Agrarian Skys help, venting, and discussion thread

[GreenZombie]

Rant - Having setup a Big Reactor / MFR Laser I tore down my entire automated sieve and smeltery operation and replaced it with pulverizers and redstone furnaces.

And find my ME system filling slowly up with "Platinum Gravel".

 

[Adonis0]

Looks like no one's answered my query, so I'll ask one more time:

Honestly, is there some way of improving the farm area, as I would like to be able to grow many more things, like soybeans and onions (for practicality and a quest)

Have only the upgrade that you need, no more, no less. It will stop your farms from intersecting, but also speed them up as there's less area to check.

Want to cover a 5x5 area? Only put in a lapis upgrade.
what about a 9x9? Put in the +3 upgrade
(Upgrades apply to the radius, not diameter of the square)

 

[Xtremekiwi]

Out of curiosity, how do range upgrades affect harvesters? Planters I have no real problem figuring it out, but harvesters...

 

[Marsupilami]

Out of curiosity, how do range upgrades affect harvesters? Planters I have no real problem figuring it out, but harvesters...

You take the upgrade level x 2 and add that to the default range of 3. So a harvester with a tier 3 upgrade is 3 + (3x2) = 9. So a 9x9 square centered in front of the harvester. When in doubt, holding a precision sledge hammer in your hand will help you visualize the area that is affected for most MfR machines.

 

[Crumbology]

Has anyone found a good way to control your Big reactor on this pack? I would normally use computercraft or a state cell to control my Big Reactor I an using MFR which I found here

http://www.otegamers.com/topic/9459-big-reactors-resonant-rise-2833-and-you/

and it works very well but not when you change over to steam. I am looking for good way to control my reactor.

I use a similar method with the big reactor itself, but when I switched over to steam it seemed to become uncontrollable, I just try to use as much of the output as possible and let the excess be wasted at the moment. It's a tough mod to get info about and with turbine speed up and slow down testing in creative is tedious.

On the planters and harvesters I also go 9x9 and add more farms as necessary, can be easily hydrated and takes a lot of crop speedup before the harvesters are overwhelmed. Bigger farms with single harvesters sometimes can't keep up with regular plant growth. Lots of the harvestcraft stuff doesn't even require a planter,

 

[GreenZombie]

My redstone controlled BigReactor is NOT turning off. I have a simple redstone latch turning on at 10% reactor energy capacity and turning off at 90% capacity. A 3rd redstone port is set to control the power from the input.

I deep finding the reactor on, at 100% capacity, I cycle the setting on the port and it turns off... stays off till the power drops to 10%, automatically turns on, but then stays on.

 

[ratchet freak]

double check that the latch actually does what you want, there are multiple latches that each behave differently

 

[Crumbology]

My redstone controlled BigReactor is NOT turning off. I have a simple redstone latch turning on at 10% reactor energy capacity and turning off at 90% capacity. A 3rd redstone port is set to control the power from the input.

I deep finding the reactor on, at 100% capacity, I cycle the setting on the port and it turns off... stays off till the power drops to 10%, automatically turns on, but then stays on.

I've used that method before, found it pretty unreliable also, the rednet controlled version linked by the fella I replied to is really reliable and pretty simple to set up even if you don't know rednet.

 

[GreenZombie]

double check that the latch actually does what you want, there are multiple latches that each behave differently

I can see the output from the latch itself is correct the redstone torch, and the redstone reactor port, both are dull/off in the intended off state.
The Big Reactor GUI is somewhat confusing as the mod uses a button with text on to display its (what I presume to be "current") state. But Ive tried both modes available for power control (toggle on redstone pulse, and directly controlled by redstone state) and it does not turn off when the redstone signal goes low.
Which is odd as I have a test world in which I prototyped the controlling latch, and there it works perfectly. Ive even checked the redstone source and Big Reactor redstone control port are in the same chunk (allthough it is close to the edge).

I think I need to just stop messing around and use a MFR Rednet controller.

 

[Crumbology]

I can see the output from the latch itself is correct the redstone torch, and the redstone reactor port, both are dull/off in the intended off state.
The Big Reactor GUI is somewhat confusing as the mod uses a button with text on to display its (what I presume to be "current") state. But Ive tried both modes available for power control (toggle on redstone pulse, and directly controlled by redstone state) and it does not turn off when the redstone signal goes low.
Which is odd as I have a test world in which I prototyped the controlling latch, and there it works perfectly. Ive even checked the redstone source and Big Reactor redstone control port are in the same chunk (allthough it is close to the edge).

I think I need to just stop messing around and use a MFR Rednet controller.

The rednet controller doesn't turn the reactor on or off either, it changes the output of the reactor to match the demand so it runs pretty efficiently, shouldn't have to pay it any attention unless you start using more power than it can produce.

