Is energy from lava appropriate?

[Abdiel]

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.

You can make a functional lava power plant without using barely any pipes. (In fact I'm pretty sure with some effort you could make a completely pipeless setup.)

[edit] duhh, Liquid Transposer attached to the pump, and distribute lava buckets/cells instead of liquid.

 

[Daemonblue]

Well one of the reasons for Netherrack > Lava is so people don't lag out the Nether on servers with pumps.

As for my first power source, it depends on what's available. If I dig under my starter base and run into a ton of lava, I'm gonna use it. If I don't then I'll start off with coal or maybe peat. As of right now though I have about 30 stacks of Netherrack from getting to a fortress via tunnels and making my Blaze trap, so I'm set for a while. I also already made my first energy cell a while back and it's about half full from a single engine :x

 

[Saice]

Ok I'm not about to tell anyone how they should play this post is personal play style options and any suggestion within I hope would be something settable via a config.

I love and Hate lava. I like the idea of geothermal power and Thermopiles but the first is easily abused with using some sort of infinite lava creation or pumping the neither which is also basically infinite. The later I like (From Redpower) its like an inefficient solar system that has a chance to randomly muck up if you build it for max power or an even lower power output it can be fairly self running. Why do I like this "free" power over say Solar and Infi-Lava? Well it has to do with cost to output. The Thermopile has a fairly decent cost to make and for that it ends up being 1/4th to 1/10th power of solar it takes up more space and has a challenge to getting one built and working. You can say similar things about Infi-lava But really You can sand/dirt cast a portal shortly after you have 3 iron. The Infi-Pump build is not all that costly outside of its chunk loader but you can have it up and running with out that just visit it and AFK in a box to get your stock up until you have the chunk loader. I've seen a buddy get that set up within a day on a server and never have to worry about power other then more power storage as needed in his base.

I think what would be nice is some option to nerf infi-lava setups so they have an output somewhere between solar and thermopile to there footprint size. But sadly since this setup normally uses multiple mods I do not foresee that happening.

 

[bwillb]

You can make a functional lava power plant without using barely any pipes. (In fact I'm pretty sure with some effort you could make a completely pipeless setup.)

[edit] duhh, Liquid Transposer attached to the pump, and distribute lava buckets/cells instead of liquid.

Yeah that's true. Just uses more resources to get it started, as well as sucking up some of the power for the transposers.

 

[LazDude2012]

Yeah, honestly, lava's not OP, it's just exploited more commonly. Charcoal's another common example. Heck, SoulShards and blaze spawners could be considered OP, (they're what I'll be using for power though)

 

[Daemonblue]

You should be able to use aluminum cans from xycraft in a transposer to fill them with lava, so it's not even that much more resource intensive.

 

[Antice]

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.

People suggesting using the nether "exploit" lava as a "better" option on a thread about making a self sufficent peat farm or a really productive bio fuel factory are just being rude and anoying imho. I don't give a rat's tail about what is the easiest method when i make my power infrastructure, I choose my system because i find it to be cool/fitting to my current build theme rather than ease of setup.
Sure. if i was doing a competitive map thing, then I'd do the easy/fast setup too, but I'm not. and neither is most others who wants to do these other powerplant methods., they want it to be something cool that fit's their style.

That being said. I do think that the netherrack ->crucible ->magmatic engine loop is far to productive. it gives a massive energy gain at a very low cost. getting tonnes of netherrack is easy as pie. a filler can fill multiple barrels with the stuff in minutes when set to clear a chunk from the top to the lava level.
Heck. just making a netherhub at roof level in the nether is going to be netting you a barrel or three full just by clearing out the space to build a nice hub/rail system.
Even the cobble cycle is OP compared to other conversion devices meant to convert MJ's into EU's. especially with the thermal generators added by gregtech. (OP because it's a loss-less conversion while all other systems incur rather big losses, and that is how it should be. there should be a cost incurred when basing your energy production on only one system)

 

[Malkuth]

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.

