An out of the box approach...

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mushroom taco said:
Really? Man, i'm either really uninformed or outdated.
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The Compressor is fairly new. It's a pain to automate, but fairly effective.
KirinDave said:
They really can't do things like, "Start producing things when this is below a certain threshold. AE basically has no good automation primitives at anything less than "full throttle."
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It's possible, just generally the worst tool for the job, and the worst problem to pick if AE is the tool at hand. It's very, very good at crafting things as devices on the network need them, but maintaining lower or upper limits gets expensive (one level emitter and at least one import or export bus per item type). That said, most of the alternatives win for compactness rather than cost, effectiveness, or ease of use : you have to get pretty deep into an MFR PRC or RedPower managers for the more common methods, and MiscPeripherals can do pretty much anything, so that's that.
Bellaabzug21 said:
Remove BuildCraft, and you loose a lot of what else you have. Such as AE. From what I understand you've also removed IC2? You'd have to remove AE as well as Thermal Expansion.
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You can run Applied Energistics and ThermalExpansion without BuildCraft or IC2, with fairly common mods : Forestry and ThermalExpansion both individually contain enough power production to scale reasonably well, and RailCraft's steam boilers are used more than any BuildCraft engine in mainstream packs.
 
ShneekeyTheLost said:
TE engines with TE energy conduit already do this automatically. With Steam, you don't want to. Again, why bother? What would you want to shut down that simply doesn't draw energy when not being used? Most things that produce liquid will stop producing if their internal buffer backs up, giving you an automatic shutdown Perhaps, but none of the things you have mentioned yet are necessary either.
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TE engines throttle down, sure. But they dont stop. They will keep wasting fuel hence why gates can actually shut them off completly.

Multiple railcraft/forestry machines uses power when not used. With gates you could shut off the energy cell completly removing standby costs.

As for liquids, the best example is using MFR's auto spawner with grinders. Fill up a railcraft tank and there is no way of telling the spawner to shut down. It will happely keep spawning just as the grinders will happely keep grinding.

Another example is railcraft steam. Shutting of a boiler is ofcourse not an option. But shutting down the engines and store the steam instead. That is something one could do.

And there are alot of other possibility's, the thing is that BC offers unique interaction here thats lost upon its removal. When another mod covers that though, there would indeed be no point to BC other then "different aproach" :)
 
PhilHibbs said:
Is it actually possible to use MJ without BuildCraft installed? I thought BC implemented the API. It's open source though so someone could compile an API-only version.
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BuildCraft created the API, but any mod implementing the full API will have at least the necessary PowerProvider and PowerConsumer code (though not all mods using parts of the BuildCraft API do, or include things like engines or machines). You can run ThermalExpansion, Forestry, and even Railcraft, without installing BuildCraft separately.

You'll end up with some potentially bizarre base designs as a /result/, but it's quite doable.
 
Skyqula said:
TE engines throttle down, sure. But they dont stop. They will keep wasting fuel hence why gates can actually shut them off completly.

Multiple railcraft/forestry machines uses power when not used. With gates you could shut off the energy cell completly removing standby costs.
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Or you just remove the machines from the energy network with a whack of the wrench. Switch the energy conduit on the machine to export instead of import and they won't draw any more power.

As for liquids, the best example is using MFR's auto spawner with grinders. Fill up a railcraft tank and there is no way of telling the spawner to shut down. It will happely keep spawning just as the grinders will happely keep grinding.
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Umm... they respond to a redstone signal. Generally, you are wanting to start/stop grinders independent of fuel, so you will want to build a manual on/off switch anyways. Which is best done with MFR's Rednet.

Another example is railcraft steam. Shutting of a boiler is ofcourse not an option. But shutting down the engines and store the steam instead. That is something one could do.
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Wait, you want to try to store steam? Umm... do you have any idea how much steam you would be storing? It would be much better to simply throw on a couple more REC's or build something that demands that level of power.

And there are alot of other possibility's, the thing is that BC offers unique interaction here thats lost upon its removal. When another mod covers that though, there would indeed be no point to BC other then "different aproach" :)
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With the Sockets Engineer's Toolbox mod, you can transmit liquid, power, items, AND redstone signal all through the same block to the machine in question. Which rather obviates gates entirely.
 
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Skyqula said:
Another example is railcraft steam. Shutting of a boiler is ofcourse not an option. But shutting down the engines and store the steam instead. That is something one could do.
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Storing steam is a horrible concept. Make some power converters and hook the extra power up to a mass fabricator.
 
