1.6.4 Liquid Fuel Boiler fuel changes.

Sarda

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...What happened to these things? Currently Ethanol/Biofuel produces 8k heat & Fuel produces 24k heat, 1/4 what they used to produce in 1.5.2! What is the point of the Boiler now? The steam engines and steam turbines still produce the exact same amount of power, its not like they were quadrupled to make up for this. Sure the Boiler was better then engines but it was a small amount better even lowering the heat to 90% of 1.5.2's would have probably made them break even with just burning fuel in standard engines. There's no possible way to even break even now with Ethanol, and with how fast this thing eats fuel you'd need a Mystcraft oil ocean to keep up with it.

Edit Quick testing: It took over 700 buckets of refined bc fuel just to get to 100c. That's insane. You need multiple fuel lines into the Boiler just to keep up at the start, a Ethanol boiler needed 3 fuel lines at 100% or it had gaps in the heating process. These things are totally worthless, back to making towers of engines.
 
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Larandar

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In fact it need a true Forestry tree farm with good production using tree breeding, or a big Steve'sCart tree farm.
I don't think it's a bad since 36 HP boiler produce 10 time more than the average needed power for a base. Even with a quarry running all the time.
But It's true that the same boiler, in solid fuel is more than easy to power with charcoal.
 
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PierceSG

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Is this change hard coded or is there an entry in the config files?

I wouldn't be too upset if the value can be configured easily.
 

Harvest88

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Well at least Force Engines are an option.. I don't get it either except it could be just to break that fuel looping.
 

Sarda

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Is this change hard coded or is there an entry in the config files?

I wouldn't be too upset if the value can be configured easily.

There appears to be a config that's set to 1.0 by default, to get the same as pre-nerf it would need to be 4.0. Which everyone either has to do to make it useful at all or simply forget the liquid boiler even exists there is no other real option.
 

Ripley

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Not sure why they nerfed BC fuel.
Nerfing MFR biofuel was fine as this thing is way too easy to produce.

The log says "Adjusted Fuel/Biofuel Boiler default heat values as per Player's new balance paradigm. 1/4th previous values.".
This changes also affects buildcraft so boilers are still a better option than combustion engines in the long term.

Btw anyone know if you can use firestones to heat up liquid fueled boilers? My guess is you can't, that makes solid fueled boiler seem like a very good option now(if you can find firestone ore that is, that thing is rare).
 

Sarda

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Not sure why they nerfed BC fuel.
Nerfing MFR biofuel was fine as this thing is way too easy to produce.

The log says "Adjusted Fuel/Biofuel Boiler default heat values as per Player's new balance paradigm. 1/4th previous values.".
This changes also affects buildcraft so boilers are still a better option than combustion engines in the long term.

Btw anyone know if you can use firestones to heat up liquid fueled boilers? My guess is you can't, that makes solid fueled boiler seem like a very good option now(if you can find firestone ore that is, that thing is rare).

You can't use firestones on a Liquid Boiler. Also the fuel burn rate still shows the exact same for all the standard bc engines 6mj x 100,000 ticks as it was in 1.5, unless its bugged.
 

Omicron

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As far as I gathered from changelog snippets and forum/video/livestream comments, what happened was something roughly like this:

A bunch of mod authors sat down together and worked out some kinks in cross-mod integration. During that, one of them proposed aligning various fuel types more strictly to the "coal standard" set by vanilla Minecraft. That doesn't necessarily mean making them worse, but rather that all fuel types got a good hard look in terms of how much effort it took to make them vs. the burn value they yielded, in relation to other options. It was found that 1.) MFR biofuel was way out of that line; 2.) Forestry biomass & ethanol was way out of that line in the default gamemode; and 3.) Buildcraft fuel used to be balanced due to its rarity, but with various changes over the course of 1.4 - 1.6 making oil extremely common and even renewable, it was deemed in need of rebalancing.

