Is energy from lava appropriate?

[MavericK96]

Thats a popular one too... But I don't think enderchest are all the cheap... They are almost on par with GregTechs version of hard mode. Enderpearls and all that... Don't know about you but I don't get a whole lot of enders from the Men anymore... I have to use Minium stone to get them..

I dunno, IIRC you only need one Ender Pearl per chest, and you only need two chests...

In my experience it hasn't been insanely hard to find Endermen overall, and they seem to drop Pearls fairly regularly. If nothing else, like you said, you can just use 4 iron to get one from the Minium Stone.

 

[nevakanezah]

I dunno, IIRC you only need one Ender Pearl per chest, and you only need two chests...

In my experience it hasn't been insanely hard to find Endermen overall, and they seem to drop Pearls fairly regularly. If nothing else, like you said, you can just use 4 iron to get one from the Minium Stone.

one pearl, two blaze rods. (possibly a diamond?) definitely not as expensive as you'd think.

 

[MavericK96]

I have 20 Thermal Generators running 300+ EU into my IC2 stuff.. Mass fab... Ore Processing etc... All that takes a massive amount of lava.. And the lava I pipe in using Mystcraft portals and railcraft.. .And none of those are easy things to start off with... Railcraft is pretty slow going.. And you need crystals for the Mystcraft portals.. Which is like trying to find diamonds.. only your making ages.. And thats a lot harder.

I don't think the bucket system would keep up to be honest with what I have running.. So I would need more....

I'm running 15 geothermals on the system I mentioned previously in the thread, with no issues. Actually, depending on how many buckets/cells you cycle in the system, and what you set your timer to for the filters, you will end up with full lava buckets waiting in the Ender Chest. You're only really limited by the speed of the Liquid Transposer, which is very fast. If you build a Railcraft tank of lava (I've got a 5x5x5 which I believe is like 2,000 buckets) you have a buffer, as well.

FWIW, my tank never drains at all while running all 15 geothermals. I have them in banks of 5 using Liquiducts so I can disable some of them and save lava when I don't need that much energy production.[DOUBLEPOST=1357758027][/DOUBLEPOST]

one pearl, two blaze rods. (possibly a diamond?) definitely not as expensive as you'd think.

No diamonds...and with the blaze rod -> macerator -> blaze dust -> Minium Stone trick, you basically have infinite blaze rods, which you can get from Cinderpearls so you don't ever even have to kill any Blaze to get them.

So, yeah, Ender Chests are really cheap considering they are interdimensional (provided you use a chunk loader, which generally requires a couple diamonds so there's a cost there).

 

[raiju]

Personally, I really liked the old ender chest. As far as I'm aware a mod or two bring a similar feature back - but I just liked the original old vanilla ender chest being player unique. I guess it didn't help SSP though.

 

[MavericK96]

Can't you just craft a vanilla ender chest if you want? Or does the Ender Chest mod remove it?

 

[nevakanezah]

Can't you just craft a vanilla ender chest if you want? Or does the Ender Chest mod remove it?

They're both present, as i understand. The big difference is that vanilla ender chests work very differently. Instead of encoding each chest to a specific inventory, the vanilla chest gets encoded to whichever player opens it. So when you hook a machine up to a vanilla EC, it doesn't know which player's inventory it's supposed to be using. in addition, the vanilla ECs can only host one inventory per player, whereas the mod ones can be encoded to have tons of different ones.

 

[MavericK96]

Yeah...well, my point was that the person I quoted said they "missed the vanilla ender chest", but it's still there if you want it.

 

[raiju]

I had no idea, on the beta pack the recipe didn't work for me so I assumed it was gone entirely, nice to know

 

[nevakanezah]

I had no idea, on the beta pack the recipe didn't work for me so I assumed it was gone entirely, nice to know

The beta pack is still on an older version of minecraft. We're 1.4 to the current 1.7, which will have vanilla ender chests in it, among other things.

 

[raiju]

I am aware it should, it just didn't work for me

 

[slay_mithos]

The funny thing is that I love lava as an energy source, but rarely ever use it, because I tend to have a massive input of coal/charcoal/seed oil, making my early stage quite easy in term of energy generation.
( 3 9x9 farms for wheat, and a turtle managing 20 trees, cutting them down every 5-10 minutes and feeding that into a furnace of some sort).

As some people said, lava is a great source of energy, but it comes at the cost of having to build an infrastructure to be able to automate it, where you could produce other energy sources using stone, redstone, glass, iron and a chest (plus a diamond/gem tool).

Forestry has so many ways to make really decent fuels, peat even doubling as a fuel for normal coal powered machines.

Railscraft can also level up your coal by quite a lot, granted that you spend a little sand and clay, and one of the most efficient uses for your fuels in the form of steam boilers.

