Change in Railcraft Boilers as of 8.3?

[John Freeman]

So I noticed there doesn't seem to be any sort of "efficiency" when boilers reach max heat anymore. A 1000 deg boiler seems to burn coal and charcoal for the same amount of time as a cold boiler. Is this how it's supposed to be or is something wrong?

 

[Seraph089]

I'm pretty sure they just produce steam faster when they're at max heat now. There may be a bit of an efficiency change still, but if there is it's hardly noticeable.

On the bright side, they aren't so painfully fuel-hungry when you start them up now

 

[John Freeman]

I'm pretty sure they just produce steam faster when they're at max heat now. There may be a bit of an efficiency change still, but if there is it's hardly noticeable.

On the bright side, they aren't so painfully fuel-hungry when you start them up now

>hardly noticeable
Charcoal lasts like 5 seconds instead of 15. That's hardly noticeable?
And they are as power hungry as startup now, and will remain that way forever.

 

[Omicron]

I think when you say "efficiency", you really mean "fuel usage". That indeed is a lot more subtle now. Covert says that it slightly increases with temperature, but I have not played with it yet.

Efficiency however is the ratio of input to output, and while input no longer scales massively, output now does scale. What happened is basically this: under the old system, steam output was constant but fuel use went down with temperature. Under the new system, fuel use is "constant" (roughly) but steam output goes up with temperature. It's basically just switching out one thing for the other. The end result should be similar.

It gets a little more complicated because fuel values changed at the same time as the fuel consumption formula, so give the community some time to puzzle it out. If you want to take a stab at it yourself, CJ posted the changes and the new boiler code here.

 

[Seraph089]

>hardly noticeable
Charcoal lasts like 5 seconds instead of 15. That's hardly noticeable?
And they are as power hungry as startup now, and will remain that way forever.

I always use liquid boxes with fuel, and those start with less fuel than they used to. Startup may be a factor with solid boxes still but it can be bypassed with that new fire crystal.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38558957/Minecraft/Railcraft/boiler_changes.txt
Link is the actual formulas used, looks like fuel use actually goes up a bit at higher temps now

 

[John Freeman]

So by what factor is it and how far should I scale down my boilers? Had 5 full size running off one full size MFR farm.

 

[Omicron]

As stated above:

We don't know yet. Nobody has done that math yet.