Lava Crystal Reactor

[steve g]

yet another crazy build in my never ending quest for unusual ways to generate tons of energy, I give you the Lava Crystal Reactor: (photo album link) http://s653.photobucket.com/user/MaudDibb/library/lava crystal reactor

so I was using NEI one day to get me a lava bucket...and I noticed the lava crystal. on hovering over this item, a tooltip shows up saying it generates 66k EU at 10EU/t in a generator. i was like..wutwut? an item that lasts over 5 minutes in a generator...HMMMM

So out comes this beast. 20 alvearies with Fiendish queens produce a massive amount of phosphor that gets squeezed into lava. why 20? this machine generates about 3-4 lava crystals per second, feeding over 500 generators, generating 5k EU/t to run a mass fab. to get the other components needed for the crystals, 8 blaze spawners(!), 3 wither spawners, a creeper and a spider spawner run full tilt to get all the other stuff. spiders are needed for string to build untreated frames for the alvearies. why so many blaze spawners? well every crystal needs 6 blaze rods (2 for blaze powder for the 4 fire charges that go into one crystal), so this chews through around 20+ rods per second and blazes dont always drop rods. an mfr tree farm growing sickly twilight oaks provide the sticks needed for alveary frames. theres a MAC in the ae network that handles autocrafting the charges and frames, while 2 cyclic assemblers with routers handle making the crystals.

the fiendish bees are nether bees, but I tweaked them for both2 tolerances, fastest productivity, longest lifespan, flowering on rocks instead of nether, and no aggression. I got lucky on the roll of the dice with my superflat map, it generated a massive desert biome which was perfect for their temp/humidity needs

theres an mfr tree farm growing sickly twilight oaks for the frames getting fed into the alvearies. why sickly twilight oaks? they only get you like 2-5 logs each, but they have an amazing growth rate. when i was planting the saplings, by the time i had 2 rows down, 3 had already grown...they are that fast. no need for fertilizer. just plant them and stand back. and you dont need a lot of wood when your building frames, 1 log + 1 string = 1 frame. i have no shortage of wood on this map with the growth rate of these oaks

the mob traps are a cool design i came up that handles a pretty decent quantity of mobs. there is a iron spike ring over the center of a water pit. above that is a 5x5 platform with conveyors that push the mobs out into the water pit, which will push them into the spikes. the wither trap has spikes on the sides to handle overcrowding, and uses obby pipes with redstone energy cells to suck in any loose drops when mobs land on the side spikes. in the center of the water pit is a mfr collector grabbing drops and sending them off to tesseracts tied to a sorting pipe, which sorts out the drops into DSU's

side note: cyclic assemblers have a cool ability to handle recipes with buckets of fluids, but dont actually need the buckets themselves...if you pump the fluid directly into it, it will use that instead, which made this build possible. I had a pigman spawner so i could collect gold, convert it to iron via EE3 minium stones and build buckets, use a liquid transposer, etc...but cyclic assemblers leave the empty buckets in their inventories, quickly filling up and stalling the machines with empty buckets, with no way to extract them except by hand, which sucked something fierce.

to the TE author: gotta have a way to pull those buckets man...that inventory cant be input only.

 

[Saice]

I approve of crazy power gen setups.

As a side if you have MFR the liquid crafting table can also craft with things that need buckets and can take piped in liquids directly to do so.

 

[Yusunoha]

I approve of crazy power gen setups.

As a side if you have MFR the liquid crafting table can also craft with things that need buckets and can take piped in liquids directly to do so.

the over the top builds are often the most awesome builds

 

[DrEinsteinium]

This is crazy. I really like your (discovery?) of sickly twilight oak's growth rate. I will definitely be using those for tree farms from now on!

 

[KingTriaxx]

Logistics pipes can also handle bucketed items and remove the buckets automatically. Might take a little experimenting, but I've seen it done.

 

[abculatter_2]

Why don't you use steam boilers instead of generators, to produce even MOAR POWAH?

Also, what mod are those lava crystals from?

