Factory Tutorial Ideas

[Vovk]

Hello FTB forums!

I see that people play minecraft for various reasons - to build impressive megastructures, to explore new and interesting lands, or to unlock all the toys and gadgets a mod has to offer.

I play minecraft (especially ftb) almost solely to design and build interesting autonomous systems to create a product or set of products in minecraftia - but I am currently out of ideas :c

I very much enjoy sharing these factory designs with people, and perfecting them to use fewer resources or to increase their efficiency. So I am making this thread to ask for factory ideas to design and then post on the forums.

If you would like me to design for you a system to give you easy access to resource X, or a set of resources - please post here along with the FTBlauncher modpack you're using as well as the tech level you want to use (no conduits, only factorization, no railcraft, exclusively turtles, only golems, etc) I'll then try to design and create the system and post a tutorial on the forums, linked from this thread

So far I have been playing mostly with railcraft to create a source of iron, gold, tin, wolframium and sulphur (newer update drops iron and adds silver and copper), infinite sustainable mulch and trees, automatically sustainable MJ and EU charging stations, and other goodies.

 

[SilvasRuin]

Well, the most daunting thing to me about Forestry is regulating all that production without having to resort to sending things like wood, saplings, and apples into a void pipe or an increasingly ridiculous stockpile of materials that are never going to be used up. A (Bituminous) Peat stockpile would be useful for future expansion and for fueling carts (that works in Steve's Carts, right?), and Biofuel sounds like the easiest way to keep a maximum power Boiler or 2 going, but how would you maintain an Enderchest of Bituminous Peat and a perpetual Boiler(s) without getting inundated with wood and byproducts? Is there a way to put it all to use that I'm just missing, or a way to minimize the amount of waste and/or prevent stores that are never used? I'm not a fan of waste/void pipes if it can be helped. On a somewhat related note, is there a way to tell a Steve's Cart to only run during the day without leading to it losing power when cutting trees (i.e., from using only solar engines)? I hear the farms produce so much wood that it's not an issue, but I'm curious if any more fuel efficiency can be squeezed out of them.

I'd be interested in this being done with the Magic World pack with Factorization included if it helps.

 

[Peppe]

How are you creating resources with railcraft? or is just the gregtech centrifuge and railcraft routing the needed materials?

 

[Vovk]

Almost everything that forestry creates can be turned into fuel. I would recommend fermenters, stills, and furnaces to turn spare wood and byproducts into charcoal and biomass/biofuel. use the charcoal for turtles and the biomass/fuel for boilers. Eventually you should be able to create an equilibrium where every excess product gets burned for energy turning your factory into a power plant.

As for resources with railcraft - it was mostly just for routing and sorting. The actual resource creation devices come from Thermal Expansion, IC2, Buildcraft, Forestry, Gregtech and the 1 railcraft resource creator - the rock crusher.


I would be veeerry interested in a bituminous peat factory and powerplant. I haven't done much with bees yet, so this might be a fun experiment. A note - 4 peat go into making 1 bituminous peat. 1 bituminous peat runs at 2x the speed and lasts around 20% longer than peat in an engine, and lasts 2x as long in a furnace or boiler. Bituminous peat is more compact, but if compactness doesn't matter then normal peat supply is actually more bang for your production buck. Running a boiler off bituminous peat is a waste, but running it in a peat fired engine, turtle or stevescart is not.

 

[Vovk]

ps: on the bituminous peat, did you want routers to be the most utilized sorting method? rails, pipes, golems? did you want it as cheap as possible even at an efficiency hit? as efficient as possible but expensive? etc

 

[SilvasRuin]

My ambition is to eventually go about creating a sprawling world with a rail system connecting it all. Most effective way to do that seems to be using Steve's Cart to lay the initial rail line (thus the desire for more compact fuel in the form of Bituminous Peat) and then go in and replace it later with the appropriate rails. That might seem a little redundant, but the custom cart would be used primarily for trailblazing and making sure there's a good place to put the final track. So, yeah, that's my reasoning for wanting to work out automated Bituminous Peat production.

Golems are fun, but even with their two sets of stacking upgrades, I'm not sure they can effectively compete with other methods. I'm most interested in efficiency. I'd prefer to avoid Turtles though. They feel cheaty when using pre-written code, and I've had more than a few failed attempts to learn how to code myself...

