Power options

[chessguy]

Hi all,

 

I'm trying to figure out what my best options are for power. So far, I've been using steam dynamos for everything, which works well with my automated tree farm. However, now I'm trying to make a laser drill work, which requires more serious power. At the moment, I have 1 steam dynamo hooked up to each pre-charger, and it takes 15 minutes to charge the drill enough to get a single piece of ore. Not ideal.

 

So...googling around a bit, it sounds like all the dynamos output power at the same max of 80 rf/second. This tends to make me think that I want to use some kind of energy cell to power my drill chargers. But then I'm going to run into the same problem, right? It'll just take me a long time to power the energy cell, so it's really the same thing. Am I missing something?

 

I've also seen a few places where people have a stack of dynamos and/or a stack of energy cells, but I'm not quite sure what that accomplishes. Got any tutorial suggestions for me on these topics? Thanks.

 

 

[BrowserXL]

Nope you are basicly right. Power generation is THE big issue in this modpack. The dynamos is your best option. All other means of electricity generation will yield less then that per tick.

After having set up some mobgrinders I have switched to reactent dynamos which I feed with mob essence on the liquid side and blaze powder, sugar, gunpowder and nether stars on the solid fuel side.

The yield of these dynamos (running 4 at the moment) charge up 6 resonant energy cell (50Mio RF capacity each) which then distribute the energy around the base.

Since I have a quite compact setup in my base the dynamos basicly run permanently when I am around my basement somewhere, since the chunks are always loaded.

 

This is basicly the most efficient (at least in my eyes) setup without taking up that much space like a tree farm set up, and enjoying the the creaming of dieing mobs.

If you have a compact setup you could easily upgrade it with more dynamos. if you needed them. These 4 dynamos are enough to keep my whole machinery running and have 64 tanks of mobessence at the ready as well as all dynamos charged with fuel and have the 6 cells on full power.

Granted I have no drill and don't run chunkloaders, but they can be added along with additional dynamos later.

I could show you the setup, but since my tutotials are in german I doubt they will be a big help.

[pirahnah3]

There are many different setups to use, as mentioned the tree farm is what I would call the "old reliable" setup. Always works, and if you want more use out of it use the sawmill to cut the logs into planks, they do yeild more than the charcoal and you can get the sawdust and reprocess that into charcoal. 

 

The mob grinder as mentioned above is another good option for power but only works when your around, unless your using an auto spawner. 

 

There is a glitchy way using liquiducts and a lava generator but no idea when/if that will get patched. 

 

I know a few of the B-Team guys have used the tropicraft corals and fish with a reactant dynamo as well. This is probably the easiest "free" option there is unless you use a vanilla mob spawner and a grinder but either of those you need to be in the area of to make work. 

[BrowserXL]

The good thing about the mobgrinder ist that you do not have to be around for long. The amount of mobessence is insane and fills up tanks really fast. Combined with blaze powder or even Nether Stars you should be good to go for a longer generation time without standing next to it.

 

The lavagenerator trick only works when you use galacticraft wires, since there is a bug that is creating more energy through the generator then it should. When you use leadstone cabling it won't work.

But be advised that this setup can cause chunk corruptions. I have tried it once and it worked nicely and had no problems. Keralis also had it in one of his videos and it worked so far, but depending on how much you like your world, I would take a different route.

 

The fishy reactor is basicly a different setup of the mobgrinder. Bdubs was the first one to come along with it. It tried using it in a 5*5 coral setup and while it looks nice, I had the feeling that the spawnrate of the fishes is too small to be effective. Additionally you have the same problem as in the mobgrinder since the fish won't spawn when you are not around.

 

Getting around the spawning problem would be to use a darwin mob mutation chamber, which would eliminate the need to be in place. All it would need is a poppet shelf or a chunk loader, to keep the machinery running.

Edited October 24, 2014 by BrowserXL

[chessguy]

Ok, so, out of curiosity, if power is the problem in this modpack, what mod or modpack would you say gets it right? FTB?

[SuppiKun]

Advanced solar arrays from galacticraft are pretty nice.  They require no maintenance but they have to have a view of the sun and they take space.

