Bee Queries & Boiler Queries

[namiasdf]

I will be adding to this thread periodically as I come up with questions; I feel like I will be having quite a few and this will save on threads (You're welcome mods =D)

Bees:

Bees that have effects, including the exploding ones: Do apiarist's suits negate all these effects? I don't want to create craters in my base when I begin breeding the dumb nether bees.

"Can only be mutated in the nether": 1. Does this mean that once the mutation is found, I can get the hell out of the nether and begin using them in the overworld? (No pun intended). 2. Might I be able to simulate the climate conditions of the nether using an alveary to achieve the same effect.


Steam Boilers:

One 36 HP boiler produces 720 steam/t. This is enough to power 18 industrial steam engines, producing 128 MJ/t. Due to the fact that boilers have a long start-up time, with significant fuel costs as well, when your MJ storage system caps is the only solution one where you allow the energy to disappear in your conduit system/add more RECs?

If you could elaborate on your strategies in using/maintaining/dealing with steam boilers, it would be appreciated.

 

[Lisranda]

The Apiarists equipment will negate all of the effects -- provided you are wearing every single piece. This also applies to the upgrades to the Modular Power Suit.

Some bees have special mutation requirements, the nether, plains biomes, etc. After you have the bee, you can set it up anywhere. Be aware however that it will not produce any product marked as a "specialty" unless it is in its ideal conditions. +/- tolerances can allow it to live in non-ideal conditions, but no specialty products will be created. To an extent you can use the Alveary blocks to better provide the correct conditions. Remember that blocks such as Alveary Heaters need a source of Buildcraft power.

Due to the long start up time and large fuel inefficiency during start up, large high pressure steam boilers are best used in circumstances where fuel is in infinite, renewable supply so that you can turn them on once and never shut them down. Charcoal from an MFR tree farm, biofuel, Fuel if you have a bunch of one of the three bees that can produce Oil/Fuel. In that case, storing energy is a moot point, just keep producing it and let it dissipate out of the conduits. If you prefer to do things with the more... "Buildcraft" mindset of not wasting energy, you'd have to add more energy storage devices or find a way to consume large amounts. The MFR Mining Laser is a great energy sink, as are Mass Fabs if you eat the extra juice up with Electrical Engines or something. If you have Mekanism available, it has four levels of Energy Cube that are exceptionally good at storing large amount of power and using them for anything later.

 

[Adonis0]

I will be adding to this thread periodically as I come up with questions; I feel like I will be having quite a few and this will save on threads (You're welcome mods =D)

Bees:

Bees that have effects, including the exploding ones: Do apiarist's suits negate all these effects? I don't want to create craters in my base when I begin breeding the dumb nether bees.

"Can only be mutated in the nether": 1. Does this mean that once the mutation is found, I can get the hell out of the nether and begin using them in the overworld? (No pun intended). 2. Might I be able to simulate the climate conditions of the nether using an alveary to achieve the same effect.


Steam Boilers:

One 36 HP boiler produces 720 steam/t. This is enough to power 18 industrial steam engines, producing 128 MJ/t. Due to the fact that boilers have a long start-up time, with significant fuel costs as well, when your MJ storage system caps is the only solution one where you allow the energy to disappear in your conduit system/add more RECs?

If you could elaborate on your strategies in using/maintaining/dealing with steam boilers, it would be appreciated.

For the effects one, a side note, the explosion ones don't actually cause landscape damage. They give the explosion visual effect, hurt like a creeper, but don't actually destroy anything.

Everything else has been answered by the above post

 

[Labhras]

It's also easy enough to use the genetic machines to get an effect cancellation serum and do away with any effect you dislike. You can get the serum for any effect, but effect cancellation is available from most hive bees as it is.

 

[namiasdf]

Ah, these are excellent.

MPS seems so much better than quantum. The flight is just so awkward >_>... Though it'd be so convenient to have apiarist's suit + TC goggles at all times.

I'm in 1.4.7, so I don't have the option of the mining laser, else I'd be shutting down my quarry permanently and opting to make at least 10 mining lasers (4000 MJ/t, bah kids stuff... 500 industrial steam engines...). I was about to lose interest in my world, since I rather hate the efficiency flaw, so I settled for being able to use turbines to route the excess energy into my matter fabricator. It achieves the same things, but I still have to go out and move the damn quarry every once in a while.

