Consuming Power

[RedBoss]

My biggest power hog is an energetic infuser. Its being powered with two Mekanism windmills. They also power all of my EnderIO & TE machines. I've got an EnderIO farm running off of two EnderIO solor panels and I'm swimming in stuff. Plus with my TiCo hammer, I only hand mine.

TL; DR I've got a 7x7 big reactor connected to nothing because I don't need it.

 

[Derpysauce]

Here's a good one make 100 mass fabs power them ALL and try to fill the biggest tank you can make... then destroy all your diamonds... then make new diamonds or just make a ocean filled with UU... ya know what that's a good one ocean of UU automagically fill a giant hole with UU...
Then fill a deep storage unit with iridium... then reset the world :3

 

[GreenZombie]

So far, every use of power on this thread, has involved directly or indirectly, amassing materials.
Outside of the bragging rights inherent in having 1 billion cobblestone, and the unexercised ability to turn it into stacks and stacks of glass "instantly"...
Having "ticked" that quest in HQM what is the purpose of it all? without the ability to deploy some devices and level square km at a time to get started on building something.

 

[Omicron]

Well, in real life, we have five main purposes of power: lighting, transportation, computation, processing and mechanical work. Due to the limitations of Minecraft's engine, applications of the first and last are few in number - your character can move and carry an arbitrary amount of mass, and you'll rarely find any lighting solutions that require power because a.) torches are free and eternal and b.) it's just too incredibly impractical to try wiring up your buildings in the 1m³ block system. Transportation - well, there are such things as trains, jetpacks and teleporters. Personal flight is probably one thing that pretty much everyone goes for. Computation doesn't even apply. And the rest is all processing.

So what's the purpose of the processing? Whatever purpose you make it, I reckon. For example, if you are planning to build a city like the one you linked, the ability to get a stack of glass within a few seconds would be fairly amazing IMHO, because you're going to be needing a metric ton of it. It's really a direct analogue to power: just producing it isn't enough, you also need to consume it. Without consumption, production is meaningless, be it power or resources. So yeah, I won't be making a a few million iridium just to throw them away.

...that reminds me though. Gotta put up some IC2 infrastructure and make myself a nanosaber. Frigging amazing thing and feels less cheaty that Rotarycraft's bedrock sword. And it also consumes some power.

 

[PierceSG]

Hmm. ..With Ender IO, they have powered lights. The mod also comes with redstone and power conduits that you can bundle together.
Also, a conduit facade together with the painting machine to hide those conduits with.
So, with enough determination, one can wire up the whole city with powered lights that makes use of your power generation.
Hook up the redstone conduit to a daylight sensor so the street lights will turn on and off automatically.
It will not be consuming a huge amount of power but I reckon that will be a great project.

 

[GreenZombie]

This is all true. But. 10,000 glass, one block at a time, is still a damned long time.

We need mods that acknowledge the need to deploy blocks in bulk.

If I try an lay a road, manually, in Survival mode (Rather than MC edit) Well, 600m of 11m wide road takes 6,600 blocks which is a lot of clicking.

I know of no mod that lets me level a 600x11 wide stretch in one go, and then pave it with a repeating pattern. A mod, with a machine that took RF, could get away with charging an awful lot of RF for that.

This is buildcraft builder kind of territory, but that mods weird obsession with non storable energy meant that to deploy a builder required a rather large investment in MJ generation equipment, that would have to be set up and torn down per bit of structure to duplicate.

Well, thats the building aspect.
The other aspect is, between EnderIO, TE, RotaryCraft etc. I wish the various mod authors would - without going all greg-tech on us, well, go a bit more greg tech.

Standardize on a 4/5 stage ore processing pipeline with an ultimate 5x yield, but make each stage take exponentially more resources to set up than the previous stage. Create tiers of automatic mining machines, but again, each tier is exponentially more expensive, for a more linear performance improvement.

e.g. Tier 3 devices would require the full resources of a chunk to construct. Tier 4 devices would require the resources of 16 chunks. Something like the buildcraft quarry would be a tier 3 device. And its output (when max sized) would yield the resources for 1 tier 4 device.

