Assistance with an Automated Boiler.

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Omicron

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Jul 29, 2019
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Try looking further into the uses of GregTech wood pulp. I only have the Mindcrack v6 values available to me, so they might have changed, but here I can burn the wood pulp in a boiler for 100 HU, or put 8 into a compressor to make a wooden plate worth 1600 HU. That's pretty much the same process as making charcoal out of 8 TE sawdust, which is also worth 1600 HU. The only issue is that you need an Industrialcraft compressor instead of a furnace, which can't be powered by MJ. But once you have the plates, they will easily fuel a dedicated 1LP boiler for the sawmill with excess to spare.
 

Shad Mecham

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Jul 29, 2019
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On my server we started with a single Steve's Cart tree farm 64 tracks in size feeding sapplings into a single fermenter that was hooked up to a mid size railcraft tank. The biogas generated was used to feed 5 biogas engines. We then focused on build a max size HP liquid boiler and 2 max sized railcraft tanks. Before we finished up with the boiler we had our tanks set up and were feeding sapplings into 6 new fermenters to fill up one tank and had 10 stills hooked up to our new max size biogas tank feeding biofuel into the other tank. It took a day or so to fill up both tanks and we switched on the boiler which ran 18 industrial steam engines.

We used a single TE steam engine to start things off and get the biogas rolling.

We found that the fermenters were generating more then enough biogas and in the end we build 3 more max sized HP boilers. However when we did this the damand for sapplings became to much so we threw togther a few more SC tree farms.

We ran the wood through a furnace to make it into charcoal and then feed it back to the cartmanagers to help fuel the carts at night and in the rain.

All in all we have an endless supply of power.
 

Kemintiri

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Jul 29, 2019
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I'd love to see an updated album - I'm in the planning stages of mine now, and all info is welcome :D

I would also like to see this. I have 2k + stacks of logs and I've been wanting to set up a boiler to replace my nether lava pump.
 

MilConDoin

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Jul 29, 2019
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I'd love to see an updated album - I'm in the planning stages of mine now, and all info is welcome :D
Will come probably tomorrow. A change: The fermenter currently runs on mulch, since the cobblestone->fertilzer path ain't possible anymore. This has reduced the output of biomass a little bit, but it is still enough to feed 5 boilers, if the apple juice is used. Current problem: the farm doesn't produce enough to apples to keep the mulch-supply up. I'll have to check, how to counter that. Either using a wheat farm with a moistener, or a forestry multiblock farm orchard with apple oaks.

I believe 6 planks is better by 200 heat. Right now my hang-up is how to power the sawmill, since in Minkcrack v8 you get the stupid gregtech sawdust which can't be turned into coal.
There is a config for that. I changed that config for me, because that gregtech sawdust isn't compatible with a MJ powered furnace.

My end goal was to power two 36HP boilers, one on biofuel and one on planks for both MJ and EU production.
You're thinking small :)
 

Westingham

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Jul 29, 2019
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Will come probably tomorrow. A change: The fermenter currently runs on mulch, since the cobblestone->fertilzer path ain't possible anymore. This has reduced the output of biomass a little bit, but it is still enough to feed 5 boilers, if the apple juice is used. Current problem: the farm doesn't produce enough to apples to keep the mulch-supply up. I'll have to check, how to counter that. Either using a wheat farm with a moistener, or a forestry multiblock farm orchard with apple oaks.

You could try my idea here: http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/liquiducts-and-bc-gates-is-there-an-easier-way.10543

Use apple juice when you have it, otherwise use water.
 

Westingham

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Jul 29, 2019
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How does your setup produce mulch?
I only see how to auto-switch to apple juice, which I already do.

Oh, sorry, that was just to demonstrate the auto-switch of liquids. That's a total theory world. I was saying that you didn't necessarily worry about your mulch output not keeping up because you could auto-switch to water... but then I realized that wasn't your concern. Never mind what I said! :D
 

Abdiel

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Jul 29, 2019
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I have been theorycrafting scaling the boilers to ridiculous limits (something like 4-6 max size tree farms for biofuel + planks, their output is ridiculous), steam turbines with rotors built out of Ferru plants (bonus points if you know what a Ferru plant is!), all feeding a matter fabricator. Quite literally growing stuff on trees.
 

