Automated farming without fertilizer?

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egor66

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endermen hunting in desert biome is fastest way, if DW pack the min stone makes them from iron, the lava plant can cause lag if you load a big area, use spot loader, loads only the single chunk its in, as to the time line of a lava plant yep its more mid than early game at start I use charcoal in gen's as a stop gap to next stage, then the charcoal can/is used in a boiler for ic2/bc power.
 

LittleMike

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Jul 29, 2019
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endermen hunting in desert biome is fastest way, if DW pack the min stone makes them from iron, the lava plant can cause lag if you load a big area, use spot loader, loads only the single chunk its in, as to the time line of a lava plant yep its more mid than early game at start I use charcoal in gen's as a stop gap to next stage, then the charcoal can/is used in a boiler for ic2/bc power.

Oh, I didn't realize they spawn more in desert biomes. I will have to go hunting. Thanks for the tip.

Okay, so if you stick to a single chunk, it won't be as bad. It's a thought. Not really "renewable" but at the same time, I won't drain the nether dry, I'm sure.

I want to do a farm of sorts for charcoal and biomass, but still haven't decided on which route to take. Looks like with Forestry I will absolutely need fertilizer. So that means golems or SC are the only options for an automated version. :\
 

egor66

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one other point most ppl know of but dont speak of in case it gets fixed :p, but if you make any t5 shard & combine with any shard in an anvil you get a new t5 so making ender/blaze/etc shards is not a big problem, yeah if it can be fixed its a bug if not its a feature, aint sure if the shard anvil thing is a bug or feature atm :p
 

LittleMike

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one other point most ppl know of but dont speak of in case it gets fixed :p, but if you make any t5 shard & combine with any shard in an anvil you get a new t5 so making ender/blaze/etc shards is not a big problem, yeah if it can be fixed its a bug if not its a feature, aint sure if the shard anvil thing is a bug or feature atm :p

I have read about that as well as the free reset on renaming an item in the anvil, or something to that effect :p Looks like I'm going to have to go back to the nether for some soul sand and glowstone.
 

WTFFFS

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Thanks for the ideas, guys.

WTFFFS - Early on you run 4-8 geothermals? How do you supply them with lava? Enderchest and pump the nether? In my current setup, I have 2 hobbyist steam engines that I manually throw charcoal into running into a magma crucible that melts netherrack that I also got by a quick trip to the nether. But even filling that one geothermal, it took about 2 hours of having the crucible constantly running. The geothermal then goes into a batbox which feeds another batbox so I have a buffer. That 2nd batbox powers an Extractor, Compressor, Electric Furnace, and Macerator. If I don't use any overclockers, they seem to work okay, but if I throw any in, it slows down. I guess the batbox because it can only put out 32EU/t is the bottleneck?

Oh, I also have a coke oven and IC tank? (the red/clear one) about 4 high with creosote oil in it. Not sure how many buckets that is. I've blown through a lot of coal that route, though and I stopped using it because I'd rather save the coal for diamonds.

So yeah, the point is that the system I'm running now isn't really sustainable and requires some manual intervention. Feeding the two HSE isn't that big of a deal and neither is going to the nether to pick up a few stacks of 'rack, but I want to automate things. The biofuel idea is because I love watching the Mindcrack guys and I was impressed by the setup they have on their server. Plus I keep hearing how biofuel is a pretty efficient fuel if you don't have an oil well nearby.

I have used that as well as a tesseract as well as really early manually filling cells by walking down to the laval lakes I found and clicking like crazy (a stack of cells lasts a while), but generally I run one crucible to 2-3 Geos, I power the crucibles from the magmatic engines I've found that 10 will provide enough power to fill themselves and the Geos usually while you mine with enough left over to run a pulveriser\smelter for processing, truthfully I only ever have compressor\extractor on the EU power early the main reason for the Geotherms is to charge some method of storage to charge my tools. The hobbyists produce 1.6 MJ\tic a magma crucible will run on that but at full power it requires 30 MJ\tic so it was severely energy starved and severely throttled in speed (which TE machines do they change their power usage and therefore speed depending on the internal energy buffer level), overclockers do increase the power requirements I rarely use them though so I'm not sure what they do to the requirement but slowing down with any does sound about right on "your first powergrid" :D
 

LittleMike

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I have used that as well as a tesseract as well as really early manually filling cells by walking down to the laval lakes I found and clicking like crazy (a stack of cells lasts a while), but generally I run one crucible to 2-3 Geos, I power the crucibles from the magmatic engines I've found that 10 will provide enough power to fill themselves and the Geos usually while you mine with enough left over to run a pulveriser\smelter for processing, truthfully I only ever have compressor\extractor on the EU power early the main reason for the Geotherms is to charge some method of storage to charge my tools. The hobbyists produce 1.6 MJ\tic a magma crucible will run on that but at full power it requires 30 MJ\tic so it was severely energy starved and severely throttled in speed (which TE machines do they change their power usage and therefore speed depending on the internal energy buffer level), overclockers do increase the power requirements I rarely use them though so I'm not sure what they do to the requirement but slowing down with any does sound about right on "your first powergrid" :D

I may upgrade to Magmatics once I have the materials. I am having a lot of trouble finding ferrous ores and with GT (Mindcrack 8.1.1) you need invar to make each engine. I do think I'm going to throw a Pulverizer in the mix for that chance at bonus ore, though. According to the FTB wiki (the newer one - http://ftbwiki.org/Magmatic_Engine) it takes 8 magmatics to power the crucible at full speed. More than that and I think you wind up burning too much lava than you're making.
 