--

Also, when building on that scale, I would gladly wire up powered lights if they could light up more than a torch can. given sufficient advances in wireless power

 

[mcalpha]

Computation doesn't even apply.

I haven't played with them yet, but don't OpenComputers computers require power?

the unexercised ability to turn it into stacks and stacks of glass "instantly"...

Eh, unexercised? Glass is one of the more common crafting ingredients, and for autocrafting you want it to produced speedily.

I know of no mod that lets me level a 600x11 wide stretch in one go, and then pave it with a repeating pattern. A mod, with a machine that took RF, could get away with charging an awful lot of RF for that.

+1

Not sure how fast you can get with MFFS, but that at least will consume lots of power.

 

[ScottulusMaximus]

This is all true. But. 10,000 glass, one block at a time, is still a damned long time.

We need mods that acknowledge the need to deploy blocks in bulk.

If I try an lay a road, manually, in Survival mode (Rather than MC edit) Well, 600m of 11m wide road takes 6,600 blocks which is a lot of clicking.

I know of no mod that lets me level a 600x11 wide stretch in one go, and then pave it with a repeating pattern. A mod, with a machine that took RF, could get away with charging an awful lot of RF for that.

MFFS can do all that(128 range due to stack size limits), I "think" with custom mode you might even be able to do a pattern...

 

[Golrith]

You could also use an army of PneumaticCrafts Drones as your roadbuilding crew. In some aspects, it's easier to setup than MFFS.

 

[Omicron]

I know of no mod that lets me level a 600x11 wide stretch in one go, and then pave it with a repeating pattern. A mod, with a machine that took RF, could get away with charging an awful lot of RF for that.

This is buildcraft builder kind of territory, but that mods weird obsession with non storable energy meant that to deploy a builder required a rather large investment in MJ generation equipment, that would have to be set up and torn down per bit of structure to duplicate.

Buildcraft has been RF compatible for as long as RF has existed, though... because TE conduits (and probably other mod's cables as well) autoconvert RF to MJ.

So now that the builder is back in 1.7.x, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from using a portable energy cell and one piece of conduit to power a builder and ignoring the MJ infrastructure entirely.

 

[mcalpha]

So now that the builder is back in 1.7.x, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from using a portable energy cell and one piece of conduit to power a builder and ignoring the MJ infrastructure entirely.

Well, in 1.7.x it might be difficult to use a piece of conduit but of course other cables that can do it exist.

But soon not even a cable will be required, and hopefully all the BC bashing (not referring to this thread!) can come to an end.

 

[MigukNamja]

Not a TechWorld2 topic, per se, but pre-Fusion and post-Fusion GT is very power-hungry. Granted, you can't use just any power source. It has to be IC2-based, which limits it. But, nevertheless, you need a substantial power infrastructure in place and a processing infrastructure to match to just enter GT Fusion era.

I was not a fan of GT - had never even tried it - until I played InfiTech on 1.6.4 . I'm still not a big fan of GT, but I do like how it slows down progression and forces you to be very thoughtful (careful) with your planning.

Also, not a TechWorld2 topic, per se, but RotaryCraft / ReactorCraft is a high-power build where all that power can be used.

But, outside of GT, IC2, and RoC/ReC, the only "high power" builds I can think of involve the MFR Laser, massively parallel bee breeding, and big MFFS systems. Most everything else can be accomplished with 1,000 RF/t and energy buffers.

@Omicron - I think you hit the nail on the head. The way Minecraft is designed, there are limits to what you can do in-game with huge amounts of power without putting huge strains on the server and/or client, and servers and clients (in general) are strained enough as it is.

