Magic Crops + Big Reactor = lots of power (pic heavy)

steve g

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
445
0
0
Been toying with magic crops and big reactors and out comes this crazy, almost rube goldberg-ish setup

2014-04-15_184109.png

the big reactor. this thing is 7x7, 25 blocks high. it has 5 fuel rods in an X configuration, with diamond blocks in between the stacks, and liquid ender on the perimeter. it needs 460 buckets (or ingots) of fuel

2014-04-15_184126.png

yep. thats it producing 60k rf per tick (using default config settings). on the bottom are 3 ender chests. one pipes in yellorium, a second pipes in blutonium (it does the blutonium first, which is really cool), and a 3rd takes the cyanite waste for recycling. theres a circuit on one side taking 2 inputs off redstone ports, one is set to emit when the power buffer drops below 20%, another set to emit when power buffer goes above 95%, and an rs latch toggling a 3rd redstone port set to turn on or off the reactor, depending on power levels. not too efficient, but it works ;)

2014-04-15_184152.png

and the reactor is powering an mfr laser drill. all ores are collected into a small ae network. (ill do something with all that ore later)

now for the fuel production:
2014-04-15_184241.png

5 magic crops are growing the various items needed to make yellorium. wait..you can grow yellorium? not really. but you CAN grow uranium..which can be converted to yellorium. theres also ferrous metal, coal, redstone and blaze essence crops.

2014-04-15_184301.png

each crop uses fertilized dirt. theres 4 rows of lilypads of fertility underneath to speed things up, plus the lamps of growth around the jackolanterns. the block floating above the jackolanterns has an essentia mirror bringing in herba to keep the lanterns going. in the back is a row of dispensers used to flood the crop when its time to harvest, and theres a row of hoppers up front to catch all the drops, sending them off to an ender chest with a filter rejecting seeds...they go off to a planter to be replanted after the water is cleared.

2014-04-15_184419.png


behind each crop is a control circuit that controls the entire harvest cycle. it takes 90 seconds for the crop to grow and get harvested, including the water flood/clearing. the wireless reciever is controlled from ae level emitters when the network detects if that item is running low. only reason i do it this way is machines dont get the extra drops, this method allows me to get the extra weak and nature essence drops.

2014-04-15_184312.png

part of the AE network, these dsu's store the fuels needed for the bio reactor and the big reactor. there are item translocators between the ender chests and dsu's.

2014-04-15_184348.png

lots of level emitters tied into wireless transmitters. the first 5 on the right control when the crops need to be harvesting or not. the rest control the production of charcoal and vines for the production of alumentum, and control when we need to produce more sulfur and yellorium. you can see rs latches being used between pairs of emitters, these activate the emitter when an item's stock is below a certain value, but stay on until the item is stocked over another value. for example, the melon seed farm is active when the seeds drop below 100, but stays active until we get 1000 in the network. the jungle tree farm gets almost the same treatment, but is activated when charcoal *or* vines drop below threshold, and turns off when they hit their stock amount

2014-04-15_184318.png

the herba farm and the crop/fuel processing equipment behind it. each essentia mirror is tied to one of the crops, 6 in all (the melon farm has lamps of growth as well). the herba generator is fed vines from the jungle tree farm and alumentum as fuel from the alumentum factory, shown a bit later

2014-04-15_184330.png

the way I produce yellorium is as follows:

1) produce pyrotheum to smelt with ferrous metal ore. this gives us a very high chance of getting rich slag. thats why theres a ferrous metal crop, just to get rich slag ;)
2) put rich slag + uranium into induction smelter, get 3 bars of yellorium
3) pyrotheum needs redstone, blaze powder, sulfur and coal dust. to get sulfur, we pulverize blaze rods and coal.

when yellorium level drops, we turn on the smelter for rich slag + uranium. if uranium level drops, we turn on the crop for uranium essence.

when rich slag level drops, we turn on the smelter for ferrous+pyrotheum to generate more rich slag. this in turn uses up redstone, blaze,coal dust and sulfur, which will cause the redstone, coal and blaze crops to kick in if levels for those items drop. and the ferrous essence crop will kick in if the ferrous metal ore level drops too low as well.

