The problem: A familiar one: not enough diamonds. MFFS needs tons of those. I know of two mods that provide ways to make diamonds from coal: IC2 and RotaryCraft. IC2's way is fairly complicated but probably not too hard to automate with Applied Energistics autocrafting. However, it is inferior to RotaryCraft's process which gives you one diamond for 16 coal instead of 64. Automating that, however, is a little tricky because of the compactor's slot mechanics, unless you want to go "brute force" and use four compactors, which would also require 16MW of power (equal to about 4kRF/t).
Once connected to your power and storage system, this diamond factory will continuously convert coal into diamonds at a 16:1 rate using one RotaryCraft compactor, in batches of 2048 coal, creating 128 diamonds per batch and stopping only if you switch it off or you run out of coal. Power requirement is a fairly modest 4MW (about 750 RF/t).
The pictures first:
Built into the wall is a standard RoC compactor setup powered by a magnetostatic engine. At the heart of the contraption on the left is the black block at its centre: a Transvector interface. It is linked to the compactor and allows me to connect five additional pipes to it, even though the compactor has two sides occupied by heating and power. For all intents and purposes, the Transvector Interface is the compactor.
The logic goes like this: each of the four iron chests stores the raw material for one of the four stages of the diamond creation process, starting with coal. Products will be drawn out of the bottom, intermediate ones routed to their chests and diamonds down below the floor into my logistics pipes system. For each chest except the last, an iron AND gate checks if the chest is empty. If it is, it activates the pipe signal which is detected by the gate next to it, which will then activate the redstone signal controlling the itemduct pulling the raw material for the NEXT stage of the creation process into the compactor.
Note: If the chest for any given stage is empty, then it means one of two things: either the creation process hasn't reached this stage yet, in which case it is unproblematic to activate the itemduct since the next chest won't have any items in it either, or all raw material for the current stage is at least in its itemduct, which means the chest for the next stage has items, and its itemduct can also be activated, since the items for the next stage won't be able to get into the compactor until its slots are empty, and that won't happen unless the itemduct has delivered all of its content and it's all processed.
Meanwhile, as the diamonds are created, there is a logic gate attached to the logistics pipes Mk2 (!) Extractor that emits a redstone pulse every time a diamond is extracted from the bottom chest. The Counter counts them (picture 2). As soon as the count has reached 0 from 128, that means that the 2048 coal of a batch have been converted into 128 diamonds, and it will (1) loop back to reset itself to 128 and (2) activate the signal that will reset the counter on the floor above to 16 (from 0). Resetting the counter will activate the Timer which will start to pulse, each pulse activating the Logistics Pipes Mk3 (!) Extractor module for a very short time (gate is set to "redstone signal off = disable pipe") which will draw 2 stacks of coal out of the diamond chest (amount seems reliable based on experimentation). At the end, it will have drawn 16x2 stacks of coal (2048) into the chest for the raw material for the first stage. The itemduct drawing from there into the compactor is controlled by the factory's main switch. If you leave it on, the process will continue as long as there is coal in the diamond chest. You can use the diamond chest either as an item sink for coal in a Logistics pipes system (fed from below) or if you use AE for storage, set an export bus exporting your coal there.
So why batches of 2048? Well, for the compactor to work, all four slots must be filled with equal amounts of raw material for the current stage, so unless you have some external logic being able to control the amount of items that goes into each of the four input slots, you'll need enough coal that the last stage of the process starts with four full stacks.
So, that's it. I'm sure it won't be long until someone comes with a simpler design, but that's ok. I don't pretend to be the best Minecraft automation designer. Still, there are so many tried and proven ways to do things that the opportunity to come up with a new design is fairly rare. Anyway, I'm fairly satisfied with this. There may still be one kink in the system: in my last test, it appears to have lost some raw materials at some intermediate stage as I didn't get four stacks of Lonsdaleite out of my 32 stacks of coal. Hard to say since I was still making changes to the setup and sometimes I inadvertently knock off pipes. I'm going to run a final test. It is possible that some items in stuffed itemducts can be lost if you leave the game and re-load, and since a batch takes several hours to process.
Once connected to your power and storage system, this diamond factory will continuously convert coal into diamonds at a 16:1 rate using one RotaryCraft compactor, in batches of 2048 coal, creating 128 diamonds per batch and stopping only if you switch it off or you run out of coal. Power requirement is a fairly modest 4MW (about 750 RF/t).
The pictures first:
Built into the wall is a standard RoC compactor setup powered by a magnetostatic engine. At the heart of the contraption on the left is the black block at its centre: a Transvector interface. It is linked to the compactor and allows me to connect five additional pipes to it, even though the compactor has two sides occupied by heating and power. For all intents and purposes, the Transvector Interface is the compactor.
The logic goes like this: each of the four iron chests stores the raw material for one of the four stages of the diamond creation process, starting with coal. Products will be drawn out of the bottom, intermediate ones routed to their chests and diamonds down below the floor into my logistics pipes system. For each chest except the last, an iron AND gate checks if the chest is empty. If it is, it activates the pipe signal which is detected by the gate next to it, which will then activate the redstone signal controlling the itemduct pulling the raw material for the NEXT stage of the creation process into the compactor.
Note: If the chest for any given stage is empty, then it means one of two things: either the creation process hasn't reached this stage yet, in which case it is unproblematic to activate the itemduct since the next chest won't have any items in it either, or all raw material for the current stage is at least in its itemduct, which means the chest for the next stage has items, and its itemduct can also be activated, since the items for the next stage won't be able to get into the compactor until its slots are empty, and that won't happen unless the itemduct has delivered all of its content and it's all processed.
Meanwhile, as the diamonds are created, there is a logic gate attached to the logistics pipes Mk2 (!) Extractor that emits a redstone pulse every time a diamond is extracted from the bottom chest. The Counter counts them (picture 2). As soon as the count has reached 0 from 128, that means that the 2048 coal of a batch have been converted into 128 diamonds, and it will (1) loop back to reset itself to 128 and (2) activate the signal that will reset the counter on the floor above to 16 (from 0). Resetting the counter will activate the Timer which will start to pulse, each pulse activating the Logistics Pipes Mk3 (!) Extractor module for a very short time (gate is set to "redstone signal off = disable pipe") which will draw 2 stacks of coal out of the diamond chest (amount seems reliable based on experimentation). At the end, it will have drawn 16x2 stacks of coal (2048) into the chest for the raw material for the first stage. The itemduct drawing from there into the compactor is controlled by the factory's main switch. If you leave it on, the process will continue as long as there is coal in the diamond chest. You can use the diamond chest either as an item sink for coal in a Logistics pipes system (fed from below) or if you use AE for storage, set an export bus exporting your coal there.
So why batches of 2048? Well, for the compactor to work, all four slots must be filled with equal amounts of raw material for the current stage, so unless you have some external logic being able to control the amount of items that goes into each of the four input slots, you'll need enough coal that the last stage of the process starts with four full stacks.
So, that's it. I'm sure it won't be long until someone comes with a simpler design, but that's ok. I don't pretend to be the best Minecraft automation designer. Still, there are so many tried and proven ways to do things that the opportunity to come up with a new design is fairly rare. Anyway, I'm fairly satisfied with this. There may still be one kink in the system: in my last test, it appears to have lost some raw materials at some intermediate stage as I didn't get four stacks of Lonsdaleite out of my 32 stacks of coal. Hard to say since I was still making changes to the setup and sometimes I inadvertently knock off pipes. I'm going to run a final test. It is possible that some items in stuffed itemducts can be lost if you leave the game and re-load, and since a batch takes several hours to process.
Last edited:
