solar panels look boring. I think the mekanism ones look much better
Isn't an MFR tree farm really just a solar panel?
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Actually the only insulting post here so far... is yours. If you feel my comment is out of line, report it to a mod. if not, stay on topic please? Thanks.
Just finished setting up a fun "solar panel" with steves carts and factorization that I am quite pleased with. I have a steves carts carrot farm with a solar engine and basic farmer. When the carrots mature (thanks to the sun) they get harvested by my solar powered cart and get taken to some caliometric burners which make steam. (This steam is supplemented by the actual factorization solar panels too which I already had set up). The steam then gets pumped through a bunch of TE steam dynamos to make delicious redstone flux. Guess what I will use that RF on... yep, I am using all this power to run an MFR tree farm.
Solars need power to make power? Oh they don't. So a farm that needs power to generate resources is slightly more complicated than an expensive block that generates power passively from the point of placement.
Well except for this solar panel from extra utilities. @Extra_Utilities: In more cheerful news - I've finished solar generators mechanics. Unlike most solars this one requires automation. http://twitter.com/Extra_Utilities/status/416900546419634176/photo/1
And the steves carts farmer has durability on the tool, right? So that whole setup seems a lot more fun to me than the MFR part of it. Sending the dynamos to power a multifarm would be completely ideal for my idea of balance.
IMO if something provides a lot of resources or power, it should require attention, or cost a lot of resources. Notice steves carts gets flack on the forums for having durability on the tools, CJ from railcraft is always being asked to allow people to replace turbines automatically, and MFR farms are used more than multifarms due to them being cheaper and requiring no interaction from the player once set up. Solars often get flack for not requiring any attention... but they are expensive to make for the power they give you.
Personally im removing MFR from packs I play in the future, interesting to read other people's ideas on this subject though.
My prefered power setup takes more resources, more time, more space to set up, and provides more power, is objectively more interesting than any solar panel (never seen the Extra Utilities ones, but as I think my power setup is the most interesting I've ever seen (so far) then I'm subjectively saying it's more interesting than that too... probably) yet once it has been set up, it requires 0 input of resources other than a small fraction of the power it provides...
And it can run without MFR
And it can run without MFR
Solar panels are awesome for performance. A MFR tree farm, while incredibly potent and always my choice for easy, early energy, is loud and a little laggy.
At the end of the day its about the goals you set for yourself. You can take the time and refine renewable resources into fuel using elaborate forestry setups that take days to put together.
Or you can use MFR/Solars and lets not forget about the new star amonst the OP mods, QuarryPlus.
Its up to you. If you have concerns as a server admin and want to provide a more challenging environment for players there is always the choice to deactive whole mods or single block IDs (such as the enchanting block for QuarrysPlus, dear god that EfficiencyV is a beast).
At the end of the day its about the goals you set for yourself. You can take the time and refine renewable resources into fuel using elaborate forestry setups that take days to put together.
Or you can use MFR/Solars and lets not forget about the new star amonst the OP mods, QuarryPlus.
Its up to you. If you have concerns as a server admin and want to provide a more challenging environment for players there is always the choice to deactive whole mods or single block IDs (such as the enchanting block for QuarrysPlus, dear god that EfficiencyV is a beast).
Can you remove one set of golems and get it working in another way? Like replace the Use Golems with the MFR planter or the Open Blocks block placer. Can you add turtles to protect from any mobs spawning? Could you replace the gather golems with ME Transition Planes or vanilla hoppers? Could you use loaders and unloaders to move the saplings and wood? Could you use farm sugar cane instead of trees? Could you use the wood differently? Like transport it into a room full of sawmills and export the wood into an automatic crafting table turning them into stairs and burning them in a coke oven.
To me what you've done is all well and good and vastly superior to most tree farms, but to me it's slightly dull as I've seen it done time and time again. Why not mix it up by over complicating it like this?[DOUBLEPOST=1388352763][/DOUBLEPOST]
How are you generating power?
Alright, so I spent ages trying to build this in creative and TE crashed. It's itemducts are still somewhat buggy as they crashed twice and corrupted 2 worlds. But when it was working what I had built was greatly inefficient and took a long time to do anything. I think I'll stick with MFR.
ME and a friend have this discussion frequently, he likes solars an lava, I don't. His argumantation is reasonable, he wants lots of power as fast as possible. I don't know if he's right, but he likes it that way.
I on the other hand want to try out new things, this does not mean the most efficient or easiest way. I like it that way.
I like the MFR treefarm because it creates a lot of tinkering and thinking about it... I am currently trying to make the most out of my farm:
- Cows supply crap for fertilizer
- Can I use the saplings for biofuel?
