An idea to prevent Nether lava exploitation

[HeffronCM]

Well, then. How about we go the way of the Solar Panels? Well, sort of. Make multiblock versions of the Geothermals. A 2x2x2 that puts out medium voltage and a 3x3x3 that generates high voltage, and each eat through lava at an appropriate rate. If people are just going to put out huge geothermal facilities and use transformers/storage devices to get the voltages and outputs they need, it would reduce server load a bundle.
Plus, it wouldn't be just a "no" to people who want that method of power, either for maintenance or thematic reasons. Coming from the tabletop RPG world, I can say that my players are always much more satisfied when I tell them, "Sure, you can do that. But..."

The lag comes from gathering the lava, which causes flowing liquid blocks, not using it in the generators :-D

Here's another fun 'fix' for the lag: change the lava-powered blocks into something you need to bring to the lava lake, instead of bringing the lava lake to it. I'm really not sure how feasible it would be to stop people from just making artificial lava lakes, but I think it would be nice to have more mechanics that require us to leave our base camps and set up outposts.

 

[Captain Neckbeard]

The lag comes from gathering the lava, which causes flowing liquid blocks

Oh, that old Vanilla problem, exacerbated by chunkloaders and larger scale? I'll investigate how we've managed to avoid it and get back to you guys if it turns out my administrator is some sort of wizard.

 

[Bluehorazon]

Well thinking about ForgeCraft it can't create too much lag. There biggest tps-drops come from quarries and redpower. And on ForgeCraft basically every single person pumps the nether dry. And I don't had any problems with it myself, every over method of gathering or producing the same amount of a certain fuel propably causes as much lag. The only downside is that you have to load some extra chunks, but well not too many.

If you want to solve the problem you need to adjust the value of lava as a fuel. At this point A bucket of Lava has about 17 times the value of coal. And the best you can get out of Lava with IC2 is 30.000 (well for some odd reason some cells give 50.000 EU in the generator, but I think it would be easy to poke player for a fix). 30.000 EU would equal 12.000 MJ, so Lava could be created for 6.000 MJ from Netherrack, Provides 10.000 MJ in a Magmatic Engine and is created for 12.000 MJ from Cobble or similar sources. So you can store energy by using lava if you use IC2 (well GregTech to be more precise, basic IC2-Ratio is only 20.000 EU). The same considerations need to be done with Combustion-Engines.

The reason why using lava is such a common thing is because it is an incredible powerful fuel. The reason for this propably lies within Vanilla-MC. IC just copied the fuel-rate from Coal and Lava for use in it's own machines. At this point it wasn't a big deal, since cross-dimensional transport was not possible. All over mods just followed the example from IC and uses their value or even improved it. But exspecially with the new tesseracts all you need to do is place a pump next to a tesseract and your done. Although this is very friendly for most servers it makes lava easier avaible as it should be considering it's fuel-value.

The problem is that most off the mods need to rebalance the value of lava together, since if as an example buildcraft reduces its value you can easily get a nice profit from lava via IC2 and Electric-Engines or Thermal Expansions Magma-Crucible. The only mod which adjusted Lava-value so far was railcraft and the value CovertJaguar used seems a bit low, but actually represents the abundance of lava far better than the fuel-values of most other mods.

 

[Saice]

Lava monsters. Thats what we need Masses of lava that raise up and attack pumping stations like pissed off pre-nerf endermen made sweet sweet love to a creeper and then set them on fire.

Ok maybe not.... Man but now I want lava monsters in my game.

 

[EternalDensity]

Lava monsters. Thats what we need Masses of lava that raise up and attack pumping stations like pissed off pre-nerf endermen made sweet sweet love to a creeper and then set them on fire.

Ok maybe not.... Man but now I want lava monsters in my game.

Pipes containing lava should have a chance of spawning firebats.

 

[darkrage000]

this is not an exploit. If you have been to the wiki, it would be fairly obvious that that is correct.
there is an image in the Tesseracts page that shows a pump, a energy tess, and a liquid tess in a nice pile.
In the annotation it states that the liquid tessaract is pumping lava.
Now... the very first thing that came to MY mind (and probably many other people) when seeing the image and the words LAVA.. is the truly major source of lava in the game... the NETHER.
I think that i can state with a fair amount of certainty that King Lemming, when he wrote that (and built the mods and the updates), thought of the nether.
thus, in my opinion, using a tessaract in the nether to pump lava is NOT an exploit.
its simply an alternative (and a better way) of transporting lava which replaces the pump>transposer>enderchest system

you can also set up a series of cobble generators, and using block breakers, send the cobble to the Extruder to create free lava.. and an infinite source to boot...
would you call THIS an exploit?