 

[Yusunoha]

Why don't you use steam boilers instead of generators, to produce even MOAR POWAH?

Also, what mod are those lava crystals from?

because sometimes taking the more difficult route is more fun

 

[steve g]

Why don't you use steam boilers instead of generators, to produce even MOAR POWAH?

Also, what mod are those lava crystals from?

they come from Tinkers Construct, look in the materials tab. true..there are other ways to generate power...im exploring them all

also found another likely source of fast wood: sakura trees from Natura. they seem to grow almost as quickly as sickly oaks without fertilizer, with a bit more wood and a lot more saplings in return. more to come as I experiment

i did not know lava crystals would burn in a steam boiler..hmmm. HMMMMM

 

[Hoff]

they come from Tinkers Construct, look in the materials tab. true..there are other ways to generate power...im exploring them all

also found another likely source of fast wood: sakura trees from Natura. they seem to grow almost as quickly as sickly oaks without fertilizer, with a bit more wood and a lot more saplings in return. more to come as I experiment

i did not know lava crystals would burn in a steam boiler..hmmm. HMMMMM

Sakura trees grow 12 times faster than vanilla oak trees. Ghostwood trees grow 11 times faster. The downside to sakura trees is that they have a chance to transform into a natura redwood tree. I would suggest ghostwood. If you go unfertilzed go for a 9x9(tin upgrade) field. If you go fertilized 7x7 at the most and will require ~100 animals to produce enough fertilizer for constant use.

 

[steve g]

Sakura trees grow 12 times faster than vanilla oak trees.

yep. but im not using *vanilla* oaks...try sickly twilight oaks. they grow pretty damm fast too

steam boiler experiment underway. already lit up 20x 18HP boilers for 4k EU/t, and the factory is keeping up with them still heating up. i think once the first 20 are at full heat, i think i can almost double the boilers and go for 8k EU/t more once i let the map run for a few and add some iron bees to get the turbine rotor farm going

 

[Hoff]

yep. but im not using *vanilla* oaks...try sickly twilight oaks. they grow pretty damm fast too

steam boiler experiment underway. already lit up 20x 18HP boilers for 4k EU/t, and the factory is keeping up with them still heating up. i think once the first 20 are at full heat, i think i can almost double the boilers and go for 8k EU/t more once i let the map run for a few and add some iron bees to get the turbine rotor farm going

Just saying they both give quite a bit more wood and saplings

 

[abculatter_2]

Just so you know, it's more efficient to heat up fewer max-sized (3x3 wide 4 high for 36 boiler blocks) steam boilers, which will allow you to get that much more power from your fuel.

Also, if you have Gregtech installed, you can electrolyze obsidian dust for iron, allowing you only need lava to keep the system going. (Of course, you could also just use the Gregtech steam turbine. You will require far less of those, and they only require the use of tool durability to repair the rotors, but they also produce a bit less energy per steam then the railcraft option.)

 

[Yusunoha]

Just so you know, it's more efficient to heat up fewer max-sized (3x3 wide 4 high for 36 boiler blocks) steam boilers, which will allow you to get that much more power from your fuel.

Also, if you have Gregtech installed, you can electrolyze obsidian dust for iron, allowing you only need lava to keep the system going. (Of course, you could also just use the Gregtech steam turbine. You will require far less of those, and they only require the use of tool durability to repair the rotors, but they also produce a bit less energy per steam then the railcraft option.)

the most efficient route isn't always the most interesting or most fun route. some people like to take the harder route for more fun or more interesting builds

 

[steve g]

Just so you know, it's more efficient to heat up fewer max-sized (3x3 wide 4 high for 36 boiler blocks) steam boilers, which will allow you to get that much more power from your fuel.

