Solving the overflowing quarry

[msknight]

Hi Folks,

Because I don't get that much time to actually do things, I just leave things running while away, I've got a problem with quarries that overrun and drop items in the world which chokes the server.

I need peoples input on the following please...

1) Does anyone know whether it will be days, weeks, months or never, that a solution to the chunk loader function issue will be solved by the replacement railway block?

2) If I put a transposer directly beneath the transport pipe that is attached to the quarry, power it with a 1 second timer and connect it to an alchemy chest, with a filter in the middle which feeds cobblestone and earth to a lava pit ... then when the chunk loaded, would that start processing things and sort stuff out ... or would that be a colossal waste of time?

3) ... your idea here.

[slayerlife]

1 ) Don't have any idea.

2)

1.Connect wooden transport pipe directly to the quarry machine and it will automatically push all the blocks mined trough it.

2.Then just lead the blocks trough cobblestone transport pipes to a dimond pipe which will be able to sort blocks out.

3.Connect cobble pipes all around the dimond pipe which will create diffrent colored ends of the dimond pipe.

4. Chose what kind of blocks you want to be directed to which colored pipe. (Right click the dimond pipe to enter a meny)

5. connect each pipe that is connected to the dimond pipe to 1 or more chest and it will automatically fill the chests up with the blocks.

[msknight]

The problem I'm facing is that when I'm away from the area, the pipes leak stuff all over the place, resulting in lag that kills the server so bad that I can't get to the area to clear it up myself.

My thinking is, if I have the transport pipe directly attached to the quarry, then the leaked stuff will be all in one block area ... ideal to be picked up by a transposer and sorted out.

In other words, the transposer won't be doing any day-to-day sorting ... it'll be clearing up the mess after a large item leak.

[ErusPrime]

The problem I'm facing is that when I'm away from the area, the pipes leak stuff all over the place, resulting in lag that kills the server so bad that I can't get to the area to clear it up myself.

My thinking is, if I have the transport pipe directly attached to the quarry, then the leaked stuff will be all in one block area ... ideal to be picked up by a transposer and sorted out.

In other words, the transposer won't be doing any day-to-day sorting ... it'll be clearing up the mess after a large item leak.

yep. obsidian pipes would also work.

[msknight]

I thought "transposer" because it handles stacks of objects at a time in pneumatics. How fast would obsidian pipes connect/shift objects?

[BuccaneerRex]

Transposers will pick up items that land in front of them, in (I think) a 3x2 area when redstone triggered They will pick up anything that hits them, but will only pull one item at a time from a chest. Obsidian pipes have to have the items land on them.

For my quarry, I use a stone pipe to a teleport pipe, the other end of which feeds a diamond pipe to separate valuables from cobble/dirt/etc. Each of those outputs feeds into a vanilla chest, with a redpower filter pulling items into the redpower sorting/processing system. Filters will pull entire stacks, so the system doesn't backup very easily, as it's pulling from the sorting chest faster than the quarry can load it.

I keep a chunk loader sitting next to the quarry, and make sure that the teleport pipe is within the loaded chunk.

Overflow is handled by changing the diamond pipe's filter to send cobble to be processed in a recycler or energy condenser instead of storing it.

Buildcraft pipes overflow when there's nowhere for the items to go. If you always maintain a valid route for them, they should not overflow. However, if the route becomes invalid while the items are in transit, then the system doesn't know it. You can control where the overflow happens, if you pay attention to where the valid inventories are. Just make sure that wherever the overflow occurs, it's on the side of a block. that way the overflow items won't get hung up on the top of the block, or in the pipe itself.

I used a water flow system to catch excess coal on a steam engine setup I had for a while. The engines were fed coal through a pipe system, but even if there was a valid outlet for the coal, if the engine filled up the coal would still try to enter the inventory, but would overflow at the engine instead of ignoring that route. So they'd fall into the water and then be pushed to an obsidian pipe that recycled them to the beginning of the system.

One thing I've found that works is to get items out of the Buildcraft pipes and into Redpower tubes as soon as is reasonable. Redpower tubes won't overflow, but the system will jam up. If you pay attention to your sorting, and relative distances from input to inventory, you can minimize overflows and jams.

[DragnHntr]

This can be solved incredibly low-tech. Diamond transport pipe, filter all the shit you want to keep into an alchy chest. Filter the rest into a chest with a gem of eternal density.

If EE is disabled, filter each item that you will get a lot of into its own double wide chest, like redstone or coal, the other good stuff into its own chest, the rest goes into a lava pit.

[Teirisius]

I had the very same problem on my tekkit server:

If you use EE just hook up an energy condensor with a piece of Red Matter as the target –I have all my materials go through an item sorting system using red power (3 sorters for very specific filtering) - I have cobble/dirt/sand/marble/gravel go into a chest which has no free slots so once each stack is full - the overflow ends up following the Pneumatic Tubes to a condensor.

if you do manage to have a huge item spill and your server gets choked up, you can use worldedit to clear the drops:

/remove drops -1

this will remove any dropped "loose" items in your world: you won't be able to get em back so prepare to lose lots of items ( I had 11,000+ drops killing my system at one point)

Hope that helps

[Skuli]

So if it's literally dumping items out into the world, could you surround the chunk edge/pipe intersection with a 3x3 lava pit, so any item the pipe spits out just drops into lava?