KirinDave said:
My immediate thoughts. These are negative, but I am taking your idea seriously and I think it could work.
  1. Gates enable a lot of good automation. Automation no one else can really do effectively. You don't see it too often, but it's there.
  2. Gates enable a lot of "intelligent" systems. Redstone signals for internal state, etc. Unless you add a way to do this, you make every machine a black box that cannot be automated around.
  3. How exactly do you get liquids besides lava into tanks without BC pumps?
If you removed BC from your pack, it'd be making a strong argument for an equally capable item introspection system to actually enable lots of automation. There aren't many. The only one quite as effective that comes to mind is... OpenPeripherals. Which I know you will never-in-a-million-years include.

And when you say "Sockets" do you mean "Engineer's Toolbox"?
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1) Automation is indeed an issue, but is becoming less of one as other systems step up to the job. There's now several different types of automation available. AE can automate a lot of things, but you are correct in that it doesn't do everything. However, 90% of what I see involves redstone signals, so you can look to MFR's Rednet. If there was a way for a PRC to identify a couple of gate triggers, it would win the Most Ultimate Awesome Award.

2) You still have a great deal of automation for machines using things like Translocators, conveyor belts, and AE's ME Interface.

3) What liquids do you wish to pump other than lava and water (Aqueous Accumulator)? There aren't many other liquids available out in the world (I remove poop lakes in my configs. They just aren't necessary). Remember that Oil no longer exists now.

I agree, there is a need for an equally capable item introspection system. Infinitubes can handle a LOT of this, as can AE, and even Extra Utilities. If the PSC could identify states for liquid, energy, and items (expressed as a percentile of filled) it could be used with existing logic pages to do everything a Gate can
 
ShneekeyTheLost said:
1) Automation is indeed an issue, but is becoming less of one as other systems step up to the job. There's now several different types of automation available. AE can automate a lot of things, but you are correct in that it doesn't do everything. However, 90% of what I see involves redstone signals, so you can look to MFR's Rednet. If there was a way for a PRC to identify a couple of gate triggers, it would win the Most Ultimate Awesome Award.
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Mostly what you lose are "if this then that." Infinitubes, AE, and EU all cannot meet this need. For example, "Only generate more fruit juice when the tank is 90% empty because it decimates my apple supply to do this and I need them elsewhere".

I know I am sort of, well, vain about my builds. I like them to be smarter than they strictly need to be. But I also really don't like being forced to build in a way where every processing line only knows how to run full throttle all the time. I think those builds are ugly and crass.

ShneekeyTheLost said:
3) What liquids do you wish to pump other than lava and water (Aqueous Accumulator)? There aren't many other liquids available out in the world (I remove poop lakes in my configs. They just aren't necessary). Remember that Oil no longer exists now.
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Poison and spa water.
 
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KirinDave said:
Poison and spa water.
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I believe that the BoP team is making Spa water unobtainable with regular buckets. I heard watching Direwolf20's server play today that you will need amethyst buckets to get them. This might mean that they are doing other things to limit automated collection of Spa water if they are trying to gate it behind getting to the promised land dimension.

In response to your opening post Shneekey, I do consider Buildcraft to be integral for my MFR farms. I do use the belts a lot in my design, (and could probably replace a lot of my pipes with more belts), but I managed to automate the generation of pink slimes with pipes, thermal expansion and computer craft (a normal turtle as a deployer, the dispenser doesn't work with pink slime buckets unfortunately). However, with the addition of sorting pipes for extrautils, (and being prompted to think about it by this thread) I can replace all the buildcraft pipes with extrautils pipes.

I would like to ask though, does extrautils have emerald pipe functionaility? It doesn't matter if you use a turtle but if there was a deployer or deployer like block in any mod coming out in the future I think the design would need an emerald pipe or something else that has a filter on extraction.

EDIT: Even though its probably obvious, I should say that I don't play Shneekeycraft. I just wanted to offer my thoughts. Its definitely an interesting proposal, removing buildcraft, not sure if I would do it because I have grown to love its pipes but good luck with your decision.
 
ShneekeyTheLost said:
With the Sockets Engineer's Toolbox mod, you can transmit liquid, power, items, AND redstone signal all through the same block to the machine in question. Which rather obviates gates entirely.
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Not quite. Multi Input and Output modules don't transmit a redstone signal. The upcoming Advanced Multi I/O module, however, will have that capability.

