Automated farming without fertilizer?

[LittleMike]

Hello all,

I think I'm suffering from too much information. I'm trying to find out a way to get some automated energy production going earlier on in the game. I prefer IC to BC, though I have a mix of a few machines right now. I was thinking of getting into Biofuel production because it's renewable and am trying to come up with a sustainable/self-contained system and that's where I'm having trouble.

Searching through here, I find a ton of information, but sometimes I think it's too much. I can do an SC tree farm, or Forestry Arboretum, or use Thaumcraft golems, or this or that. It makes my head want to explode. Then when you factor in changes to the mods, like oh wait, now it's multi-farm and now you need fertilizer, but wait, saltpeter is nerfed unless you have an ender spawner, and well just skip that and make a tier 5 blaze spawner. And then, oh you're playing with Gregtech on? That's a different story. Is your head spinning yet?

So yeah, I'm sure the question has been asked a ton of times, but I'm lost in all the posts. I'll try and break it down as simply as possible:

Beginning to mid-tier energy generation
Prefer IC machines to BC, but a mix of both isn't bad
Renewable, automated, sustainable
Efficient
Always running? - I tend to turn machines on when I use them, but as I start turning more and more on, things slow down. I want to prevent that. I don't mind "on-demand" power, provided I can turn everything on at once and nothing slows down, rather than having to use only one machine at a time at full speed.

So are these things possible in the earlier to mid stages? I was thinking maybe a boiler setup run on biofuel? But how do I automate that? From what I understand, I need a tree farm->fermenter->still->boiler->industrial steam engines for MJ or ... what do I do for EU, boiler->ISE->magma crucible->Thermal Generator? I start to get lost at that point. Then throw in things like oh, well you need apples because it's 1.5x over water. And then I read about peat bogs and peat-fired engines, so now I need 3 farms?

Sorry for the long post. I hope it wasn't too confusing. Any help would be appreciated. I don't mind going mining for a few hours to go and collect stuff, I'm just not sure how to set up any of this infrastructure so that I can stop going mining for stuff as the reward for setting everything up.

*EDIT* I forgot to include, I'm using Mindcrack v8.1.1 with all default settings (so GT is enabled) for what it's worth.

 

[zwahlm14]

your best bet is to use a steve's carts tree farm with oak trees and about 2 stacks of tracks for it go go along and then to use the apples to make apple juice for use in the fermenter so you get more bio mass and use the sapplings in the fermenter as well then turn the biomas into biofuel useing biogas engines and pump that into a liquid fueled railcraft boiler. If you need some help with which steves carts modules you need i can help you as i have made them several times. also if you don't want trees you can also use the steves carts wheat farm which would only need a fuel source which would be a tree farm set up to make charcoal, or you could just do it manually and steves carts does not need any water on by the tilled dirt or any sort of furtalizer however you can put some bonemeal in the cart i think and speed up the growth process.

 

[Captain Neckbeard]

I'll swear by Golem wheat farms up and down, side to side, forward and backward, and higher-dimensional directions that are still theoretical. Eat wheat, mulch wheat, ferment wheat, distill wheatmass, burn wheatfuel.
Plus the plantations look awesome.

 

[RavynousHunter]

I'll swear by Golem wheat farms up and down, side to side, forward and backward, and higher-dimensional directions that are still theoretical. Eat wheat, mulch wheat, ferment wheat, distill wheatmass, burn wheatfuel.
Plus the plantations look awesome.

Unfortunate implications...

(Bolding is my doing.)

 

[Neirin]

If you just want pure IC2 power, I think the simplest renewable setup is a t5 Blaze spawner feeding generators. Blaze Rods aren't all that great for MJ now that they've been nerfed in boilers, but they still work just fine for IC2. I say simplest because all you really need is a spawning room, some water, a transposer, and some pneumatic tubes (maybe an overflow chest as well). There are better ways to kill blazes (particularly if you want to farm xp), but that's the simplest.