MilConDoin

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Jul 29, 2019
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I don't like the system, which gets you Ferru plants. For renewable iron I'd use either centrifuged obsidian dust or rusty bees.
 

Abdiel

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Jul 29, 2019
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I like it. I don't know why so few people use crops, considering that bees (similar mechanics, even more complex) are so commonly used.
 

Milaha

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Jul 29, 2019
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I like it. I don't know why so few people use crops, considering that bees (similar mechanics, even more complex) are so commonly used.

The sole reason I have not gotten into IC crops is because of the lack of info out there on it. Bees are complex, sure, but if I go looking I can find out all sorts of stuff about it. IC crops (at least last I looked) are a total mystery.
 

DoctorOr

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Jul 29, 2019
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I have been theorycrafting scaling the boilers to ridiculous limits (something like 4-6 max size tree farms for biofuel + planks, their output is ridiculous), steam turbines with rotors built out of Ferru plants (bonus points if you know what a Ferru plant is!), all feeding a matter fabricator. Quite literally growing stuff on trees.

I got all the IC2 plants early on, then dismantled them. Bees are more interesting and can produce output maintenance free.

I even had redwheat, but now I have a _single_ fast bee in an alverary oproducing a stack of redstone an hour.[DOUBLEPOST=1360261904][/DOUBLEPOST]
I like it. I don't know why so few people use crops, considering that bees (similar mechanics, even more complex) are so commonly used.

For starters, IC2 has no way to automatically harvest them. GregTech adds one, but it requires a diamond (actually four, but only uses 1/4th the output) and 24 iron, along with 32eu/t
 

MilConDoin

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Jul 29, 2019
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I almost forgot to post my updated setup :)
Since it's picture heavy, I'll spoiler it for faster page-rendering:
Overview item input.png

1) Here we see an overview of the item input side. Saplings and apples are put into those two item tesseracts. (Scrap the third filter with the enderchest, it is completely unnecessary, forgot to delete it.) Should those two tesseracts ever backlog, they will fill the barrels (there is a restriction tube avobe the log-barrel). Logs will rise up in the tube and go throught the top filter into the stacked hoppers, which fill into the TE pulverizer.
Overview solid side.png

2) The pulverizer will produce planks at max speed, using 2 MJ/t in the process. They get auto-ejected into the relay, which feed the tubes leading to the boilers. The (TE-)sawdust is entered into the diamond chest (could be any kind of inventory, cheating stuff in for experiments kinda leads to oversized stuff), autocrafted to compressed sawdust and pumped into the powered furnace (the second gray block next to the RE-Cell), which ejects into the tube network.
The cell is fed by two TE steam engines (second one is below the cell, AqAcc for water can barely be seen beneath the visible steam engine). These are powered from the charcoal. The filter next to the boilers also accepts charcoal. This will be used, when the plank-reservoir will dry up (the sawmill is just a tad to slow to keep all 3 36HP boilers running with planks alone). If neither the steam engines nor the boilers need the charcoal, it will first fill the diamond chest next to the manager in the background and finally, if even that chest is full, fill the barrel in the back. That manager will keep the cargo manager stocked with a stack of charcoal.
The filter 3 right to the steam engine is set to planks. If everything works normally, nothing should ever go through there.

managers.png

3) Manager 1 is the manager at the charcoal chest, Manager 2 is the manager at the cargo manager (CM). Since my tracks connect to the CM on the red side, the options are set red. You could also remove the saplings from manager 2 and remove the "fill saplings" instruction from the CM without problems.

Solid Boilers.png

4) This shows where the tubes, which went underground before the charcoal-filter, come up again. Important here the equidistance between the two inventories.
Hello mister slime!

