Electrical Engine has opened my eyes

[Coyote81]

So being new to FTB, I decided to go the route of using lava as a energy resource to power things like my quarry and machines. After some reading I found that I needed to use buildcraft engines to power a quarry. No problem, figured it out ran a lot of pipe (water and lava) to my combustion engine and got it going. My first attempt lead to an explosion (due to my water pump being in a chunk that my quarry was not updating, sigh) After a new world and a restart I got the combustion going again, I continued doing some reading, and learned that foresty mod was a sort of cross mod that could be used with IC2 and Buildcraft for interchangable power. OMG, once I hooked up 2 eletrcial engines and watched them power my quarry as like 4x faster then my one combustion engine could (and without the ability to explode and destroy all my stuff around it) I've had my eyes opened, and I'm develing more and more into finding out what foresty can really do. Working on a diamond factory (sinec I can't seem to find many, just enough for my quarry, and thats all). For those of you educated in forestry, what kind of things should I look at, build toward, and or know ahead of time (kind of like the quarry chunk updater thing). Thanks and hope you guys are enjoying FTB as much as I am.

PS. Call out to the mindcrack folk for leading me to this amazing modpack. It's an engineer's delight.

 

[Sorok]

Check out all the farms you can make with forestry, They make automation a breeze with the simple design. And if you combine them with BC gates, you can have a system that's self feeding requiring you to do absolutely nothing but rack in massive amounts of wood or wheat. With these farms you'll eventually have more saplings than you'll know what to do with so forestry adds way to make green energy like bio-fuel and biomass that can be run in stuff like combustion engines and what not. There is also Bees which can be a little complex at first but once you start messing around with them you'll discover how powerful they are and how they can save you a lot of resources. Your best bet is to watch Direwolf20's spot light on forestry to see all its features. If i remember correctly, there's like 2 or 3 videos and I would watch them all.

 

[Rhinehart_]

meh i dont use forestry farms all that much because they are a little too much like magic blocks to me,
that being said i also use magical flying computers to do everything i can think of a program for

i do like the bees though, they add aLOT of gameplay and are pretty entertaining, you can even use the extrabees mod(still beta for now)
it adds tons of cool machines and like 40 some new bee species, acutally i think its 70 now,
spoiler this is a breeding guide for extrabees and i think forestry,
http://hexflower.com

for energy though i think you should switch to thermal expansion, its got quite a crowd nowdays but the fact that it allows you to store MJ is enough for me, plus with a couple stacks of netherack you can make enough lava to power a couple quarries........okay its alittle OP

 

[WTFFFS]

So being new to FTB, I decided to go the route of using lava as a energy resource to power things like my quarry and machines. After some reading I found that I needed to use buildcraft engines to power a quarry. No problem, figured it out ran a lot of pipe (water and lava) to my combustion engine and got it going. My first attempt lead to an explosion (due to my water pump being in a chunk that my quarry was not updating, sigh) After a new world and a restart I got the combustion going again, I continued doing some reading, and learned that foresty mod was a sort of cross mod that could be used with IC2 and Buildcraft for interchangable power. OMG, once I hooked up 2 eletrcial engines and watched them power my quarry as like 4x faster then my one combustion engine could (and without the ability to explode and destroy all my stuff around it) I've had my eyes opened, and I'm develing more and more into finding out what foresty can really do. Working on a diamond factory (sinec I can't seem to find many, just enough for my quarry, and thats all). For those of you educated in forestry, what kind of things should I look at, build toward, and or know ahead of time (kind of like the quarry chunk updater thing). Thanks and hope you guys are enjoying FTB as much as I am.

PS. Call out to the mindcrack folk for leading me to this amazing modpack. It's an engineer's delight.

hmm Engineers delight.. have a look at Steves Carts they automate a lot of mundane tasks (farming\tree harvesting\mining to an extent) and more importantly look damn cool and are damn cool toys to boot. (They are also pretty damn powerful, I would say overpowered except their cost is high.)

They also avoid the issue expressed in the post above mine of being "magic blocks" you can see the cool little thing doing your work for you lol.

 

[bigtwisty]

Damn...

 

[Evil Hamster]

There's a steam boiler setup in the "whats your power room look like" thread that takes a few hours of babysitting to get started, but after continues to pump out free BC energy!

For my quarry, I built 12 advanced solar panels to fill a MFE which powers 4 electrical engines. I'm currently mining a huge chunk of ocean, I set up dirt pillars for the landmarks, put the quarry at sea level and built a dirt platform above the quarry area for the panels engines and item area. I'm piping the engine energy down to the quarry and have the loot sent up to an enderchest which gets pumped out of another enderchest in my main base. I had to put a world anchor at my base to keep the system running while I'm out doing other things, but it works great!! The sapphires replace diamonds in lapotron crystals which significantly reduces diamond costs of a lot of cool stuff. Also- you can (if planned correctly at the start) run the quarry 4 times with minimal moving stuff around because it sits in a corner.