Part of why you get lots of different info is because there's lots of viable ways to produce renewable energy. If you've got the materials to make a golem powered wheat farm, do it. If you've got a soul shard and a lucky nether spawn, get the blaze spawner. They all work pretty well, just do what's easiest for you.

 

[LittleMike]

zwahlm14 - I'm not sure if I like SC farms. Also, don't they require a lot of materials to set up?

Captain Neckbeard - I like the idea of golems but it takes forever to get golemancy. I've just started thaumcraft in a test world and it took me hours of playtime to figure out how to get to Tier 2.[DOUBLEPOST=1362015796][/DOUBLEPOST]Neirin - is that really early to mid-game, though? I guess as soon as you get obsidian you can get to the nether, but aren't the shards a later item to get?

 

[Neirin]

Neirin - is that really early to mid-game, though? I guess as soon as you get obsidian you can get to the nether, but aren't the shards a later item to get?

It requires 1 diamond and a lucky nether spawn. If you don't spawn near a fortress, it's probably not worth your time to go looking for one compared to building a tree farm or some such. However, if you spawned right next to one, a little bit of blaze grinding can get you a t5 shard very quickly. I got mine in about 20 minutes after entering the nether using a sword with Soul Stealer IV and absorbing 2 spawners for their 200 soul bonuses.

 

[LittleMike]

I don't think I spawned near a nether fortress but I'd have to check again. Only made one quick trip to get some netherrack. Regarding SC farms - what is the recipe for tracks now? In NEI, it says you need rail beds which require creosote oil, which requires a coke oven, and the rails recipe is 8 tracks o.0

 

[jumpfight5]

My recommendation if you didn't get coal coke farms up, go into a mineshaft and take all the rails from there. Creosote oil may spawn in the chests there. And pick off a few ores while you're at it

 

[Adonis0]

I'm not sure how Early-mid game this is, this is my set-up that i have, and you should be able to scale it down, then upsize as needed
What I use is a solar panel array for IC2 power, and then a nifty little set-up to run off that

Requirements:
t5 Cow spawner
25 industrial centrifuges
enough IC2 power to run those perpetually
36 HP liquid fueled steam boiler
Steam engines to run off the steam

I've got the cows spawning onto a layer of quicksand to kill them with water underneath to collect the items
Leather goes into chest
beef goes into centrifuges, 12 beef + 250s + 1 cell = methane cell
Methane gets put into a huge railcraft tank
then the rest of the methane gets used in a steam boiler to produce steam, keeps a 36 HP boiler at maximum, not sure if it'd be able to run a second, but one is more than enough, because you can produce 144MJ/t, and this I pipe into an energy tesseract

 

[WTFFFS]

Early to mid game, EU: Geothermals (4-8 will easily supply your early power needs), MJ: Magmatics, both fed from magma crucibles melting Netherrack. Later game, MJ: 36HP\LP boilers running on whatever you can be arsed making (used to be Blaze Rods hands down but now....I use charcoal from a Steves tree farm about a stack and a half of tracks easily over supplies a 36LP, HP's I am running on Biofuel\Fuel) EU: mass Geothermals (Thermals Gens if you have Gregtech currently I'm running 32) fed from a nether pump station.
These setups are running my full Gregtech processing line (2x Grinders\Blastfurnaces, 6 ind Furnaces 2 Electrolysers, 4 Recyclers with 6 overclockers in each), my Matter Fab, 35 lasers on an assembly table, a bunch of Forestry\Extra Bees\TE machines and various other single machines with no requirements to ever slow down on anything (except the Matter Fab, when my dual head TBM (dual 9x10) is running flat out e.g. timer set to .8, I keep it at 1.5 seconds usually otherwise it backlogs the Enderchest somewhat, though I will swap to a Tesseract soon then I may just run it flat out all the time)

 

[Golrith]

My recommendation if you didn't get coal coke farms up, go into a mineshaft and take all the rails from there. Creosote oil may spawn in the chests there. And pick off a few ores while you're at it

Indeed, I had a loot filled mine system near my base, so have creosote bottles, coal coke & steel, without the need of any railcraft machines. Made for a "cheaper" tree farm.