LittleMike

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Anyway, so all great ideas on power generation - what about back to farming, though. Any automated ways of doing farming that can be completely automated anymore? Forestry 2 needs fertilizer, so that's out. Thaumcraft requires golems, which is possible, just not right off as it requires some research to get to golemancy. SC? Is that my only choice, really?
 

jumpfight5

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Is it a bad choice?

SC is a great automatic farmer. I guess you could use RP2, but that's a bit weird and really slow.
 

LittleMike

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Is it a bad choice?

SC is a great automatic farmer. I guess you could use RP2, but that's a bit weird and really slow.

No, not really. I'm just not that big into trains :p Well that and the need for creosote really sucks. I was just more asking what my options are. It looks like SC is the way to go, though maybe I can switch over to golems once I get them. Because come on, who doesn't like those little guys? So cute! Haha
 

jumpfight5

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Was this the thread where I recommended going into an abandoned mineshaft to find lots of rails and Creosete? :p ...I actually don't know.
But golems are pretty awesome, even though I've opted for SC.
 

LittleMike

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Was this the thread where I recommended going into an abandoned mineshaft to find lots of rails and Creosete? :p ...I actually don't know.
But golems are pretty awesome, even though I've opted for SC.

Yes it is. I don't know if you saw my follow up post saying that I do have about 48000mb in creosote or so. Not sure how many the rails take. The recipe in NEI is all screwed up, though, so I'll have to check the wiki. Or... find a mineshaft :p
 

jumpfight5

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Oh, no I didn't see that hahahah
But you can start small and always upgrade your farm. So if you only have 30 rails, place them all, and then when you do hit a mineshaft, add the other ones you get. Then upgrade to golems, but that farm (to me) seems like something that's more for show. I can see having a farm to make it look good, then putting an SC farm underneath :p
 

LittleMike

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Oh, no I didn't see that hahahah
But you can start small and always upgrade your farm. So if you only have 30 rails, place them all, and then when you do hit a mineshaft, add the other ones you get. Then upgrade to golems, but that farm (to me) seems like something that's more for show. I can see having a farm to make it look good, then putting an SC farm underneath :p

Well golems can use bonemeal, can't they? I know the SC carts can use it, but it won't allow the trees to reach full growth, only accelerate it in an SC farm. Plus the materials are a pain, of course. I was looking at MilConDoin's setup here and it looked good. Only problem is that when I tried it in a test world, none of the saplings ever got picked up. Added a cleaner and that seemed to fix the problem, but then I had an issue with running out of charcoal and the suggestions to add a solar panel were good, except it's not compatible with the cleaner. Ugh, decisions.
 

jumpfight5

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Running out of Charcoal? Upgrade your engine's size or make the farm smaller. Also, at the rate you're getting trees, acceleration is not a problem. I'm not sure what your problem with the saplings, but mine works fine. Is there storage?
 

LittleMike

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I did what MilConDoin suggested in that post I linked to. His exact setup - same size (16x14 or something? E shaped) same settings on the Manager, side chests for storage, etc.[DOUBLEPOST=1362094207][/DOUBLEPOST]Also, I think the reason I was running out of charcoal is that the cart would just speed around the whole track and not do anything because the trees weren't growing fast enough.
 

jumpfight5

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Okay, if it's speeding around it should get refueled quickly, shouldn't it? I'm not sure of your problem, but I just set up an Iron furnace which takes charcoal and smelts charcoal with the power of charcoal, all excess is sent to the second Cargo Manager, and after that's completely full, it'll start outputting normal wood.
 

LittleMike

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Okay, if it's speeding around it should get refueled quickly, shouldn't it? I'm not sure of your problem, but I just set up an Iron furnace which takes charcoal and smelts charcoal with the power of charcoal, all excess is sent to the second Cargo Manager, and after that's completely full, it'll start outputting normal wood.

The cargo manager confuses the hell out of me. Going with two of them might be a good idea. I remember someone else recently saying that's what they do. One for inventory, one for fueling up the cart.
 

egor66

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Jul 29, 2019
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put the cargo manager on a bend touching two tracks one colour unloading the other loading fuel. yep its that simple no need for 2 managers, I guess its why we get 2 adv tracks.

ps put a stack of wood in its fuel slot it will then refill & use wood until it runs out & will then use what ever you are using rod/coal/char, if you segregate the manager into 4 so you can have it keep wood & refuel form that.

so say blue is the second side it should be last side cart touches before it starts it round trip, set blue with the engine simbol & have the arrow pointing outwards, one other of the for should be blue as well & set to chest simbol with arrow pointing in, the manager should working it out & keep some wood from each drop off to refuel engine, the adon to manager I forget its name atm helps with this, its not near as complex as it first seems, but its hard to explain in text.
 

WTFFFS

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Steves Carts farms are very good for set and forget farming of a single resource type, Golems work very very nicely for multiple resource types from a single farm, a RP2 auto farm isn't really as possible unless you have a steady supply of bonemeal but if you do they can be horrifically productive in a very small space. Forestry multiblock farms are great but as you said the apatite requirement is somewhat offputting though apatite does spawn in very very large amounts in >60 exposed stone (caves ect) if your world was generated after the 2.0.0.X update, I got a few stacks of apatite from a single spawn.
Though for a somewhat off the wall suggestion a Tier5 Zombie spawner is fairly easy to achieve and centrifuging rotten flesh to methane to power a boiler is definitely a possibility requires some setup and resources but I will be trying that one.