[BrowserXL]

I wouldn't call it a problem. It just requires you to revisit you power plant from time to time, to adjust it to your needs, And with the minions I doubt that you need the drill. I am currently sitting on a stack of over 1K blocks and ingots each of iron alone just through using Minions and having a darwin mob grinder and the other materials are in the upper hundres as well.

What is the material that you are after?

 

Since I haven't played any other modpack except for AOTBT I can't say which other pack handles it better. You would probably looking for a pack that has big reactors included. You might want to check out Keralis new modpack series that he just started. I think that has it. Since that modpack is even bigger then AOTBT you might want to check the requirements of the pack.

And if you want to stay with AOTBT you could always and another mod that makes your energy generation easier.

Edited October 26, 2014 by BrowserXL

[pirahnah3]

The good thing about the mobgrinder ist that you do not have to be around for long. The amount of mobessence is insane and fills up tanks really fast. Combined with blaze powder or even Nether Stars you should be good to go for a longer generation time without standing next to it.

 

The lavagenerator trick only works when you use galacticraft wires, since there is a bug that is creating more energy through the generator then it should. When you use leadstone cabling it won't work.

But be advised that this setup can cause chunk corruptions. I have tried it once and it worked nicely and had no problems. Keralis also had it in one of his videos and it worked so far, but depending on how much you like your world, I would take a different route.

 

The fishy reactor is basicly a different setup of the mobgrinder. Bdubs was the first one to come along with it. It tried using it in a 5*5 coral setup and while it looks nice, I had the feeling that the spawnrate of the fishes is too small to be effective. Additionally you have the same problem as in the mobgrinder since the fish won't spawn when you are not around.

 

Getting around the spawning problem would be to use a darwin mob mutation chamber, which would eliminate the need to be in place. All it would need is a poppet shelf or a chunk loader, to keep the machinery running.

 

Actually the Lava issue is a known bug with the fluidicts not galacticraft wire. I have NO galacticraft wire in my setups as I know they can cause some chunk corruption when exploiting that bug (as mentioned several other places here) I just have a magmatic dynamo pointed at a Lava generator with a fluiduct over the top of the two of them and then into a tank. There are several videos out on this but with 1 lava generator I am powering my entire base and a laser drill with 4 prechargers and have no issues with power. 

 

Your right about the Darwin mobs, i totally forgot about Generiks setup there. Great use of mobs and can be used as food production as well. 

 

There are several ways to get ores, in the past I would just go out with a hammer and go to town on it and then pulverize or use the induction smelter with either cinabar or rich slag. But at this point in the game I have so many resources its almost sickening. I really like that it is not a problem to get ores and process, but that is why I did the laser drill with an automated setup into a pulverizor and redstone furnace. Now I can just go and build and explore without having to concern myself with materials. 

[BrowserXL]

Actually the Lava issue is a known bug with the fluidicts not galacticraft wire.

 

Ah ok. I didn't notice that back when I setup the reactor like Keralis did back then.

 

Currently my "powerplant" consists of 4 reactent dynamos of which 2 burn blaze powder and one each burns sugar and gundpowder. My current maintank of 64  open blocks tanks is permanently filled as is the reserve 32 tanks overflow tank.

I have 4 resonant energyy cells which are constanty fully loaded and the machinery so far is running nicely without any problems.

 

I do not think that the energy generation is the big problem, since the components are rather cheap to make once you got past the initial days. Even the acquisition of the various fuels shouldn't give you a headache.

I think the real problem that has to be tackled to is to have a sufficient storage system for energy that can build up capacities while not so much energy is requested and cope with additional energy needs caused by  RF spikes.

 

I haven't used it so far, but what is the energyconsumption of the laser drill, and what is its yield?

[pirahnah3]

Laser drill is an energy HOG but it produces ores out of thin air. If you have a TON of power and nothing else to do with it, its a nice way to burn it off and get all the different ore blocks with it. The more your feed it the faster it works. 

 

I have mine running at full power and i would say i can get an ore block every minute or there abouts.