FTB Pack Energy Efficiency

[SnipersCode]

So I was wondering what the most "efficient" way to create energy or other machines in the FTB pack was (minus GregTech) or am curious as to how others have gone about it. What's the most efficient source of fuel? Also, are there reasons to use some engines over others for efficiency reasons?

I'm fairly new to all the mods in the pack but have "tested the waters". At the moment, I have a pipe system where I put all my mined blocks in a chest at level 7 and pipe them to all my machines at level ~65 to have them automatically sorted into crates. I also have it set up so that
- Dirt, sand, cobble, diamond, redstone, apatite, etc goes directly to barrels or the output chest
- iron, tin, copper, gold, silver, and monazit ore all go directly to the macerator (with a hopper) [the fact that it can only hold 5 different types of ore when using the hopper and that the world gen has two different silvers are different problems entirely though]
- lead goes directly into induction furnace and then to the output chest
- uranium goes directly into compressor and then to output chest
- the iron, tin, copper, gold, silver ore goes into induction furnace and then to output chest.
- forcilium after macerated goes to output chest

I always end up using a large amount of coke coal burned in the generator this way which is piped from 2 coke ovens so I was wondering if I was being really inefficient by doing it this way. It might also just be me since I'm not used to having multiple stacks of ores (though I am always low on diamond ;D).
If it makes a difference, the macerator (2 overclocker upgrades), compressor, extractor, induction furnace, Thermionic Fabricator (which is connected by electric engine but is turned off unless needed) are all connected together to 2 chained batboxes, also being powered by 1 solar panel. Does it also have to do with the fact that the induction furnace also blinks on and off (but still heats ore dusts)?

I've also recently made a magma crucible to melt netherrack into a 5x5x4 railcraft tank powered by a magmatic engine which is also getting its lava from the tank to start making more magmatic engines for all my other buildcraft power machines and am in the middle of getting a peat bog farm running.

I just have to say I've been checking the FTB forums every so often and have seen wonderful replies to other questions and thought to give it a shot and ask my own. I hope that I will eventually be able to add my own two cents to other people's questions on this forum as I gain more knowledge of this pack . In fact, there should be a separate forum section for newbie questions.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

So I was wondering what the most "efficient" way to create energy or other machines in the FTB pack was (minus GregTech) or am curious as to how others have gone about it. What's the most efficient source of fuel? Also, are there reasons to use some engines over others for efficiency reasons?

In terms of energy per bucket of fuel- buildcraft 'fuel' (refine some oil) is the most efficient. However its non-renewable and you will run out.

With exception of lava (works best in magmatic engines or IC2 geothermals), the most efficient fuel to energy ratio is using a 3x3x4 railcraft boiler- when fully heated up.
The boiler-fuel value of lava was halved, before 1 lava bucket made enough MJ to melt cobblestone in the magma crucible.

As for engines (MJ)

Combustion engines work best with buildcraft fuel, but needs water cooling​

Magmatic engines are designed to run on lava. (will generate 18,000 MJ per lava bucket. It takes 4,000 to melt down netherrack)​

Biogas engines will run on all liquid fuels, as well as honey and milk. They use a small amount of lava to get going each time to switch them on.​

The hobbyist steam engine has its own boiler, and will except fuels, but runs slightly faster off an external boiler.​

Electrical engines are somewhat inefficient at producing/converting power- use them if you want 1 powergrid, or have a lot of spare Eu. (needs water when using internal boiler)​

Stirling (buildcraft) and thermal expansion's steam engine are slightly less efficient versions of the hobbyiest engine, but wont need water​

Redstone engines will not power any machines​

Redpower is coming with a blulectric->MJ engine, but using a crazy amount of blulectricity. (but that stuff's free)​

And Generators (Eu)

The coal generator you have is an early start, but remember it will not stop mid-burn if it's power cant go anywhere (wasting the rest of that fuel)​