 

[MigukNamja]

The other aspect is, between EnderIO, TE, RotaryCraft etc. I wish the various mod authors would - without going all greg-tech on us, well, go a bit more greg tech.

I can't agree more, sir. The GT baby is often thrown out with the GT bathwater, but the good qualities of GT are rarely discussed, those being tiers and a very clear and persistent carrot in front of one's nose to increase resource gathering/production, processing, and capabilities. RotaryCraft has done a great job of taking the good parts of GT and leaving the bad behind.

e.g. Tier 3 devices would require the full resources of a chunk to construct. Tier 4 devices would require the resources of 16 chunks. Something like the buildcraft quarry would be a tier 3 device. And its output (when max sized) would yield the resources for 1 tier 4 device.

Yes, yes, and more yes ! This is one of the reasons why I thoroughly enjoy playing @Jason McRay and team's InfiTech mod-packs. Just updated to 1.7.2 and I updated to 1.7.10 beyond that. Wonderful pack that does things like place the BC quarry much, much later in the game.

 

[Omicron]

I haven't really perceived Rotarycraft as a particularly power-hungry mod, and I'm using it right now. I mean, you can always speed up machines with more shaft speed, but there comes a point where a machine is simply "fast enough" for practical purposes. And for most machines, this comes sooner than you think: a megawatt is only a little more than two basic TE steam dynamos. Except the extractor of course. Which is so unreasonable in its needs without a multi-speed transmission that the gains don't outweigh the effort invested.

I mean, of course it has base defense turrets, forcefields and light bridges with completely ridiculous power consumption, but those are honestly gimmicks. I don't see the reason for building a gas turbine that guzzles the equivalent of 40 buckets of buildcraft fuel just for initial spinup just so I can operate a machine that sits idle most of the time and does the same thing as a TiCo drawbridge... except of course "because I can", but that gets old quickly after the first time

 

[GreenZombie]

I also find RotaryCraft a very ... horizontal mod. 5x Ore multiplication can be setup rather easily all things considered. The tunnelbore is rather simple to setup and then runs forever. Ultimately it suffers from the curse of trying to be realistic as exponential material tiers, for all that its a gameplay progression element, isn't actually that realistic.

 

[Omicron]

Being fairly horizontal isn't that bad in principle. Minecraft itself is fairly horizontal, so that fits in overall makeup.

 

[Vaeliorin]

I once had a setup with 15 fully powered mining lasers. I had all the cheese ore a man could want (for me, this would be none. ) Other than that, the 5x Mek ore processing is pretty power hungry if you set up 8 lines at once (one for every ore type) and the digital miner fully upgraded can eat a ton of power, too. Honestly, a fully automatic mining/processing system can eat up thousands of RF/t pretty easily depending on the mods you use (not TE, but TE processing is so slow I only use it if I have no other choice.)

To me, the point of having overkill power generation is simply so that once I have power set up, I can build pretty much anything I want and not have to worry about powering it. This gives the freedom to just build whatever inspires me (be it a giant laser-filled death trap or what have you), and not be concerned about picayune details like powering it.

 

[GreenZombie]

Again - you are using the power to gather resources. Other than watching your material counts go up - why?

 

[ScottulusMaximus]

Wanna eat power? Set up 7 overclocked Recyclers feeding 3 mas fabs with constant scrap and a replicator churning out Iridium for a gravi suit... 4 BR turbines at 28000RF/t are struggling to keep up with that

Yes it's gathering more resources but was a fun build with the new UU setup for me and troubleshooting the least laggy method of generating scrap...

 

[MigukNamja]

Wanna eat power? Set up 7 overclocked Recyclers feeding 3 mas fabs with constant scrap and a replicator churning out Iridium for a gravi suit... 4 BR turbines at 28000RF/t are struggling to keep up with that

Yes it's gathering more resources but was a fun build with the new UU setup for me and troubleshooting the least laggy method of generating scrap...

How are you converting from RF to EU ?