RequestMake TE dynamos produce more or less rf/t depending on fuel
Thread starterCellular
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I've been disappointed with Thermal Expansion's dynamos in regards to fuel. My problem with them is that all the fuels produce the same amount of rf/t with the only difference being how long the fuels last. This irritates me because it removes incentive to explore fun fuels such as oil, coal, and biofuels. I don't have to worry about how long fuel lasts at all because all I have to do is pump lava from the bottomless supplies in the nether and augment magmatic dynamos for 640 rf/t. What's the point in searching for oil to pump if I can just have all the energy I want coming from the nether? If other fuels provided varrying levels of generation rate it would make me a lot more interested in exploring them all, but as of now there is no point.
Fuel efficiency is the name of the game. If you look carefully, you'll notice that almost all tech mods with comprehensive power gen options make fuel efficiency the game mechanic to play with.
The problem with your proposal is that it doesn't really work. If lava provides half the RF/t then you just build 2 generators, and you are back at square one. You will see this with the survivalist generator from Extra Utilities; They generate only 5 RF/t but are the most fuel efficient generator out there, and economically minded players tend to just build a whole lot of them.
The real problem is that you combine TE with other mods. In and of itself, TE provides enough incentive to go for fuel efficiency, and TE doesn't provide a way to pump lava from the world. You used a different mod for the pump. (And I'm guessing you probably used ender tanks and not TE's own tesseracts to teleport the lava as well, because they are available earlier and are cheaper)
In the same vein, if you combine a steam dynamo with a mod that provides automated tree farming, you'll have endless charcoal right there. And you don't even have to go to the nether, and you don't have to use tesseracts to teleport the fuel. You could build such a contraption in one chunk, and limit your chunk loading.
This problem is almost fundamental to modded minecraft. No matter how well thought out and balanced a mod is, when you combine it with some other mods, something cheesy becomes possible. Even if those other mods are also well thought out and balanced.
Anyway; Possible solutions include:
Disable the nether.
Disable teleporting items/fluids.
Disable pumps.
Disable pumping lava only.
In Buildcraft, there is a config that very specifically disables its pump from working in the nether.
These solutions will leave the magmatic dynamo as it is for early game, but doesn't allow endless nether lava cheese.
The most solid, lasting, and modpack indifferent solution is to just choose to not use magmatic dynamo's and build some other type of power gen for the fun of it.
Fuel efficiency is the name of the game. If you look carefully, you'll notice that almost all tech mods with comprehensive power gen options make fuel efficiency the game mechanic to play with.
The problem with your proposal is that it doesn't really work. If lava provides half the RF/t then you just build 2 generators, and you are back at square one. You will see this with the survivalist generator from Extra Utilities; They generate only 5 RF/t but are the most fuel efficient generator out there, and economically minded players tend to just build a whole lot of them.
The real problem is that you combine TE with other mods. In and of itself, TE provides enough incentive to go for fuel efficiency, and TE doesn't provide a way to pump lava from the world. You used a different mod for the pump. (And I'm guessing you probably used ender tanks and not TE's own tesseracts to teleport the lava as well, because they are available earlier and are cheaper)
In the same vein, if you combine a steam dynamo with a mod that provides automated tree farming, you'll have endless charcoal right there. And you don't even have to go to the nether, and you don't have to use tesseracts to teleport the fuel. You could build such a contraption in one chunk, and limit your chunk loading.
This problem is almost fundamental to modded minecraft. No matter how well thought out and balanced a mod is, when you combine it with some other mods, something cheesy becomes possible. Even if those other mods are also well thought out and balanced.
Anyway; Possible solutions include:
Disable the nether.
Disable teleporting items/fluids.
Disable pumps.
Disable pumping lava only.
In Buildcraft, there is a config that very specifically disables its pump from working in the nether.
These solutions will leave the magmatic dynamo as it is for early game, but doesn't allow endless nether lava cheese.