 

[Omicron]

P.S.: Your combustion engine was slow due to using lava as fuel. It only runs at 1 MJ/t in that case, whereas an electric engine runs at 2 MJ/t. However, you can also run a combustion engine at 3 MJ/t (raw oil), 5 MJ/t (Forestry biofuel) or 6 MJ/t (refined fuel). If your config is unchanged, a single aqueous accumulator from Thermal Expansion sitting between two water blocks and hooked up with golden waterproof pipes cools up to four combustion engines running at full speed. You can hide this assembly directly below the engines to make sure it is always loaded when the engines are loaded.

 

[Coyote81]

Thanks, seems like the forestry mod strikes again and again at making life easier.

 

[Omicron]

Yeah, it's way too easy. I actually went and asked SirSengir for an option to make it harder just yesterday He says he might have an overall difficulty setting like "Easy - Normal - Hard" in the config, just like he already has for bee breeding.

 

[Golrith]

meh i dont use forestry farms all that much because they are a little too much like magic blocks to me,

I've been having the same thoughts. In tekkit I managed to work out a way of automatically growing and harvesting a single tree (as well as collecting saplings and apples). Needed RP pipes, transposers, deployers, block breakers, a condensor (powered by chicken eggs supplied by a chicken farm) to produce bonemeal, filters, etc, etc. Worked a treat although was "expensive" to run, was a nightmare to build and figure out.

Now, with Forestry, it's just a couple of blocks and cheap running cost. There's less sense of achievement.

But, loving the Forestry engine options though, mainly because they don't explode, plus the info boxes are really useful.

 

[xanderhunter]

I'm actually having a bit of trouble getting the electrical engine to work, trying to power a quarry with it and a generator and coal coke but it doesn't seem to take out energy from my MFE, tried with and without a LV Transformer.

 

[enoch]

I'm actually having a bit of trouble getting the electrical engine to work, trying to power a quarry with it and a generator and coal coke but it doesn't seem to take out energy from my MFE, tried with and without a LV Transformer.

Are you still extracting energy from the Electrical Engine with a Wooden Conductive Pipe?

 

[xanderhunter]

No, I was just trying to have the engine hooked directly to the quarry at the moment.

 

[SilvasRuin]

Did you give it a Redstone signal? The Thermal Expansion engines appear to be the only ones that don't require Redstone turning them on.

 

[xanderhunter]

No I haven't, didn't remember ever needing it for an electrical engine before so I will go test it out.

Edit: Yeah now that I think about it I do feel really stupid, all engines need a red power signal, thanks.

Edit 2: Okay still doing something wrong because the engine is powered up but isn't putting out any MJ's.

QE-M-G That is how I have it setup with Q = Quarry E = Electrical Engine M = MFE and G = Generator, all connected with Glass Fiber Cables

 

[zemerick]

If the electrical engine is moving, its working. Electrical Engines are bugged and always say they are putting out 0mj.

Also, I would very strongly recommend using a redstone cell/Conduit. It can have a pretty big diff on powering your quarry.

FYI your goal is 10mj/t for a quarry. At least until the update, then quarries can take more.

 

[xanderhunter]

Unfortunately those will have to wait as at the moment as I am just barely starting out and don't really know what they are.

Edit: Finally figured it out, frame was too big even though I had managed to get the black and yellow frame to show up.

 

[SilvasRuin]

For the Redstone Energy Cell and Redstone Conduit, you have to make an Induction Smelter to combine powderized Lead and Obsidian into its brand of Reinforced Glass, combine and smelt powdered Gold and Silver into Electrum, then combine those together and throw them into a Liquid Transposer that fills them by pulling from a Magma Crucible you melted Redstone Dust to a liquid in. It's less complicated than it sounds, it's just a tad on the expensive side... but once you have replaced a Conductive Pipe network with the Conduits, it's well worth it for Buildcraft power efficiency. Not Enough Items is your friend. Left click for how to make things, right click for things to make with what you clicked on.

 

[MCJinzha]

I'm personally going the Biofuel route, but yea, the electric engines are friggin awesome!

 

[WTFFFS]

Did you give it a Redstone signal? The Thermal Expansion engines appear to be the only ones that don't require Redstone turning them on.

The TE engines do require a Redstone signal it's just that they default to require a low(off\none) signal, which can be changed to require a high(on) signal in the lovely TE UI.