The IC2 geothermal is your best bet (I don't bother with the normal one)- just make some lava cells and you're away.​

(you get 20,000 Eu per lava bucket/cell, and it can stop mid burn so nothing is wasted).​

-note if you put lava in an IC2 geothermal, and run an electrical engine you only make about 6,300 MJ, instead of 18,000 from a magmatic engine​

--put a magmatic engine on the side of a magma crucible, a hopper on top and a geothermal on the other side. fill with netherrack and enjoy.​

​

Wind turbines and water mills don't produce much for what it takes to make them, but if you want a low level supply of free energy.​

Solar panels are somewhat expensive- but can be upgraded to produce more. (up to 512Eu/t). They provide a good long term goal to work towards.​

​

Nuclear reactors are awesome- look on the IC2 forums for all the answers.​

​

I'm still testing out the railcraft steam turbines- Will add a thread over Xmas break with efficiency spreadsheets and quantum goop goodness ect...​

If it makes a difference, the macerator (2 overclocker upgrades), compressor, extractor, induction furnace, Thermionic Fabricator (which is connected by electric engine but is turned off unless needed) are all connected together to 2 chained batboxes, also being powered by 1 solar panel. Does it also have to do with the fact that the induction furnace also blinks on and off (but still heats ore dusts)?

I've also recently made a magma crucible to melt netherrack into a 5x5x4 railcraft tank powered by a magmatic engine which is also getting its lava from the tank to start making more magmatic engines for all my other buildcraft power machines and am in the middle of getting a peat bog farm running.
.

Overclocker upgrades use a lot of power, each one is roughly 1.7x more Eu needed to go 1.5x faster, so adding more of them multiplies up.
-Its more energy efficient to make 2 machines and get twice the speed for twice the power.

Advanced machines (induction furnace ect) use 1Eu/t constantly and take a while to warm up- keep them switched on with a redstone signal. They blink because they dont get enough power. (use geothermal generators)

Generally advanced machines provide the best Eu to processing time if you're doing a lot of stuff, but consider building a pulveriser and powered furnace- as MJ are very cheap to come by with a magmatic engine.

Also please post some images of your setup- it's easier to work out whats going on.

Oh, and keep copper cables short- they loose a lot of power.

 

[Hawcian]

If you're near a decent sized lava pool, you can consider pumping that up into a geothermal generator. It should meet your needs for a while, at least, depending on how much lava is around. Also handy to have if you're using magma crucibles and magmatic engines, since you'll usually have some extra lava floating around to use if you need to. You can also upgrade your solar panels into advanced solar panels, if you don't mind using some of your uranium (make sure your cables can handle the increased EU output, though). You might want to think about an MFE or MFSU if you start ramping up your power generation, since they can store a lot more energy than a batbox. Just be careful with the EU output or bad things can happen.

 

[MilConDoin]

As you can see, upgrading the furnace and the recycler with one overclocker each will lower the total EU needed, because of rounding errors.

 

[Captain Neckbeard]

So you're using Coal Coke in IC2 Generators and Buildcraft Engines? Go Railcraft. Even single-chamber High-Pressure Boilers hooked up to Commercial Steam Engines will beat Stirling Engines four times over in output and don't burn through the Coke near as fast. A 2x2x2 Low-Pressure Boiler can wring almost three million MJ out of a stack of Coke. I'm not sure how the efficiency of a Pulverizer or Induction Smelter stands up against IC2 equivalents, but I definitely seem to be worrying about Coal a lot less after switching over to Magic World (and therefore Thermal Expansion), and giving electrical machines the boot. Plus, I believe steam pipes transmit power losslessly, and the Redstone Conduit energy loss is minimal and not distance-based.
And if you really need that electricity for the high-end gizmos, I hear that Turbines are ludicrously efficient, even though they are Iron-expensive as hell.

