I'm Obviously Doing BC Power Wrong. How can I improve?

[MrZwij]

You can't get more than 64 items in a stack with creative, either... At least not by any technique I know of.

You can by giving yourself "infinite of" something. I think it's Ctrl+click the item(?). There's definitely a keystroke involved.

Edit: This is NEI Creative, as opposed to vanilla Creative.

 

[arkangyl]

You can by giving yourself "infinite of" something. I think it's Ctrl+click the item(?). There's definitely a keystroke involved.

Edit: This is NEI Creative, as opposed to vanilla Creative.

Well that's probably how I don't know about it. I pretty exclusively use the vanilla creative inventory for cheating stuff in/playing creative. The NEI screen is just too cluttered for my tastes.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

For those running low on diamonds, pulverise coal, craft with pulverised gravel and compress. The igneous extruder is a useful source of on-demand obsidian for the next step.

You can't get more than 64 items in a stack with creative, either... At least not by any technique I know of.

Its an infinite stack given by NEI in cheat mode

as for the diamonds? Gen a fresh world with that seed, and go to that spot.

 

[EternalDensity]

Hmm, comparison time.

Buildcraft power: needs manual switching off, automatic switching off with gates, or machines that continually drain energy 'keeping warm', to prevent conduits from exploding.
Thermal Expansion power: a little tricky to make (electrum and liquid redstone), but has the benefit of only 1 type of conduit to keep track of. You'll want to disconnect machines that continually drain power, as there's no need to waste it and you'll be wanting to fill up energy cells with your energy surplus.
IC2 power: doesn't explode from energy buildup, but does vaporize stuff if you get the voltages wrong. Requires rubber. If not insulated enough can hurt players (that can still happen, right? I'm a bit out of date on this).
RP2 power: pretty straightforward really, but I haven't made any in quite a while so I can't comment on cost. I don't think anything can explode, right?
Factorization power: wiring based on lead, energy generation based on silver mirrors. Well I guess we can say it's unique but I don't think it's "for me".
Xycraft power: what little I've seen looks pretty awesome. Can cause serious damage to you if you walk into the beams. Also, isn't available to us common plebs.

Anyhow, at the moment my world is exclusively TE power. One of these days I'll find rubber (or my crossbreeding will succeed and I'll be able to grow it that way. I keep forgetting to check and finding my crops are weeds.)

 

[Korenn]

The infernal furnace is inferior in bonus to both the macerator and pulverizer (my testing with three bellows was that a stack of ore turns into a stack of ingots plus 84 nuggets, a bonus of 9 ingots where the macerator would give a bonus of 64 and the pulverizer 10% more than that.

It does smelt dusts, so you can use it on that, but provides no bonus. Note it also eats vis and creates flux.

In short: In a mixed mod game, the infernal furnace is worthless.

The infernal furnace does have a couple things going for it:

• it looks awesome
• you get experience from smelted items like with a vanilla furnace, but it can be automated. This means you can set up a drop system to dump stuff in, a pickup system to store away the results, and put a brain in a jar next to it to hold on to the experience for when you need it. Now, this is of course dangerous due to the massive flux and massive vis draining when automated, so you might not want to do this until you're at thaumcraft endgame.

 

[Evil Hamster]

Hmm, comparison time.

Thermal Expansion power: a little tricky to make (electrum and liquid redstone), but has the benefit of only 1 type of conduit to keep track of. You'll want to disconnect machines that continually drain power, as there's no need to waste it and you'll be wanting to fill up energy cells with your energy surplus.

Don't forget with the cells you can throttle the MJ output to downstream machinery or use a redstone signal to turn them off on demand.

 

[EternalDensity]

Don't forget with the cells you can throttle the MJ output to downstream machinery or use a redstone signal to turn them off on demand.

Indeed. I was focusing more on the conduits than on the cells, but that is definitely a big advantage that's worth mentioning.

 

[KhrFreak]

i'd reccomend a thermionic fabricator as an energy sync and toss in some glass that'll sync energy nicely

 

[EternalDensity]

You mean 'sink' not 'sync'. Sync is short for synchronise (or synchronize ) and isn't applicable to this situation.

 

[eable2]

To go back to the OP's original question...

Trust the other posters, and go with redstone energy conduits. You don't need the energy cells for now, because you are just starting the power grid, but energy conduits are superior to buildcraft pipes in almost all ways. The only thing that the BC pipes have going for them are the gates - a big deal for later automation, but not right now.

• They don't explode
• They will distribute energy evenly throughout a power grid (BC pipes are kind of dorky at this when you introduce intersections, particularly with "energy sink" machines)
• You can manually set them to either input or output energy for each conduit block
• You don't need to deal with wooden pipes
• There is only 5% energy loss, and it isn't distance based (so you can make these grids really large)
• You can't break them with your fist in a quarter of a second
• Magmatic engines and steam engines will be smart and only supply as much power as is needed.
• They are way less laggy than BC pipes

Start using them now, and you'll thank us later!