What are you all's favorite basic power generators? I personally like Steam boilers with a charcoal generator. What's yours?
Best Early Power Gen
- Thread starter Akeldama280
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There's pretty much no argument that the first thing an enterprising power generator goes for is a lava tap in the nether over a large sea. It's easy to do early, can be easily relocated, relies on materials that you can gather in the nether pretty effectively, and can be quite compact.
But after that most of our packs have a lot of diversity. One of the easier high-output builds is solid fuel boilers fed by a treefarm (the trick being that sawmill'd planks have a power output that is greater than the sum of its inputs). Traditionally we used Steves Carts for this (and consequently made perpetual treefarms). But Steve's carts are sort of slow in the current design meta compared to Minefactory Reloaded's harvesters, which are... very good. However, to get them to work right you need to bootstrap their power requirements (they can be hungry) and you need to set up a good source of industrial fertilizer.
Anyone complaining that MFR's harvester is OP needs to go look at the hundreds of SC2 treefarms that are perpetually gathering trees forever without any power input at all.
MFR is not so hands off nor so easy to build, but has really crazy high wood output.I prefer using turtles for tree farms. They run for hardly anything, and if programmed correctly, they will run fast enough and smoothly.
MFR farms are still pretty easily power positive, you just need to kickstart them (as you do with Steve's Carts, MFR just needs a much bigger kick). To generate fertilizer I went with a slightly upgraded sewer (gold I think? the one that increases range by 4) under a 9x9 pen of cows that had 3 stacks of wheat given to its feed station. So many cows, so much sewage. Put that through a composter and you're set for life.
An easier solution is probably a skele shard mob grinder (many people set one of these up anyway) or a sulphur goo farm, but I liked doing it the way MFR has built in.
EDIT: OT: I like to start with TE steam engines. I know the hobbyist engine is more fuel efficient, but I like the slightly increased power output.
An easier solution is probably a skele shard mob grinder (many people set one of these up anyway) or a sulphur goo farm, but I liked doing it the way MFR has built in.
EDIT: OT: I like to start with TE steam engines. I know the hobbyist engine is more fuel efficient, but I like the slightly increased power output.
They're power positive for wood. My experience with the bio reactor stuff has been... less than stellar. It's basically a nice way to burn off extra seeds and produce, but it's far from useful in my experiments. I guess it might work better as the final input to a HUGE sum of farms, as the efficiency grows in some kind of superlinear fashion the more types of things you have in there. The problem is the thing runs so fast it's tough to actually keep it stocked.
Yeah, I haven't tried messing with that yet. For now I just send saplings to my standard forestry biofuel line. I have a design concept where the outputs of my golem farms would feed into the bio reactor and maybe I'd regulate its inventory with a manager or sorting machine or something. I'm sure it's possible, but it may be more trouble than it's worth if you're only handling the output of a tree farm.
Fusion reactor! Oh, wait, that's endgame in FTB? I really need to stop playing TerraFirmaCraft.
Unless you have a redstone energy cell to buffer them, they are terrible early power gen. Your first REC goes in in front of them, and then they are the best. They have no middle ground.
If you are not buffering power, use TE steam engines. If you are, then use Railcraft.
My impression was that the bio reactor outputs the same biofuel as a still. Any nerf to biofuel would affect both. Or did you mean the rate at which you can accumulate biofuel using forestry (i.e. 1 sapling would give 50% as much as it currently does or whatever)? If that's the case, we might see people switch to the bioreactor even if they only run it off saplings depending on the relative outputs. That'd be a shame since people have already kinda abandoned forestry farming for other methods. I love the bees and all, but Sengir might be nerfing himself into obsolescence.
Can't wait till the modpack comes out. I'm bad at installing mods.
I use steam engines. Like, the coal+water engines. It's funny, I usually go MJ all the way but I never make RECs. I never really liked the whole wrench+filling+conduits thing. I just like to plop down a couple engines, put a lever on the back (engines are so sexy now that you can put levers on them) and watch em work. Redstone energy cell doesn't move. :'c
I'd like to get into steam and everything, but it just seems so volatile and I feel like I'd have all my stuff ruined if it overheated or something. That's the whole reason why I strayed away from IC2..
Don't worry, just supply your boilers with water and it'll all be okay.
I can't remember, do RC Steam Engines explode or just stall? If they explode, just make sure they're not producing too much power or hook them up to Redstone Energy Conduits.
I thought they explode if you put water in them when they're dry? So I guess I'll just hook it up to an aquaman accumulator.
And I think RC engines to explode. At least, they'll explode when the steam tank does. One of the two explodes, that's for sure. And it'll take the other with it. :'c
Yep, do make sure they have enough water in them when you start them up. Then just start supplying water.
Not that I can see, unless you have good diversity.
Those are the rumors DoctorOr has been whispering in my hear.
I wish I understood what SirSengir was thinking with his farm design. They're basically worse in every way. The only reason anyone fires one up is to harvest forestry-specific harvests that cannot be got at automatically any other way. And the threads here about power consumption? Not heartening. The constant need for mined fertilizer with apparently no generatable substitutes? Not heartening. SirSengir makes jokes about how hard GT is. But you know what? Forestry is WAY harder unless you short-circuit parts of it with other mods (or finally get bees doing what you need them to do to give you free energy).
Last I checked (and it has been a while I suppose) the RC Hobbyist engine will explode like a boiler if you add water while it's hot. If any of the RC engines fill up their energy buffer, though, they'll just seize up like a TE engine and wait to get a whack from a wrench.
EDIT: @KirinDave: By "same biofuel" I meant the same liquid. So any nerf to the usages of biofuel would affect both systems.
EDIT: @KirinDave: By "same biofuel" I meant the same liquid. So any nerf to the usages of biofuel would affect both systems.
I switch between RC and TE Steam engines all the time. TE for fast power, RC for lasting, easy maintenance power gen.