Cobble Compression
- Thread starter mattp_12
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The Gregtech electric crafting table has a 3x3 packager mode. You should be able to just pipe in all the cobble and out comes the compressed versions. Think it can even handle all the tiers at the same time(stores them in buffers and toggles through each of them until it can pack one. At least this is what it does in the dust mode).
RFTools has an autocrafter that can do eight different recipes at once. Also, Factorization packagers work well with ExtraUtilities' autocrafting system- if you place a crafting table beneath the center of a 3x3 square of packagers, then place an item transfer node with a World Interaction Upgrade on the bottom of the crafting table, it'll do two levels of compression at once.
Also, back in the days of XyCraft, my go-to solution would probably be a line of Fabricators. I miss having those things... but, then again, AE is so much more versatile.
Also, back in the days of XyCraft, my go-to solution would probably be a line of Fabricators. I miss having those things... but, then again, AE is so much more versatile.
Steve's Factory Manager is the simplest and seems to cause the least lag in the world. One inventory manager and two chests are all you need. I was feeding cobble to mine from my Ender Quarry. You could also easily feed it with any cobble gen. Extra utilities transfer nodes with speed upgrades and world interaction upgrade are the fastest and also create no lag.
At the bottom right, you see my cobble generator. The transfer node has quite a few world interaction and speed upgrades in it. It feeds into the top of the packagers. Note that the pipes atop the packagers are Rationing Pipes. I realized as I was writing this post that that was actually a bad idea- not only are they unnecessary (they will insert no more than one stack's worth of any given item type into an inventory, but the packager's input slot can only hold one stack anyway), they were causing some kind of bug where the packagers stopped working after creating a stack's worth of compressed cobblestone. Use normal transfer pipes instead. They work fine.
The blue carped covers are to break any loops in the connections of the pipes- they make the pipe line follow an S shape over the top of the packagers. Why blue carped? It's the only cover that showed up in NEI in my Resurrection client. I blame Greg. If you don't like covers, you can use a wrench or a stick to turn the pipes into one-way pipes, directed in the same sort of S shape.
The crafting table is underneath the middle packager, and the second transfer node is directly under it. This node also has some speed and world interaction upgrades, although it doesn't need nearly as many as the cobblegen. It really only needs one interaction upgrade, and doesn't need any speed upgrades at all to keep up with the packagers, unless there's a really long pipe attached to it.
However, it's still kinda slow, because the packagers are slow. If you're worried about speed, it's probably worthwhile to exclude Factorization (at least for the first few stages) and look to other mods.
XU alone can do it pretty well. I found that if you take the setup in the above screenshot (with rationing pipes this time), replace the packagers with chests, barrels, or any other inventory that accepts cobblestone (protip: you can place trapped chests right next to normal chests, so alternating them works well), and place a duplicate setup right under it (with the covers slightly rearranged so it accepts items from the middle instead of a corner) such that the transfer node in the top setup takes the place of the central rationing pipe in the second (place a rationing pipe in this node's GUI so that it won't try to completely fill the chest below it with compressed cobblestone before moving on to the others), you can get a few times the output of the XU-FZ setup in twice as much space with the right number of upgrades.
It seems that putting more than one world interaction upgrade in a transfer node on a crafting table doesn't do anything. However, speed upgrades do make it craft faster. If you put 64 speed upgrades in the first node, you need only six in the second to just barely outpace it- if you have a sufficient cobblestone supply. I managed that with two dozen transfer nodes in cobblegen mode (i.e. attached to a block with lava and water on either side) with a stack of both interaction AND speed upgrades. This rig produces a stack of double compressed cobblestone in about eight seconds, or about eight double compressed cobblestones per second. That's probably slow enough that the packager rig could comfortably keep up and produce a quadruple compressed cobblestone every second or so, which could easily be fed through a chain of four more packagers with hoppers in between, for a grand total of one octuple compressed cobblestone every 9^4 seconds = about two hours.
Wow, Tema doesn't make bedrockium cheap.
agreed, if you want the most easy and fastest way of obtaining octuple compressed cobblestone, Steve's Factory Manager and Extra Utilities nodes is the way to go
This is also the molecular assemblers from AE2 in pattern mode, then don't take up a CPU and they will eject into the next inventory so you can chain them
I would use Steve's Workshop because you can turn one crafting table block into four automated crafting tables, and there's also a speed upgrade as well so it really flies.
I use this setup to make my charcoal from logs coming out of my tree farm (using four furnaces instead of four crafting tables obv) but it can easily be used for compressing cobblestone.
Nice and simple, compact, inexpensive, and once it's setup you literally can just forget about it. I don't know if automated crafting requires any fuel - that might be a factor tho if you have to supply the Workshop block with fuel.
I use this setup to make my charcoal from logs coming out of my tree farm (using four furnaces instead of four crafting tables obv) but it can easily be used for compressing cobblestone.
Nice and simple, compact, inexpensive, and once it's setup you literally can just forget about it. I don't know if automated crafting requires any fuel - that might be a factor tho if you have to supply the Workshop block with fuel.
Thanks for all the suggestions! I'll probably end up doing a EU transfer node on top of a cobble gen after my 200k cobble all gets compressed. I'll also try steves factory manager. I also might try the factorization method, but that machine is slow 
In the long run I will probably just use steve's factory or AE2, telling it to craft 1000's of compressed cobble and letting it sit there.
In the long run I will probably just use steve's factory or AE2, telling it to craft 1000's of compressed cobble and letting it sit there.I think I know how it works. Transfer nodes, provided they have a world interaction upgrade, can pick up dropped items. With the cobble generator feeding into a dropper on a redstone clock, it will constantly spit out cobble into whatever crafting system you want from the transfer node.
Actually I think the droppers place the cobble in a certain spot in the crafting table. not sure though.
Transfer nodes, attached to a crafting table, with an interaction upgrade will scan the 9x9 inventories behind the table for a pattern to craft, craft it and pump it across the network, as with any other thing. With speed upgrades, it can be really very quick.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet: turtles. Seriously, ComputerCraft has an answer for everything if you're willing to teach it. They require no fuel, and you can program them to automatically mine the cobble from the generator. If you were savy, you may even be able to teach the same turtle to do the entire compression process.
I used extra utilities in-world crafting (9 chests behind crafting table) and got a throughput of about 2500 cobblestone per second. You can use 18 (9 pairs) of ender chests for the first crafting step, and then separate max-upgraded transfer nodes generating cobble into 9 of them. Routers (reborn) was great for distributing the compressed cobble to the next crafting steps. Takes a bit less than 5 hours for one octuple compressed.