But in my opinion the balance issue is a non issue in FTB or any mod.. The whole mod is unbalanced.. Many people in this thread gave many different examples on how you can make many different Power things in the game.. They all can be considered unbalanced... Most of them take advantage of cross mod compatibility... With a mod like Feed The Beast its a little much to ask every mod dev.. To balance his mod with others.. Its not going to happen.

ANd this kind of unbalance is not limited to power... I have a tutorial on how to use redpower and factorization to build a cheap sorting system.. By passing pretty much all the sorting systems in the whole mod pack. And its cheap and easy to build on day 1 of gameplay.

I say leave things be.. and let people play the way they want.

Lets also face the fact.. The Nether is a Vanilla game mechanic.. Mods can't nerf that stuff.. Nor will they.. They know just like every other modder out there. .You got your guys that are hardcore and will build complicated things.. And you got your normal.. after work guy that does not want to spend 3 weeks building 1 little building..

The mods cater to everyone... Its there choice on what they build or don't.

 

[makeshiftwings]

Well one of the reasons for Netherrack > Lava is so people don't lag out the Nether on servers with pumps.

I think that's a key point that really needs to be said more often. A lot of people want to nerf the magma crucible because they think it's too "easy" compared to putting a pump in the Nether, but it's really not that different, and nether pumps can lag a server really badly if you have more than two or three people doing it. The crucible is sort of a way of saying "Hey, we know that since you have all this Netherrack that you could have just as easily set up a pump in the Nether, so let's just pretend you did that and give you all this lava without bringing the server to its knees". It's the same thing with the cobble generator and such; it's basically a way to do something that's doable in other more laggy ways.

 

[Abdiel]

I am very tempted to come up with a mod with a machine that turns cobble into netherrack for a trivial amount of power, just to see the erupting discussions.

 

[Saice]

I am very tempted to come up with a mod with a machine that turns cobble into netherrack for a trivial amount of power, just to see the erupting discussions.

you mean like cobble to netherrack which can be done with the soul shards mod?

 

[Abdiel]

you mean like cobble to netherrack which can be done with the soul shards mod?

Hmm this is news to me, how? If so, why is nether lava an issue, when you can have literally unlimited amounts of it this way?

 

[makeshiftwings]

I am very tempted to come up with a mod with a machine that turns cobble into netherrack for a trivial amount of power, just to see the erupting discussions.

If it turned cobble to netherrack at roughly the same cost as Cobble->Lava minus Netherrack->Lava then it would probably be fine as far as energy creation goes. And as long as the machine required something from the Nether in order to build... like blaze rods or something.

 

[Abdiel]

TE assigns a value of 12,000 MJ to netherrack, and even in the absolutely worst case 4,000 EU (Geothermal Generators + Forestry Electrical Engines). if you have TE, you have a magmatic engine that can power the crucible. Running a geothermal on the remaining lava yields 12,000 EU per netherrack. An electrical furnace uses 390 EU per smelting. A compressor or extractor uses 800 EU per operation. Basing block values off vanilla distribution, it is reasonable that netherrack should cost a similar amount. For comparison, it costs 100 EU to create one piece of dirt from plantballs in a macerator.

 

[Daemonblue]

Just ran the numbers from processing netherrack. TE takes 8k MJ to produce 18k MJ worth of lava, so you have a 56% MJ gain rate (it's actually 55.55555...etc.) per netherrack. This also means that you have 56% of a lava bucket you can use to produce EU. With a Geothermal Generator, 56% of a lava bucket comes out to 11,200 EU, and in the Gregtech Thermal generator it comes out to 16,800 EU.

 

[King Lemming]

There's not a single great solution for the lava quandary. I'm glad some of you realize the purpose of the Crucible - ideally it would not need to exist as a lag prevention device.