As a result:
- MFR biofuel got nerfed in boilers. It still continues to work as always within MFR itself, because either Powercrystals was not involved, or was not interested in standardizing fuels across mods
- Forestry biomass got nerfed in biogas engines and the bio generator, and IC2's new semifluid generator got a matching value
- Forestry ethanol got nerfed in boilers and combustion engines and the bio generator, and IC2's new semifluid generator got a matching value
- Buildcraft fuel got nerfed in boilers and combustion engines, and IC2's new semifluid generator got a matching value

In addition:
- Railcraft gained config settings for the value of MFR biofuel and Buildcraft fuel in boilers (but not ethanol, that's handled by Forestry)
- Buildcraft gained config settings for the value of refined fuel in combustion engines
- Buildcraft gained config settings for the value of unrefined oil in combustion engines
- Forestry gained config settings for the value of biomass in biogas engines and bio generators
- Forestry gained config settings for the value of ethanol in combustion engines, bio generators and Railcraft boilers
- IC2 gained config settings for the value of all individual fuel types in the semifluid generator


Note that you may see more fuel rebalancing in the future, and possibly other mods aligning themselves as well. Don't ask me though, I can only speculate.
 

Sarda

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Well this will make the gregtech people happy I guess. Just making and refining the liquid fuels now takes so much of the potential mj you would have got out of it you might as well set up MFR tree farms, make charcoal and run everything with arrays of sterling engines and solid boilers that way.
 

Ripley

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@Omicron:
I'm curious about your 3) about the BC fuel, which changes?
It still seems quite rare.
 

Sarda

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@Omicron:
I'm curious about your 3) about the BC fuel, which changes?
It still seems quite rare.

Apparently they believe everyone has access to a stable Mystcraft oil ocean/oil field now so they made it a requirement to use a boiler or a combustion engine. Seems in Railcraft/BC/Forestry if theres a possibility, even if its extremely rare or difficult to obtain then its made the standard for balancing.
 
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Omicron

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@Omicron:
I'm curious about your 3) about the BC fuel, which changes?
It still seems quite rare.

There were quite a few tweaks in oil well generation over time. I remember when I played on a long-term map back in 1.2.5, I had this notion of a fossil fuel powerplant. I built a really nice refinery area, with tanks and pipes all over the place, and next to it a set of combustion engines. Since back then, MJ pretty much had no real use beyond driving refineries and quarries, pretty much all of it got converted into IC2 power, which fed my actual processing factory. It's relevant here because I remember having to jump through massive hoops getting enough oil. I played with 4 other people on the map, and between all five of us, we found three oil wells. All of them small sized. I claimed them all, and that was just barely enough for what I wanted to do, but if any of the others had wanted any it would have been difficult. We explored almost 100 MB worth of map area, too, and found maybe a grand total of one thousand buckets of the stuff in the entire time the map existed. Nowadays, if you're exploring that much, you're pretty much guaranteed a far larger amount of oil. People routinely fill tanks that contain more than one thousand buckets of oil, as if it was nothing special. And it really isn't, not anymore at least.

The probability for really large oil wells went up significantly after the generation system was changed to incorporate the bedrock "oil spring" blocks creating renewable oil underneath large wells. Because you automatically get a large well when one of those spawns, you have a far higher number of large wells nowadays than you used to. The formula was also tweaked to generate more mid-sized ones instead of small ones, and mid-sized deposits were made bigger. Then, additional biomes gained the ability to spawn oil lakes, like deserts do. The way this was implemented also allowed biome mods to specify whether they want oil lakes in certain biomes or not. It's significant because biomes which do feature oil lakes gained a 50% boost in the probability to generate proper oil wells as well. Oceans had the chance straight doubled. And to top it all off, we now have the two oil field biomes, which contain ridiculous amounts of the stuff. Oh, and I already mentioned the oil springs producing renewable oil by spawning in new sourceblocks every so often.

Oh, and somewhat related, refined fuel did see a 20% output boost in 1.4.x over its original value. That was around the same time the quarry got reworked to accept more power to work faster.

You can read in detail about all of these changes in the github commit history, but I warn you, it's a massive list and it's hard to search for keywords.

Apparently they believe everyone has access to a stable Mystcraft oil ocean/oil field now so they made it a requirement to use a boiler or a combustion engine. Seems in Railcraft/BC/Forestry if theres a possibility, even if its extremely rare or difficult to obtain then its made the standard for balancing.

Cynically whining about something generally doesn't help, much less if you didn't even bother to do your homework. If you want people to take your statements sriously, get yourself a source you can quote.
 

Sarda

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Cynically whining about something generally doesn't help, much less if you didn't even bother to do your homework. If you want people to take your statements sriously, get yourself a source you can quote.

