Railcraft/TE/IC2 Infinite Lava Centrifuge (aka free gold, iron and tin)

[Vovk]

This only works in 1.4.2 - future updates give different centrifuge products.
Mostly to show my friends who play on my server so that I don't have to explain it 6 times, but also for anyone who's new to railcraft automation.

I present you with a railcraft setup for the automatic generation of gold, iron, tin and sulphur from 24MJ/t and 10EU/t.


Suggested power setup - a 12L steam boiler with 3 industrial steam engines on it would power the MJ side of this setup perfectly. for the 10 EU/t I would probably have it hooked into my biofuel generator or steam power generating networks - or if you can afford 2 of the solar panels that give 8 each, you could use those.

total cost minus power generation:
-4 standard rails
-10 elevator rails
-12 booster rails
-10 boarding rails
-12 redstone torches (replaceable with levers)
-1 lever (turn it on and off :3)
-1 Chest Cart
-5 Item Unloaders
-4 Item Loaders
-1 Igneous Extruder
-1 Magma Crucible
-1 Liquid Transposer
-2 industrial centrifuges
-2 copper chests
-1 redstone engine
-1 auto crafting table
-1 wooden pipe
-1 output chest - I chose a diamond one.
-64 empty cells to start everything off, or the tin to make 64 cells.

Overview:

The cart runs counter-clockwise from this angle. starting from the right and going left you should see the extruder, crucible, transposer, 2 centrifuges, a chest attached to an autocrafter attached to a pipe attached to a chest, and the output chest at the very end. When the cart is on top of the loop it's filling machines, when it's on the bottom it is receiving goods. The single cart acts as a shared inventory as it moves between all the machines and distributes exactly what each machine wants as quickly as it can. Boarding tracks only push a cart forward when they have a redstone signal. Loaders and Unloaders release a signal when they can no longer move objects to or from the cart, so you can just put boarding tracks on top of unloaders and underneath unloaders to work as automatic stations.

The booster tracks are to prevent a cart from stalling on a laggy server. The placement of the right most torch (the one on the right elevator track) is important, it must be 1 level below the top track in order for the elevator to work properly.

There is a somewhat hidden boarding track underneath the energy conduit on the right on the lower portion of the track. This is attached to a lever which pulls on and off to start and stop the minecart. Good for checking the contents of the minecart or for pausing the process to save power. You can put this boarding track in any position in the loop as long as it's got room for a lever.

Centrifuges do not output through the bottom, so we have to draw from the sides. The broken track is fine, the boarding track pushes the cart over the edge and it falls on the bottom track correctly.


I am not going to show the power generation picture, it's quite overkill. refer to the top of the page for power requirements.

So. Let's start with the machine setups. I've opened the Thermal Expansion Configuration tabs and will put notes below each picture, everything should be self explanatory.

The extruder:

Just needs 1 lava bucket and 1 water bucket to run forever. Set its orange output in the direction of the crucible.

The crucible:

Will take 20 MJ/tick and melt stone into lava. Set input from the extruder and output to the transposer.

The transposer:

The Item unloader on top of the crucible looks like this -> Transfer as many tin cells as you can into the transposer.

Make sure to set the inputs for the transposer from the magma crucible and the item unloader. set it to output to the item loader.

Item loader on the transposer is set to grab as many lava cells as it can.

The 2 Centrifuges:

The top unloader is set to grab as much lava as possible.

The bottom loader is set to grab as much of the output as possible - the output is Tin, Gold Ingots, Wolfram Cells, and Pyrite Dust. Please note this is important - the name of the tin is Tin. It is not a "Tin Ingot" you must use the item named "Tin" or the centrifuge will not run. An easy way to make sure you're using the right item is to run the centrifuge manually once, and then take the tin that it spits out and use it to program the loader.

The unloader on top of the second centrifuge is set to fill it with as much pyrite as possible.

The loader on the bottom is set to grab as much iron dust and sulphur as possible.

The Automatic Crafting Table!

Remember, the loaders and unloaders don't properly interact with autmatic crafting tables, so you have to have a chest for input and a pipe/pump drawing crafted items into an output chest. The loader and unloader only interact with the input/output chests. Come to think of it, you could use the same chest for both things - I have kept them separate in this setup though.

Again - this tin ingot is just named "Tin". If you use an item called "Tin Ingot" then this unloader will not pull anything. Use the tin from the centrifuge. Also, instruct it to only grab 4 tin per pass instead of 64. The lava centrifuge produces more tin than is required for the lava cells, the ratio is 5 output for 4 input. We are going to route 4 of the output back into the system and save the 1 output in our final chest.

Use the same "Tin" to make the tin cells.

Ask your loader to grab all the output from the autocrafting table and put it back into the system.

Finally! The Output Chest!

Grab all gold, all sulphur, all iron, all wolfram, and 1 Tin (again, make sure it's the proper tin) every passby. You can now route this output chest to an ender chest or do whatever you want with it.