Currently, the relative gain on Netherrack is a bit high and Magmatic engines are slightly easier to get than I'd like. Both of these will change with the next TE update. Thing is, I can't move it too far in the other direction. Bear in mind that a Sapling is worth 40k MJ, and I have no idea what a piece of Charcoal is worth in one of the RC boilers, but I do know that the Hobbyist engine is something like 3 or 4x more fuel efficient than the TE steam engine. I assume that ratio holds true as it scales up, making Charcoal pretty good on its own.

I think part of what we're seeing with lava is a convenience factor - there are actually far better power sources available, but they're better suited for large infrastructure. Lava is also sort of the commonality between IC2 and BC power, without using converters.

As far as BC goes, once you get a massive factory setup going with constant power consumption, you'd be crazy not to run a Boiler (or two) and a tree farm.

 

[Saice]

Hmm this is news to me, how? If so, why is nether lava an issue, when you can have literally unlimited amounts of it this way?

1 Cobble + 1 Corrupted Essence in a Soul Forge give your 1 Neitherrack

The corrupted essence cost you 1 Vile dust and 1 glowstone dust this is shapeless and can be done in an autocrafter

The vile dust is just soulsand smelted.

There is a way to make glowstone also so the only neither mat you need for this whole affair is soulsand.

So it might not be a better way to get neitherrack but it is a way.

 

[Daemonblue]

To add onto that, lava is one of the easier common factors to obtain. With Gregtech several others are added, such as a diesel generator to turn fuel/bio-fuel ino EU, and methane which can be used in both boilers and a gas turbine. The only problem that I can see from these is that due to the boiler's very high efficiency of burning liquid fuels (including methane) that you'll get much more eu out of the system by using MJ to burn cobble for lava and use it for EU, rather than using one of the direct methods such as the Gas Turbine. To be fair, this would be a fairly hard thing to properly balance across all the mods in the pack due to wanting lava to both be useful early on, yet not be totally and overwhelmingly overpowered. It's a pretty hard balance to strike since someone will always find a way to exploit a machine's full power generation using some form of conversions that were overlooked.

 

[Exasperation]

​

Even the cobble cycle is OP compared to other conversion devices meant to convert MJ's into EU's. especially with the thermal generators added by gregtech. (OP because it's a loss-less conversion while all other systems incur rather big losses, and that is how it should be. there should be a cost incurred when basing your energy production on only one system)​

I don't see where you're getting a loss-less conversion from the cobble cycle. Looking at fuel values, most basic fuels that can be burned for either MJ or EU give 2.5 times as many EU as MJ.
Coal/charcoal: 4k EU/1.6k MJ = 2.5 EU/MJ
Wood/planks: 750 EU/300 MJ = 2.5 EU/MJ
Sticks/saplings: 250 EU/100 MJ = 2.5 EU/MJ
Peat: 5k EU/2k MJ = 2.5 EU/MJ
Bituminous peat: 10.5k EU/4.2k MJ = 2.5 EU/MJ

Cobble -> Lava costs 20k MJ (burning the same fuel to get EU directly would typically get you 50k EU). Putting that through a geothermal generator gives you 20k EU, a 40% efficient conversion. The thermal generator improves that to 30k EU, a 60% efficient conversion. There actually is a loss-less conversion in the other direction: an electric engine with an iron electron tube converts 5 EU/t into 2 MJ/t.

