Automating pure titanium output from Mariculture Vats

[SpawnMoarOverlords]

Hopefully @JoshieJack but anyone who wants to chime in is positively welcome!

I am near end-game in the Regrowth modpack. I recognize that just because you wrote Mariculture doesn't mean you provide support for modpacks. This isn't a modpack question though I don't think as it pertains specifically to the vat and to the block caster.

So I have an upgraded crucible furnace cranking out lots of magnesium and impure titanium. I actually have an emerald fluid pipe from Buildcraft Transport running from the crucible to a diamond fluid pipe that filters to 4 branches for different fluids (I run anything that can't go into Mekanism through Mariculture's crucible furnace, so that's ardite, cobalt, rutile, etc.).

I've got the magnesium and impure titanium in molten state and pumping into the vat. I see two problems so far:

1. It seems that no matter how much magnesium and titanium is in there, it makes ONE ingot's worth of molten pure titanium and then stops until the pure titanium is cleared out of there. Ok, no problem, though it would be cool if it would work on multiple recipes simultaneously if enough fluid is preset, but w/e. Should be able to clear it easily with some form of fluid pipe. Which leads me to #2

2. When I attach a fluid transport system, whether it's a Mekanism mechanical pipe or a Buildcraft fluid pipe, I can't seem to get the pipe to figure out that all i want to pull out is the PURE titanium. It sucks out everything, or tries to until it fills up. The block caster it's all attached to won't accept anything but the first fluid that comes out, and to be fair, it does always prioritize taking from the "output" section of the vat.


So I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, what's the deal with the vats? Is there some native Mariculture method of extracting molten titanium from the vats? Like a pipe I'm not seeing or something? Or is there maybe a specific location on the multiblock (I'm doing a 2x2 vat) that is a designated output? I need a few thousand titanium plates and they're going to be a bear to make manually : )

 

[Someone Else 37]

Hopefully @JoshieJack but anyone who wants to chime in is positively welcome!

I am near end-game in the Regrowth modpack. I recognize that just because you wrote Mariculture doesn't mean you provide support for modpacks. This isn't a modpack question though I don't think as it pertains specifically to the vat and to the block caster.

So I have an upgraded crucible furnace cranking out lots of magnesium and impure titanium. I actually have an emerald fluid pipe from Buildcraft Transport running from the crucible to a diamond fluid pipe that filters to 4 branches for different fluids (I run anything that can't go into Mekanism through Mariculture's crucible furnace, so that's ardite, cobalt, rutile, etc.).

I've got the magnesium and impure titanium in molten state and pumping into the vat. I see two problems so far:

1. It seems that no matter how much magnesium and titanium is in there, it makes ONE ingot's worth of molten pure titanium and then stops until the pure titanium is cleared out of there. Ok, no problem, though it would be cool if it would work on multiple recipes simultaneously if enough fluid is preset, but w/e. Should be able to clear it easily with some form of fluid pipe. Which leads me to #2

2. When I attach a fluid transport system, whether it's a Mekanism mechanical pipe or a Buildcraft fluid pipe, I can't seem to get the pipe to figure out that all i want to pull out is the PURE titanium. It sucks out everything, or tries to until it fills up. The block caster it's all attached to won't accept anything but the first fluid that comes out, and to be fair, it does always prioritize taking from the "output" section of the vat.


So I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, what's the deal with the vats? Is there some native Mariculture method of extracting molten titanium from the vats? Like a pipe I'm not seeing or something? Or is there maybe a specific location on the multiblock (I'm doing a 2x2 vat) that is a designated output? I need a few thousand titanium plates and they're going to be a bear to make manually : )

I know that Buildcraft's emerald transport pipes can filter what items they pull from inventories; it might be worth trying an emerald fluid pipe to see if they share that functionality (which they may or may not, I don't remember off the top of my head). Failing that, while I'm not familiar with Regrowth, there's a good chance you have Thermal Dynamics, Extra Utilities, EnderIO, or another mod that can handle fluid transport installed; both of these mods allow you to filter what fluids they pull.

