Tinker's Steelworks
Steam Power Guide
Steam Power Guide
This mini-guide is written and should be correct as of TSteelworks 0.0.4.2-Fix2. Improvements and updates to the mod will likely invalidate this guide as steam power is currently a work in progress and not quite ready for prime time.
All that aside, steam power is currently viable and can produce considerable power for a fairly inexpensive setup cost. This guide will show how to setup the high oven to provide over 160 RF/tick, or almost 480 RF/tick utilizing two high ovens.
If you aren't familiar with the basics of Tinker's Steelworks, please read Tinker's Steelworks for Newbies (A Reference Guide for the Rest Of Us!) by ShneekeyTheLost. He does a very good job explaining the basics of the mod and how to get started using it.
High Oven Setup
In order to produce steam, the high oven has to reach 1300 degrees. In the current version of the mod, that can be reached with a 3x3x3 oven. In the previous versions, it required a 3x3x4 oven. To fully automate the high oven to produce steam, there are only a couple requirements to the physical building of the high oven.
- Scorched drain for water input (x2 if using fluiducts)
- Scorched drain for steam output
- Scorched duct for fuel input
- Redstone signal to the controller
In this setup, I will be using AE to supply the water, so I only have the two scorched drains installed (center) and one scorched duct (lower right) set to the fuel slot to feed charcoal blocks to the oven.
Supplying the Water (and early game setup)
Wouldn't it be great if you could just hook up an aqueous accumulator to the high oven directly and get steam? Well, it's not quite that simple. The high oven has some limitations in the regard that make this type of setup simply not work.
Fluids have to be in the bottom of the tank in order to be pulled out. This on it's own isn't too bad, but coupled with the next limitation it is downright disastrous. Any added fluids are placed in the bottom of the tank. That's right! If you add in water, you can no longer pull out steam!
Based on my informal calculations, it takes about 10 ticks to convert any accumulated water in the high oven into steam. A single aqueous accumulator generates 800mb of water about every 15 ticks. This should be slow enough to connect directly however it doesn't work. It takes time for the fluiduct to completely empty itself of fluid. In the time it takes for the fluiduct to completely empty, more water is generated leaving water constantly accumulating inside the high oven.
However, you can successfully split the output of a single aqueous accumulator into two high ovens and generate a constant (but small) amount of steam with absolutely no issues. No further automation is required, and you can run this indefinitely.
I looked into this further, the qualifying factor is not the second high oven, although that does work, but the second fluiduct connection. This second connection is what allows the fluiduct to clear the duct fast enough for the water to be converted into steam and then removed via the steam output. Thus, if you connect a single aqueous accumulator to a high oven using two (or better three) fluiduct connections, you can generate steam automatically using a single high oven.
Water to Steam Conversion
The high oven must reach 1300 degrees before you add any water. If water is placed in the high oven before that temperature is reached, steam will not be generated. Water inside the high oven will convert to steam every 10 ticks. This conversion only takes place though if water is in the bottom position inside the tank. If you swap the position of the steam and water, so steam is on the bottom, no additional water will convert to steam until the steam is completely extracted leaving the water in the bottom of the tank.
Extracting the Steam
The fluid extraction is fairly quick. The only requirement is that you need to add a servo to the extraction fluiduct and either blacklist water, or whitelist steam, and set redstone control to disabled. This will let the fluiduct output constantly and extract the steam the moment it reaches the bottom of the tank.
Practical Power Generation
The little bit of water that is generated by a single aqueous accumulator doesn't generate much steam, nor much power. Since all water in the high oven tank is converted to steam every 10 ticks, the best way to increase the steam output is to get more water in the tank.
To get more water in the high oven tank, we need a larger water source.
This mockup shows the connections needed using fluiducts. The water source can be supplied by any number of methods. A redstone signal will be used to activate the fluiduct feeding the high oven. With the redstone signal on, water will be pumped into the high oven. With it off, the water will stop flowing and the water in the high oven tank will be converted to steam. At that point, the steam just needs to be extracted and sent to your steam consumer of choice to produce power.
You will want the fluiduct connections to the high oven to be fairly short as the entirety of the ducts need to be completely empty of water for the high oven to convert it all to steam. This will force the use of a buffer tank of some sort as shown in the mockup above. You can fill the buffer tank in any method you see fit. It does not matter if the buffer tank runs out of water. You of course will not generate any steam, but the power will start flowing again the moment water is reintroduced into the system.