The issue, as far as I can tell, is that some of the specialized engines (magmatic, combustion, biogas) are much better than their IC2/gregtech equivalent generators per bucket of fuel, so much so that even a 40-60% efficient conversion can look quite good:
The magmatic engine gives 18k MJ, compared to the 20-30k EU of the geothermal/thermal generators (about 1.1-1.7 EU/MJ). At 60% conversion efficiency you get 27k EU. So burning lava in a magmatic generator, using the energy to melt cobble into lava, then feeding that lava into a thermal generator loses 10% of the energy you would get just using the lava straight in the thermal generator - exactly what you would expect, since the magmatic engine gives back 90% of the energy it takes to make an amount lava equal to what it burned.
The combustion engine on normal fuel gives 600k MJ, on biofuel 200k MJ: the diesel generator gives 384k EU on normal fuel, 32k EU on biofuel (0.64 EU/MJ and 0.16 EU/MJ respectively!). At 60% conversion efficiency, on normal fuel you get 360k EU instead of 384k EU - a 6.25% energy loss compared to just burning the fuel in a diesel generator. Still within reason. On biofuel, you get 120k EU instead of the 32k you get burning the biofuel straight, a 275% gain in energy over just burning the biofuel straight in the diesel generator. Even using the 40% efficient conversion, this nets you a 150% energy gain over just burning the fuel straight.
The biogas engine gives 50k MJ on biomass, the semifluid generator gives 8k EU (0.16 EU/MJ again!). This gives the same 275% gain in energy over burning the fuel straight in the semifluid generator when passed through the 60% efficient conversion process again.

Looks like we have our culprit! In order to actually gain energy (or, indeed, not to lose it) from the cobble cycle feeding into a thermal generator, you have to use biomass/biofuel to power your magma crucibles (or steam, maybe; I haven't really looked at railcraft boilers yet, but I hear they're very efficient). The combustion and biogas engines are just that much better than their EU-producing counterparts (the bio generator gives the same* total EU per bucket on biomass/biofuel as the diesel/semifluid respectively, just not at the same burn rate).

If the thermal generator were as good as the magmatic engine, it would give 45k EU per bucket, not 30k. If the semifluid generator were as good as the biogas engine, it would produce 125k EU per bucket of biomass. If the diesel generator were as good as the combustion engine, it would give 500k EU per bucket of biofuel, and 1.5M EU per bucket of normal fuel! Conversely, if you brought the engines down in efficiency to match the generators, the magmatic engine would only produce 12k MJ per bucket, the combustion only 12.8k MJ on biofuel and 153.6 MJ on regular fuel, and the biogas only 3.2k MJ on biomass.

*(Well, almost the same - in direct testing, the bio generator gave 32k EU/ bucket on biofuel, while the diesel generator consistently gave me 31,992 EU per bucket, tested by hooking each up directly to an empty MFSU and feeding it a single bucket of biofuel.)​

 

[King Lemming]

The magmatic engine gives 18k MJ, compared to the 20-30k EU of the geothermal/thermal generators (about 1.1-1.7 EU/MJ). At 60% conversion efficiency you get 27k EU. So burning lava in a magmatic generator, using the energy to melt cobble into lava, then feeding that lava into a thermal generator loses 10% of the energy you would get just using the lava straight in the thermal generator - exactly what you would expect, since the magmatic engine gives back 90% of the energy it takes to make an amount lava equal to what it burned.​

Just wanted to address this as to why I chose 90% - the IC2 generators are far more power output, at the expense of less total energy. The goal was to ensure that a simple loop could not be constructed to allow for IC2 energy to self-sustain. Since Greg has now effectively raised that bar, expect the Netherrack conversion cost to go up to match it - I have no desire for BC energy to be removed from play again.

This is actually a very different (and interesting dynamic), since in many cases prior, it was always:

1) Build lots and lots of solar panels.
2) Convert energy.
3) Never build anything that uses BC energy other than a quarry.

So actually, it's really cool to see this kind of discussion now.

The rest of your analysis shows something else that a lot of modders have long held to be true - the scaling between IC2 and BC energy is not linear, the 2.5:1 ratio is inherently flawed. The problem is that converters tend to allow for this, and you can take advantage of arbitrage. Then again, depending on the converter mod you have installed, there's no need for all of this lava stuff and you just go directly from MJ to EU.

Having said that, I'm not even sure I can address the other sources of generation - they are absurdly good.