Why are [hobbyist steam engines] terrible? The warmup time isn't that bad, and if you put a hopper on top of your pulverizer you improve the warm-up to use ratio. it seems pretty efficient as it doesnt burn coal very fast.
Best Early Power Gen
- Thread starter Akeldama280
- Start date
-
The FTB Forum is now read-only, and is here as an archive. To participate in our community discussions, please join our Discord! https://ftb.team/discord
They are terrible before you have energy buffering. They are quite good after it.
To get past the warmup period you need a lot of work. That's not the pattern I (or most people) experience in early workshops. You mine for a bit, get full, come back and dump in a hopper, then mine some more. Your power usage will spike. It's very easy to have workloads that never fully heat the hobbyist steam engine and therefore suffer from inferior efficiency. For start-stop unbuffered loads, the Steam Engines from TE are demonstrably more efficient. This is, in fact, what they're designed to do.
If you don't believe me, you can test. Use 0.5 of a piece of coal on a cold engine of each type and see how much energy you collect from both.
Did I say I don't believe you? I understood your point about buffering, and I already acknowledged the warm up period being an issue -- putting half a piece (?) of coal won't prove anything I don't already know.
I guess I've not seen people as adamant as you about how terrible they are before... I take steps to minimize the inefficiency of the warmup and cooldown period, so maybe that's something that helps me. I baby my Hobbyist engines -- I put at least two full stacks in the hopper before I fire them up. If I'm hanging around my base I pull the coal out and let them spend their residual heat doing work while cooling down; i don't just flip the lever to off.
I will test this by putting 2 full stacks in hoppers, put 4 coal in each engine, and see how it goes. Why? Because I'm curious just how much difference there is after reading your passionate opinion on the subject.
This is not my passionate face.
Make sure to note how well your TE pipeline is keeping up with the workload.
I'm only concerned with fuel efficiency in the early game. If you have other criteria let me know and I'll try to note them when I test.
I start out with a few hobbyist steam engines or TE steam engines. Which one I go with is primarily determined by whether a desert is nearby or not. If I have easy access to cactus, I'll use it to make waterproof pipes to supply TE steam engines with water from an aqueous accumulator. If no cactus is around, I'll go with the hobbyist steam engines. Why? Because the TE steam engine uses a ton of water, while the HSE sips it at a comparatively slow rate. Filling hobbyist engines by bucket every stack of coal or so is no big deal, but micromanaging a TE steam engine can be extremely annoying.
Well, note how the cold hobbyist steam engine doesn't generate power until it builds up temperature.
[DOUBLEPOST=1364410403][/DOUBLEPOST]
This is a good point. On our server we actually raided a nearby village for beeswax to get our initial waterproofing going.
Couldn't you put the aqueous accumulator directly below the engine? It'd require a dedicated one for each engine, but they are fairly inexpensive.
Also, what about liquiducts? Or is that too far down the road for early-power-gen?
Technically, yes, but building dedicated accumulators for each engine is much fussier than just dumping some buckets of water in every half hour or so. Much of the early game for me is a rush to get hardened glass so I can make an energy cell, liquiducts, and conduits and start putting together an actual infrastructure. I don't like spending a lot of time on a system that I'm going to disassemble in an hour or two, anyway.
The only thing that I don't like about new farms is that Sengir took the logger away. It was really great machine for tree breeding. Plant trees, let the bees work, cut trees down using logger and collect crossbreed saplings water stream. However new farms seem a lot more balanced, interesting and powerful. Forestry is now a lot more centered on bee/tree breeding, but they are for me the most interesting part of this mod. However I sometimes like to build more mechanical type farms then one magical multiblock (http://i.imgur.com/9kpnjRq.png).
Forestry is well balanced with BC/RC/RP2 and maybe TE. Apatite spawns in enormous veins, finding one will grant you days of work for farming complex, specially if you increase fertilizer yield using ash and thaumic bees. RC adds renewable fertilizer via saltpeter, you can make cheap manual farm (double row of sand on saltpeter spawn and wand of equal trade), or automatic using quarry/filler or piston/deployer/block breaker combo to achieve enormous supply of it.
Back to the topic: combustion engines. Using them you are set on BC power from the beginning. With some gates, aqueus accumulators and energy cell you can get very good energy system early game and oil is trivial to collect using cans. When I was using IC2 early game, I build simple generator based power system with 3 generators 2 batboxes, splitter cable and RS latch to conserve fuel inserted into generators.