2014-04-15_184337.png


to add even more fun to this, i made a alumentum factory to generate fuel for the alchemical furnaces. this takes in charcoal and cobblestone, and makes alumentum. when the alumentum level hits a certain level, this factory gets disabled. closest machine to us is the cyanite processor, for recycling spent fuel from the big reactor. for those interested in the alumentum factory, this is almost the same exact machine direwolf20 designed in his let's play series (i think s6ep49 and 50) but instead of item ducts, im using ae buses, and an emitter to stop feeding the mystical construct coal once we have enough alumentum in the system.

2014-04-15_184401.png


powering all this equipment is the Derpy Squid reactor. its just a holding tank for 8 squid with 4 ranchers pulling ink sacs from the squid. next to that is a melon farm adding seeds into the mix for a MFR bioreactor

2014-04-15_184459.png


the bioreactor feeding fuel to 3 biogenerators, sitting on top of a redstone cell (just below the generators). since everything is so heavily automated, that cell hardly ever drops below 100%

2014-04-15_184542.png

and finally the jungle tree farm. this has vacuum hoppers to collect stray saplings because the leaf decay is riduclously fast, faster than the harvestor can keep up. so lots of saplings end up on the ground. the vacuums are there to keep that under control. the wood from this farm is converted to charcoal, and the vines are stored for the herba generator. excess saplings are also fed to the bioreactor, but most times its already stocked with ink sacs and seeds, so it just piles up in the ae system. ill have to do something with that eventually.

im sure y'all are falling asleep so I'll shut up ;)
 
Last edited:

Pyure

Not Totally Useless
Aug 14, 2013
8,334
7,191
383
Waterloo, Ontario
Super awesome steve g. Its producing a significant fraction of a small ReactorCraft fission reactor, which is actually really amazing :)

Curious, are you actually fully extracting all the power you're making? If those are 2 redstone energy conduits with 1 connection each, you're pulling out 20k rf/t are you not?
 

steve g

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
445
0
0
im not sure...actually there are 4 connections per conduit, and they both link up to a resonant energy cell at the end powering the ae network. i wasnt trying to drain the reactor super quick, just seeing if i could power the drill without it going loopy on lack of power and such. it does drain the reactors power buffer pretty quick, the reactor cycles every 20 seconds or so (only takes a few seconds to max out its power buffer)
 

Staxed

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
1,019
-2
0
I...I...I like this

though...you do know you can just stick the uranium in the reactor right? :)
 

Pyure

Not Totally Useless
Aug 14, 2013
8,334
7,191
383
Waterloo, Ontario
im not sure...actually there are 3 connections per conduit, and they both link up to a resonant energy cell at the end powering the ae network. i wasnt trying to drain the reactor super quick, just seeing if i could power the drill without it going loopy on lack of power and such. it does drain the reactors power buffer pretty quick, the reactor cycles every 20 seconds or so (only takes a few seconds to max out its power buffer)
Ah. I have no familiarity with BigReactors and didn't realize it produces in cycles.

Obviously if its draining, its a non issue :)

I must be smoking it because I can only see two connections (I think) going from your reactor into 1) a MFR drill, and 2) an energy cell.

I see three connections on one side, but those look like itemducts interacting with ender chests as far as I can tell.
 

Staxed

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
1,019
-2
0
You aren't crazy Pyure, I only see 2 connections as well. (So @steve g you are only pulling out 1/3 of the power that the reactor is producing)
 

Pyure

Not Totally Useless
Aug 14, 2013
8,334
7,191
383
Waterloo, Ontario
You aren't crazy Pyure, I only see 2 connections as well. (So @steve g you are only pulling out 1/3 of the power that the reactor is producing)
ok good, I worry about my brain sometimes.