So that's the setup. Please inform me if you find any errors


PS: I am very aware that the bottleneck in this system is actually the magma crucible and not the centrifuge. I decided against having 2 magma cruicbles because it would draw 44 MJ per tick instead of 24 and it would not give an equal gain in tin generation. 1 crucible already produces 3 stacks of tin a day, 1.5 stacks of gold a day and 4 stacks of iron a day. for perspective this is enough to be able to afford replacing all cobblestone waterproof pipes in your base with gold after around a days wait, and constantly supplying the iron needed for replacing 5 steam turbine rotors at 100% output forever - granted you mine enough coal (turtles, quarry, stevescarts, IC miner, etc).

My base currently doesn't run much IC2 so I'm not sure on how much tin I would use constantly. Perhaps you would find the extra 20MJ/t is a good thing to spend to boost tin output. In order to do this, create another igneous extruder and attach it to another powered crucible that feeds into the same liquid transposer - there is space to fit it off to the side.

 

[ItharianEngineering]

Well I just set it up and I noticed something different. I updated everything to 1.4.5 the other day and the items you get from centrifuging lava cells has changed. You still get the 40 tin but you get a tungsten dust, 16 copper ingots, and 6 electrum ingots instead of the iron and gold. Just a note that when things update this will end up changed if you wanted it for something other than tin (the tungsten can still be turned into the wolframium cell). I love the design though, I didn't think that it would go as fast as it does the only problem I have is that the constant minecart moving might cause some people issues

 

[Vovk]

Hmm... The copper output is nice, but this means that the only way to make iron and gold will be aurelia and ferru farms again. with a rock crusher providing a tiny bonus.

now the only way to provide enough iron for steam turbines will be to automatically mine it (easy, especially with mystcraft) or to have a truly massive ferru farm. :c

 

[ItharianEngineering]

You can get the gold from the electrum if you turn it to dust and then centrifuge it. 1 silver and 1 gold dust from every 2 electrum dust, so it isn't a bad trade. The copper can also be macerated and centrifuged to get some gold and nickel which is used a lot in the new update. So it isn't all bad, but the gift of iron was great. Also I don't know how long lava centrifuging takes in 1.4.2 but it takes 42 minutes in 1.4.5.

With the addition of Liquiducts to thermal expansion this allows you to get silver which you can centrifuge for lead which is needed to create them along with obsidian dust and copper. I have found them to be a lot better than buildcraft waterproof pipes so this new result is even better in that way if we aren't busy using the silver elsewhere.

 

[Vovk]

42 minutes in 1.4.2 - with the crucible filling it around once every 50 minutes or so - this leads to around 28 operations a day, producing 8 tin, 4 gold, 10.6 iron, and 1 wolframium per operation. according to your new numbers, the new stats will be

8 tin, 1 tungsten, 16 copper, 6 electrum -> 8 tin, 1 tungsten, 16 copper, 3 gold, 3 silver per operation for 224 tin, 28 tungsten, 448 copper, 84 gold and 84 silver a day. At those numbers I would be sorely tempted to pay the extra 20MJ to speed it up to 40 operations a day, 320 tin, 40 tungsten, 640 copper, 120 gold and 120 silver per day.

 

[Larroke]

oh, the things we do without RP

 

[Skyqula]

now the only way to provide enough iron for steam turbines will be to automatically mine it (easy, especially with mystcraft) or to have a truly massive ferru farm. :c

Fanilla iron golem farm. Takes some time to setup but provides over 27 iron per cell per hour. With 16 cells thats nearly 7 stacks per hour With world anchors there realy is no limit to how much cells you can have running so go crazy!

 

[mauijim44]

why not use netherrack?

 

[Larroke]

why not use netherrack?

Its for a fully sustainable system.. Netherrack while you could use a quarry/ender to collect, it would still require your further input at some point.

 

[Zaxxon1]

off topic a tad: whats your texture pack? i looove it

 

[Vovk]

off topic a tad: whats your texture pack? i looove it

http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/64x-soartex-fanver-smooth-and-clean-ftb.2087/

 

[SilvasRuin]

I would stay away from Iron Golem Farms. They're not easy to put an off-switch on due to the way villagers work, and they do not despawn. On singleplayer they risk overpopulating and lagging your game until you can get to them and kill them, and on servers the danger is even worse. Now, with FTB there are a few ways to have the kill device always on and automatically collect their drops, but then you're risking overflow rather than overpopulation. There are too many ways for an Iron Golem farm to go wrong.

 

[Vovk]

Another point about netherrack - I've timed it and the current system melts 64 lava worth of tin cells in 53 minutes. Using netherrack would remove this limitation, but then the centrifuge would be the bottleneck at 42 minutes. Netherrack would be a good option if you had at least 2 simultaneous lava centrifuges going, however - since that would then place the bottleneck back on the netherrack for highest efficiency.It wasn't because netherrack is not sustainable that I chose to go with this method - it's that the setup for a constant flow of netherrack doesn't reduce the bottleneck by very much, and you could do the same thing by just inputting more MJ and adding another crucible.