The users of DW20 pack also have cheap solar energy for IC2, with normal recipe and compact solar, but the Mindcrack pack comes with solar that can also produce a little during the night.

Oh, and if anything fails, you still can power your BC stuff via RP solar or wind power too.


Damn, now I want all that in my world...

 

[Mero]

Just going to add on another question or two for those interested:

Do you feel lava is a go-to resource generator for you or do you generally use others (such as tree farms) more for your early-midgame gameplay? If you do use lava - do you think other generator methods should be made more attractive options?

My first source of power is peat. I don't use any of the EU mods so I will never use any of their sources. After I get peat automated I work on lava. I have finally started to play around with bio fuel so I will start to mess with that too. It really won't matter to me too much what I use. Peat will power my bog and tree farms and everything else will feed energy into my redstone energy cells. I might even see if RP can fill my cells, then I can use windmills for that.

 

[Spikednate12]

In my opinion the power from it is okay just not what you can do with it in the industrial centrifuge, that would be a exploit in my opinion. Also i dont really like ender chests with fire and forget methods, seems slightly cheep to me. But once again it depends on play style. I like playing with a sort of difficulty to the game to make it seem closer to the actuality it will never be because its a game.

 

[Omicron]

"I think generating lava from crucibles isn't appropriate right now" - For my own worlds, I'm doubling the energy required for Netherrack from 8k to 16k MJ.

"I think the EU/MJ conversion for lava isn't correct" - For my own worlds, I am nerfing geothermal generators down to 15 EU/t, 15k EU total.

I like config files!

 

[raiju]

Thanks for all the responses so far I honestly expected the "it's fine" to be more around the 40%~ mark, but this is what we learn!

 

[Omicron]

A sure sign that something is too strong is when most people say "it's fine, leave it be"

 

[raiju]

I made this thread because a lot of others were bringing it up as an argument against things in other threads where it didn't belong as I was interested to see how a majority felt. I don't remember calling it too strong and tried to imply as much as possible that values may just be "out of line" not too low or too high. My bias may skew slightly but that was my attempt.

 

[Abdiel]

I use lava all the time, and I usually cart it through a Mystcraft portal. It is certainly plentiful, but it's still fairly resource intensive to get it up and going early game. I've played with the other energy gathering systems, and for the most part they either require more resources, or a much longer setup time which is why I usually fall back on lava. If it's was nerfed, making it more difficult I would be fairly disappointed.

Everytime I consider a different source of energy (such as biofuel), I start looking into what it takes to get up and going and becoming self-sustaining and I lose interest in it. Nope, lava is my go to, and I just like the way it looks/behaves.

Unfortunately, this is exactly what indicates a balance issue. If a majority of people think that one method of generating power is so much more efficient, cheaper, easier to set up, more sustainable to the point they won't consider using anything else, that power source needs to be brought back into balance with others. In an ideal world (read: practically impossible), energy sources would be divided into tiers. In every individual tier there should be balance - choosing a power source from one tier should only be a matter of personal preference, not of one being significantly more powerful than all others. Advancement through tiers should have a meaning, a tier 1 power source should not be powerful enough to last you through the whole game. As it is right now, you can very well use lava power from your first generator to running massfabs and industrial machines.

Vanilla IC advanced solars have the same problem: there is little reason to build anything else as they were cheap, efficient, and didn't require any additional infrastructure to run. GregTech balances them slightly - the cost becomes an issue (you need some advanced machinery to get them), and they are divided into tiers. A tier 1 solar will not be enough to run your whole base - there is an incentive to upgrading. And upgrading requires additional resources and processing, not just building more of the same machine (packed into a single block or not).

I don't think anyone really argues about lava generators in the overworld - lava is severely limited and any stationary power plant will only last for a short time. Therefore my proposed solution is to change worldgen so that the Nether spawns a different kind of lava - call it "superheated lava", which can not be pumped or put in buckets/cells. This keeps lava as a viable early-to-mid-game power source, and keeps the crucible->geothermal BC->IC conversion, but stops the practically infinite source of Nether lava power.

 

[LazDude2012]

Meh... Lava in and of itself is a great power source. Lava form the Nether via Ender Chests or Mystcraft, though, is fine, but lacks creativity. Personally, creativity is what Minecraft's about. So, other people can do the whole Nether lava thing, but I'll use different Nether power. (I'll be getting 2 tier 5 blaze spawners to power a Railcraft boiler, for turbines and engines)

 

[bwillb]

I think special piping should be made for lava, a little bit of cactus green is fine for water but lava should need some pulverized obsidian and diamond dust or something.

Really though if you did this people would just use water or charcoal which are just about as easy to do.