To be honest, I can still think of a few uses for gates if you don't use AE though. Facades are also pretty useful with a few other mods that support them.
 
Emasher said:
Not quite. Multi Input and Output modules don't transmit a redstone signal. The upcoming Advanced Multi I/O module, however, will have that capability.

To be honest, I can still think of a few uses for gates if you don't use AE though. Facades are also pretty useful with a few other mods that support them.
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Immibis's microblocks are generally the preferred offering these days.
 
casilleroatr said:
I believe that the BoP team is making Spa water unobtainable with regular buckets. I heard watching Direwolf20's server play today that you will need amethyst buckets to get them. This might mean that they are doing other things to limit automated collection of Spa water if they are trying to gate it behind getting to the promised land dimension.
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Even that concept is broken if you have mystcraft. You can get a promised land page, or get lucky with a random age. My 3rd random age included promised land, and so I was able to get amethyst gems without needing a nether star.
 
casilleroatr said:
In response to your opening post Shneekey, I do consider Buildcraft to be integral for my MFR farms. I do use the belts a lot in my design, (and could probably replace a lot of my pipes with more belts), but I managed to automate the generation of pink slimes with pipes, thermal expansion and computer craft (a normal turtle as a deployer, the dispenser doesn't work with pink slime buckets unfortunately). However, with the addition of sorting pipes for extrautils, (and being prompted to think about it by this thread) I can replace all the buildcraft pipes with extrautils pipes.
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I should give the turtle a shot, I had been a bit lost without a deployer with respect to things like pink slimes. However, I ended up not using any pipe coming out of a slaughterhouse by using a liquid transposer to collect a bucket of meat and a bucket of pink slime, which allowed me to set up MFR's liquid router to place meat in the meat packer and pink slime into the transposer (which could be supplemented with a turtle for deploying and slaughtering). It would be nice if the liquid router could be set up without first having a bucket of something though... Maybe I'm just missing something there.

As for the farms, yeah transport nodes work OK for supplying them, but I don't really find them fast enough for dealing with the output of tree farms (even with a speed upgrade). If I really didn't have BC pipes for that, I'd probably burn the energy needed to hook it into an ME network.
 
Siro said:
I should give the turtle a shot, I had been a bit lost without a deployer with respect to things like pink slimes. However, I ended up not using any pipe coming out of a slaughterhouse by using a liquid transposer to collect a bucket of meat and a bucket of pink slime, which allowed me to set up MFR's liquid router to place meat in the meat packer and pink slime into the transposer (which could be supplemented with a turtle for deploying and slaughtering). It would be nice if the liquid router could be set up without first having a bucket of something though... Maybe I'm just missing something there.
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That's what I do! It's a fun build I think although I agree that configuring the liquid router can be tricky. This is however one area where buildcraft's liquid pipes have a certain niche. They can contain more than one liquid at a time. My slaughterhouse outputs into buildcraft pipes not liquiducts.

Also, instead of using the turtle to kill the pink slime I just made it deploy the bucket over the top of a conveyor belt system that leads to my general purpose grinder. Saves two diamonds since I was using that grinder for other things anyway! The only thing was the slimes would usually die instantly upon being placed. They would still drop slimeballs so it wasn't a big deal. I think its because they were insta-suffocating in the confined space.

The beauty of the system was that it only need one bucket which could be sent back and forth along the same line of pipe between the turtle and the transposer.
 
ShneekeyTheLost said:
Or you just remove the machines from the energy network with a whack of the wrench. Switch the energy conduit on the machine to export instead of import and they won't draw any more power.

Umm... they respond to a redstone signal. Generally, you are wanting to start/stop grinders independent of fuel, so you will want to build a manual on/off switch anyways. Which is best done with MFR's Rednet.

Wait, you want to try to store steam? Umm... do you have any idea how much steam you would be storing? It would be much better to simply throw on a couple more REC's or build something that demands that level of power.


With the Sockets Engineer's Toolbox mod, you can transmit liquid, power, items, AND redstone signal all through the same block to the machine in question. Which rather obviates gates entirely.
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You are completly missing the point. Annything i talk about is about automation. All your "solutions" are manual. Not to mention i am talking about complex setups where all your examples are starter cave setups.

(Also, iron has no value and can be gained by the thousands/hour after a relatively small time/resource investment.)
 
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