 

[EternalDensity]

1. You can't send cobble to the Extruder, but you can get free cobble from teh extruder
2. You can send cobble to a magma crucible and melt it into lava
3. But doing that costs more MJ than the lava will give you in a magmatic engine, so it's a loss (but it can be used in geothermal generators to convert MJ to EU)

A quarry over netherrack which is fed into magma crucibles powered by magmatic engines will give you a surplus of lava and energy pretty easily, but I wouldn't call that netherack exploitation either

Engines powered by milk from an automatic milking process could be called "cow exploitation" but that's more of a humane issue

 

[GreenWolf13]

Engines powered by milk from an automatic milking process could be called "cow exploitation" but that's more of a humane issue

"Cow abuse" is actually against the rules on the server I play on.

 

[Carrington]

this is not an exploit. If you have been to the wiki, it would be fairly obvious that that is correct.
there is an image in the Tesseracts page that shows a pump, a energy tess, and a liquid tess in a nice pile.
In the annotation it states that the liquid tessaract is pumping lava.
Now... the very first thing that came to MY mind (and probably many other people) when seeing the image and the words LAVA.. is the truly major source of lava in the game... the NETHER.
I think that i can state with a fair amount of certainty that King Lemming, when he wrote that (and built the mods and the updates), thought of the nether.
thus, in my opinion, using a tessaract in the nether to pump lava is NOT an exploit.
its simply an alternative (and a better way) of transporting lava which replaces the pump>transposer>enderchest system

you can also set up a series of cobble generators, and using block breakers, send the cobble to the Extruder to create free lava.. and an infinite source to boot...
would you call THIS an exploit?

ITT someone who didn't get the point even slightly.

 

[noskk]

IMO, If there's a way to prevent any pumps to be put in the nether, this problem will be solved. Because the overworld lava is not OP, and netherrack lava is.. okay I think...

 

[Hydra]

Also the fact still remains that pumping lava from the nether for energy is not and never will be an exploit. Enderchests that allow you to move it free anywhere are the exploit, and the heart of most "exploits" in modded mc. Not that I'm advocating changing them, because they're a cool, fun mechanic. Just saying don't go on and on about something when you're blaming the wrong game mechanic.

I think you're overreacting a bit to the word exploit. People don't mean you have to burn in hell for all eternity for using the mechanic. What people mean that it's cheesy. You compare it to a boiler setup that you consider more exploity, which I really don't understand.

A fermentables > fermenter > still > boiler setup takes a LOT of time to set up, and it's quite complex to automate. Gathering all the materials, crafting them and setting it all up will take you hours. Once you have that, you have 'eternal' power. IMHO there's nothing exploity about it because there's a good balance between effort involved and returns.

Getting lava from the Nether is way easier and can easily net you the same amount of power with enough magmatic engines. And I don't know if you've been to the nether lately but those pumps last for a LONG time, those lakes are huge.

So that's the issue some players have with lava pumping. It's supposed to be a tier 2 power setup, an intermediate step untill you get the 'best' power systems. But currently it's used as the 'best' way to generate both IC and BC bower and that IMHO is a bit silly. For the effort involved (2 filters, 2 liq transposers and 2 enderchests are cheap and easy to manufacture) you get a setup that lasts as long and gives as much power as any other setup.

And added to this there's the problem of lag on servers thanks to all the block updates.

I personally think lava power is a good intermediate step between your startup phase and when you have a 'proper' powersource. So lava power should be possible. But I do agree that pumping endless lava from the nether is too cheesy.[DOUBLEPOST=1359970954][/DOUBLEPOST]

As for nether lava lag, why are we attacking the symptom, and the trigger? Why hasn't it been fixed?

It hasn't been fixes because it can't be easily fixed. It's also something that's not a problem in Vanilla because vanilla doesn't have system that pump loads of lava and cause those block updates.

 

[Hydra]

IMO, If there's a way to prevent any pumps to be put in the nether, this problem will be solved. Because the overworld lava is not OP, and netherrack lava is.. okay I think...

I would personally like to see that for both IC and BC power people would want to go for the 'end game' setups. The ones that are most complex but give the best return on investment. For BC that's currently either combustion engines on fuel (non-renewable but lasts a LONG time) or boiler. For IC, excluding gregtech, there is no clear progression but IMHO people should 'want' to go for a nuclear setup. But unfortunately nuclear reactors are incredibly underpowered. A basic 'safe' setup is quite costly and only nets you 100EU/t. That's the same as 5 geo's which can easily run on nether fuel and are dirt cheap. Not to mention solars which are completely fire-and-forget and which are very easy to build.

