilizers put out fertilizer faster than Harvesters harvest. That's not fully tested because I soon realized that I was going to have a zillion saplings and 3000 seeds unless I had a way to regulate each item on its own, which I then did.

Sorry it was long, and hopefully it helps. Thanks for the interest. I love talking about efficiency and making things more efficient, any suggestions or further questions are welcome.

[Gildan27]

he could be powering a mining drill and still be down power. The trees things may be because of the way some of the trees grow, and whether he is harvesting on demand or when all trees in a set are full grown.

Whoa, wait, you mean there is a justifiable reason to add more power? And yeah, your reply got in while I was still typing that ^ up. To clarify, the Planters and Fertilizers are full of items via the ME Network and will thus instantly plant/fertilize/harvest each item on its own as long as there is power. The system cuts power from the tesseracts in the control room for each item to manage the levels as needed.

Edit: Just read http://wiki.technicpack.net/Laser_Drill, I will be needing one for sure (for glowstone and Nether Quartz). I wonder how much "an extraordinary amount of power" is?

[Prototype958]

Not too long at all! I'm soaking up every word and trying to figure out how to make it myself. =P

So for the Level Controllers, I'm still new to the whole ME Network thing and how a lot of it works, but to my best guess you're simply using the Level Emitter piece, set to send/drop a redstone signal that's activating and deactivating the Tesseracts powering the group of machines farming the particular component?? I thought it was going to be so much more complicated than that! I could probably set up a few of those in a reasonable amount of time!!

I must hurry off to expand my little plot of land! I need more space! =P

[Gildan27]

Correct, it is just powering/unpowering tesseracts. It seemed the simplest way. I believe that there's a way to use redstone signals to control the export busses (which would be less expensive), but I had hit or miss luck getting them to respond reliably and gave up. They're all wired to one "master" tesseract, which allows for a master power off.

For the level controllers, basically, yeah... it has two sides for each one, an upper side and a lower side. For example, if there was just one level emiter to output at 9999, it would shut it off at 9999. Then the Bio Reactor would use one of that item and kick it on again. So it would basically run constantly once it hit 9999. I thought this would be annoying after a while and might mess with my fertilizer production (if they were all trying to run at the same time). That's why I added the lower one as well, to let it be off within a range. I'm using the tileable RS NOR latch from here:

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/892820-ultimate-collection-of-redstone-circuits/#RS, #7

[TokiWartooth]

"an extraordinary amount of power" is?

each pre-charger requests 1000m/j a tick I think its been a while since I was doing the testing but I think thats the max input for those, you can run them at any input but that is the max, they are designed to be quite the sink.

[CharlieChop]

Just logged on to show you guys the fruits of this thread and your tips. I obviously exaggerated when i built this but it seems to work perfectly fine XD

-An emerald planter surrounded by 3 emerald harvesters and a fertilizer with a woodcutter cart to get the extra sapling.

-The auto crafting to get the seeds (thank you very much for this idea)

-Below the bio reactors for the export plus the logistics pipes for the 9th item. ( i dont trust logistics to give the the 9 items, during my trial they kept dropping lots of items randomly)

-The result of running the Bio reactors at full power

-And finally the results of so many farms and side-products.

Ive been watching this thread closely and im glad to know that i can easily run 50 bio gens with that setup no problem. MOAR quarries... xD

Edit: ignore the pumpkins at the edge... those were the ones i manually harvested until i got the autocrafting tables

[TokiWartooth]

Only issue I see is you can only transport 100 mj/t and you are producing more than that, get some rec's and more tesseracts, set them to different frequencies to feed different areas of the base.

[Prototype958]

Wow, Chop, very nice. Were those all DSUs in the last picture? I guess my question there would be how are you moving them to and from the ME network, it doesn't look like you have those hooked into anything, although I'm sure there's pipe or something running along the backs for input?

But what about pulling from the DSUs? How are you going about that?

Also, I'm going to make myself sound like an even bigger newb here but, what is and how do I make this mining drill you keep talking about Toki? I haven't seen i before, I can't find it in NEI, I don't even know what mod it's from. That's not a Tekkit Classic item, is it?

[Dewfire]

Storage Bus, what I have on my DSUs. Nice setups guy, gives me some ideas to expand my fertilizer usage!

[CharlieChop]

Yeah, like Dewfire said. If you use storage buses from AE, you can turn almost any block with an internal storage into part of the network and depending on priorities, will use it for storage and take stuff out too. ( containers that already have items of that kind will always have highest priority afaik).

The mining laser is an end game block from MFR that consumes Massive amounts of energy. If what the guys here said was accurate a single mining laser can consume up to 4000 mj/t (holy cow is this true??)

Dewfire, keep in mind the fertilizer uses retarded amounts of industrial fertilizer....mine goes through 9 stacks in minutes! The good thing is that once your reactors are at maximun efficiency, they last forever.... I might need to turn the farm off sometime in the future. I already have more wood than any other item in my entire network.

[Dash16]

Whoa, wait, you mean there is a justifiable reason to add more power? And yeah, your reply got in while I was still typing that ^ up. To clarify, the Planters and Fertilizers are full of items via the ME Network and will thus instantly plant/fertilize/harvest each item on its own as long as there is power. The system cuts power from the tesseracts in the control room for each item to manage the levels as needed.

Edit: Just read http://wiki.technicpack.net/Laser_Drill, I will be needing one for sure (for glowstone and Nether Quartz). I wonder how much "an extraordinary amount of power" is?

Only justifiable if you call needing to stockpile diamonds like a squirrel hoarding for winter. I've been running a Laser Drill for a couple weeks and am up to 20k diamonds. Also, bonus: tons of Certus Quartz, Emerald, and other assorted ores.

I need MORE POWER.

[Dewfire]

Only justifiable if you call needing to stockpile diamonds like a squirrel hoarding for winter. I've been running a Laser Drill for a couple weeks and am up to 20k diamonds. Also, bonus: tons of Certus Quartz, Emerald, and other assorted ores.

I need MORE POWER.

Tool much Little Einstein's for me from my 3 year old, 'need more power, Pat Pat Pat Pat...

[Karaktar]

Omg if only it was that easy to get more power pat pat pat lol

[Prototype958]

Is the Mining Laser one of the Auto-Disabled items in multiplayer? I'm hosting my own server but I don't see any sign of this thing anywhere

[CharlieChop]

i think its called laser drill and laser drill prechargers respectively

[weirleader]

I'm using the tileable RS NOR latch from here:

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/892820-ultimate-collection-of-redstone-circuits/#RS, #7

have you considered using the RedNet version? I guess it is more expensive, but nice and compact -- I think I'm just addicted to RedNet.

[TokiWartooth]

you probably aren't running 1.1.5 yet, which adds the mining laser, but to you other question you can put a single storage bus on each dsu and it acts as an attached inventory for the ME network, allowing you to put stuff in and take stuff out as needed.

[Gildan27]

have you considered using the RedNet version? I guess it is more expensive, but nice and compact -- I think I'm just addicted to RedNet.

I haven't done anything with RedNet yet, I just needed it working and knew how to do it quickly with good old-fashioned Redstone. There's another latch back there for the on/off/auto switch, so the space back there is getting pretty cramped. Thanks for the tip, I'll look at RedNet for sure as the next enhancement to the system.