Overview liquid side.png

5) Now over to the liquid side. The front tesseract feeds apples into the squeezer, mulch is pumped out to the left, apple juice to the front into the single BC-tank. The back tesseract feeds saplings into the fermenter. The whole setup is powered via 7 industrial steam engines on one of the liquid boilers. Try out, if 6 engines suffice.

Closeup liquid.png

6) Below the tank is gate, set to (IF tank==full THEN emitRedstone). This redstone signal is sent via the (lime green) jacketed wire to the AqAcc below the fermenter. Result: Water will slowly drain from the fermenter. As soon as the liquid tank is empty, apple juice will pour in, which will in turn drain the tank, which will deactivate the redstone signal, so the water will start to refill, as soon as the apple juice has been used up. Mulch is pulled from the ender chest via an autarchic gate set to (IF fuel<25% THEN pulseEnergy).
All six sides of the fermenter are used (apple juice, water, mulch, saplings, energy, biomass out).

The mulch production from the apples is a little bit too low, so another method of mulch production needs to be added. If this problem is solved, the setup produces just enough biofuel to feed 5 36HP boilers.

Any questions? (I assumed, that you know how to setup a steve's carts farm. If not, I posted a howto somewhere.)
 

Minosha

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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MilConDoin - does your farm produce enough saplings to run two fermenters? Also, do you use a timer to pulse all the filters? (Edit: nvm, forgot filters 'pulse' when an item is inserted via tube)
 

MilConDoin

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Jul 29, 2019
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Last time I checked, I didn't got a backlog of saplings, so the farm is only enough for one fermenter (which feeds almost 5 stills, so plenty of MJ coming off that).
 

Minosha

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
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Built most of the parts last night - I have the tree farm running and producing biofuel. Once I have a lot of it, I plan on firing up one liquid boiler with which I'll use some of the corresponding steam engines to power the system. (Right now I'm dropping in RE Cells that are being charged via my current set up of wind and solar.) After that, I'll slowly start turning on the rest. I'm not in too much of a rush to get them all going as I'm in an iron shortage and actually can't make all the needed industrial steam engines and turbines I need. Oh, I'm not pushing it quite as far as you though - going to run 2 36HP boilers on planks and 3 36HP boils on liquid with a 4th coming in the future when the others are running and I have iron again. I thank you for your pictures, they were helpful. I used it as a starting point for designing mine - I'm not as high tech, no tesseracts and unfortunately I can't change the sawmill back to TE sawdust (server, consensus needed for changes :() so I don't have the TE powered furnace and the sawmill will run off of one of the boilers instead of steam engines. Right now I'm just voiding the sawdust.
 

MilConDoin

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Jul 29, 2019
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If you only use two solid boilers, you can (as soon as max heat is reached) either reduce the log input to the sawmill to 22 logs per 62.5 seconds (use a filter+timer below a chest instead of the stacked hoppers), or simply burn the excess in other steam engines for extra output (remember to put these extra engines farther away than your boilers, restriction tubes can help with that).
 

Minosha

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Jul 29, 2019
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Would I need to regulate the system with a timer/filter though? Wouldn't my relay fill up, so the Sawmill wouldn't output, so the hoppers would fill up, then the filter would fill, resulting in the logs going to my barrel instead? Trying to avoid timers.
 

MilConDoin

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Jul 29, 2019
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The boilers eat very fast through the planks (less than a second per plank), so there would almost always be a demand, which would result in a big mass of planks bouncing around in the tubes.

Hmm... what could work: Scrap those tubes, put the sawmill directly next to the chest sitting between the boilers. One relay less (reported as lagging the server by others) and no tubes. And since you only want to run two boilers, you could try running steve's cart on the harvested logs instead of charcoal, reducing even more overhead. Use only one manager set to keep 1 stack of logs inside the CM (should be enough for the cart to refill its fuel-storage), or pull stuff out with filter + slow timer (20sec), which is deactivated when the cart is at the CM (use 2 detector rails and a rs-latch for deactivating the timer).