The most solid, lasting, and modpack indifferent solution is to just choose to not use magmatic dynamo's and build some other type of power gen for the fun of it.
You mention that people will simply make more dynamos, but that's not cost effective. With the limitation on lava transfer, sure the mod has itself covered, but who plays with one mod at a time? They're all made to work with each other, so we can't simply look at the mod and say "no way to get large amounts of lava here so it's balanced". As for your proposed solutions, I'm not looking to debuff myself in the nose, I simply want a reason to search for fuel.
I'm not trying to suggest you should only play with one mod at a time; Please DO combine them all you want. What I'm trying to say is that this issue of having a cheesy easy solution that keeps you from doing something more interesting is extremely difficult to solve.
And ultimately, if you want to try out something different, you probably just have to do it.
Anyway. I didn't remember there was a way to change the RF/t per fuel type. But today, I decided to check it, just to be sure; It turns out I was right, you can't!
However, it seems you can change the base RF/t per dynamo. Not exactly the same, but because the magmatic dynamo pretty much only uses lava, you can get something close to what you want, maybe.
You can find the settings in <minecraft instance folder>/config/cofh/thermalexpansion/common.cfg
By the way, here's an anecdote from the past. (in spoiler)
In the mc v1.2.5 days, when Ic2 was the main tech mod everything else was build around, and 'EU' was the standard energy unit. The early game generator in Ic2 was (and still is today) a furnace generator that makes 8 EU/t And higher tech versions are complicated set ups that can generate between 100 and 2000 EU/t.
The mod also provides mid-game tech in the form of solar panels that make 2 EU/t during the day and watermills that make 1 EU/t at all time as long as they are submerged in flowing water.
These existed so that people could power small far away outpost that don't need much power, or to keep some machines going that drained 1 EU/t all the time to remain efficient. Or so the mod authors intended...
Guess what, the main problem in this era was that people brought servers to their knees by building massive arrays of solar panels and or watermills.
So add on mods where made that allows you to combine 8 solar panels into 1 medium solar and 8 medium into 1 high power solar, etc.
When Extra Utilities came around years later, this feature was build right into ExUtil from the start.
I'm not trying to suggest you should only play with one mod at a time; Please DO combine them all you want. What I'm trying to say is that this issue of having a cheesy easy solution that keeps you from doing something more interesting is extremely difficult to solve.
And ultimately, if you want to try out something different, you probably just have to do it.
Anyway. I didn't remember there was a way to change the RF/t per fuel type. But today, I decided to check it, just to be sure; It turns out I was right, you can't!
However, it seems you can change the base RF/t per dynamo. Not exactly the same, but because the magmatic dynamo pretty much only uses lava, you can get something close to what you want, maybe.
You can find the settings in <minecraft instance folder>/config/cofh/thermalexpansion/common.cfg
By the way, here's an anecdote from the past. (in spoiler)
In the mc v1.2.5 days, when Ic2 was the main tech mod everything else was build around, and 'EU' was the standard energy unit. The early game generator in Ic2 was (and still is today) a furnace generator that makes 8 EU/t And higher tech versions are complicated set ups that can generate between 100 and 2000 EU/t.
The mod also provides mid-game tech in the form of solar panels that make 2 EU/t during the day and watermills that make 1 EU/t at all time as long as they are submerged in flowing water.
These existed so that people could power small far away outpost that don't need much power, or to keep some machines going that drained 1 EU/t all the time to remain efficient. Or so the mod authors intended...
Guess what, the main problem in this era was that people brought servers to their knees by building massive arrays of solar panels and or watermills.
So add on mods where made that allows you to combine 8 solar panels into 1 medium solar and 8 medium into 1 high power solar, etc.
When Extra Utilities came around years later, this feature was build right into ExUtil from the start.
Interesting, I see clearly now. I did however find a nice little workaround, reika has an engine powered by bc fuel that will output more power than a dynamo if it is connected to a EU electric generator or a rotational dynamo. Converting the EU to rf yields more rf though... Shhhh
