An idea to prevent Nether lava exploitation
- Thread starter MrZwij
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IMO, the problem is generators requiring fuel. There simply is no way you can balance that when there is a way to make energy out of nothing. Moreso, i will go as far as to say that you cannot attain balance aslong as infinite loop setups exist either. Wich will always exist, because thats the whole point behind he mayority of the mods. Now since we are all aware that these infinite setups exist and heck, there are generators that dont require resources at all annyway (most notably t2/t3/t4 IC2 solar panels) we can savely say that anny generator requiring resources is an outdated design (outside of coal ==> furnace "early game" or the nucliar "endgame"). Now you can ofcourse disagree here in wich case this post is pointless for you 
Annyway, I love the RedPower aproach to this whole thing. Thermopile requiring water and lava. Or increased output wit ice/snow wich will turn into water and the lava turning into basalt/obsidian wich you need to manage. The solar panels wich require direct sunlight and will therefor be inactive over 50% of the time (storms). Windmills wich are mediocre unless its storming or build way up, wich in turn makes for long cabels or nothing to look it. Additionally you need to replace the windmill every now and then. The cool part here being that they all give different challanges and advantages with gameplay options around them. And unlike things like netherrack quary's or nether lava pumps they dont produce lag or require chunkloaders.
So in short, I would like to see more infinite generators that require thinking to gain maximum efficiency without the current straightforward, lagproducing and RAM consuming machine setups we see now. But maybe thats just me...
Annyway, I love the RedPower aproach to this whole thing. Thermopile requiring water and lava. Or increased output wit ice/snow wich will turn into water and the lava turning into basalt/obsidian wich you need to manage. The solar panels wich require direct sunlight and will therefor be inactive over 50% of the time (storms). Windmills wich are mediocre unless its storming or build way up, wich in turn makes for long cabels or nothing to look it. Additionally you need to replace the windmill every now and then. The cool part here being that they all give different challanges and advantages with gameplay options around them. And unlike things like netherrack quary's or nether lava pumps they dont produce lag or require chunkloaders.
So in short, I would like to see more infinite generators that require thinking to gain maximum efficiency without the current straightforward, lagproducing and RAM consuming machine setups we see now. But maybe thats just me...
Balance is a tricky beast. In the nether, you can effectively drain a fairly large radius down to the bottom, forcing you to relocate your setup. Granted this would take some time, it is still going to happen. If you replace source blocks with cobble, you would have to change the behavior of the pump so it pulls from the furthest blocks inward, effectively having a giant cobblestone wall closing in on you.
People have been using the nether for lava gens since teleport pipes were introduced. When I started with redpower two, the first thing I created was an automatic way to fill lava-cells. It required that I actually go to the outpost, but it was still very easy.
I say it would be nice if gregtech increased the cost of lava-gens to scale with an ultimate hybrid. Both are touch-free ways to get EU. Lavagens only output 5% of a UH, so I think it'd be fair that it cost at least a quarter of the UH's value in materials. It's a cheap early game to get EU, but should not be end game. Maybe use reinforced glass/stone, lead/steel plates, coolant cells, and something other than a generator.
I put the pressure on gregtech because that is his theme, making the game more challenging. For people new to these mods, I think it's fair to give them an easy start so they can discover alternative ways of doing things.
People have been using the nether for lava gens since teleport pipes were introduced. When I started with redpower two, the first thing I created was an automatic way to fill lava-cells. It required that I actually go to the outpost, but it was still very easy.
I say it would be nice if gregtech increased the cost of lava-gens to scale with an ultimate hybrid. Both are touch-free ways to get EU. Lavagens only output 5% of a UH, so I think it'd be fair that it cost at least a quarter of the UH's value in materials. It's a cheap early game to get EU, but should not be end game. Maybe use reinforced glass/stone, lead/steel plates, coolant cells, and something other than a generator.
I put the pressure on gregtech because that is his theme, making the game more challenging. For people new to these mods, I think it's fair to give them an easy start so they can discover alternative ways of doing things.
This would be preferable and superior to server-crushing lag.
