Let's talk about RF

[ShneekeyTheLost]

A couple of notes: Shneekey is right about the Mekanism power storage being worse than other options, with one exception. Energy Cubes can drain power from items. The others all rely on generation, but if you need to provide a bit of power to kick start a set of generators, even the basic energy cube can draw it from whatever you've got with power in it, and feed it into the system. So firing up the Vats from EnderIO, or the Ethylene production setup from Mekanism, can be done just by plonking down an empty cube and draining power from your Tinker's tool, or Flux Capacitor.

EnderIO's capacitor banks can also drain power from items, believe.

Speaking of Logistic's Pipes, there was an option at one point to use Thermal Dynamics ducts in place of BC pipes, it's gotta be turned on in the configs I believe, and was still experimental, but should work.

Yea, but the only thing you can do with LP that you can't with TD is the auto-crafting, and that's what AE2 is for. After all, you have to actually install BC to run LP, because it's a hardcoded dependency even if you use TD with it.

If your pack has Immersive Engineering, another storage option is Zetta Industries, which adds a huge fluid based battery.

Speaking of, Immersive Engineering is another excellent option for power generation. It's got Watermills early on that generate a small, but continuous stream of power. Windmills are basically the same as those from Mekanism, though they don't produce quite as much power, and have to be spread out a bit or they stop working entirely. Then you get to move up to the Diesel Generator, which runs on biodiesel, produced from growables, meaning it's totally renewable.

The Diesel Generator runs around 4k RF/t, and runs on consumables. You'd have to go a very long way to find a better generator than that. And water mills can be ganged up three to a dynamo, so it can produce roughly 70RF/t per three water mills. Which is pretty solid for passive RF generation.

Blowing them all out of the water though, is Advanced Generators. It runs on either steam produced from other mods or itself, or basically any fuel you've generated through other mods. BC Oil, BC Fuel, IE Biodiesel, even EnderIO rocket fuel I believe. But it's also customizable. You can build iron or bronze turbines early, produce just a couple hundred RF/t, or later on move to Enderium Turbines producing 500RF/t, for every block, and it can have up to 50 of them per generator multi-block structure. There's also no fixed shape for it. As long as they share a face, it'll count as part of the structure.

Never played with AG before. May have to check that out.

Buildcraft isn't completely obsolete. It does have some cool features that other mods struggle to duplicate. The floodgate for filling areas with fluids, which has been done a couple times, but I can't name any that are current. The auto-workbench is slow yes, but it also doesn't require power to run, which most of the other auto crafting options do. And the BC chute is extremely fast at dumping items into inventories, which makes for a good buffer no matter what system you're using to dump the items into it.

I also prefer the slow and steady look of the BC quarry to the crazy fast, but visually less interesting EnderQuarry, but that's personal preference.

Refined Storage now does the floodgate thing.

Also, running a BR Turbine off of 5x MFR Boilers which themselves are powered by five Lava Crystals from Blood Magic... running an entire base on a Well of Suffering. Now that's fun.

 

[KingTriaxx]

I've never seen EIO able to do that, but if it can, that'd be very useful.

You could do auto-crafting with TD, but you'd have to have redstone, and levers, and retrievers, and it'd be probably more hassle to set it up than to just craft it yourself.

Right I forgot about RS being able to do that.

Yeah, Advanced Generators is definitely an interesting mod. It can even, if you're playing with IC2, natively produce EU, which is a nice feature.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Yeah, Advanced Generators is definitely an interesting mod. It can even, if you're playing with IC2, natively produce EU, which is a nice feature.

Still salty about the changes the IC2-ex branch did to the EU system. First they redesigned the nuclear system so my Decentralized Distribution of Steam technique no longer worked (coolant cells have to cool in the towers that heated them up, which is convoluted and silly), then they take a swing at my Tower of Power by changing how power works through conduits. I just got tired of coming up with something only to have them swing a nerf bat at what I make immediately thereafter, and walked away from it. But hey, at least you couldn't accuse them of not paying attention to what people were doing.

 

[KingTriaxx]

True, I'd already abandoned it long before they started that nonsense though.

Another option for RF generation, is Magneticraft. It technically runs on it's own power system, but includes a block that can be used to transform it's power to RF and vice versa. It's got the basic, inefficient one block heat generator that needs steam generators to make power, or a big 3x5x4 Coal Generator that produces power directly, as well as waste heat that can make more steam power. Or a cool looking solar tower option that uses mirrors to generate heat. It also has Tesla Coils that can charge it's battery which will in turn charge RF using items.

 

[malicious_bloke]

Big Reactors is great for generating power, but I don't know offhand that it has anything for storing it.

Nothing beyond the small internal buffer the reactor has. It would actually be quite a nice engineering project to use no energy storage system whatsoever and just toggle the reactor on/off, balancing it solely on the reactor's internal storage

 

[Pyure]

Nothing beyond the small internal buffer the reactor has. It would actually be quite a nice engineering project to use no energy storage system whatsoever and just toggle the reactor on/off, balancing it solely on the reactor's internal storage

Not too hard to do in passive mode, but in turbine mode its essentially impossible to do efficiently given the spin-up time of the turbine (unless your base's power draw is very constant and closely approximates the output of your turbine)

 

[KingTriaxx]

Only with Big Reactors would the 10million energy buffer be 'small'.

 

[malicious_bloke]

Only with Big Reactors would the 10million energy buffer be 'small'.

My medium sized passive reactor outputs 25k RF/t. That 10 million RF buffer fills up in around 20s

 

[KingTriaxx]

Exactly. Even small reactors fill pretty fast.