 

[Peppe]

Generally the only non efficient sources of power are the crossover machines that take power from one system and convert it to power of the other. These are both in the Forestry mod: biogas generator and electrical engine. They bridge the two power grids, but do so with penalties. But early to mid game you may have to use them if you lack infrastructure in the power grid you need.

Pete is a great crossover fuel source. Burns for 5000 EU in a generator and 5000mj in pete engine.

For industrial craft machines (run on power/ EU) there are many choices and they are all fairly equal. Most of the generators are within the mod, so are balanced well with each other. If you go off and make a lot of coal/coal coke or gather bunch of lava the generator and geothermal generator are about equal in bulk power generation.

Building a bunch of watermill or some basic solar panels or windmills are all roughly equal for slow consistent power. Advanced Solar panels kind of break the balance as they give high amount of consistent renewable energy. Endgame you can still make nuclear reactors, but advanced solar panels are better in most cases. *Nuclear reactors are a fun mini game themselves though.

For buildcraft type machines (run on MJs). There are also a lot of options the main thing to look for here is to make use of all your materials. Forestry gives you a lot of options to convert waste products to fuel in MJ producing biogass engine or biomass to fuel for the combustion engine. Unlike EU generators MJ engines do have different power scales to them - the same fuel can be run in several engines with different results. The engines get expensive and generally work better than cheaper/easier to use counterparts, but running them may get complicated

Example:
1 coal in a generator = 4000 EU running an Electric engine will make around 1300mj total
1 coal in sterling engine (buildcraft's, no additional resources) = 1600 MJ
1 coal in steam engine (TE's, req water as well) = ~3200 MJ
1 coal in hobbyist steam engine (cold start, req water as well, delay in power until 100C) = ~4800 MJ
hobbyist steam engine running hot actually gets 10k+ MJ out of each coal, but you gotta keep it running...

1 peat in a generator = 5000 EU. Electric Engine ~1600 MJ
1 peat in sterling engine (buildcraft's, no additional resources) = 2000 MJ
1 peat in a steam engine (TE's, req water as well) = 3000 MJ
1 peat in a peat engine = 5000 MJ

1 peat in hobbyist steam engine (cold start) = ~6200 MJ

With railcraft boilers the commercial/industrial steam engine you can end up squeezing 15k-25k MJ out each piece of coal/pete.

Liquid fuels can also make a lot of MJs per bucket/can in the biogass or combustion engine.

For MJ's storage TE's redstone energy cells and conduits can help you buffer peak demand.

You can also use the liquid boiler to burn the creosote byproduct you get in coke ovens from making charcoal or coal coke. You may need a lot of coke ovens to keep a large liquid boiler going. The steam is easiest to convert to MJ's, but there is also a 50EU/t turbine you can run on steam.
So cheap flexible fuel is pete.

Once you have more MJs than you know what to do with you convert MJ to EU using the TE magma crucible and burning the lava in a geothermal generator. Efficiency wise the magma crucible would use netherack, but if you have a boiler running all the time and the MJ's would otherwise be lost running cobble through it is a good way to store the energy as lava or EU -> UU matter.[DOUBLEPOST=1355872685][/DOUBLEPOST]Also,
In the latest version of TE the TE induction smelter running ore has a 20% chance to give you rich slag. Each rich slag can net 1 ingot of your choice running 2 pulverized dust of the type you want back through the smelter.

Basically you get 2 ingots from each ore the first time through and each ore has a 20% chance of rich slag. You then run gold ingots through a pulverizer and the dust + slag back through the smelter for +1 gold ingot per slag.

FTB version of TE does not have this yet.

 

[Captain Neckbeard]

You can also use the liquid boiler to burn the creosote byproduct you get in coke ovens from making charcoal or coal coke. You may need a lot of coke ovens to keep a large liquid boiler going.

A LOT. Creosote Oil isn't a good fuel at all. I haven't gotten far into Forestry myself, but I see a few people firing up with Biofuel on my server. If it has even a quarter the heat value of Buildcraft Fuel it's definitely a better choice than Creosote Oil.