I'm not concerned with changes for balance purposes. This is a sandbox game with so many configuration options that the same 'balance' is laughably OP in one instance and so weak to be worthless in another. No matter what balance point you choose, it will fail to match someone's playstyle. As we already have configuration options that disallow the components of nether lava pumping or allow the alteration of lava energy values to make it undesirable, I don't see a need for further work towards preventing nether lava from a balance perspective. Rather, we need work on allowing it from a server resource use perspective.
Stop. Right. There.
Redpower produces more lag than any other mod in the pack combined. Do you now what tile entities are? They're little lag bombs which kill a server's tps. Redpower is full of them. Literally full of them. Redpower relays alone increase server lag at not an exponential rate, but at more than a quadratic rate oer each relay added. The only non-lagging lart of red power is tubes (when compared to buildcraft, although buildcraft has gotten much better recently, and may even be better than redpower now) and that's because they use fake entities.
If bukkit devs were to ever loosen their iron grip (and buttholes) and allow the unity of bukkit/forge we'd have more options in the form of plugins. That's unlikely to happen however.
Prevent chunk loaders in the nether and it'll discourage the heavy use/need for multiple pumps. This used to be the same issue with water until TE was introduced. You can use vanilla mechanics to get limitless water anywhere, but cannot do the same for lava.
Make lava pumps slower, give the server time to deal with multiple pumps.
Maybe a forge-mod could implement something similar to NoLagg, give you the ability to limit how many "flow" blocks can exist at any given time.
Honestly buildcraft could improve their pipes and that would really fix a lot of lag issues -_- Next to impossible to get people to add some sort of fail-safe to prevent over-flow.
Maybe drop the pump all together, and create a new mechanic. Maybe force players to create a reservoir in the lava adding a drain at the bottom. Once this reservoir is detected (like all these new multi-blocks) it is converted to essentially an iron tank pre-filled with lava. This creates a lot more effort from the player to setup such a contraption with the risk of dying in lava. Anywho, I think using a unique idea with multi-blocks could create a new mechanic that would be interesting.
Prevent chunk loaders in the nether and it'll discourage the heavy use/need for multiple pumps. This used to be the same issue with water until TE was introduced. You can use vanilla mechanics to get limitless water anywhere, but cannot do the same for lava.
Make lava pumps slower, give the server time to deal with multiple pumps.
Maybe a forge-mod could implement something similar to NoLagg, give you the ability to limit how many "flow" blocks can exist at any given time.
Honestly buildcraft could improve their pipes and that would really fix a lot of lag issues -_- Next to impossible to get people to add some sort of fail-safe to prevent over-flow.
Maybe drop the pump all together, and create a new mechanic. Maybe force players to create a reservoir in the lava adding a drain at the bottom. Once this reservoir is detected (like all these new multi-blocks) it is converted to essentially an iron tank pre-filled with lava. This creates a lot more effort from the player to setup such a contraption with the risk of dying in lava. Anywho, I think using a unique idea with multi-blocks could create a new mechanic that would be interesting.
Pumps don't cause the issue. Flowing blocks do.
The server dealing with said pumps doesn't cause an issue, and slowing them down would just make people build two or three or ten instead of one, creating the same number of flowing blocks.
Limiting number of 'flow' blocks would fix things. Not sure on the quality of that change versus changing the way the pump operates to not create the flow blocks in the first place. Could end up looking very strange, but I'd prefer weird graphical gremlins to disconnects and block lag.
Buildcraft has seriously improved it's pipes, they are much less laggy now. The dev team also added a Buildcraft config option to deal with over-flow generating lag. You can set overflow items to disappear near instantly.
Building the lava-lake into a pre-filled tank could work depending on implementation, and would certainly add an interesting element of danger to pumping lava from the nether. The nether could probably use more danger all around.
It was, until my forum host decided to suspend the forums for it. The drawbacks of free hosting. Don't worry though, amazing things are in store.