- How many furnaces do I need so I won't get an overflow of wood?
- How many boilers will it power?
- Would I be able to increase apple output in some way?
These are questions that make the game interesting for me. Some people think I am weird and I should stick with lava or solars
I on the other hand want to try out new things, this does not mean the most efficient or easiest way. I like it that way.
I like the MFR treefarm because it creates a lot of tinkering and thinking about it... I am currently trying to make the most out of my farm:
- Cows supply crap for fertilizer
- Can I use the saplings for biofuel?
- How many furnaces do I need so I won't get an overflow of wood?
- How many boilers will it power?
- Would I be able to increase apple output in some way?
These are questions that make the game interesting for me. Some people think I am weird and I should stick with lava or solars
Has anyone here actually tried not using Compact/Advanced Solars?
12 HV solars is equivalent to 24 chunks full of normal solar panels. Not even glass fibre reaches that far (in pre-experimental IC2).
If several people built that many solar panels on a server, it caused severe tick rate issues. But that's not related to how good the gameplay is.
If you had that many solar panels, you probably had a Buildcraft-based machine to automatically craft them. Designing and building that machine was fun, right?
You might also have had an RP2-based machine to automatically place them. Also fun to design and build.
If you didn't automatically place them, you had to design the layout of the solar panels. You definitely couldn't just attach them all to a single run of glass fibre. And then you had to actually place the solar panels and wiring. While it may sound boring to place over 6000 solar panels and over 2000 cables, the reality is that once you finished, you would feel very proud of your creation. You didn't just click a few buttons in an access terminal and then place 12 blocks; you earned every last EU/t.
Building an MFR tree farm was fun the first time I did it, to see how the different MFR machines work together. Also the second time, when I used fertilizer. But after a few times, it's so easy to build the exact same thing you built last time that it's just not interesting. (At least in the solar panel case, there's all the manual labour involved, that you can be proud of)
Conslusion: (Non-compact, non-advanced) solar farms are slightly more fun than MFR farms.
12 HV solars is equivalent to 24 chunks full of normal solar panels. Not even glass fibre reaches that far (in pre-experimental IC2).
If several people built that many solar panels on a server, it caused severe tick rate issues. But that's not related to how good the gameplay is.
If you had that many solar panels, you probably had a Buildcraft-based machine to automatically craft them. Designing and building that machine was fun, right?
You might also have had an RP2-based machine to automatically place them. Also fun to design and build.
If you didn't automatically place them, you had to design the layout of the solar panels. You definitely couldn't just attach them all to a single run of glass fibre. And then you had to actually place the solar panels and wiring. While it may sound boring to place over 6000 solar panels and over 2000 cables, the reality is that once you finished, you would feel very proud of your creation. You didn't just click a few buttons in an access terminal and then place 12 blocks; you earned every last EU/t.
Building an MFR tree farm was fun the first time I did it, to see how the different MFR machines work together. Also the second time, when I used fertilizer. But after a few times, it's so easy to build the exact same thing you built last time that it's just not interesting. (At least in the solar panel case, there's all the manual labour involved, that you can be proud of)
Conslusion: (Non-compact, non-advanced) solar farms are slightly more fun than MFR farms.
The steve's carts tool I am using currently does take damage. I am considering upgrading it to the unbreakable galgadorian one if I need to repair it too often because I don't really know how I feel about automating iron provision that far away from my base. I would like to save any galgadorian metal I get for the drill or wood cutter though.
The durability isn't the fun part for me. For me the fun part is watching an adorable little cart farming carrots for me. I won't presume to tell you how to have fun but I just wanted something that was cool and that looked nice. That is how I still enjoy making MFR farms. I want to make them look neat and tidy and fit into my aesthetic design which I am having fun doing. I don't even care that I will probably be nowhere near the point where I will be using all of the farms wood output (and cotton, wheat and rubber too). Multifarms are equally good in their ability to provide the sort of enjoyment I get from minecraft but I just went the MFR route because it was more thematic in this instance.
I had that many, and none were automated (as I said, I was learning the game back then)
"Bad?" Maintained forests are an amazing source of energy and material in real life.
Why are you doing the same build over and over, then claiming the only other option is a single block that replaces the entire system?
Eeehhhhhh. The laser is pretty absurd. The real power of the MFR tree farms is their programmability. In terms of output over time, they're only a bit better than modern and well powered forestry farms (and about equivalent to mid-tier SC2 farms). MFR has a good reputation for gameplay because its components have a lot of synergy. MFR motivates you to make a farm and the the individual pieces contribute to a whole.