Hmm... if you don't have Thermal Dynamics, Extra Utilities, or EnderIO, you may still be able to use Mekanism's pipes. I don't know if you can filter what fluids they pull from tanks offhand, but if the pipes can't do it natively, there may be a fluid equivalent to the Item Router/Sorter/whateveritscalled, which should be able to solve your problem quite efficiently.

 

[rouge_bare]

Maybe you could try using decanting golems? None of the other options in the above post are in regrowth for better or worse. You could use a gate setup to only pull when the gate detects the titanium, to be safe i'd suggest runninga diamond fluid pipe to circle anything non-titanum back to the vat.

 

[SpawnMoarOverlords]

These are pretty good suggestions, but they have problems. As rouge has pointed out, Regrowth doesn't have any of the mods Someone Else mentioned. And rouge, the difficulty I'm having is that the emerald pipe does have an internal filter and I've set it (I got 2 ingot's worth of molten pure titanium which was enough to fill a bottle, and I placed that in the filter), but even with that filter in place, it still sucks up all of the molten ores in the vat. So I tried running a recursive loop back for the magnesium/impure titanium, but it clogs up almost right away, backs up into the emerald pipe, and then the whole thing gets borked.

My verdict is that BC pipes...kind of suck to be honest.

So neither of these options is working. I'm really not wanting to get into golems because they are a pain in the butt and tend to be really squirrely around piping because they are half-blocks.

Any other ideas?

 

[thephoenixlodge]

You can perform the mixing of molten magnesium with impure titanium in the smeltery too. Much easier to automate properly and I kind of added that recipe specifically for the purpose of automation. The issue with the emerald fluid pipe is that IIRC it only really recognises buckets, and unfortunately there is no molten titanium bucket. I might bring it up with asie. BC pipes do work well, this is just a bit of an edge case that they can't really handle.

 

[SpawnMoarOverlords]

You can perform the mixing of molten magnesium with impure titanium in the smeltery too. Much easier to automate properly and I kind of added that recipe specifically for the purpose of automation. The issue with the emerald fluid pipe is that IIRC it only really recognises buckets, and unfortunately there is no molten titanium bucket. I might bring it up with asie. BC pipes do work well, this is just a bit of an edge case that they can't really handle.

Woah hey, the man himself. Thanks, phoenixlodge, for your response.

Yea, I've gone back to using the smeltery, but for the ENORMOUS amount of resources needed for mekanism this gets to be a serious rate-limiting step. The crucible furnace CRANKS the stuff out, but I can't combine it. The smeltery will combine it, but it is slooooooooooooooooow to melt and slow to decant. If this were Ag Skies I'd just put a servo on and we'd be good to go, but I'm going to run into the same issue trying to pipe out of the smeltery where it will just take whatever fluid it can grab, not allowing time for the twain to combine.

A friend suggested the Logisitcal Sorter, but alas, it only sorts solids. It would be very cool to add a Mechanical Sorter to Mekanism that would sort gases and liquids (or just liquids and then do a 3rd for gases, w/e). Actually, the latter would DRAMATICALLY declutter Mekanism setups as you could run common conduit for your various gas-producers and fuel your gas-burning generators, feed your fusion reactor, and fuel jetpacks and the like all in one grand hurrah.

 

[thephoenixlodge]

Woah hey, the man himself. Thanks, phoenixlodge, for your response.

Yea, I've gone back to using the smeltery, but for the ENORMOUS amount of resources needed for mekanism this gets to be a serious rate-limiting step. The crucible furnace CRANKS the stuff out, but I can't combine it. The smeltery will combine it, but it is slooooooooooooooooow to melt and slow to decant. If this were Ag Skies I'd just put a servo on and we'd be good to go, but I'm going to run into the same issue trying to pipe out of the smeltery where it will just take whatever fluid it can grab, not allowing time for the twain to combine.

A friend suggested the Logisitcal Sorter, but alas, it only sorts solids. It would be very cool to add a Mechanical Sorter to Mekanism that would sort gases and liquids (or just liquids and then do a 3rd for gases, w/e). Actually, the latter would DRAMATICALLY decluter Mekanism setups as you could run common conduit for your various gas-producers and fuel your gas-burning generators, feed your fusion reactor, and fuel jetpacks and the like all in one grand hurrah.

