A puzzler [buildcraft]

[Drbretto]

I'd have gone with Magmatic Dynamo's myself, since they can be power boosted, but they require Invar which is often a pain to get.

It wasn't an option for me. This was my first foray into the wild world of Minecraft mods, and I have a meticulouslt selected custom modpack. I figure if it's worth it, I'll add it when I need it. Right now, I'm trying to avoid any unnecessary ores and whatnot in the world. I have no doubt you're right in that would be the better option.

But, I tried the lava generators and... Wow. It's so much easier it's almost a letdown. I'm trying to take my sweet ass time going through this mod, so I don't mind using what immediately feels like a completely obsolete method up until this point, but the difference is crazy. No overheating, nearly infinite fuel. It's totally hands free. Compact setup. It's so easy it's blowing my mind, lol.

If you're willing to cheat a little; have the tanks to fill/empty and use a separate feed for the shower/fountain effect. (this isn't the technical solution, rather a practical means to achieve those visual effects)

Put a gate on the pipe directly feeding the tank and set it to;

Tank empty= blue signal
Fluid in pipe= blue signal
Tank full=red signal​

As soon as the tank is empty, it'll turn on the supply feeding the tank. The fluid in the pipe keeps the filling signal on until the tank is full, when red can be used to shut it off.
You can then create the illusion of random filling/emptying by differing the flow rates through each individual tank, and sometimes having one tank empty into another.

Alternately a few pieces from RedPower may be useful; a randomiser, timer, and 2 toggle latches per tank. One latch controls filling, and the other emptying- using the randomiser to pulse the latches.
However the randomiser pulses rather quickly- so you won't see any real change in tank level, which is why you'll want the timer to activate the randomiser only occasionally. (say it takes 10 minutes to fill the tank from empty- you'll want a 2 minute count on the timer, so the randomiser has a chance to change the fluid level by 1/5th)

I will read this post as soon as I can understand it!

 

[Drbretto]

Using this newfound stability to set up on the quarry, turn on the shaders, turn off the HUD and record the whole rest of the quarry overnight. I'll have to find some editing software and turn it into a time lapse. It'll be cool because there's a little duel between some water and some lava, so it's forming some shapes. If it ends up being a good watch, I'll post it here.

 

[Drbretto]

I don't think it recorded right! and there was some cool stuff, too. Sped up and turned into a 5-6 minute time lapse video, I think it'll be mesmerizing. But, if this one didn't record, I'll just do another one under better conditions. This one, I kept having to stop and fix my engines or whatever until the end. I also went through about 15 different shaders trying to find the perfect one, only to fin out the SEUS shaders were still the king and I just had a setting off that broke them.

I'll dig through my videos. I just let the thing record all the time, so I have like a TB of raw footage to check. If I can put something cool together, I will soon. If not, I'll just set up the quarry somewhere more scenic and stable anyway. I think a quarry time lapse with maxed out SEUS and 128x textures will be pretty mesmerizing, though.

 

[Drbretto]

Is there a limit to how many items you can fit in a transport pipe before it explodes or something?

I have vacuum hopper floors leading into my auto-sorter 5000. I was upgrading my common blocks chests to jabba barrels, so I used the dolly to move the obsidian chests full of blocks over each if the vacuum hoppers, then broke each chest over the hopper to drop hundreds of stacks of blocks all at once, over 7 hoppers simultaneously. These hoppers output at about the same rate as a combustion engine on a wood pipe, so I pumped in one hell of a load all at once.

Then, I heard an explosion like a creeper, and this base has been creeper free since '93. On the other side of the room, there's a gigantic pile of ores flying around all over the place and one single pipe missing. Did I just overload it and blow it up or is this some weird bug?

Btw, the quarry did record and I'll mess around with a time lapse tomorrow, just to see what it'll look like.