I could honestly careless if you take me sriously, I did all the testing myself. There is zero ways to make Ethanol fuel a boiler with positive energy output, when you factor in the MJ for the growing of saplings/other fermentables, the power draw of the fermenters and then the stills/refineries, the passive MJ draw of the machines (another poor design choice) you always end with a negative MJ overall even with a capped heat boiler.

Fuel is now used at a exorbitant rate, you need nearly a entire steel tank of near max size to get a single 36hp to max heat which is quite a few oil wells which run dry fast (the fact that oil springs blocks exist are meaningless because they regenerate oil so slowly I couldn't careless if I found a 50x50x1 block of them). You practically need to go around constantly tapping new wells now and recovering equiptment from dry ones just to keep up with demand if you don't have a oil ocean, the oil in normal oceans is again mostly useless as its to much work to bother tapping them (pumps frequenetly begin pumping water on the way to the ocean floor unless you incase the entire oil shoot in blocks so the pump doesn't screw up which takes alot of time.).

There's no cynical whining here, this is fact proven "if they would have invested 5 minutes and thought about it they would realize that all there did was make liquid boilers useless."
 

Hoff

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Follow them mindset of a dev who is changing the mod he works on to fit an extremely small niche within the modded mc community? Brilliant. It's also brilliant of them to make major changes one after another before a majority of the players are able to give feedback.
 

Harvest88

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Yea I just think it's just a way too much of an overhaul just to stop that 39% excess fuel looping with max size HP boilers. (That's was net gain even after refining)
 

Hoff

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Yea I just think it's just a way too much of an overhaul just to stop that 39% excess fuel looping with max size HP boilers. (That's was net gain even after refining)
No way man 400 iron/steel(not to mention the required infrastructure), stack or two of redstone, a decent amount of diamonds, and the other things I don't wanna think about is a totally trivial inestment for 56 mj/t. I mean it's not like you can't make the setup a day into your world. It's so easy how do you not see it. It's not like it wasn't already a poor investment compared to charcoal anyway. Power is the whole goal of these mods anyway; right?

What a joke. Let Player lead those mods to the chopping block of mods who have outlived their creativeness.
 

Omicron

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I could honestly careless if you take me sriously, I did all the testing myself. There is zero ways to make Ethanol fuel a boiler with positive energy output, when you factor in the MJ for the growing of saplings/other fermentables, the power draw of the fermenters and then the stills/refineries, the passive MJ draw of the machines (another poor design choice) you always end with a negative MJ overall even with a capped heat boiler.

Another statement you cannot back up with facts.

A minimum-size multifarm with willow trees (which require a grand total of one breeding cycle and no expensive treealyzer, something you can finish long before you even start to make steel) will produce roughly 110 buckets of ethanol per hour (source , data describes two-hour test runs). Let's assume you have one fermenter and two stills, which won't be under full load for this setup. At most 15+1 MJ/t for the fermenter, and each still takes what, 5+1? I forget, but the values show ingame if you run 1.6.x. The multifarm takes less than 1 MJ/t and has no power perdition. Let's eyeball it at ca. 25 MJ/t for the entire production stage over the full runtime, which might be overestimating it, depending on whether or not I got the stills wrong.

At 8,000 HU per bucket, a 36 LP boiler will consume one bucket of ethanol every 50.5 seconds (source). Meaning for every hour it needs between 71 and 72 buckets. Conveniently the setup described above produces 110 buckets, taking about 25 MJ/t to do so. This leaves a positive energy output of 47 MJ/t - roughly two thirds of the boiler's output remains available for use, without factoring in the ca. 52% ethanol overproduction that you could be using to run another 12 LP boiler. Which could be powering the production stage pretty much by itself, leaving the entire 36 LP output as net gain.

Using HP boilers changes nothing about this, it simply requires twice as much fuel for twice as much output in the same timeframe.

Additionally you can increase a fermenter's output by 50% without making it require more energy by using fruit juice. And if you use a higher sappiness trait - since the willow is only in the middle of the pack - you also get increased output for zero extra energy cost (and it's even multiplicative with the fruit juice bonus).
 

Yusunoha

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I both love and hate the changes. I love them because they actually make you build big builds for power production and requires you to do some actual work for the best production. but I hate it because it also makes the chance of automating it all very late game. but seeing as I often reach an end-game point and don't feel like continueing anymore, this will be a good chance for me.