The Redstone Clock
To turn the water input off and on automatically, we will need to use a redstone clock. Since water will only convert completely to steam after no more water is being added to the high oven, we need enough time for the water to stop flowing, convert to steam, then be extracted. It takes time for the fluiducts to completely empty, and an additional 10 ticks for the water to convert to steam. With so much time involved, I used a very slow clock of 60 ticks (3 seconds). Every three seconds, the clock with switch states. It pumps water for 3 seconds, then while off, the water is converted to steam, extracted, and sent to the power plant. Using this clock with a single fluiduct connection feeding water did not allow enough time for everything to happen. Adding the second fluiduct connection allows for everything to happen in the time allotted.
In my setup, I used a MFR rednet controller to output a square wave pattern. I set the input to be a constant of 60 (ticks) and the output to be the color connection on the rednet cable. This makes for a very simple MFR rednet controller based clock. You can also use repeaters, T flip-flops, or other cyclic setups that will generate an equal period redstone signal (same length on as off).
This setup using fluiducts and a 60 tick clock will generate enough steam to almost fully power a steam turbine from MFR (160 RF/tick).
Variation on a Theme
With all the infrastructure to automate this setup already in place, it's a simple matter to double your output. Use the same redstone clock to run a second high oven producing steam. If you invert the signal to the second high oven, you will have only one oven active at a time. This will help even out your steam generation and double your output for just the cost of a second high oven and a few fluiducts.
This setup using fluiducts and a 60 tick clock will generate enough steam to almost fully power two steam turbines from MFR (~300 RF/tick)
An AE Configuration
AE along with ExtraCells, has a fluid export bus which allows you to export the water directly into the high oven without the lag associated with fluiducts. This will allow you to tighten your timing a bit (if you so choose) and reduce the "dead" time where the system has fully exported all its steam and is waiting to receive water with the next clock cycle.
The default configuration for the fluid export bus needs to be changed to match the settings below.
The redstone setting is set to the "emit when on" and the fluid volume is set to the middle option (250mb/tick). Using this setup along with the same 60 tick clock will produce enough steam to fully power a MFR steam turbine and about 1/3 of another turbine. If you use a second high oven with an inverted clock setup, you can almost fully power three MFR steam turbines for nearly 480 RF/tick!
An AE Mockup
Here is a single high oven as pictured in the first image, but with all the components attached. The MFR rednet connection is on the fluid export bus providing the clock signal. Next to that is the precision export bus set to export charcoal blocks into the oven. I didn't have the servo installed on the fluiducts in the picture, but it would be set to blacklist water, and redstone ignored.
Other Considerations
- The high oven has an
internal tank limit of 100 buckets. Water will cease converting to steam if you reach this limit! The tank limit is based on the size of the oven. a 3x3x3 oven is limited to 20 buckets.
- You must consume all the steam you produce. You will want to over-build your steam consumers a bit to make sure that all your steam is used every cycle. If the steam output backs up, the high oven will eventually hit the
100bucket limit above and the oven will stop working. - You need a place for the power to go. With TE steam dynamos and MFR steam turbines, if nothing needs power, no steam will be consumed which means you will back up you high oven eventually and it will stop working. To this end, the high oven needs to be your primary method of producing power. Other sources will need to be turned on and off to make sure all the power produced by the high oven is completely consumed.
I can see a few places where the steam output of the high oven can be pushed to extreme limits and produce lots and lots of power. I can see generating over 1k RF/tick easily with
Since the amount of steam generated is exactly proportional to the amount of water in the high oven, more water = more steam. The fluid export bus has a high setting that will export 1000mb of water per tick for a cost of 60ae. While this is a high cost, the cost per mb of water is actually quite low compared to the medium setting that was used in the previous examples.
The trick to this all is to take the normal redstone clock (Sine wave - square) and instead of driving the fluid export bus directly, pass it through to a one shot pulse, then to a pulse lengthener, then finally to the fluid export bus. This will allow you to keep your normal off state for the fluid export bus to allow time for the steam to be produced and used, and drastically shorten the amount of ticks the fluid export bus is pumping water into the high oven at 1000mb per tick!
You should also be able to use this same trick to scale your steam production. With some fancy rednet setup and comparators, you could automatically change the pulse lengthener settings away from the standard 60 tick clock and lower it automatically as your power requirements decrease thereby preventing the high ovens from getting backed up with water/steam and cease functioning. (In reality, it is just easier to AND the output of your timer circuit to a switch and turn the system off and on as needed using a redstone energy cell as a buffer.)
Thanks
I hope this little mini-guide has helped others get going with producing steam using the high oven from Tinker's Steelworks. Thanks to @Toops for making the mod, and to @ShneekeyTheLost whose guide and subsequent thread posts prompted me to investigate this further.
Last edited:
