Am I missing something with Exp Turtles?

[Servillo]

I've built a very simple experience farm using Melee and Exp/Anvil turtles along with a Tier V Skeleton spawner. I've got books in a chest above the turtle all spaced out, and it will automatically pull a book from above when it reaches level 30, enchant it, and drop it in a chest below it. It works great, and I've gotten dozens of books.

Problem is, they're all pretty much the same series of books. Disjunction III, Power III, Sharpness IV, Soul Stealer III, and the very, very rare Efficiency IV or Fortune III. I have gotten almost nothing else. In fact, last night, after going through one row of books, I noticed that the next row was following the last one almost perfectly, i.e. whatever book is in a slot in the chest, the one below it is the exact same book (I realize this is likely coincidence, since this is in a diamond chest, so I wouldn't see the same pattern in any other chest).

So yeah, am I missing something with my Exp Turtle? Should I find a way to randomize the level it enchants a book with within a certain range, say Lv. 22-30? Or am I just getting an extremely weird string of random enchants that just happen to follow a set pattern?

 

[zilvarwolf]

I don't think you're missing anything. Enchanting books is terribly inefficient in terms of experience to useful rewards. It's a great way to use those turtles, but you'll get a lot more dross than wheat.

 

[Servillo]

I figured I'd be getting a lot of junk books, I'm just concerned that I'm always getting the same junk books, in almost perfectly the same order every time. Yeah, there's some variation, but not much. That's my main concern, is that something in the way the Exp Turtle works means I really won't be getting anything like Silk Touch or Repair II. I know those are rare enchants, so I expect to go through a number of books, but when my enchant spread seems limited to only about 8-10 enchants out of the couple dozen I know are available? That's where I get worried.

 

[zilvarwolf]

I figured I'd be getting a lot of junk books, I'm just concerned that I'm always getting the same junk books, in almost perfectly the same order every time. Yeah, there's some variation, but not much. That's my main concern, is that something in the way the Exp Turtle works means I really won't be getting anything like Silk Touch or Repair II. I know those are rare enchants, so I expect to go through a number of books, but when my enchant spread seems limited to only about 8-10 enchants out of the couple dozen I know are available? That's where I get worried.

I know that at some point, Repair was removed from the 'can enchant to books' list. On the server where I setup my turtle xp farm, I know that I got maybe 3 silk touch books out of probably 240 enchants. Pretty rare. That was in the 1.0.1 version of ultimate. We've never upgraded the server, so newer versions probably have different drop rates.

 

[Dkittrell]

I use turtles to enchant, there are tons of crap enchantments but if your at the point of auto enchantment you prob have tons of materials for books to
Waste . I get silk touch every so often and repair 1 &2 even less but it does happen its just really rare . I wish they would allow you to add two books like 2 sharp 3 books for a sharp 4 book that's my only complaint

 

[Bibble]

If you're doing book enchants, they really need spamming to be of any real use.

My method was to use AE. Throw a controller, disk drive and interface down, raid the twilight forest for a few mountains of books, set the interface to keep a single book stocked.

Get the turtle to pull from the interface enchant and put back into the interface. The enchanted book gets whisked away and stored and there is always a fresh one ready and waiting.

This is also one of the few (2?) ways of stacking enchants. You can't search them, but you don't have to look through 20 punch I books before you find something different.

The randomness of enchanting is a pain, and leaving a system like this set up and chugging through is a reasonable way of mitigating some of that (although you still need the XP to apply the enchants, so you'd probably need a different XP farm/turtle off switch), but it's still a slog for not a huge gain. It's something to do, but I wouldn't call it something to aim for.

 

[Zarkov]

I know that at some point, Repair was removed from the 'can enchant to books' list.

Maybe that's a config thing? They do show up in FTB beta 0.7 (ngt), although a bit rare. They're almost common compared to Infinity I though. Ah well, RNG is RNG... and I have a railgun.

 

[zilvarwolf]

Maybe that's a config thing? They do show up in FTB beta 0.7 (ngt), although a bit rare. They're almost common compared to Infinity I though. Ah well, RNG is RNG... and I have a railgun.

OK. Let me remove my assumption-sized foot from my gossip-sized mouth. There was a post that was probably a quote of a post of a tweet of a random IRC comment from someone's cousin's brother's best friend's sister a while back indicating that Repair was going to be taken out of the list because it was supposed to be rare and xp grinders and auto-enchanters somewhat trivialize it (and I can agree with the notion, since once you get repairing armor and tools and weapons, you stop making more).

That said, I'd never know in the ngt pack, because I loves me some Dartcraft and I haven't enchanted anything outside of using the dartcraft table in over 55 levels. That, essentially, is what enchanting SHOULD be (even if fortune is a LITTLE too easy and wing is a LITTLE (lot) too good)

 

[Quesenek]

You are just having good/bad luck getting the same enchants i have a 5 tier 5 skelly and zombie grinder and i have gotten every single enchant in book form more than once for my barrel wall of enchants using an xp turtle to automate the enchants.