What are your suggestions for getting started with serums, etc. Do you take the time to sequence your mundane bees? What are your machine ratios and how might you have automated them. I have AE, logistic pipes, etc. I am also very good with BC pipes, given their limitations.

 

[Labhras]

No sequencing. My personal opinion is that the sequencer and whatever its counterpart is are more or less useless. What you need is a isolator, synthesizer, purifier, and inoculator. Also build a genepool for converting extra bees to liquid dna, which you will use a lot of in the synthesizer and purifier. It sounds like you have no concerns about power, which is awesome for these. The isolator requires vials, which you will need royal jelly to build.

Basically, the order is: isolator to create vials of random genes from a bee, synthesizer to fill the vial, purifier to bring the quality back up (only use excellent. No excuses), and then inoculator to play bee god.

As far as 'early' bees go, get max fertility off wintry bees, fast production off cultivated bees, and effect cancellation off any bee with no effect.

 

[namiasdf]

I might dedicate a small portion to sequencing just for the hell of it. I have stable pairs of a few of the mundane bees and plan to find a pair for the rest. A completionist mixed with a perfectionist = time wasted.

Conveniently, I was looking for an energy sink. I heard the extra bees used a ridiculous amount of energy, so I am happy. How much DNA do I need to do stuff? I have about 150k mB of DNA already from my breeding to industrial/imperial. Right now I am doing other things and letting my jelly/pollen accumulate (I have over 5k of each now... I don't think I'll ever build 5k/27 ~= 200 alvearies.) Are there any useful uses for pollen. I saw the recipe for slime balls and choked on my water, though it could always be used to condense all that crap in lieu of saving AE space.

 

[Lisranda]

MPS flight gets a million times better in 1.5.2, there's a modifier in the table that allows you to change how much your direction of sight affects your direction of flight -- set to nothing it gives you full creative mode flight and not the stupid... "Where I look is where I fly" flight.

For the most part I don't really bother doing anything with Forestry mundane bees except mutating them. Extra Bees and Magic Bees world gens I might go to the effort of stabilizing and running in an Apiary.... maybe. Common bees? Hell yea, I'm not done with them and ready to move on to Cultivated until I have a 100% pure/stable bee with stacking drones.

Once I'm sure I won't lose a species, I'll start isolating traits from one-off unique drones and if they have nothing of value I'll Gene Pool them. The only bees I want available to be automated are pure/stable pairs of Princesses and their stacking drones.

In 1.4.7, the smoothest form of automation was probably Buildcraft-based using Apiarist's Pipes. Logistics Pipes has a nice pipe that will automatically extract and re-insert the Princess and one of her Drones but I'm not sure when that was implemented. AE in 1.5.2 is CRAZY smart at automating bees. Sadly, in 1.4.7 it was just... not. At all. Binnie's machines in Extra Bees have Buildcraft Gate conditionals available in 1.4.7 -- they currently don't work in 1.5.2 but they should be coming back shortly. As cumbersome and uggghhh as I find Buildcraft, you can usually find a solution using it.

 

[Adonis0]

I might dedicate a small portion to sequencing just for the hell of it. I have stable pairs of a few of the mundane bees and plan to find a pair for the rest. A completionist mixed with a perfectionist = time wasted.

Conveniently, I was looking for an energy sink. I heard the extra bees used a ridiculous amount of energy, so I am happy. How much DNA do I need to do stuff? I have about 150k mB of DNA already from my breeding to industrial/imperial. Right now I am doing other things and letting my jelly/pollen accumulate (I have over 5k of each now... I don't think I'll ever build 5k/27 ~= 200 alvearies.) Are there any useful uses for pollen. I saw the recipe for slime balls and choked on my water, though it could always be used to condense all that crap in lieu of saving AE space.

Pollen I think is used for some of the bee machines, but in my opinion, the better product from industrious bees are their combs, which give 100% chance of propolis

I used that much more than any of their pollen, you use it to make apiarist pipes, which are very handy for automation of your bees

 

[namiasdf]

I have figured out the automation for bees, specifically. I was more so referring to how you might have automated your splicing/purifying/etc.

The reason why I am gathering up all those bees is to DNA them/combs. I am planning to run all my excess combs to my biomass factory. This will allow me to create a complex apple juice/honey/water automated fluid system. I've already developed it, but would like to finally put it to use.