 

[Peppe]

Did not see cresote oil had such low energy potential... its basically worthless then other than used in some recipes.

Still making biogass or bio fuel out of plant based extras, which you will produce in bulk with any automated farming will be a good way to turn that waste into energy.

 

[MektonZero]

A LOT. Creosote Oil isn't a good fuel at all. I haven't gotten far into Forestry myself, but I see a few people firing up with Biofuel on my server. If it has even a quarter the heat value of Buildcraft Fuel it's definitely a better choice than Creosote Oil.

Fuel Values:
Creosote Oil - 1600
Biofuel - 16,000
Buildcraft Fuel - 48,000

 

[Captain Neckbeard]

All this thread needs is for somebody to condense it for the wiki.

If we want to get more precise, I suspect that the output from a 2x2x2 Low-Pressure Boiler burning a stack of Coal Coke may be exactly 3 million MJ, if it's already up to temperature. When I tested with Energy Cells, I had started from cold and it was only a negligible ways away from topping off a fifth one. My smaller Boilers are still going through their test stacks, I'll try to come back with approximations when they've run their course.

 

[Froghandler]

Biomass is awesome and I'd highly recommend it The best part is that you have so many options to generate biomass, which is a lot of fun.

For generating Buildcraft power, I am fond of stacking 7 Forestry wheat farms on top of each other. 7 stacksed farms can all be harvested by a single combine. Simply stack 7 wheat farms with a block between them (space for the wheat to grow) and then put the combine between the second and third farm (if the bottom farm is on level 1, the combine would be on level 4.)

Like this:

These 14 farms power 48 Biogass generators easily and it's still producing excess fuel for a total of 240 MJ/t. I just it to power 9 magma crucibles at full throttle with power left over. There's one caveat: this produces a bit of graphical lag (comparable to those huge laggy ExtraBiomes trees) because of the wheat, which must be sorted graphically or something in front of each other. Cacti farms may fare better, though I don't know about comparable returns.

There's another option for power which is very promising: Forestry tree farms. For tree farms, it turns out that rubber trees are the best for generating energy that is non-cheaty. Here's the reasoning:

From logs, 1 charcoal is worth 4000 EU. Don't turn your logs into charcoal; this is the most inefficient method. Crafting them into scaffolds gives you 750 EU per scaffold, which nets 12000 EU per log. However I would consider this very cheaty. centrifuging 16 rubber logs gives you 4 Methane cells, 8 worthless carbon cells you extract to get the empty cell from, 6 plantballs and 8 sticky resin. Without considering the byproduces and only the methane you get 9687.5 EU per rubber log. Here's the math:


4 methane 45000 EU 25000 EU
------------- x ---------- - -------- (centrifuge energy) = 9687.5 EU/log
16 logs 1 methane 16 logs



Now let's look at byproducts. Centrifuging the 8 sticky resin again for 12,500 EU gives you 2 compressed plants, 28 rubber, and 2 plant balls. You can centrifuge the sticky resin, but unfortunately by any method it will lose energy. Here's the calculation for how many MJ platballs nets if you throw them into a fermenter and use the Biomass to fuel a Bio Generator to get EU:


.4 Bucket
Biomass 8000 MJ
------- x ---------- = 3200 MJ/plantball x 6 plantball/ 16 logs = 1200 MJ/log.
1 plantball 1 bucket BM

Multiply by .960 because it takes 4.00% of the energy generated from a plantball to power the fermenter. So 1150 MJ/log

Adding 1150 MJ for plantballs to the 9687.5 for methane nets 10800 MJ/log for rubber logs.

 

[Peppe]

A good first liquid fuel is seed oil from a squeezer (if you get into bees you will need seed oil anyway). You can do both off wheat, but pumpkin or melon farms generate more seeds.