Ultimately, ALL power in minecraft is solar. All of it. Even coal is, in abstract and with sufficient automation, solar. How we get from here to there is the important part.
I think it all depends on where you play and how many people play with you. On a large (70+ person) server, I would think twice about my power generation. Am I being respectful/responsible with the server resources that I am consuming with this setup?
I've seen apartment complexes built out of industrial centrifuges on a server with 100 people logged in. Sometimes boring is kind.
I've seen apartment complexes built out of industrial centrifuges on a server with 100 people logged in. Sometimes boring is kind.
I wasn't saying forests/tree farms were bad. I was saying that the math/physics/chemistry in most of these mods is bad as in it returns more energy than it consumes.
There are only so many power system types with a given suite of mods. There are minor variations for them but they're just that, minor. I didn't claim anywhere that replacing them with a single block was the only option. I said it was an option I prefer, particularly when creating those "single blocks" is often more of an adventure than building another liquid/solid fuel power system.
The difference there is that MFR tree farms are dirt cheap and trivial to setup. Forestry multiblocks aren't. MFR makes its own fertilizer, whereas Forestry has Apatite, automation of which is more work than 4 cows, a sewer grate, and a composter.
Almost everything MFR does it does cheaper/easier than other major tech mods.[/quote][/quote]
In real life too. That's why we mine coal. We're exploiting the fact that we're at the edge of a long process. Minecraft doesn't model long term consequences like global warming.
A tree farm in real life yields more energy than YOU put into it. Trees get energy from other places. Hence this whole discussion of "solar".
- I knew very few people who have built every power system possible. Even in 1.5. Are you really one? I've yet had to repeat a power system twice.
- The thing about the solar panels is they cannot break. Bigger systems expressed as interactions between mods in subtly different settings can express all sorts of fun flaws. But I guess maybe that's just me who likes builds you need to think about.
SC2 is cheap. Golems are quite cheap. Golems have been a way stronger farming system for quite some time.
Actually they're cheaper for very large areas. That's where they shine. Making MFR scale out for diversity in harvesting (which because of the programmability is very tempting) costs huge sums of power. I use MFR for starter farms then change to a more efficient system asap. No reason to pay that much power when I'm already forking over 17.5mj/t.
One strike of apatite will give you about 2-5 weeks of continuous farm operation since late 1.5. Fertilizer is only "not renewable" in the sense you may need to mine it twice.
I think there are many facets of power that aren't being talked about. We've already covered that ultimately, all power is free. But there are many other things that should be discussed, and they are IMO far more important than how free they are. Particularly, how convenient and dominating power is.
#1: Ease of use. So much power in the game is just plug and use, with magical pipes, wires, and conduits that don't have load limits or diminishing returns, and always provide the exact amount of power you need to the exact amount of machines when you need it. This is certainly convenient, but it is also boring and unsophisticated.
A more impressive power system would be concerned about transformers managing power inputs and outputs so machines don't break and people don't electrocute themselves. A more impressive power system would have to deal with idle power draw and the fact that electricity is used regardless of whether the device is active or not. As much as people hated having to adjust energy rates for IC2 and early Gregtech, dislike the idle draw from BC and railcraft, and hate having to convert and manage speed/torque in rotarycraft, I find that these things are good for a power system, since they are more realistic, necessitate innovation for use, and also nerf the entirety of power.
#2: Portability. A big issue with the power in a lot of these mods is that they're easy to store, release, and carry. You can dump incredible amounts of power into single Resonant energy cell or an Ultimate Energy cube, then pick it up and carry it with you. There's no danger in doing so, nothing is lost, and getting power is easy from these devices. Then, there is also dimensional energy transfer, which sends power across the far reaches of the cosmos, making it available for convenient use, even in the deepest reaches of hell.
For reference, the worlds largest battery in (http://www.popsci.com/science/artic...lds-largest-battery-36-megawatt-hour-behemoth) is 2.16 Terrajoules, and it is several football fields in size. It is also equivalent to about 17 Elite Energy Cubes from Mekanism. The way a lot of power is usually stored is through some kind of alternate means. I know that, for example, the U.S.A. stockpiles millions of barrels of oil for emergencies.
I'd like to see this used more often. For example, instead of the hydrogen generator + hydrolytic separator from mekanism making a free energy loop, it could be used to store large amounts of power at a loss in hydrogen gas, which then can be carried around in a players inventory, and when necessary extracted and used in the hydrogen generator for portable power, emergency power, or a certain output voltage/amperage that is necessary to run certain machines.