Or no engines. Pump, energy cell, liquiduct, xposer/tess is all that is necessary, leaving three sides of the pump available. All horribad ideas. I do not endorse cheesepumping the nether in any way shape or form
You could say most things are cheesy if you think netherlava pumping is. Crafted spawners? Cheesy. Conduits instead of normal conductive pipes? Cheesy. Overclockers in machines? Cheese. Jetpack? Swisscheese. Solar panels? Kraft cheese. Cobble? Cheese. Not in hardcore mode? Cheese. More than one heart life? Cheese. Eating food to stay alive? Cheese. Playing with mouse and keyboard? Cheese. Having arms? Cheese. Playing MC with Java doing all the work for you instead of pencil and paper and doing all the formula/coding by hand? Cheese. Using a pencil for that and not a pen? (who makes mistakes you corner cutting noob) cheese. Having access to the physical laws on nature that allow matter to form and evolve in a way to bring us to the computer age and logical conscious thinking? Cheese.
At least with lava its not infinity replenishable like water. If all it took was a 2x2 pit of lava for infinit energy, THAT would be cheesy. As it is right now its just fine. I have to move my pump every other day to keep up and thats with 3 ultra panels so far.
Over the weekend my project of getting a quarry in the nether set up has been a success. So now I have a tiny magmatic powerplant using quarried netherrack. Even with just a few mj/t the quarry way outpaces the low-power crucibles that push the fluid into a holding tank, then a tesseract. What's even better about this setup is that it self-chunkloads, causes little lag, and doesn't overproduce.
This lava drive is my go-to powersource for the small outputs to keep things like my thermionic fabricator and fermenter warm. I'm starting to get biofuel production underway, and I intend to use a redstone energy cell as a tap on the system (with a gate) to detect power underflows and supplement that power output when it's obvious there is a big draw.
I hope I have now escaped the moniker of "cheese," right? I'm mining hell for resources that I pipe inter-dimensionally into a soon-to-be self-regulating power system. And I'm deliberately avoiding steam because that's actually the easy route!
This lava drive is my go-to powersource for the small outputs to keep things like my thermionic fabricator and fermenter warm. I'm starting to get biofuel production underway, and I intend to use a redstone energy cell as a tap on the system (with a gate) to detect power underflows and supplement that power output when it's obvious there is a big draw.
I hope I have now escaped the moniker of "cheese," right? I'm mining hell for resources that I pipe inter-dimensionally into a soon-to-be self-regulating power system. And I'm deliberately avoiding steam because that's actually the easy route!
Challenge: build a frame machine that collects lava and replaces it with cobble to prevent flow.
Bonus challenge: make the frame machine more CPU efficient than lava flow
Bonus challenge: make the frame machine more CPU efficient than lava flow
Challenge: build a frame machine that collects lava and replaces it with cobble to prevent flow.
Bonus challenge: make the frame machine more CPU efficient than lava flow
Oh yeah that would fairly stright forward.
Worm drive with somethign to collect lava from its front and something to poop out cobble from its back as it crawls along the lava lake.
So a framework that uses empty buckets/cells in the front, feeds the filled ones through tesseracts to tranposers, has another tesseract to bring more empty cells/buckets to the front, and deployers to place cobble?
Edit: Bonus points for making it able to move in all directions so you can also move it up and down to pull up lava.
Edit: Bonus points for making it able to move in all directions so you can also move it up and down to pull up lava.
Funny to see all these people using these methods try to convince everyone it's 'just fine'. It's not fine. If you want to use it in solo play, go ahead. But for servers it's currently definately not fine at all. Nether lava pumping kills performance and removes all progression in power systems.
If the server owner is so bothered he can disable people from crafting pumps. Just like all the decent tekkit servers that I played on did
Way to miss the point
I was talking about the concept, not the actual mod. The concepts that the current most used engines use for fuel are crazy. Thats the part i am argueing against and thats the part where the redpower concepts show that there are other ways to do it.But then how do you move large masses of water? This seems like it's throwing out the baby with the bathwater just to make a very weird point.
You know another solution? Just make ONE interdimensional lava plant and give everyone access. :\
as in draining a lake? I've never done it, and don't know if it's in the most recent version (because I've never used the mod) but I know people used to use MFFS to clear water on the old server I played on
Ugh. Graceless, artless, expensive. But at least you don't have nether pumps, amirite?