 

[Vovk]

Note that a more efficient fuel will only increase the range of your cart between filling stations. Ye may want to try a turtle which plonks down ender chests and connects them to buffer chests and filling stations, then sets that as the new home and keeps going from there. Stevescarts could then run between these turtle-built stations. I can't think of another solution to this problem. Using bituminous peat would increase the distance these stations could be apart from another, but would not solve the problem. This too would be a fun project.

 

[madaffacca]

The unique 100% automated thing I've ever built was in my 1.2.5 world, and now I'm porting it to my FTB world with some tweaks. Basically, a couple of tree farms and a wheat one are connected to 3 commercial steam engine. The wood from the tree farm get smelted by a TE furnace, the charcoal produced keeps the low pressure boiler (2x2x3) heated, generating some extra fuel after a little while. Wheat farm splits its outputs: seeds and around 1/4 of the wheat get autocrafted in plantballs that get macerated into dirt, then the remaining wheat and dirt get autocrafted in compost that goes to another crafting table to be converted in humus together with some more dirt from plantballs. The humus get routed into a chest that keep supplied both arboretum, the compost goes into a fermenter that produces biomass together with the extra saplings from the tree farms.
So, products of this contraption: biomass, charcoal (not that much at the beginnings, a load while the boiler gets heated), 100% automated.

The other factories I've built were EE2 condensers based, so no real automation. Thanks god, now EE3 removed those infernal devices and I can start using my brain knowing that maybe there's not a way easier and cheaper way to achieve automation.

 

[Vovk]

Hmm... I did a similar thing using peat bogs as the dirt generator rather than macerators. Peat bogs take 4/9 sand, 4/9 dirt and 1/9 mulch and output 8 peat and 8 dirt OR 4/9 sand, 4/9 dirt and 1 water bucket to output 6 peat and 6 dirt. Either way it turns sand into dirt. Sand I got from an extruder+pulverizer.

The dirt was fed back into the peat bogs and excess was sent to a tree farm where it was combined with wheat from a farm to create compost and humus. The output'd sand was then piped back into the peat bog system and all excess sand was stored in a factorization extra dimensional barrel or void piped.

Output of this system was Peat, Sand, Dirt, Saplings, Wood and Seeds and MJ. I had hoped to turn the seeds into oil and the saplings into biomas but i never finished it.

 

[Vovk]

Working on the bituminous peat right now. bees of the industrious bloodline are required, so I am going to make a bee test world and just try to breed most of them. Creative/NEI cannot give you specific bloodline'd bees

 

[voidreality]

Working on the bituminous peat right now. bees of the industrious bloodline are required, so I am going to make a bee test world and just try to breed most of them. Creative/NEI cannot give you specific bloodline'd bees

I believe there is a server command to give you bees. Check the /help command.

 

[lolpierandom]

I'm curious as to how you're farming iron and gold- I presume by centrifuging something? I know the tin and wolframium comes from centrifuging 64 lava cells (is there a way to get the still lava in so that recrafting the tin into cells can be avoided?).

 

[SilvasRuin]

The method Vovk demonstrated in another thread was an assembly line of sorts using Railcraft that automatically produced and centrifuged lava, and centrifuged the resulting pyrite. It appears that a GregTech update beyond 1.4.2 introduced the ability to pipe lava directly into the centrifuge.

 

[wolvyn]

What about a sorting facility so i can just dump everything into one chest and have everything routed to various barrels? Im sure thats already been done, but im horrid at finding things on youtube and get so distracted on the forums here that i end up getting lost.

 

[Peppe]

Hmm... I did a similar thing using peat bogs as the dirt generator rather than macerators. Peat bogs take 4/9 sand, 4/9 dirt and 1/9 mulch and output 8 peat and 8 dirt OR 4/9 sand, 4/9 dirt and 1 water bucket to output 6 peat and 6 dirt. Either way it turns sand into dirt. Sand I got from an extruder+pulverizer.

The dirt was fed back into the peat bogs and excess was sent to a tree farm where it was combined with wheat from a farm to create compost and humus. The output'd sand was then piped back into the peat bog system and all excess sand was stored in a factorization extra dimensional barrel or void piped.

Output of this system was Peat, Sand, Dirt, Saplings, Wood and Seeds and MJ. I had hoped to turn the seeds into oil and the saplings into biomas but i never finished it.

While the moistener is a pain to work with it is a very efficient source of mulch vs wheat into plant balls.