#3: Scales of power. As it stands, even the free power loops make a lot of power in scale to how much is needed to perform a task. In reality, most free power isn't truly free, and the stuff that is free isn't that much power. Otherwise the world would've gone to photovoltaic cells a long time ago. If the scale of free power that was produced was quite small compared to what the machines demanded, then there wouldn't be a problem with free power.
#4: Power is dominating. I use mechanism a lot, since it is a mod I've played with recently, but it is a fine example in that power does everything in that mod. Same thing with IC2, same thing with Rotarycraft, same thing with Thermal Expansion... the list goes on. This is understandable to a certain extent, since power in any mod provides a handy resource in which to gauge the speed and availability of of any task, but it is at the point where you can use generic power production to perform pretty much any task you would ever need. Including producing more power.
Now, this discussion of power is neglecting these 4 facets of power. With all four combined, you get boredom, overpowered, broken, however you want to describe it. Now, the important thing to consider is that, if you are to completely remove one or two of these from a power system, then it ceases being overpowered. Large scale production of free energy isn't a big concern if energy is only used for specialized or obscure tasks. Free energy wouldn't be an issue if you have heavy transportation costs that restrict its use, or if the requirements to use that energy require massive infrastructure due to the complexity of how it functions. Or if the amount of energy required to perform a task make free energy impractical.
The hard part of this, of course, is that different mods have different constraints, and with so much power being interchangeable between mods now, it makes things nigh impossible to balance. What is fine for one is overpowered for others, and without some global config to modify things, coming up with a truly balanced gigantic mod pack is impossible.
#1: Ease of use. So much power in the game is just plug and use, with magical pipes, wires, and conduits that don't have load limits or diminishing returns, and always provide the exact amount of power you need to the exact amount of machines when you need it. This is certainly convenient, but it is also boring and unsophisticated.
A more impressive power system would be concerned about transformers managing power inputs and outputs so machines don't break and people don't electrocute themselves. A more impressive power system would have to deal with idle power draw and the fact that electricity is used regardless of whether the device is active or not. As much as people hated having to adjust energy rates for IC2 and early Gregtech, dislike the idle draw from BC and railcraft, and hate having to convert and manage speed/torque in rotarycraft, I find that these things are good for a power system, since they are more realistic, necessitate innovation for use, and also nerf the entirety of power.
#2: Portability. A big issue with the power in a lot of these mods is that they're easy to store, release, and carry. You can dump incredible amounts of power into single Resonant energy cell or an Ultimate Energy cube, then pick it up and carry it with you. There's no danger in doing so, nothing is lost, and getting power is easy from these devices. Then, there is also dimensional energy transfer, which sends power across the far reaches of the cosmos, making it available for convenient use, even in the deepest reaches of hell.
For reference, the worlds largest battery in (http://www.popsci.com/science/artic...lds-largest-battery-36-megawatt-hour-behemoth) is 2.16 Terrajoules, and it is several football fields in size. It is also equivalent to about 17 Elite Energy Cubes from Mekanism. The way a lot of power is usually stored is through some kind of alternate means. I know that, for example, the U.S.A. stockpiles millions of barrels of oil for emergencies.
I'd like to see this used more often. For example, instead of the hydrogen generator + hydrolytic separator from mekanism making a free energy loop, it could be used to store large amounts of power at a loss in hydrogen gas, which then can be carried around in a players inventory, and when necessary extracted and used in the hydrogen generator for portable power, emergency power, or a certain output voltage/amperage that is necessary to run certain machines.
#3: Scales of power. As it stands, even the free power loops make a lot of power in scale to how much is needed to perform a task. In reality, most free power isn't truly free, and the stuff that is free isn't that much power. Otherwise the world would've gone to photovoltaic cells a long time ago. If the scale of free power that was produced was quite small compared to what the machines demanded, then there wouldn't be a problem with free power.
#4: Power is dominating. I use mechanism a lot, since it is a mod I've played with recently, but it is a fine example in that power does everything in that mod. Same thing with IC2, same thing with Rotarycraft, same thing with Thermal Expansion... the list goes on. This is understandable to a certain extent, since power in any mod provides a handy resource in which to gauge the speed and availability of of any task, but it is at the point where you can use generic power production to perform pretty much any task you would ever need. Including producing more power.
Now, this discussion of power is neglecting these 4 facets of power. With all four combined, you get boredom, overpowered, broken, however you want to describe it. Now, the important thing to consider is that, if you are to completely remove one or two of these from a power system, then it ceases being overpowered. Large scale production of free energy isn't a big concern if energy is only used for specialized or obscure tasks. Free energy wouldn't be an issue if you have heavy transportation costs that restrict its use, or if the requirements to use that energy require massive infrastructure due to the complexity of how it functions. Or if the amount of energy required to perform a task make free energy impractical.