But honestly if he says its draining, either there are connections we can't see, he's creating less than 60l rf/t somehow, or it gets created in batches (so its not 60k rf/t sustained)
 

Staxed

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
1,019
-2
0
ok good, I worry about my brain sometimes.

But honestly if he says its draining, either there are connections we can't see, he's creating less than 60l rf/t somehow, or it gets created in batches (so its not 60k rf/t sustained)

I was wondering about that as well. All of my reactors seem to be pretty stable on their rf/t...though i've never really sat their and watched it as I don't have anything that's capable of pulling ALL of the power at the moment.[DOUBLEPOST=1397677514][/DOUBLEPOST]actually, now that I think about it, he did say he has it setup to turn the reactor off when it gets to 95% buffer and turn it back on at 10%...so if it's not on until it hits 10%, it doesn't really matter that it's only pulling 20k rf/t out of the 60k total, because it's producing 0k until it hits that 10%.
 

Pyure

Not Totally Useless
Aug 14, 2013
8,334
7,191
383
Waterloo, Ontario
actually, now that I think about it, he did say he has it setup to turn the reactor off when it gets to 95% buffer and turn it back on at 10%...so if it's not on until it hits 10%, it doesn't really matter that it's only pulling 20k rf/t out of the 60k total, because it's producing 0k until it hits that 10%.

Yeah, so long as he doesn't max out the buffer, which would be wasteful, and waste makes me sad :)
 

steve g

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
445
0
0
I...I...I like this

though...you do know you can just stick the uranium in the reactor right? :)

why does no one tell me these things...man ;)

eh i figured the 3:1 return with the rich slag makes up for it,...tho i wonder, does it take uranium ore? or does it have to be run through ic2 stuff? i was kinda hoping to avoid ic2 machinery
 

steve g

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
445
0
0
when i say 3 connections, i mean there connecting to 3 different places...from what i understand, each *connection* on a redstone power conduit handles a max of 10k, not the conduit itself. so each pipe is connecting to 3 laser drill prechargers, plus the final connection to the redstone energy cell. so it could be using whatever the prechargers can handle with some power left. as usual, the math is always obscure to me since its a bit of mystery how to measure rf at a certain point along a conduit
 

Staxed

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
1,019
-2
0
when i say 3 connections, i mean there connecting to 3 different places...from what i understand, each *connection* on a redstone power conduit handles a max of 10k, not the conduit itself. so each pipe is connecting to 3 laser drill prechargers, plus the final connection to the redstone energy cell. so it could be using whatever the prechargers can handle with some power left. as usual, the math is always obscure to me since its a bit of mystery how to measure rf at a certain point along a conduit

The problem is there is only 2 connections that are pulling power out of the reactor...each connection can only pull 10Krf/t, you need at least 6 connections on the reactor to pull 60Krf/t out.
 
  • Like
Reactions: PierceSG and Pyure

steve g

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
445
0
0
ok i was kinda derping on that connections thing. so i dug around and tried the TE multimeter...and it was telling me the laser drill prechargers were only pulling 5k each...so i was all like...hmmmm.

2014-04-16_231501.png


so now im running 6 laser drills, 2 prechargers each. and now the reactor is just *barely* keeping up with the power draw, enough that it doesnt need the power cycle anymore. its hovering just a few points over 60k rf/t, which is what is being pulled right now off that setup.
 

YX33A

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
3,764
1
0
Looks pretty bloody awesome... Though Alumentium powered alchemical furnaces? You have over 60k RF a tick, surely some can be fed into a Technomancy Galvanized Bellow attached to a alchemical furnace!(it powers it without fuel but needs RF instead)
 

steve g

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
445
0
0
dont have that technomancy mod yet. been looking tho. the whole setup was designed so the reactor and the fuel farm were independent of each other in terms of power, thats what the squid/melon seed farms are doing to keep the fuel factory going. the alumentum was just to add some flair to the generation of herba ;)