Okay, just played with it a bit myself, and it doesn't seem to be that the filtering is limited to only fluids with buckets, but may actually be completely non-functional currently :/
Also, just tested, and you can filter fluids using gates. If you use a gate of gold level or higher on your emerald or wooden fluid pipe (I used a gold AND gate with an autarchic pulsar), and set the condition to Fluid in Tank, next to it there is a second box, use your titanium bottle there, and then set the result of the conditional to be energy pulsar. Works perfectly with the vat, and so presumably with the smeltery as well.

 

[SpawnMoarOverlords]

Okay, just played with it a bit myself, and it doesn't seem to be that the filtering is limited to only fluids with buckets, but may actually be completely non-functional currently :/
Also, just tested, and you can filter fluids using gates. If you use a gate of gold level or higher on your emerald or wooden fluid pipe (I used a gold AND gate with an autarchic pulsar), and set the condition to Fluid in Tank, next to it there is a second box, use your titanium bottle there, and then set the result of the conditional to be energy pulsar. Works perfectly with the vat, and so presumably with the smeltery as well.

Wow, thanks PL! I'll go do exactly what you've said. Hopefully I've used decent keywords such that anyone having a similar issue can find this thread. I'll certainly teach the folks on my server.

Again, thank you!

EDIT:

Hey, in case anyone else is going this route and wants to know about the optimum setup for smelting at 2x (i.e. prior to fully upgraded mekanism machines that will do this just as fast but get you 3-5x), slam 3x ultimate hyperkinetic upgrades into each of two crucible furnaces (you can get them to max heat really quickly with 3x ultimate heating upgrades that you then swap out for the hyperkinetic; takes about 30 seconds to hit max heat). Then run a mekanism mechanical pipe from your crucible to your smeltery's smeltery drain and set the fluid to pump from the crucible furnace to the smeltery.

The reason for having two of these is to allow for alloys. For example, I melt up magnesium in one while melting rutile in the other (though I actually have a third that is melting limestone to quicklime and then dumping into two 2x2 vats to make LOTS of magnesium...may expand that to 3 or 4 2x2 vats). Anyway, the fluid very rapidly melts (~1s per block so 64 blocks melts in 1 minute vs. taking several minutes in the smeltery unless you make an enormous one to handle a lot of extra blocks which would cause a lot of lag and use a LOT of lava which would mean growing a lot of fire essence seeds etc.). Anyway, set the magnesium and molten impure titanium to run to your smeltery via two different drains. They will instantly combine in the smeltery. Then you can pump them out via another mekanism mechanical pipe attached to another drain, OR you can get fancy and use an emerald pipe with the gold AND gate with autarchic pulser upgrade. Indeed, if you did this for a bunch of different smeltery drains and kept everything separated with covers or spacing, you could full automate any ore production simply by running piping or a hopper to your crucible furnaces to feed ores from auto-assemblers (which are, in turn, fed essence from, say, a Reap of the Harvest Moon ritual (which won't break AgriCraft crops, unlike your poor, silly, stupid golems). On the back end, just have a different output for each ore or alloy you want to pull out, run a single common Mekanism conduit set to PULL from your block casters, and attach to JABBA barrels, an ME import bus, or both. Then sit back and giggle as ingots pour in.

And even if you have gotten to 5x Mekanism production, you can't make titanium through Mekanism (unfortunately) because Mekanism doesn't recognize rutile ore. Neither does it seem to like nether ores which means ardite and cobalt are out. So I have my crucibles + smeltery set to make just those 2 ores + 1 alloy because you need a LOT of each to make all the various upgrades and components for the mekanism machines.

 

[SpawnMoarOverlords]

Okay, just played with it a bit myself, and it doesn't seem to be that the filtering is limited to only fluids with buckets, but may actually be completely non-functional currently :/
Also, just tested, and you can filter fluids using gates. If you use a gate of gold level or higher on your emerald or wooden fluid pipe (I used a gold AND gate with an autarchic pulsar), and set the condition to Fluid in Tank, next to it there is a second box, use your titanium bottle there, and then set the result of the conditional to be energy pulsar. Works perfectly with the vat, and so presumably with the smeltery as well.