If you're worried about MJ efficiency and you NEED to use netherrack - it is not a bad choice whatsoever. The math is quite favorable:

A 64x64 quarry on top of the nether will bring in a maximum of 64x64x128 = 524,288 netherrack per setup. Most of the time this number is significantly lowered due to caves and lava and air 'n such. That much netherrack (we're getting 1 tin cell per netherrack) is 8192 centrifuge operations. each operation costs 42 minutes for 344064 minutes, or 5734.4 hours or 238 days of solid running. The fun part about this number is that we can then assume our netherrack quarry only has 5% of that total netherrack and we're still running for over 11 days straight. An ender chest can plug in on another loader/unloader system and the cart can keep the magma crucible supplied through a loader with 64 netherrack at all times. It would make the setup 2 blocks longer and would require the expensive pair of ender chests, but you could run the nether quarry off pump'd magma if ye wish - the entire MJ cost of the setup would rise from 24 to 30. This setup also assumes that if you have ender pearls for ender chests, you also have ender pearls for factorization infinibarrels. To be safe, you would probably need around 4 of them to hold all the netherrack - 1024 stacks of 64 netherrack is only 64,000 or so, and we need to potentially store over 200,000.

 

[abculatter_2]

This method can also be used to multiply EU generation from methane in Gregtech; simply set up a system with max-size steam boilers, feed them with filled methane fuel cans, and use the MJ to melt cobblestone into lava.
Feed this into geothermals, and you get something around 300K EU from a single fuel can, assuming you are at maximum heat.
And, by the way, one maximum-sized low-pressure steam boiler is capable of producing enough MJ for 3.8 crucibles, and each crucible, assuming default MJ cost, will produce exactly enough lava for 1 geothermal. Unless you use pumps to feed it in, but that would require a 25 second redstone timer, plus a bunch of buckets and dispensers and you'd have to set all THAT up, and it would be rather difficult without Logistics pipes or Redpower.
Anyway, point is, it's ridiculously easy to program a turtle to cut down and replant a redwood or fir tree, which would provide HUGE amounts of carbon to fuel the system, then put a liquid transposer next to an industrial electrolyser and you get infinite hydrogen. Then, to craft methane, use Gregtech's autocrafting table (using any other results in loss of tin) which then goes straight to a centrifuge to bottle it up into fuel cans.
Dedicate however many crucibles as you'd like to supply geothermals, and for the rest of the crucibles, you can just pipe the lava right into the centrifuges, no need to use cells or transposers at all.

Not only will you infinitely generate tin, copper, gold, silver, and tungsten, but also generate some pretty good amounts of EU, rather then spend it.

By the way, if LUA just isn't your thing, there are plenty of ways to abuse forestry for methane production. The simplest way would be to make a double-decker forestry reed farm (it can be done with one harvester, just put it on level with the top farm's dirt, leave a block beneath that for pipes and conduits, then have your other farm RIGHT below that) then pulverize the reeds into sugar, then centrifuge that into carbon and water. Simple peat bog/arboretem set-ups, however, would likely be much more productive.

EDIT: Just realized, you can also use IC2's biofuel, sustainably bottled using gregtech, to accomplish the same end-goal but without the complexity of methane. It would probably also provide less EU, but hey, that's the cost of simplicity.

 

[Vovk]

meh, until red power and logistics pipes get added to the game, rails are still the only way to reliably supply inventories with exact stocks of items. Stick your geothermals on the same rail track as the crucibles and instead of timers, pumps and dispensers just use loaders.

To be honest, not so interested in methane for EU production - IC2 biofuel is much easier to set up especially if you already have a foresty based infrastructure (I like to always have such a system running, but meh - personal preference)

 

[abculatter_2]

Biofuel works perfectly well in this system, too.

Actually, it'd probably be a LOT easier to manage.

 

[TheKyle1]

The real question from me is, you've got this awesome system together that essentially makes free, valuable ingots. So you can do it, why not overdo it?

You could just take any part of the system that seems like its slowing the thing down, then multiply it by 16. You'll have so much tin, and silver, and gold and whatnot that you could just pipe it into a bunch of recyclers!

So I don't know about you guys, but that's what I'm gonna do for sure.

 

[mauijim44]

i do not understand how to start this, my cart gets stuck on the first unloader over the transposer, it gets to the unloader, unloads the empty cells and then when its done, it goes backwards

 

[ItharianEngineering]

Seems you have the boarding tracks facing backward maybe?

 

[Vovk]

most definitely backwards. hit it with a crowbar's right click

EDIT: This system is only good for 1 direction. Don't assume you can just set it up and decide to switch clockwise and counterclockwise. The short elevator track only goes down. The long elevator track only goes up, and there's a cliff on the lower track which a minecart cannot climb.


Also: @ TheKyle1 - You're right in that you can just keep extending this basic idea to produce an arbitrary amount. This is just the smallest system that will work. Remember that for each crucible you add, you need 20 more MJ/tick - for each transposer you add, you need 4 MJ/tick and for each centrifuge you add you need 5 EU/tick. Your power production is the only limit at first. Eventually if you have enough extensions on the same rail (I'm going to guess around 50 crucibles) you will need to stop because your minecart will not be able to distribute fast enough. When that is the case, you need to start building another one.

Note that a 50 crucible system would output over 200 stacks of iron a day or around 1 stack every 7.2 minutes. This would most likely produce a buttload of lag.