Cobblestone = 1,000 EU each?

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abculatter_2

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Jul 29, 2019
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Glass bottles give you 1000 EU at 2eu/t per filled glass bottle.
Glass bottles can be made from cobblestone at a 1 to 1 ratio, so this mean you can make 1000 EU from cobblestone in a watermill.
Out of curiosity, I also decided to gather up some info on how much it costs energy-wise to make the bottle, assuming you did rotary macerator -> Induction furnace -> auto-crafting table with redstone engine(s) -> deployer to make them;
The macerator can vary a lot since it can accept overclockers, and according to to its thread on the IC2 forums it apparently becomes ever more efficient per block at higher speeds. According to this; https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Al9yx7D_ef7vdEUtSzd0Ymh5VlBxdkR3VWZBaDBFNUE#gid=0, no overclocks costs 288 eu per block, which I'll just assume is what most people would do.
Induction furnace costs 208 per operation, and is capable of smelting two items per operation, so if you can fill both slots that will be 104 eu per cobble.
These are the only steps in the chain which cost energy, assuming you don't use Gregtech to automate, which means a grand total of 392 - 496 eu per bottle to make, for a total gain of 608 - 504 per cobblestone.
Meaning that each watermill will basically make 1.216 - 1.008 eu/t after costs are applied.
Considering this is essentially free power anywhere, and that watermills are only 4 iron, 1/2 a battery, and either 2 aluminum (with gregtech) or some wood, (without gregtech) I'd say that's pretty good.
 

Abdiel

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While an interesting thought exercise, I very much doubt the practicality of such setup.

You will need to run at least 4 watermills to even offset the running cost of the advanced machines. If you want any non-trivial EU/t output, you will likely have many more. Thus you need something to distribute the bottles among many watermills. This can be either routers or RP tubes. But then, with the machinery needed for your setup, you either already have or you're a retriever short of a system for automating water buckets - which needs no external inputs and no running powered machines.
 

abculatter_2

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\If you want any non-trivial EU/t output, you will likely have many more. Thus you need something to distribute the bottles among many watermills..
A single router allows you to not only automate the insertion of hundreds, even thousands of watermills, it also allows you to cram them into highly space-efficient blocks.
While you are right that you'll need a LOT of watermills, routers make this an actually viable source of energy.
Oh, and by the way, one igneous extruder can service exactly 25 watermills, 1 rotary macerator can service 2.5 igneous extruders, and it takes 2 macerators to match the output of 1 induction furnace. Just in case anyone wanted to know.
 

Neirin

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Jul 29, 2019
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I wonder what other cobble gen based power systems are out there. The first idea that comes to mind is making cobblestone pipes and recycling them and burning the scrap in a generator. 1 round of maceration and smelting should yield 1 scrap (8 pipes, 1/8 chance of scrap from a recycler). 1 scrap burns for 870 EU. Using your numbers for energy per maceration/smelt, that means a 374-478 EU gain per cobble. Not quite as efficient, but generators produce more EU/t, so it's easier to reach a threshold where you can sustain the production of fuel.

EDIT: forgot to factor in the recycler with 1 overclocker (uses less EU than 0) it takes 32 EU/block. It takes 8 operations to produce 1 scrap, so that takes care of another 256 EU. Basically makes my method silly inefficient. Still, it's possible I guess.
 

bwillb

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Jul 29, 2019
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You know if you use a water bucket in a watermill, you get an empty bucket back. No cobble required.
 

abculatter_2

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I wonder what other cobble gen based power systems are out there. The first idea that comes to mind is making cobblestone pipes and recycling them and burning the scrap in a generator. 1 round of maceration and smelting should yield 1 scrap (8 pipes, 1/8 chance of scrap from a recycler). 1 scrap burns for 870 EU. Using your numbers for energy per maceration/smelt, that means a 374-478 EU gain per cobble. Not quite as efficient, but generators produce more EU/t, so it's easier to reach a threshold where you can sustain the production of fuel.
I actually made a test system in creative mode using routers to feed a large block of recyclers cobblestone from extruders, then using the scrap to feed boilers. I determined that crafting the pipes are just not worth it, since it takes far too many engines to make the auto-crafting go fast enough. Unless you used commercial steam engines...
Oh, and also IC2 machines don't show up on router filter options. Which is extremely annoying...
A few other tidbits of useful info for that one;
Because of the way IC2 rounds EU use, putting one overclocker in a recycler will cause it to actually use less energy per operation. Using two will double both output and EU/t, allowing one recycler to essentially act as two. This makes things a LOT more space and cost-effective.
It also takes, if I remember correctly, about 2.1 extruders to keep each recycler running, and a little less then 9 double-overclocked recyclers to fuel a 100% heat HP steam boiler.

