CovertJaguar told me that "if you don't have Buildcraft engines running constantly you're doing it wrong". So the design intent is to simply throw more power at it. That more or less puts the ridiculous amount of oil you get in the newer Buildcraft versions into perspective; it's there so you can simply keep your combustion engines running all the time.
We get more oil? All I know of on this front is that there is a rare biome that can give you a lot of oil. I've never seen it naturally occur myself. On my current map generated with very recent Buildcraft, Railcraft and friends, I haven't seen a single oil spout. I was actually getting ready to ask if there was a bug or if the BC crew had offered up
less oil. I've yet to see oil at all! Like, ANY!
And even if we ignore that fact (maybe I'm just unlucky!) then how are we supposed to go get the fuel? Teleport pipes are gone and the simple truth is that Railcraft networks or long pipe networks are totally infeasible in Minecraft. Mine carts have never been terribly useful, and for all Covert's work they remain a specialist tool or a mark of a vanity build. Similarly, long pipe networks are costly. And so we can say, "Ah well you will go to the trouble of laying a long rail line and paying for the costly anchor sentinels and laying useful track, but the oil dries up quickly and then what?" Moving chunkloaders like the Anchor Cart didn't work well for me when I tried i 1.4.7 (for RC or Steve's Carts, I'm like the only guy I know who had primary automining handled by Steve's Carts!) and didn't work basically at all when I tried early in the 1.5.* cycle. Maybe they're better now... it seems like moving chunkloaders are a constant problem.
So we can't move things via long distances automatically. So, I guess it is expected by Buildcraft that I spend time as a player going to fetch fuel?
I just look at the buildcraft+forestry+railcraft ecosystem, and I see lot stuff that's really interesting. But what I also see is a lot of stuff propped up by forestry's renewable power model.
Imagine for a moment a world without Redstone Energy Cells. Buildcraft power has always been likened to air pressure; in fact, it is even referenced internally as "PneumaticPowerNetwork". Now obviously it doesn't work that way - in the end, MJ is still transferred in discrete energy units like EU, and Thermal Expansion even made it storable like EU. Now CJ wants to move Buildcraft away from that idea again.
I know all this, and I remember the pre-TE world.
It just seems weird. The average base can have 20-30 machines easily. That means a constant draw of fuel into engines five or six engines just to deal with the idle draw, and more in some cases! And of course you'd better get good with pipe wire or you waste an epic sum of fuel actually running the remaning half-dozen engines that provide the work power. Hope Has Work? isn't buggy.
And I hope you turn chunkloaders off when you leave your base. Except that is sort of terrible for Forestry, so enjoy your impasse.
If you just think of it as "keeping the pressure up in the pipes", you get a rough idea of what it's supposed to be like.
If anything, buildcraft seems to be deviating from ideal.
Get this, for a science project in high school I built a pneumatically actuated
arm! I actually know a bit about how this metaphor is supposed to work, and let me tell you this idea of power constantly bleeding out is a weird one. Like evidently we can make watertight pipes but our energy pipes are constantly lossy? Or perhaps our machines have massive leaks we can never fix? The idle draw implies a leak in a pneumatic system.
Heck, maybe I'll write this up in more detail and submit it as a proposal. It's probably never going to happen though, because it completely breaks compatibility with the existing system. And I bet someone else will come and complain that it uses 1% more CPU cycles for the physics simulation or something, and therefore is the devil itself and will make everything completely unplayable because of lag.
Why not just build it yourself? But be cautioned, I think they called it Buildcraft for 1.4.7 when they built it and everyone rejoiced when KL introduced high-efficiency low-lag power conduit.
In any case, I feel like BC wants to increase time intensiveness to the point where I can't play minecraft for fun anymore. It's a delicate balance I grant, but... well let me show you.
Go here. Select "Resonant Rise" from the dropdown. Find my name. You'll see in my youtube how far I've gotten in that time, it's not bad... and thats since launch of my modpack. Is modded minecraft supposed to be so hostile to casual gamers?