[Legosheep]

The trouble with that skuli is that you'd lose the items. I'd suggest using a transposer connected to an item detector which automatically switches off your quarry should overflow occur. An easy way to increase the catchment area of a transposer is to use flowing water to push items to it. If the overflow occurs because your system can't process items fast enough you can set the quarry to restart after a set amount of time using a timer.

[pixelkitty]

Perhaps try this:

Instead of using BC pipes, put a large chest next to the quarry. I believe the quarry will automatically put items into the chest. if you have EE, make it an energy condenser and you're pretty much done.

If you want a tech solution, use redpower tubes and a transposer to pull items from the chest. Redpower tubes don't dump stuff all over the ground.

Or use both. An Energy Condenser will transmute just about everything but ores. Your transposer can pull out and sort the ores.

[hoho]

How big is the quarry?

I generally just branch out the pipes into a tree-like formation and add a metric ton of chests to them. They will eventually overflow but having tens of double chests will push that problem quite far into future.

It's doable with the simpliest pipes without any filters or anything. Just make sure you always have equal amounts of branches every time so one "side" won't overflow. E.g my usual setup is something like this bit wherever there is a branch there is actually 4 pipes going out instead of 2:

  

 ___|___

_|_  _|_

| |  | | 

and at the end of each pipe there are 5 chests. For 64x64 quarry at the height of 64 it takes around 76 double wooden chests to keep fit all the stuff. Make it 100 just to be on safe side. That means with 4 branches at every place and 5 chests at the end you'd need just 5 levels of branching to fit everything in them.

Assuming quarry gets around 1 block per second it would take around 3 days and nights at full speed to dig the stuff up.

[edit]

I made some awful math there actually. You only need to have two levels of branching (one to four, each of these to four more and each of those 16 pipes having 5 chests attached.

Using alchemy chests instdead of wooden ones you need just ~40 of them. Again with similar splitting it would mean one double split and both of those having 4-way split and 5 chests.

[bonfire01]

The main issue with quarries is the cobblestone, sand, dirt, marble and gravel. I normally just run the quarry output through a series of diamond pipes and all the junk gets sent straight into a mk2 or better matter furnace per quarry or overclocked recyclers (2 for cobble, 1 for the other 2 with 4 ish overclockers in each). You can then sort the rest and macerate+smelt ores before sending them into chests. I normally have 1 alchemical chest per metal type and a few more for mixtures of the rarer stuff.

As long as you handle the garbage then it'll take ages for the more valuable stuff to cause overflows.

[msknight]

Thanks for all this.

Apologies for the delay in responding; I was in hospital.

I'm running 64x64 quarries at about nearly 1km from where the new home is.

The odd thing is that the quarry is a little over 300 metres from the old home and everything worked fine. But going this extra distance seems to have mucked things up. (the character always being in the game.) I honestly didn't think that the game loaded that many chunks around the player. Ah well.

I'm actually using all the waste to drive an energy condenser, so even the zombie flesh has a purpose!

I'm going to back up the server and then run some tests with the advice given here, and see what works best for me.

Many thanks for all the help.

[bonfire01]

If it's a long way away then put a teleport pipe by the quarry, another pipe where stuff goes into your sorting/processing area and set them to the same frequency. Then set the one at the sorting end to can receive : true and put a chunkloading block next to each pipe.

I would also put blocks around the quarry to ensure the area ia all loaded (use F9 to see loaded areas) so the quarry works if you aren't near it and blocks to cover all the sorting pipes, machines and chests. you'll be loading quite a few chunks but it's trivial compared to the number a player loads by being online and a quarry doesn't tax a server unless it's spilling plus a few IC2 machines won't be much load either unless you've got a ton of basic solar panels or an accidental energy loop there.

[msknight]

Good advice. That's mostly what I was doing. Even the teleport pipe was directly connected to the quarry and still managed to produce a large spill.

I had a large spread of a home with teleport pipes used quite a bit. I know they can do a one to many but can they do a many to one? I was thinking that if I accidentally had a many to one, then could that have produced the spill?

I've re-jigged it, moved to a new tree home and the teleport pipes are a definite one to one now. So far, so good, even though the new home is further away from the quarry than the first.

[bonfire01]

Yes teleport pipes can do many to one. You just make sure only one pipe has can receive set to true and everything will go there. I assume you can even do many to many with the items randomising between receiving pipes but never had a reason to try it out.

If items are spilling out of a teleport pipe then no valid target pipe is loaded. That's why you shoukld always pop a chunkloader under any teleport pipe.

[Sbrain]

Either do what the above poster suggested by using a teleport pipe or you could use an Ender Chest system? Personally, this is my favorite method with the rest of the sorting done by redpower. (Love Redpower)

With an Ender Chest serving as the transportation from the quarry back to your house, coupled with the inteligent tubes from Redpower, this leaves you with a sorting system with built in buffers and the Ender Chest as one. As a sort of bonus too, the Redpower tubes don't drop items onto the ground, just return to the nearest valid inventory. As an example, with my cobble and dirt chests, when they're full, the overflow path heads into a recycler. This can easily modified to suit any setup required.

[msknight]

Sounds like a great solution.

How do I hook the quarry up to the Enter Chest? Can a filter pull from the quarry, or can you just put the chest right next to the quarry with no further pipework needed? Any advice/tips on this please?