You send a little wheat to moistener and I like to use the extruder cobblestone to make mossy cobblestone instead of wheat seeds to make mycalium. One moisener on 1/3 or 1/4 of the output of a wheat farm will overflow the mulch needed for a peat and tree farm. Makes an all plant based system for humus and bog earth.

Sand back from the tree farm is way to slow to keep up with the peat bog though. If you use the sand back from the tree farm it will help keep the system in balance, but since it returns 9 sand back for every 8 dirt converted to 9 humus it is not 100% balanced. If you run pulverized sand through the system you can make stacks and stacks of humus and bog earth. Peat bog is surprisingly fast source for dirt generation.

To keep the bog earth production in balance all you have to do is make one split of the dirt off the peat machine that goes back to it's bog earth carpenter. It will average out to 50%, so it will get on average 4 dirt back from every 8 bog harvested. Sand fills in and it will make 8 new bog earths for the machine.

 

[Vovk]

What about a sorting facility so i can just dump everything into one chest and have everything routed to various barrels? Im sure thats already been done, but im horrid at finding things on youtube and get so distracted on the forums here that i end up getting lost.

tbh the easiest way in my opinion is to just have 1 rail take everything from the chest and use 1 unloader/barrel each to drop each item off where it's supposed to go. Alternately you could use chests to hold item types. I will post this after the bituminous peat I think.

 

[DoctorOr]

connected to 3 commercial steam engine.

I'm on a creative world right now - since the likely upcoming restart requirement has me uninterested in normal play - planning out a forestry tower and the power issue for buildcraft has me confused. The only thing I've been able to figure out is that the electrical engines suck

How do the railcraft steam engines compare to biogas?
Why 3xcommercial instead of industrial?
Is 12MJ/t really enough for two tree farms (assuming 2xArboretum and 1x Logger) and a combine/farm combo along with all the support autocrafters and fermenter? or are you getting outside power as well?

 

[AliasXNeo]

I'm on a creative world right now - since the likely upcoming restart requirement has me uninterested in normal play - planning out a forestry tower and the power issue for buildcraft has me confused. The only thing I've been able to figure out is that the electrical engines suck

How do the railcraft steam engines compare to biogas?
Why 3xcommercial instead of industrial?
Is 12MJ/t really enough for two tree farms (assuming 2xArboretum and 1x Logger) and a combine/farm combo along with all the support autocrafters and fermenter? or are you getting outside power as well?

I ran two tree farms at 4 MJ/T with no problems. I never had more than one tree in queue to get cut down.

 

[Peppe]

How do the railcraft steam engines compare to biogas?

Railcraft engines are the most efficient MJ producers.

Biogass engine burning 3 1/3 biogass containers should produce about 165k MJ.

Convert that amount to 1 biofuel.
You could get 200k MJ in a combustion engine.

From railcraft, a cold start single LP tank liquid bioler and a hobbyist engine you should get over:
~320k MJ


Biolers get more efficent the hotter they are and the more tanks they have, so the potential production from railcraft engines scales very high. By my math one bucket of bio-fuel should be worth about 480k MJs in hot 36 tank biolers.

Not bad for something you make out of waste plant materials.

And you only need to average about 1 bucket of biofuel every 2 minutes 45 seconds to keep a 36 tank high pressure liquid bioler hot. Low pressure 36 tanks lasts about double that time.

Railcrafts only downside is it puts out all that power over a long period. High pressure tanks are a good option or buffer the output with some thermal expansion energy cells to store up MJ's when not being consumed.

 

[DoctorOr]

Railcraft engines are the most efficient MJ producers.

Wow. Quite. Although, I'm still using coal from an oak farm, with a 18 meter low pressure steam boiler. Powering that and an IC2 generator for an induction furnace and its generating plenty of coal. Plenty to power the turtle I'm using instead of a second Arboretum for the oak trees.

I'm so used to running buildcraft machines with one or two electrical engines and just thought they were always slow. At 16 MJ (two industrial engines) I've got two carpenters, a squeezer, logger, arboreum, and everything happily fast.

The tree farm that's using the Arboretum is rubber trees and I've just been boxing the resulting wood, but while looking into centrifuging them for the plantballs (to macerate & biofuel) I notice that I need cells. I can easily extract the carbon cells with no problem to get the cell back, but the methane is good to burn all on its own at 45k EU each.