36 LP? or 36 HP? and these lava crystals, they *start* at 280 ticks...at 800c theyre over 1000 ticks. im in no danger of running out of crystals, the current system is keeping up just fine

 

[steve g]

40 steam boilers, each running 4 liquiducts into a steam turbine, providing a total of 8k eu/t! and the lava crystals are still piling up...im thinking i can easily go 60+ before they outpace the production of crystals...amazing. they all feed one mass fabricator generating 1 uu matter every 5-6 seconds. gonna have to get some recyclers going to speed that up some

bottom of image you see 2 coke ovens generating coal coke for a blast furnace to make steel ingots, and rusty bee alvearies to the right. theres 10 of them producing iron.

stats of those crystals in the boiler at full heat:

edit: doubled number of boilers to 80. 16k eu/t. and lava crystals STILL piling up. Im just gonna keep adding more till things balance out. 1 uu matter every 3 seconds now, still no recylcing

 

[steve g]

so i let the map run a while with 80 boilers at full heat, and im looking at over 20k lava crystals in my stock. I dont know what the limit is, but im thinking i can easily run 150 boilers and still have surplus. I added 20 iron bee alvearies pumping out iron into 8 blast furnaces, with 20 coke ovens providing fuel for the furnaces. the rotors are coming out slowly (only 99 steel ingots per rotor!) but i think the durability of the turbine rotors will allow me to produce enough to replace them all without delay when they go out. I'll keep tooling with it as it goes. Had to change the tree farm over to sakura trees, the iron bee alvearies were draining my wood for building frames. with the sakuras now i have way more than enough wood, ill have to figure out something with the excess. also didnt realize i was still collecting bones, over half a million in storage. time to recycle

 

[Hoff]

so i let the map run a while with 80 boilers at full heat, and im looking at over 20k lava crystals in my stock. I dont know what the limit is, but im thinking i can easily run 150 boilers and still have surplus. I added 20 iron bee alvearies pumping out iron into 8 blast furnaces, with 20 coke ovens providing fuel for the furnaces. the rotors are coming out slowly (only 99 steel ingots per rotor!) but i think the durability of the turbine rotors will allow me to produce enough to replace them all without delay when they go out. I'll keep tooling with it as it goes. Had to change the tree farm over to sakura trees, the iron bee alvearies were draining my wood for building frames. with the sakuras now i have way more than enough wood, ill have to figure out something with the excess. also didnt realize i was still collecting bones, over half a million in storage. time to recycle

You can also use the bones to make bonemeal through either crafting or pulverizing/macerating and shove them into a BioReactor from MFR to make a ridiculous amount of biofuel that can probably run 3/6(crafting/pulverizing) 36 HP boilers.

 

[steve g]

the search for more power continues. this time, i upgraded the boilers to 36HP and strapped 2 turbines per boiler:

I could have put the turbines directly on the boilers, but I kinda like it like this.

and when you put 80 of these together:

im running water pipes *out* of the turbines. I did not know they produced water. and 80 of these produce quite a bit. thats a max size steel tank in the bottom, already at 2000 liters and climbing. at the output line of the boilers, i read just under 32k eu/t. the mass fabricator is putting out roughly 1 uu matter every second. I plan on playing with gregtech and seeing if i can get a fusion reactor going, i think i have enough power to run a 'few' gt machines off this

just off to the side theres my iron queens producing iron to convert into steel. not in the pic, theres 30 coke ovens converting coal into coke to feed a few blast furnaces. once i get those in place I'll start the steel production to keep all those turbines feed indefinitely.

that small little pink checkerboard is the sakura tree farm. cool thing about it is it requires no fertilizer. just a planter and 4 harvestors grinding up the trees as they come up. these get converted into sticks for frame production for the alvearies. the sakuras produce a lot of saplings too. i have about 8k saplings in surplus. sad thing is the plantball recipe does not support natura trees, but I have the Custom Stuff 2 mod with a script to handle all natura saplings in the plantball recipe, so I can start a biomass factory and get some crazy MJ production as well

 

[CreepaCatcha]

1 uu every 3 seconds! You've created a monster! btw dont tell soryn about this.(may have spelt soryn wrong)

 

[steve g]

1 uu every 3 seconds! You've created a monster! btw dont tell soryn about this.(may have spelt soryn wrong)

read my last post. 1 second now. not 3