fact-check my power plant brainstorm

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draeath said:
Wait, does mulch/compost really work? From the wiki:


This is unclear to me. It seems to imply only apatite works!?
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Mulch works in the Fermenter to make Biomass, but not in a multiblock farm, which requires Apatite-based Fertilizer exclusively. Some mods have items which can be used to make Fertilizer, or have items that are interchangeable with Fertilizer, however. I believe MFR Fertilizer, for example, will run a multiblock farm.
 
A few apatite veins turned in fertilizer should be enough to keep a Forestry farm up for weeks. But, for a closed-loop system requiring no further apatite input, you can convert MFR industrial fertilizer to Forestry fertilizer. Use NEI to find the forestry fertilizer, click on it, and one of the recipes should be a 1-to-1 shapeless crafting for the brown MFR industrial fertilizer to the blue Forestry fertilizer.*

The easiest zero-maintenance tree farm is an MFR tree farm. A SteveCarts2 tree farm with a Galgadorian blade can also be no maintenance. Finally, a Forestry tree farm is only no maintenance hassle once you have a dirt and fertilizer solution in place.

But, whichever route you go, make sure you deal with the overflow, i.e. make sure a system left unattended for weeks won't start spilling stuff on the ground. You can either pipe the extra to a void pipe or else put each type of output into an MFR Deep Storage Unit (DSU).

*That's *probably* not working as Sengir designed - he wants a minimum amount of maintenance for his stuff. Indeed, he doesn't seem thrilled with the infinite water aspect from vanilla Minecraft. He seems to put a lot of effort into water need calculation of his farms and has his own mechanism to make it rain, but for the vast majority of the users of his excellent mod, it's pretty much a moot point - we just pump water from an infinite source.
 
ShneekeyTheLost said:
Plantballs are notoriously bad for generating biomass. While it seems theoretically possible, I don't think it would be very viable.

In fact, looking over the numbers, you're basically screwing yourself. Wheat by itself produces 100 mB biomass, it takes 8 wheat to make one plantball, which only produces 400 mB, so you are halving your output by not just using wheat straight.

Cactus and Sugar Cane each produce 200 mB biomass, it would likely be much more viable to create a sugarcane or cactus farm and run it off of that.
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plantballs are not only viable but are quite good actually if you shear leaves via MFR`s harvester. you can run 2 harvester simultaneously to shear and destroy leaves which in case with jungle trees works quite well.
math-vise it comes down to if drop chance is high enough to get you 2(vanilla trees) saplings/8 leaves or not. if yes then plantballs are a waste if not..
 
I've gone with the Dark Side and am building a Steve's Carts 2 farm cart. Gonna go with charcoal and use that for my "baseline" power then. I'll supplement with ethanol for throughput, but I need something to maintain things without extra input and it appears that a solar cart with coal backup will do that well enough.
 
I always put a solar engine in my SC2 cart, but in actual practice, it's not practical. More often than not, the cart is shaded by 1 or more blocks of leaves and it can't use the solar panel. When I set solar engine priority to H and coal to L, the solar is almost always at or around 0 energy and the cart is burning a small amount of charcoal.

For a slightly cheaper setup, you can skip the solar engine and go with just a coal engine.
 
Will the trees grow and the solar engine work if you put something like glass above the track to prevent leaves from growing?
 
Hmmm...that might work ! You'd have to stack the glass pretty high, though. I've seen leaves and trees as high as 15-ish blocks above the surface. Should be possible, yes, but will require hundreds if not thousands of glass - depending upon the track length.

So, let's say total length is 100. 15 high. That's 1,500 glass. If you cut the height down to 10, which covers 95% of the maximum tree height, you're still looking at 1,000 glass.

The problem then is you're also cutting down on the saplings, apples, and even branches (wood). So, on the total, you're probably losing out net-energy-wise. But, it would be cool to see if it works.
 
Hmm, I wonder if you could (abuse) an MFFS field to do it and still end up net-positive on your energy. Run it in disintegrate mode perhaps? Not sure if that would actually change the amount of power it would use.

Keep in mind if it works, the cart would be running on solar at all times when in daylight, which depending on needs could be all that is needed (or you could use the coal engine as backup for a reduced output - not sure if you'd end up spending more energy doing that than you'd make up for with increased production) so there is really no loss (except for the MFFS if you went that way)
 
draeath said:
How do the forestry farms work these days? I see lots of whining about lots of extra blocks - but I've not tried them since it was as simple as slapping a wheat farm and combine down and powering them.

I might go that route, I was worried about getting enough mulch from the apples but as it works for UrNotFunny I might go that way. Wood production would be secondary to the saplings and apples - I could use the charcoal for other things easily enough or perhaps in a small solid-fuel boiler to supplement steam output.

UrNotFunny, how are your 'excesses' with that arrangement? Do you find yourself close to the wire or are you drowning in apples?
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Hey, sorry for the late reply. On my MFR tree farm, I had an excess of saplings and wood/charcoal but not enough apples to run the fermenter on it constantly (fruit juice wise, mulch has been keeping up). I did decide to take that farm apart though and switched to a Forestry Multiblock. It's still using the base apple trees, but I'm working on tree breeding (along with my bee breeding) and will hopefully switch the farm to a better producer soon. The Forestry farm is not quite keeping up with my sapling needs, but I think that's just because its the basic tree type and it'll improve a lot with a better breed.

One thing I did for the forestry farm that really helps is set up my AE system to be able to autocraft fertilizer from MFR Industrial Fertilizer (from my cow/sheep farm). The export bus on the forestry farm is set to keep it full of fertilizer and it just crafts it as needed, I could have also set it up with the apatite + sand recipe.
 
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