I have 7k propolis to heh. I think I might just turn them to slimeballs when I have enough alvearies.

 

[eric167]

No sequencing. My personal opinion is that the sequencer and whatever its counterpart is are more or less useless. What you need is a isolator, synthesizer, purifier, and inoculator. Also build a genepool for converting extra bees to liquid dna, which you will use a lot of in the synthesizer and purifier. It sounds like you have no concerns about power, which is awesome for these. The isolator requires vials, which you will need royal jelly to build.

Basically, the order is: isolator to create vials of random genes from a bee, synthesizer to fill the vial, purifier to bring the quality back up (only use excellent. No excuses), and then inoculator to play bee god.

As far as 'early' bees go, get max fertility off wintry bees, fast production off cultivated bees, and effect cancellation off any bee with no effect.

agreed. even if you dont totally want to get into the genetics, getting these is reccomended.

i prefer having long life on my production bees to minimize excess drones pilling up and increase the time i can go w/o mantinance (router+chests connecting the alvearys allows automatic frames, and an ME network takes care of the combs, so its really only limited to the time it takes 64 drones to collect)
a x2 fertility serum also aids that goal. x1 is just bad, especially when breeding, but breeds out easily.

as a side project, get a T:Both 5, H: Both 2 stack of drones (10 will do unless your luck really goes bad on the isolator, you can mulch the unused, i got these from a DNA aveary, see below) in an acclimatizer, then use the isolator to pull out the respective serums. stick these on a bee, it can live anywhere. stick these onto all your hive bees, everything above them should also have those.
you can cook the serum vials to turn them back to emptys to take care of all the duplicate and junk vials.
"flowers" pollination is good for removing the odd things some bees need. you can now do water bees inland, farmed w/o wheat.

have a couple alvearys running with a fertillity x4 bee with several soul/necrotic frames for shortest turnaround (or cheat in/buy a lot of oblivions, which are really best for quickly breeding new strains) for mass-producing drones to stuff into a genepool or two feeding a tank for the liquid DNA. also mulch the unneeded leftovers from breeding/purifying a new strain. (i keep only the strains that have a species i dont have a princess/drone pair +10 breeding drones.) once you have a lot of production pairs you can mulch those leftovers as well.

for powering the advanced genetic stuff, these things eat power like crazy. have a REC set to 100 in/out next to the machine to provide a buffer, then run energy lines back to your production area. also helps to have a gate pair that goes can store energy-red pipe, red pipe-redstone signal to only activate the engines when you need them, which will be when a machine turns on and drains the buffer, and occassional activation when on standby (you can drain a couple hundred MJ from the cell before the gate detects that it can take more)

for boilers, you get better storage by sticking all the steam into a RC tank (or multiple ones). this applys to all fuels that turn straight to energy as well.

not sure about automating the genetic machines, but i prefer not to let my serums get below average before i take them from the synthesizer back to the purifier.
is there another state below "awful" or am i safe for letting those run? i saw "corrupted serum" on the NEI.
and unless you have 50 serums you want to do this with or a time-senstive project, manual operation isnt too hard.

 

[mushroom taco]

for boilers, you get better storage by sticking all the steam into a RC tank (or multiple ones).

Don't store steam. just don't.

 

[MilConDoin]

Bees:
Valiant Bee and Austere Bee are the only bees, which need to be in their preferred biome to produce their specialties. All the others don't care.

What are you guys doing with your Propolis? After the first 1000 stored, I just voided all the Stringy Combs. The few needed for the Apiarist's Pipes are the only use I could think of, because: Who needs myriads of Slime Balls?

Boilers:
18 engines produce 144 MJ/t (=18*8 MJ/t), not 128 MJ/t.
Use boilers only with some kind of infinite fueling system. Once started they should never stop, especially with the liquid ones. If a liquid fueled boiler is started/stopped multiple times, you're better off with an array of combustion engines. With this in mind, the question about dissipating energy becomes moot.

 

[Bibble]

Bees:
Most has been covered, but I'll make the point. The only time that the "mutation requirements" are checked is at the instant of death. There's nothing stopping you from running your queens in the overworld to the last tick, then nipping to the nether for the death.

Also, for propolis, it can be centrifuged into sticky resin. When you have bee systems running, it's easier than making a tree farm for it.