 

[Marsupilami]

A decent PRC setup that works well for normal reactors is detailed in one of PurpleMentat's videos. It runs constantly, but the fuel usage when there is little/no draw is almost nill.

Skip to 34 minutes in.

As for a reactor that has been converted to steam, I just manually adjust the rods to approximate the steam output I need and let it run constantly at that level. Steam turbines are slow to spool up RPMs, so I use them to provide power that I know will always draw like laser drills. I use a second standard reactor with a PRC to fill in when I exceed the output of the steam turbines. I have 4 steam turbines running producing 84k rf/t off of 7000 mb steam total and I usually only draw about 78k, so the backup reactor very rarely warms up. With 7 fully powered laser drills, I produce 10x the materials that I need for fuel anyways.

 

[tetshio]

When I tried this, the visual effect of the falling water from the sprinklers stopped at the glowstone.
Was that visual only?

It's probably visual. I have seen all of my crops grow at a same rate.

 

[Darkone84]

The rednet controller doesn't turn the reactor on or off either, it changes the output of the reactor to match the demand so it runs pretty efficiently, shouldn't have to pay it any attention unless you start using more power than it can produce.

Yeah the MFR Rednet controller controls the reactor very well and does it efficiently. I guess If I want to run setam with it I will have to manual set the conrtol rods.

 

[firas55556]

When I tried this, the visual effect of the falling water from the sprinklers stopped at the glowstone.
Was that visual only?

Purely visual, had problems with it bonemealing my ender lilies and because I couldn't see the drops I didn't know why the ender lilies were dying.
Another thing to note is that the water source emulation part is NOT upgraded to 8 only the growth effect.

 

[jepstein30]

Grinders don't stop when essence fills up. While that might have still been the root cause it wasn't direct. I turn off the liquid transport on the tesseract channel for my grinders whenever it goes over 10kb essence, the grinders keep on grinding just fine.

are you sure? I thought it stopped when it no longer had anywhere to output mob essence?

weird.. maybe it was working and I was just somehow chewing threw tons of ender pearls? I had over 500 previously though

Rant - Having setup a Big Reactor / MFR Laser I tore down my entire automated sieve and smeltery operation and replaced it with pulverizers and redstone furnaces.

And find my ME system filling slowly up with "Platinum Gravel".

I think Platinum gravel is exactly a product from the drill as well though. Not sure.

 

[Bagman817]

are you sure? I thought it stopped when it no longer had anywhere to output mob essence?

weird.. maybe it was working and I was just somehow chewing threw tons of ender pearls? I had over 500 previously though



I think Platinum gravel is exactly a product from the drill as well though. Not sure.

I think it may be a config option, but he's correct. Grinders will stop when they have no place to output items, but it will soldier on regardless of the amount of fluid inside them (same for harvesters/ranchers).

 

[Moasseman]

I think Platinum gravel is exactly a product from the drill as well though. Not sure.

Yep, this correct.

 

[SynysterBear]

Hahaha. Ahahaha. Muhahaha.

I may have now killed the ender dragon 10 times.

 

[Avatar]

In the Bees quest, "Bees, Trees and Fish?" we are asked to supply 64 each of two forestry saplings. Easily arranged. 64 each of Certus, Mellow, and Energetic Combs... and an essence of the shallow grave iirc. So I have mapped out the bees I need to breed to get to the destination. And everything s fine except I see that, at several points I need to breed with Ender bees. Which is "not a problem" as I was given them in a reward bag. Until I see that they require a dragon egg as a flower. Erp.

This is AFTER I bred the ender princess and drone together, I am not sure if the gendustry machines can overwrite a trait on a queen?

You can breed the traits out of em with GenDustry (Probs ninjad)
And the quest delivery for that is weird, i handed in the bannana saplings for plantain ones o.o

 

[Zeeth_Kyrah]

Speaking of the MFR laser drill, what is the minimum power needed to get just a bit of ores?
I was thinking of using it to either get Yelorium (mispelled i know) or the sulfur to make it, but i am far away from a proper power supply.

I have a good amount of materials, i just have not found the way i want to produce RF outside of big reactors

I know this is an old post, and I'm on page 28 of 103 (so it might have been answered already), but I have to reply.
From personal testing:
5k RF (the amount to fully power one laser precharger to send a work unit)
x4 (4 prechargers to fully power the laser drill; apparently the drill counts each precharger's work as 1/4 of a work unit)
x300 (the number of work units to get a single ore block)
== 6M RF (six MILLION RF) per ore generated. And that's only if Jaded didn't change the default settings; I haven't made a laser drill in AS yet. Two full resonant energy cells get you 19 ores with a bit of energy left over, just barely enough to test one single-color set of lenses.