I prefer a much more automated method manner that I don't have to resort to pumping lava, and it involves wood.
These are my prioritized steps to getting all the power I want that's renewable and so far as I know ... not a cheat.
I generally use this as my starting strategy for getting a renewable supply of energy/fuel. All I generally need to do is dig down, find three diamonds, and come back up. The red stone to make a turtle is found usually when I try to find the three diamonds. Come back up and craft a turtle, give it a diamond pickaxe and it's about on. Sometimes I find me some lava, turn it to obsidian, and tell the darn turtle to use my pickaxe to get me two pieces of obsidian (or more) so I can craft obsidian pipe (the only other item that's hard to get early on in a world for me). If you don't know turtle speak...
Give the turtle a piece of wood or coal or some fuel. Type refuel() and it will eat the fuel. Just needs a little to get some obsidian.
Type lua first, then these commands will work. The interface for working with turtles says how to get out of lua mode at the bottom of the little control screen. turtle.dig() (will make your turtle dig what it's facing. The item is stored in the turtles inventory. turtle.forward() and dig again assuming he needs to get another piece. When your done and got your obsidian, turtle.up() and put a cobble or two under him so when you pick him up he doesn't take a visit in lava and die. Depending on your situation, if he is on top of obsidian, type turtle.digdown() and he'll take out that piece of obsidian below him. Anyhow, that's how to get the resources to get to this point...
1. Make a mining turtle.
2. I right click the turtle and type "label set UWC" This is done so that your turtle will save the program you download and not be deleted each time you pick up your turtle. Also preserves it's fuel, so when you pick up a turtle and put it back down ... it's ready to go with it's memory intact and fuel as well.
3. I then type "pastebin get iVKtHaWk UWC" To run the program just type UWC and the program has a menu of items to choose from
I recommend visiting
http://www.computercraft.info/forum...ltimate-wood-chopper-selfbuildingmenueasy086/
and that's where you learn how to use this toy.
4. Okay, assuming you've got your automated tree farm ready to go after following his tutorial, you need to provide an infinite source of bone meal.
Oh, wait, that involves using a skeleton spawner and an automated process of converting to bonemeal and putting that in the chest ...
Well, I prefer making a 5x5x10 tall enclosed room above the bonemeal chest and off to the side. I put an obsidian pipe in the bottom, and cobble pipe running to the top of the bonemeal chest. Then I put water in the four corners of my 5x5 and place sulfur torches on every wall face I can, I also put a center column and put torches there too. Whammo, you now have an infinite supply of 'bonemeal' Well, it's some red goo stuff but hey, it works just like bonemeal and it is infinite.
5. Look at the design of his furnace with the red stone engine, iron pipe and chest setup. He puts wood in the furnace, it turns to charcoal, and then it gets routed through the pipes into the furnace for fuel or into a storage chest 50/50 chance. Fortunately it produces so much in the way of charcoal, that it's never ever run out for me.
6. Here's where you can build what you want and make an infinite supply of charcoal. Pipe out the collected wood from the wood chest into your system of hoppers and furnaces and pipes and storage boxes (or overflow box). I threw something together but you could get all fancy and make routers, sorters, and so on to handle this part more efficiently if ya want. But the charcoal you make in your furnaces is the infinite source of energy at this point.
If ya need more, make another farm or two or three. Heck, if you don't want to use charcoal, you could just harvest the wood, auto craft it into planks and burn that instead for 3k fuel instead of 4k fuel.
Once I did a small one of these, I just chuckle every time I see people pump lava and think, "I'll never run out." And to top that off ... I have a steady stream of wood and coal whenever I need it. Oh, and if you wanna get extra fancy, the saplings produced by this could be harvested for bio fuel I suppose. Just gotta make sure to leave at least one or two stacks in the chest for your turtle to use to make more trees.
As the author of this turtle program states, fir trees make for the best source of wood for this since they grow flawlessly even with leaves in the way.
Note: The wood chest sometimes gets a fir tree sapling in it, when pulling from the wood chest with a dumb pipe, put a diamond pipe in there to dump the sapling out before it heads to your furnace and gets clogged.
Admittedly, lava is more cool (so to speak).
Secondary note: Turtles when the chunk is unloaded, cease operation and stop running their program. If that happens, you'll need to go track down where your turtle left off, finish cutting down the tree yourself, put the turtle back onto his 'base' spot pointing the direction the author states to face, and then you're ready to go again. Chunk loaders prevent this problem for the most part unless the server comes down for some reason and then you're back to maintaining.
So that's it downside, turtles cease to work outside of loaded chunks or server resets. Lava pumps don't need that kind of maintenance though.
