Getting into steam

[Heliomance]

I've never played with Railcraft or Steve's Carts before, and as we've just started a new server, I thought I'd take the opportunity to look into it.

I'm in the middle of setting up a Steve's Carts tree farm. As I understand it, the best thing to do is to put the logs through a sawmill. I then presumably want to turn them into charcoal before burning them - in a coke oven for the free creosote? The saplings and apples I think I need to turn into biofuel for a liquid boiler. How do I go about doing that? And can I pump the creosote and biofuel into the same liquid boiler?

Also, how large boilers am I likely to be able to keep running off the farm?

 

[Jess887cp]

Well, you can't turn planks into charcoal, but feeding the boiler a steady supply of planks should be fine. Just experiment, and if you have surplus, make another boiler. Too little to sustain the system? Bigger farm.

 

[Heliomance]

True, you can't. Derp.

 

[Jess887cp]

You might be thinking of how you can turn the sawdust into charcoal, but I don't really think that's worth it.

 

[Wekmor]

As far as I know, 6 planks (sawmill a log) gives you more heat then a piece of charcoal.

 

[Bibble]

The planks method is more energy efficient, I think. Personally, I prefer cooking the logs to charcoal first. There is stil enough to feed the boiler and produce a reserve, but they're more energy dense, so better for fuelling other things. Plus good for torches.

 

[Juanitierno]

I always do the opposite, i feed my bouilers with planks because charcoal i can use for the boilers, but always having a stock of 5k planks in my AE network is usefull for MANY recipes.

 

[egor66]

I normally go the charcoal rout by feeding wood to TE (to buffer) furnaces piped to barrel, gates/wire to control charcoal flow to boiler, the the sapling to fermenter, to still, to liquid boiler or to engines, everything from the tree farm gets used to create power, plus some excess charcoal can go to couple ic2 generators to make a little power for compressor/extractor & mfe to power up tools as needed, if done correctly the system will be self supporting after the setup cost.

 

[KirinDave]

As far as I know, 6 planks (sawmill a log) gives you more heat then a piece of charcoal.

They are. But there is really no reason not to cook up the sawdust on the side if you're running a solid fuel boiler. The cost of running a cyclic assembler and powered furnace is trivial. The challenge is mixing your fuel supplies such that nothing ever gets backlogged.

 

[Yusunoha]

in a world I cut up the logs in a sawmill into planks and fed that to the boiler. the sawdust I refined into charcoal and stored that as a backup for incase something would happen with the wood farm. any excess logs were sent to a coke oven plant and were turned into creoscote oil and charcoal. the charcoal would also go towards the backup and the creoscote oil was stored for when I needed it.

 

[gusmahler]

It all depends on the size of your farm. My SC tree farm was 16x16. I was able to support 2 solid fuel boilers and 3 liquid boilers (full-size 36 HP). (I speak of it in the past tense because I only use one boiler now. So I void 2/3rds of the saplings and all of the logs.)

I sawmilled the logs, turned the sawdust into charcoal, and used the charcoal to power the cart's coal engine.

 

[Heliomance]

My SC farm is... large ^_^

 

[Shakie666]

My SC farm is... large ^_^

Not as large as my old MFR farm, capable of powering 20+ 36hp boilers without fertilizer (though i'm not sure how the fertilizer works with 2x2 trees). However, I have noticed that tree farms tend to be rather laggy. Too laggy for my laptop at least.