The hard part of this, of course, is that different mods have different constraints, and with so much power being interchangeable between mods now, it makes things nigh impossible to balance. What is fine for one is overpowered for others, and without some global config to modify things, coming up with a truly balanced gigantic mod pack is impossible.
Not sure about TC4, but in TC3, Im positive Ill have an MFR farm up before you get golems researched.
Did golems get the ability to cut down trees? Im still on 1.5, havent used TC much, last i checked they couldnt chop trees. Golems are cheap once you get them going but again, still harder than MFR farms. They might end up being more efficient in the long run but... who worries about efficiency in anything but Unhinged?Well Im still learning configs and how to adjust the game, but I just found this:
http://forestry.sengir.net/files/forestry/releases/1.6.2.5/CHANGELOG.txt
Apparently you can now set forestry to 'Easy, Normal, Hard, or OP'
The really intereesting thing is that the default that apparently everyone is familiar with is... the Easy config. So you mention how easy it is to get apatite but apparently that is because the mod defaults to being 'easy'.
I looked at the OP mode - fertlizer runs forever, no need to ever replace it. So it runs like an MFR farm.
So what you are saying is that Multifarms arent really much harder than MFR...when set to Easy mode. But STILL harder.
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In real life coal is a limited resource, in Minecraft it isn't. And I wasn't talking about coal. I was talking about the various "farms" that produce far more than they cost to build/run and run/produce indefinitely with zero intervention. They're perpetual motion machines that require no input of resources and produce resources indefinitely. Something that doesn't exist with real world physics.
And how much time do you put into a real life tree farm? I suspect the time vs. energy output of minecraft tree farms are orders of magnitude different than real word tree farms. I suspect minecraft trees grow far faster than real world trees do, but I may be wrong. I suspect if I go outside and dump a handful of bonemeal on a sapling it won't instantly grow a tree. I could be wrong.
I've built most types of them, if not all of the minor variants. It is one of the reasons I like ResonantRise, btw, it gave me more systems to play with due to some mods it has that aren't commonplace in FTB.
When those systems are "been there done that, multiple times even." I prefer to work on NEW SYSTEMS. Curiously enough, power generation isn't the only place to exercise your creativity in dealing with subtle interactions. Curiously enough I can get my fill of that working on things I drive with power and not just with the power generation itself.
Solar panels can break pretty easily thanks to the flakiness of IC2's energynet. I killed our server with Ultimate Hybrid Solar Panels, for instance. They partially break every time the sun goes down, every time it rains.
The last time I had an mfr tree farm break it was because an enderman stole the dirt. A ring of half-slabs around the dirt and that will never happen again. They're very simple systems that don't have many failure states, all of which can be handled in advance. Your largest concern with them is producing too much. Not a bad problem to have.
SC2 cutters wear out unless you build top tier, which isn't cheap.
Golems require lots of Thaumcraft research which is not cheap in time. Golems also have lots of failure states.
If you continue to ignore how cheap and easy MFR is in any of these comparisons you will continue to miss my point.
It doesn't matter how much power they use when they're self-powered. It doesn't cost me any power to run an MFR tree-farm. When an MFR jungle tree farm with a 2x2 block of dirt and 8 cows can produce ~15,000 logs in a real-world day, while powering itself, while producing excess coal, saplings, fertilizer, and vines, I don't see any need for a more "efficient" farm. I can fit all of this in one chunk and ~30 z-levels. The most "expensive" item in that build? A golden axe.
Oh, and there is very little point in scaling out MFR plant/tree farms. The way the blocks work the fastest farms are the smallest. If you value that speed you just make more small---in sowing area, if not in output---MFR farms. With tree farms in particular your bottleneck is cutting speed, not farming area. With other farms MFR's behaviour of stepping through each block in the farm checking state makes multiple smaller farms much better than one large farm. Instead of one planter/harvester/fertilizer stepping through 64 blocks you want 4 sets stepping through 16 blocks each. This is only possible with MFR's endless fertilizer. If you didn't have an endless supply of fertilizer you wouldn't be able to grow plants/saplings faster than you can harvest them. In a case without endless fertilizer the larger farms would make more sense.
I don't have to mine MFR fertilizer even once. I hang a sewer grate, 4-8 cows, and a composter off of a tree farm and I'll have 50,000 fertilizer in a DSU a week later. Most expensive part? The DSU to store all that fertilizer, lol.
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