If you want to start out simple with generating renewable energy, then just burn those wooden logs (or TE Sawmill them into planks) in a generator. While that is going on, then you can think about the next step, which is either making use of those saplings, or doing something else with the overflow logs. Depending on your power usage, you may not even need to expand beyond that.

 

[hotblack desiato]

how about a totally different way to renewable power?

http://extra-bees.wikia.com/wiki/Nuclear_Branch

try to breed those bees (will take some hours to get them) and try to get rid of their side effect... and then you can get radioactive combs. those radioactive combs produce uranium ore in the centrifuge.

and now, you are sitting on a renewable nuclear reactor

 

[egor66]

If you are going with SC tree farm here is what I would do & have done in past, feed the sapling into fermenter to make biomas & use that for mostly BC power, you can add 4 or so bio gens if you have an excess of biomas & you most likely will, the wood pump into 2 TE furnaces to make charcoal, this then is feed to 4-6 generators then fill a mfe, not the best option but its totally self contained system, easy to automate with BC gates or RP filter/timer, & easy to upgrade at a later date & move on up to steam boilers using the charcoal in solid fuel system & biomas in liquid system.

 

[zwahlm14]

zwahlm14 - I'm not sure if I like SC farms. Also, don't they require a lot of materials to set up?

Captain Neckbeard - I like the idea of golems but it takes forever to get golemancy. I've just started thaumcraft in a test world and it took me hours of playtime to figure out how to get to Tier 2.[DOUBLEPOST=1362015796][/DOUBLEPOST]Neirin - is that really early to mid-game, though? I guess as soon as you get obsidian you can get to the nether, but aren't the shards a later item to get?

now steves carts farms don't require any more resources to build than the forestry farms but they don't require any special dirt to plant the stuff on, plus you can make the steves carts farms look really cool.

 

[egor66]

now steves carts farms don't require any more resources to build than the forestry farms but they don't require any special dirt to plant the stuff on, plus you can make the steves carts farms look really cool.

Very true as long as you have some tracks the costs is near the same as making forestry tree farm, but SC tree farm cart is way way over powered because it can run off charcoal made from the wood it produces & even the raw wood its self.

 

[zwahlm14]

Very true as long as you have some tracks the costs is near the same as making forestry tree farm, but SC tree farm cart is way way over powered because it can run off charcoal made from the wood it produces & even the raw wood its self.

yea, i guess it is kinda over powered but in the end after you have a forestry tree farm running by itself it is just as overpowered because with either system you will still get thousands of stacks of logs. forestry just takes a bit more infrastructure first to set up is all.

 

[LittleMike]

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.

 

[egor66]

A nether lava plant is so easy now with tesseracts, ic2 pump hooked up with liqiudducts feeding a magmatic engine, this powers the pump, the rest of lava is pumped into a liquid tesseract on the same line of liquiducts, set to send only, at you base have a second liquid tesseract set to receive only, hook up liquidducts & feed 4-8 geo's, note I like to have a portable tank as a buffer at each end, not really needed but its a step I take as buffering helps, this system is simple & easy & best of all works well tnx to KingLemming a lot of builds can be compacted to very small foot prints with TE, note II, remeber you need a lever to activate the pumping of liquiducts, & if you use conduits "if not why the hell not there far better & DO NOT EXPLODE" remember to hit the conduit at the points it meet engines/machines with a wrench, to change the arrow to the correct direction required.

pz mate hope some of this is of use to you.

 

[LittleMike]

egor66 - doesn't that cause major lag? In SSP that strategy wouldn't be a big deal, but on a server it would, no? Also tesseracts aren't exactly something you can get early on because of the ender pearls needed. Incidentally, I have ran into a total of maybe 4 endermen the entire playtime on my server and none have dropped a single damn pearl.

I totally agree on using liquiducts. They are so much more efficient than BC pipes and not exploding is the clincher.