EDIT @ ABOVE: It also only gives you 500 eu per bucket.
 

Abdiel

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A single router allows you to not only automate the insertion of hundreds, even thousands of watermills, it also allows you to cram them into highly space-efficient blocks.
That's exactly my point. If you already have a router filling the watermills with bottles, you could just as well use water buckets, add a second router to retrieve empty buckets, and fill them up in the deployer you already have. You save EU, save machines, and arguably save some server load.
 

abculatter_2

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Jul 29, 2019
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That's exactly my point. If you already have a router filling the watermills with bottles, you could just as well use water buckets, add a second router to retrieve empty buckets, and fill them up in the deployer you already have. You save EU, save machines, and arguably save some server load.
Only having one router is a lot easier and cheaper to deal with, and trust me, two routers NEVER makes a system less laggy then one.
Two routers means double the amount of push/pulls per tick, which means about twice as much server load. Just having one would likely be bad enough as it is...
 

Abdiel

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Well if you have one router, it's safe to assume that you have a wrath lighter. If you have a bunch of watermills, you probably have a decent supply of iron. The cost of the second router should be fairly trivial compared to getting the first one (diamond block, TNT, Nether trip...). Even more so because you can only make dark iron in blocks of 4, and you use 6 per router - therefore after making the first, you have two left over. Except for some peculiar situations (an adventure map where you are given one router and no resources to make another?), I don't think cost will be an issue.

I honestly have no idea what causes more computational strain: one router, or the running extruders / macerators / furnaces / crafting tables / pipes / etc. Hence the "arguably" in my post.
 

abculatter_2

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Jul 29, 2019
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Yeah, you're right on the first point.
As for the second one, think about it this way; Which would be easier for you to check, 8 machines, or 125? The second router would be checking potentially hundreds of watermills to see whether or not they have empty buckets, in addition to the first router checking each and every one to see if they have an empty space to put filled buckets into. The macerator/furnace/autocrafting set-up would only be checking an additional 8 machines per 125 watermills.
 

MilConDoin

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Jul 29, 2019
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What you could do for a self-powering, scrap-producing system:
12 recyclers with 1 OC each and 1 IE above each. Produced scrap is pumped out into a generator, with overflow going to a chest (the final output you want).
The generator feeds into a batbox, which then feeds all the recyclers.
Since the overclocked recyclers take 32 ticks per item and the IE producing one cobble per 40 ticks, your recyclers are active 32/40 or 80% of the time. So the generator (output 10 EU/t) can feed 10/0.8 = 12.5 recyclers (which need 1 EU/t each), rounded down to 12.
 

Celestialphoenix

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Tartarus.. I mean at work. Same thing really.
I'm pratting around in Gregtech at the mo
I have a couple of large HP boilers set up, with a few steam turbines and engines running.​
Problem is turbine blades run out- so this is where the cobblestone comes in.​
Extruder makes cobblestone, which gets melted down into my obsidian factory.​
A pulveriser cycles through the obsidian- which is processed into iron dust and resmelted into steel- and then crafted into new turbine blades.​
Excess lava is siphoned off, and centrifuged into copper, tin, electrum and wolfram.

8 obsidian dust makes 1 iron dust,
so about 16 stacks of cobblestone can produce about 423,000,000Eu at 100Eu/t


 

abculatter_2

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Jul 29, 2019
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What you could do for a self-powering, scrap-producing system:
12 recyclers with 1 OC each and 1 IE above each. Produced scrap is pumped out into a generator, with overflow going to a chest (the final output you want).
The generator feeds into a batbox, which then feeds all the recyclers.
Since the overclocked recyclers take 32 ticks per item and the IE producing one cobble per 40 ticks, your recyclers are active 32/40 or 80% of the time. So the generator (output 10 EU/t) can feed 10/0.8 = 12.5 recyclers (which need 1 EU/t each), rounded down to 12.
... Huh, this is actually a surprisingly effective method of EU generation, even with just generators. According to my calculations, each recycler - IE setup should generate about 1.9 eu/t, for 0.9 eu/t profit.
Putting it into boilers instead yields either 11.5 eu/t if you use the lava->thermal gen method, or 14.4 eu/t (not including the lava cost of iron, which is pretty negligible) if you use steam turbines, and you will need exactly 16 to maintain 1 HP boiler.