Boilers:

This harks back to the theory behind MJ. You are not supposed to store it. You can store the energy in TE Cells, but the theory behind MJ is that it's used as it's produced (hence the move from lossy pipes to lossy machines). You make the boiler because you need the energy, and you use it there and then. If some is wasted, then some is wasted.

 

[namiasdf]

Whoops, was thinking about 16x8 (1/4 of a stack. All whole fractions of a stack are stuck in my head forever!)

I have issues with voiding stuff, aside from creosote (1.4.7). I will find a use for those balls o slime.

I have already thought of a system to avoid that. I will centrally produce steam and then send them to local steam storage. Additionally, I will have a larger local steam storage for my steam turbines. When those become full I will route all that steam to turbines which consume that steam in excess to my production by some factor. This will help me reduce the waste. The turbine storage will fill slower if I am using the steam elsewhere, but when things are idling I will be able to route all that power into my matter fabricator. It's better than power converters, since I have problems with using converters/tesseracts.

 

[Benjywa]

Steam Boilers:

One 36 HP boiler produces 720 steam/t. This is enough to power 18 industrial steam engines, producing 128 MJ/t. Due to the fact that boilers have a long start-up time, with significant fuel costs as well, when your MJ storage system caps is the only solution one where you allow the energy to disappear in your conduit system/add more RECs?

If you could elaborate on your strategies in using/maintaining/dealing with steam boilers, it would be appreciated.

18 x 8 is not 128MJ its 144
as per above - Don't use them until you have constant power needs - better off making a tank of fuel and using a stack of combustion engines when you need it
Once you have the need (UU matter essentially) you can hook that up to take all the surplus power.

Efficiency issues
1 - Redstone energy conduits to all your MJ users that ends in a bridge to EU for matter fab will be most efficient
2 - strictly speaking Steam to bridge that outs MJ is more mats efficient

to Charcoal or not to charcoal
This is a point of dicussion elsewhere, the general concensus is
efficiency - coke ovens BUT they are massive and you need a bucket load
efficiency - sawmills and burn the planks - probably the best efficiency and a couple per boiler is not too much to build
space/ease - induction furnace - 1 of these will provide charcoal for many boilers, I use it for 5 and its not even close to using 1 at full tilt

 

[MilConDoin]

Regarding your converters/tesseracts issue, here is what I used:
On top of each boiler I placed a ring of liquiducts and in the center a tesseract (send only). (This needs to be changed for 1.5.2, because you now need 2 tesseracts to transfer all the steam, since each face only accepts 100 mB now (or was it 100mB max transfer from the liquiducts?).)
For converting I had a tesseract (receive only) next to a steam consumer (can convert 1000 mB max per tick, so use more if you have several boilers)->energy bridge->HV producer (or MJ producer).

 

[eric167]

Bees:
Valiant Bee and Austere Bee are the only bees, which need to be in their preferred biome to produce their specialties. All the others don't care.

What are you guys doing with your Propolis? After the first 1000 stored, I just voided all the Stringy Combs. The few needed for the Apiarist's Pipes are the only use I could think of, because: Who needs myriads of Slime Balls?

you can double the output of peat.
2 ash, a propolis, and two peat gives a bituminous peat.
normal output is 5K MJ, bit peat goes up to 12K.

sticky resin. lots of it. 14 from 4 resin balls.

 

[namiasdf]

Haha, I meant that I don't like using them. It forces me to organize my pipes/wires and such, which requires planning. Especially with a central MJ production system, I am going to have to balance that with my EU cables & ME system. I am already quasi cheating by sending biofuel throughout my base in the form of biodiesel cans and using my AE system.

 

[namiasdf]

New query:

1. Both wiki's say that a steam boiler only requires one aqueous accumulator running at full speed, regardless of size. An AA running at full speed is rated at about 1 bucket every two seconds, quoted by at least one of the wiki's. 1000mB/40t = 25mB/t. This is what the number say as to the water throughput requirements to run a steam boiler.

2. A liquiduct is rated at 160 mB/t per input/output. This means that from one Xycraft tank powered by x number of Xycraft water; one liquiduct input coming from this tank can support up to 6 steam boilers water requirement. Though I will probably have a safety factor of about a billion for these dangerous machines, does this sound about right? (If we go with the limit, the xycraft water blocks would be required to produce at least 150 mB/t of water)

i.e. One valve from the water tank, using liquiducts, can support 6 steam boilers given that the water is produced fast enough.