Pumpkin and melon farms can be stacked the same way as wheat above, but with an extra air block each floor. Their advantage is you don't need the farm piece. You can setup your own farm shape an maximize what ends up in the harvest area (you can use all the interior and go 3 blocks wider than the normal 15x15 shape).

They may be less laggy than wheat as the melon/pumpkins have no stages.

 

[Froghandler]

A good first liquid fuel is seed oil from a squeezer (if you get into bees you will need seed oil anyway). You can do both off wheat, but pumpkin or melon farms generate more seeds.

Pumpkin and melon farms can be stacked the same way as wheat above, but with an extra air block each floor. Their advantage is you don't need the farm piece. You can setup your own farm shape an maximize what ends up in the harvest area (you can use all the interior and go 3 blocks wider than the normal 15x15 shape).

They may be less laggy than wheat as the melon/pumpkins have no stages.

I may have to try this I wonder about the math for the growth rates and power returns. They seem promising: you get 1 bucket of seed oil for 10 seeds, which gives 30k MJ. Best of all reduced lag most likely. Experimenting with melon/pumpkin farms could be fun too.

 

[Peppe]

Turbory - peat harvester only harvests level with itself, 2 blocks below, and 3 blocks above.

Peat farm doesn't seem to work without an air block above. So you can stack 3 farms in that space - one level, one 2 below and another 2 or 3 above (3 if you want to walk into to inner part).

 

[Evil Hamster]

For simplicity sake, I'm liking my nether lava pump system powering geothermal generators.

 

[Froghandler]

Can we do the same with peat farms, how many?

Peppe has it right I tested it out a while ago using trial and error because the wiki numbers for wheat farms were off.

Looks like this:

Maximum range for a cacti harvester is 2 layers, though as you only need the harvester it isn't that big of a thing to stack it higher using more harvesters.

This pic shows the level you put the harvester on:

 

[Tylor]

Fillerforest (Forestry logger + filler planting saplings) gives insane amount of fuel for it's price. I think you can get 1000MJ/t from one field, if you use boilers. But needs some work and skill setting it up. And even if fuel is virtually free, you still have to pay for engines and boilers.

Windmills are at least twice as good as solars for same price and easily spammable, so it is a best end-game EU source for me. Compact solars can have better eu/lag ratio, though.

Railcraft turbines cost LOTS of iron to make and LOTS of iron to run, so I'd pass.

Nuclear reactors are not really scalable (because uranium is limited), and was nerfed by half recently, but still good option for mid-game.

 

[Sirbab]

Looks like i'm a bit late to the party... But Wind power... it seems almost everyone dismisses it, yet it is about 1.5 times as efficient as solars. and if you are playing without GT then they are cheap as dirt, here's a tutorial by SpwnX;
http://forum.industrial-craft.net/index.php?page=Thread&postID=49260#post49260

Currently making over 100 eu/t from just 64 wind mills, and they will never break in this setup, nor stop producing power like a solar panel would.

 

[EternalDensity]

I may have to try this I wonder about the math for the growth rates and power returns. They seem promising: you get 1 bucket of seed oil for 10 seeds, which gives 30k MJ. Best of all reduced lag most likely. Experimenting with melon/pumpkin farms could be fun too.

Has this changed?
I'm using the DW20 pack and it's taking me 50 seeds for a bucket of seed oil. This makes apiaries rather slow to obtain.

 

[MilConDoin]

Has this changed?
I'm using the DW20 pack and it's taking me 50 seeds for a bucket of seed oil. This makes apiaries rather slow to obtain.

Back in FTB BETA A you needed 10 seeds. The current DW20 and MindCrack packs both need 50 seeds.
You can change that if you want:
config\forestry\gamemodes\EASY.conf (if you use the easy difficulty, which is default in this pack)
squeezer.liquid.seed=20 // change to 100 to get the old 10 seeds/bucket behaviour back.