 

[ItharianEngineering]

I think the only thing left of lava pumping is IC2 geothermal power, as Hydra said there is no clear progression, and really they provide a rather large EU/t for something so easy to obtain in the nether. It kills the idea of using nuclear power, and I don't even want to go into solar. For MJ's it has already been taken care of since lava is nearly useless in a boiler and the magmatic engines are harder to create because of the invar ingots needed, not to mention that biofuel/biomass has taken front seat as an easy to sustain power source. We just need something that can replace geothermals as an easy source of EU or the rate has to be decreased so that it loses favor. There is no reason to touch the pump itself. Pumping out the nether is just the reaction to lava being a highly valuable energy generator, something we are now seeing with blazerods thanks to the Soul Shards mod. Really wish we would just let this thread die though.

 

[Hydra]

Why let it die? I don't understand why people are so against not agreeing with someone on a topic. It's a subject that bothers some people. I would personally like there to be a better progression in balance too. On our server I see most people use the way of the least resistance: they're powering everything through geothermals and solars, even the BC stuff (through Electric Engines). So even though you get a really crappy conversion ratio pretty much everyone goes for "free" energy that's very easy to set up.

Heck, I think I'm the only on on our server with a functioning nuclear reactor. Everyone else is running solars (we had some nether-pumpers but we created a server-rule that forbids it due to the lag problems we were having).

 

[ItharianEngineering]

I'm fine with not agreeing with people, I understand most people won't change their mind based on what someone says on a forum thread. I just dislike repetitious arguments that seem to repeat endlessly with the same points in the same fashion. For the topic of nether pumping, geothermals are really the last reason to do it I think, 20 EU/t for some iron, glass, and a few other bits and all you have to do is set up a small cheap pump will win out over the expense of setting up a nuclear reactor which uses a lot of resources for a limited output and a lot of work to setup properly. As I said, solars are not something I want to go into, in my worlds they only produce a fraction of the default output. Geothermals can be made almost immediately when you start a world, you could in fact make it instead of a basic generator for a very small price in the beginning, which further draws anyone away from other means of power. I think that either the geothermals output per lava unit should be changed or something needs to change with the other generators to make them more favorable. For MJ we can use few machines for all our power needs in most situations but to get large amounts of EU for things like the mass fabricator or machines with overclockers you either need high power solars, nuclear reactors, or a large number of other generators, and it just so happens that geothermals are currently the cheapest way to do it. While some people think that just preventing pumps from working in the nether would solve it, I think it is just a cheap way of getting around the problem. You can still pump out the nether with IC2's pump but only in a 9x9 area max which means more maintenance, but people would only put more pumps down to make up for it.

 

[Golrith]

Just to add to the topic going round and round

As mentioned before, if Nether Lava could somehow have it's own unique ID, and be called SuperHeated Lava (or something), and make it that it cannot be used in the same way as Overworld Lava. A whole new tech branch can be made to allow using the Nether Lava, but it requires more expensive machines & piping.


But "simple" solutions currently available are:
Reduce the EU/t for IC2 from lava
Adjust mod pumps to be unable to pump nether lava
Servers ban Nether Lava usage

 

[Hitmaniac]

Well I don't think it is an exploit. If you don't like it, don't use it. There are many new players that aren't familiar with building advanced forms of energy. They want something fast, easy, and reliable. If this does become a problem I would make the lava lakes disappear quicker. In the game If you find a decent sized one, it can last you a long time.

 

[Hydra]

If you don't like it, don't use it.

For the zillionth time: this isn't about single player. If you're playing solo you can creative in anything you want for all I care. This is about the default packages that servers offer and how those server admins have to check players / make rules about what should and should not happen.

 

[Zjarek_S]

Server owner can change geothermal generator output in ic2 config, this shouldn't require any change on client side.

 

[HeffronCM]

People in this thread still seemed to be focused on disabling nether lava as a power source rather than solving the part that causes lag. Lag is caused when the empty hole left behind from pumping out a source block gets filled with flowing blocks, as they take a lot more information being sent from server to client. There are a couple options to stop this from happening that I've though of:

1) Pumping lava leaves behind a block of cobblestone instead of an air block. Balance features could include needing to supply cobblestone, needing to supply water, or much more power-hungry pump operation on lava.

2) Pumping lava in the Nether does not remove source blocks. The lava is effectively infinite anyway, in the interest of not lagging servers make it actually infinite. Significantly slow the rate at which lava can be pumped, and/or increase the power draw of the pump.

Maybe someone could come up with a better solution, if we can focus on curing the disease rather than the symptom.