So I've been tinkering with this for half a few hours now and I can't find a way to get the a AND gate with pulsar to pull ONLY pure titanium out. What you've proposed is a model that basically says "Hey, if there is pure molten titanium in the smeltery/vat, then start sending a redstone pulse to pump fluid out."

But what I want is a way of saying "Hey, if there is pure molten titanium in the smeltery/vat, then pull ONLY the pure molten titanium out and leave everything else."

So my pulsar keeps chewing through the pure titanium until it has pulled all out, and then it starts pulling out magnesium or impure titanium, whichever is on the bottom of the stack of my smeltery.

So now what I'm trying to do is figure out if there's some way to get an item that will cause pure titanium to be pushed to the bottom of the stack every time it is formed, because when new pure titanium is made, by default it sits on top of the smeltery inventory. But since that counts as the smeltery containing pure titanium, a pulse is sent and it starts pumping whatever is on the bottom out.

In short, I really, really, really, REALLY wish we had servos in this modpack for this one reason.

 

[rouge_bare]

Ok, i'm going to assume use of the smeltry here, and ample use of pipe wire.

On the output from the smeltery pipe, you need to pull when:

The smeltry contains Pure Titanium.
The smeltry does not contain Magnesium.
The smeltry does not contain impure titanium.

To pull we need to satisfy all 3 conditions, the not is a little harder to do though, so would require an autarchic diamond AND gate.
Firstly, you will need 2 colours of pipe wire, I'm going to use green and yellow, but you can use any two.
Contains Magnesium > Yellow Pipe Signal
Contains Impure Titanium > Green Pipe Signal
No Yellow Pipe Signal > Energy Pulsar
No Green Pipe Signal > Energy Pulsar
Contains Pure Titainum > Energy Pulsar

This would work to extract Titanium, assuming the correct ratio of impure titanium and magnesium enter the smeltery.

To add a way to temporairly stop the flow of items or fluids, we need to add another pipe wire to our setup, which will trigger the entry of the inputs, I'm going to use Red.

Add to that list Contains Pure Titanium > Red Pipe Signal.

You can use this red pipe signal to disable your import into the smeltry.

EDIT: I should note this is entirely off top of head, and entirely untested.

 

[SpawnMoarOverlords]

Ok, i'm going to assume use of the smeltry here*SNIP*

Thanks for your suggestions. I don't know that I understand them 100% but I will try. Another friend suggested that I might try just using titanium bees, but I think that's a much slower production rate so I'm not real chuffed about the possibility.

 

[Likas]

I found a way to automate Molten Titan pouring from the Vat more or less reliable...
Place a Seared Faucet on the Vat, below it place a Block Caster from mariculture, near faucet place a redstone clock (i was using hourglass from botania), and finally hopper/item pipes from Block Caster.
It works because faucet does not pour other liquids into Block Caster filled with Molten Titan and Block Caster have volume for 10 ingots, so it will be always filled. However you need your Vat constantly working without delays because if you'll have Vat without any Molten Titan and empty Block Caster - it'll start pour other liquid.

Hope it'll helps if not too late.

 

[Sjoerd Hidde Kuperus]

I know it`s old, but i am just no replaying the pack... if you melt rutile ore in the crucible furnaces, you get a 1.5 ingot per ore block, thus 6 ore, makes 1 block of titanium!! using the block caster as described above here finishes a complete automation without troubles!! it Always keeps the single ingot worth of fluid in the block caster. and you can use an interface with recipy 6 rutile ore = 1 block of titanium the magnesium side should Always be filled with magnesium and presto, full auto

 

[Sjoerd Hidde Kuperus]

Funny thing, it still went haywire in the end... in the end i set up a smeltery in which i entered correct amount to create the recipy and had the same block caster positioned. that did work and was foolproof
(exporting with an hourglass set to 1 minute) production was not fast, but flawless

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

Funny thing, it still went haywire in the end... in the end i set up a smeltery in which i entered correct amount to create the recipy and had the same block caster positioned. that did work and was foolproof
(exporting with an hourglass set to 1 minute) production was not fast, but flawless

Yeah, I've found that in the past, you think your setup is ideal but something goes haywire in the end!