Are they? Sucking up huge sums of power for what a ton of other mods have been doing for months with a fraction of that power seems questionable from a metagame perspective. I don't see tweak options in the config. Steve's Carts 2 or Minefactory Reloaded (and for some crops, Thaumcraft) do such an amazingly better job of farming for a fraction of the cost. You can argue that the current upgrade system for MFR is a bit unbalanced and needs tweaking and I'd agree, but the essential function is there. Put a tree in front of a MFR harvester and watch what happens.
I just dont see the multiblock as that magical, I guess. It's like nuclear reactor expensive in terms of copper.
I sorta feel like the sawmill still torques balance.
On the opening subject, you can actually build small steam boilers fed by wood and a steve's cart farm with a shockingly modest sum of resources for very good power output. It's slightly past "my first power plant", more around, "Another nether lava plant? Nah, that's boring." The nice part about that system is that it can scale really well with your power demands over time. Plonk down a 2x2x3 solid fuel boiler and go from there. And now you can easily power a factorization toolchain that way!
Well, in one world I used my first diamonds on enchanting table, refinery, assembly table, laser and finally energy cell.
Edit @KirinDave Overall energy is not something that is hard to generate. On my world I don't play FTB insanity, I don't have to be 100 % efficient with given set of mods, I like to explore mods and try out different combinations. Steve's cart farm is fun to build once, nether lava also (well, without using item teleportation techniques moving lava pump adds a little bit of fun with building nether tracks, but it is still extremely powerful).
Also, about sucking energy. New farms use energy only if they have something to do, I run my silly wheat farm (most expensive 5x5 multiblock) with 2 MJ/t input on REC next to the farm and cell is staying full (output 100 MJ/t).
Edit @KirinDave Overall energy is not something that is hard to generate. On my world I don't play FTB insanity, I don't have to be 100 % efficient with given set of mods, I like to explore mods and try out different combinations. Steve's cart farm is fun to build once, nether lava also (well, without using item teleportation techniques moving lava pump adds a little bit of fun with building nether tracks, but it is still extremely powerful).
Also, about sucking energy. New farms use energy only if they have something to do, I run my silly wheat farm (most expensive 5x5 multiblock) with 2 MJ/t input on REC next to the farm and cell is staying full (output 100 MJ/t).
You can make basic gates with the investment of 2 diamonds. When does early game stop and mid-game begin? Diamonds?
Early game, to me, means you can jump in without any other infrastructure. Keep in mind that to power your laser you'll need MJ, so a system using gates cannot be your very first system. Gates can be added on to your starter setup, but they're not the starter setup.
Oh I agree, generally. I much prefer when left to my own devices to NOT be maxgaming unless I discover something new. For example, I'm considering powering sawmills with a REC powered by a factorization steam boiler. Those sawmills will then feed real solid fuel boilers to start, and later I think all steam will be fed to a master steam endertank (can't use tesseracts because of their world corruption potential with dimensional doors). Then I can plonk down rate-unlimited consumers of steam anywhere as if they were nearly in contact with the steam system; I'm told ender tanks have no flow limiting at all!
So I just started a new world, limiting myself to only BC, TE, Forestry, and everything but IC2/GT stuff. I gave myself an apiarist backpack, a scoop, and a beealyzer.
What I want to know is, what kind of power do I use for this kind of stuff? I'm not really interested in huge steam boilers or anything, and I only really use RC for Coke Ovens. What's an easy to use MJ setup for Beekeeping and Forestry stuff? I'm terrible and inexperienced with multifarms and SC farms, and I need something simple.
I really would like to use Factorization, are the power converters from Charge-MJ efficient? Also if I were to use them, it would just be (Factorization wire)>(Charge Consumer)>(MJ producer)>Engine?
What I want to know is, what kind of power do I use for this kind of stuff? I'm not really interested in huge steam boilers or anything, and I only really use RC for Coke Ovens. What's an easy to use MJ setup for Beekeeping and Forestry stuff? I'm terrible and inexperienced with multifarms and SC farms, and I need something simple.
I really would like to use Factorization, are the power converters from Charge-MJ efficient? Also if I were to use them, it would just be (Factorization wire)>(Charge Consumer)>(MJ producer)>Engine?
Charge to anything has the worst conversion right. Primarily because it's only source of energy is renewable, and so it doesn't use coal, which was used as the balancing point for all the conversion done with power converter. If you're not going for boilers, magmatic engines might be your best bet for MJ along with a nether pump setup. Before you get that, the thread already has enough really good suggestions. Of course you could always just stack basic engines. If you wanted to.
Which might be due for some tweaking now that Charge is generated by steam. There actually is an author-specified metric of comparison.
Ah, thanks. I'm kind of refraining from using lava because I've had some bad experiences with combustion engines, but I think I know how to solve that.