Methane from Charcoal?

[Daemonblue]

Well, I'm not very experienced with the soul shards mod, so I wouldn't know about that. that said, how do you get started on it cause I did know about the spawners part, just not that they were controllable to that extent.

As for the energy cost, sure, if you're using the ultimate hybrid solar panels then your method would be pretty darn strong considering you probably wouldn't be converting MJ back into EU, so you could go up, up, and away with the conversions. Sadly, for me this won't be much of an option due to my sense of aesthetics, so I'm going for the smallest possible build that will still be highly energy efficient.

Basically, for my base I plan on my roof being a garden area, where I'll have my aura nodes and silverwood trees. However, due to the fact my house will be a massive floating fortress it won't give me much room for solar panels. I still haven't gotten the concept for how I'll get blutricity down yet, as I don't think the windmills will look that great on my flying castle, and might be a tad difficult to automate. I'm currently thinking of massive thermalpiles reaching from level 8 to 64, in a group a 4 thermopiles with lava in the center and water on the outsides.

 

[Peppe]

I have some 36 HP boilers running in creative now. Can confirm methane is right around 18000 using a stop watch it burns for about 56 seconds at 1000C.

I don't know if it is documented anywhere, but I am seeing what the startup heat required is for the 36 HP boiler. In a trial run about 4 stacks of methane is a good startup buffer with a rubber tree farm and 3 industrial centrifuge running. With no input it is look like 16-20 stacks to get to 1000 C.

So far any setup i have tried with industrial electrolyzer is a great for lots of methane output, but any infrastructure to run the electorlyzer ends up very expensive and kills the efficiency of the system compared to just running more industrial centrifuges and making more rubberwood to supply them.

I think the final setup i will take to my SSP world is a forestry wheat farm making some compost in an autocrafting table -> feeding a second auto crafting table that makes humus. Humus goes to the forestry rubber tree farm. The rubber tree farm with almost all the logs being process by 3 industrial centrifuges. From the centrifuge output, one macerator chewing up plant balls sending some dirt back to the compost. Carbon cells going to electric crafting cable to store as carbon fiber, but mainly to reclaim the cells. Sticky Resin chest/barrel. Methane cells to a liquid transposer that outputs to either a railcraft storage tank or if short on iron a few BC storage tanks would do.

In my test world i used a few buildcraft gates to limit the humus production to when the arboratum was at 25% soil. Another gate to limit the compost production to when a chest next to the humus crafting table is empty. And a final gate to limit the macerator when the dirt chest for the hummus and compost crafting tables is full. These are just the most basic gate outputing a redstone signal control redstone engines that are pumping the items around.

All in all a super cheap system to run the largest boiler you would likely need.

1 wheat farm can make a lot compost and hummus, so you could run more forestry rubber tree farms or use another mods automated tree farm and remove the whole hummus wheat farm requirement.

 

[TruculentMC]

Peppe, do you think it would be better to make Humus from Saltpeter fertilizer which you can get by Pulverizing Sandstone -> Niter? I guess it will take more energy that way, but it's a much smaller and more compact setup than a wheat farm.

Speaking of compact setups!

I'm currently thinking of massive thermalpiles reaching from level 8 to 64, in a group a 4 thermopiles with lava in the center and water on the outsides.

20 Recyclers is an unworkably massive amount of machines, but a quad stack of thermopiles running from bedrock to sealevel is okay?

 

[Peppe]

Peppe, do you think it would be better to make Humus from Saltpeter fertilizer which you can get by Pulverizing Sandstone -> Niter? I guess it will take more energy that way, but it's a much smaller and more compact setup than a wheat farm.

Speaking of compact setups!


20 Recyclers is an unworkably massive amount of machines, but a quad stack of thermopiles running from bedrock to sealevel is okay?

In my survival world I need some food, so wheat was a natural choice.

Looking at the sandstone path it doesn't look too efficient. You need to make sand in bulk.

If you want to get farm sizes down you can replace the forestry farms with the other automation methods. You don't need much wheat to make a lot of hummus. Maybe the greg tech crop harvester with a small patch of wheat would do the job in a compact way. Steve's carts can do the tree farm in a smaller space and eliminate the hummus branch completely.

 

[TruculentMC]

Yes, but the Forester produces Sand naturally. I think it is self-sufficient without any external Sand input but I didn't test that yet.

Also, I don't believe that Steve's Carts will farm Rubber Trees, though I could be wrong? I wasn't able to get it working but I haven't done much tests with that that mod yet.

 

[Daemonblue]

The thermopiles don't need to be wired to anything though, they send the energy through each other. Also, they could be placed in areas far from your main production line due to this feature. With the recyclers you have to have them relatively close to the boilers unless you want to see pipes with a lot of traffic. Another thing with how the piles work, you can effectily make them look like large stone pillars, so it can fit into some people's themes, such as towers on castles. That said, I'm still unsure about the blutricity side of things, as I keep having to remake new worlds due to various circumstances. Hopefully, seeing as the one I just started put me new a town with 10 farms, lots of villagers, multiple silverwood trees, and 8 greatwood trees with one of them have mobs spawners should help a lot. Also, I have chicken, pigs, sheep, and cows nearby - my other world had no cows for kilometers. The only problems is there are no cacti nearby and on the x=0 coordinate wherever there isn't land there's just a massive strip of marshland 5 chunks wide. That part extends even through biomes, in that if it gets interrupted by, say, an autumn biome, once it gets back to water it becomes marsh again.

But yea, other than having to cheat in a cacti to make some dye so I can make an omniwrench (those first two diamonds are def goin toward it) it should be fine, as long as I don't keep having aura node generation problems ><

There was another map that was also fairly good, but there was a massive 1390 pure node very close to a 690 dark node that was spewing out angry wisps, both in open air so I wouldn't have been able to close them off reliably before being zapped to death due to the dangerous levels of flux : /

 

[Peppe]

I would not have thought it would work, but I think mathematically the sand from the tree farm can self sustain itself.

So 1 niter is worth 2 saltpeter, with 2 sand = 4 fertilizer. makes 32 humus that is returned as 32 sand. That is 8 sandstone pulverized, then 4, then 2, then 1 and 2 sand leftover. So 15 chances in the pulverizer at each 10% to renew the cycle. The odds of the cycle not renewing is i believe (9/10)^15 or ~ 20.5%, so ~80% chance to renew.

With a buffer of hummus you would need many failures in a row to drain completely of sand.

 

[Daemonblue]

Aiya, anyone have a good method of keeping villagers from crowding in a large building at night? I made a fairly massive apartment for them, but whenever night comes around they all clump into one corner to the point of glitching through the walls -_- I know you could probably use the portal gun and lock them into doorless cells, but since I don't have one yet...

As for the tree farm, I'm going to try out steve's carts. Apparently it costs less diamonds to set up, though it takes rails. If I could get one of those running an turning out more wood than a forestry farm though that would be pretty nice. The added bonus is since the arboretum and logger is on a track you can expand the setup without dropping more diamonds into the build.

Now hopefully I can get these villagers to breed me a blacksmith that will trade me some diamond stuff ><

 

[TruculentMC]

You can load Villagers into Minecarts

 

[Daemonblue]

Understandable, but if I'm gonna do it like that I want them locked in place real well. With minecarts it would be kinda difficult cause we're easily talking about 15 villagers in a 10 square space.

Also, sadly Steve's carts won't work with any non-vanilla sapling - they won't even cut the rubber trees down, so you can't even use it in place of a logger : /

Edit: Also, regarding the sand thing above, don't forget that you can also - on top of pulverizing the extra plant balls for the dirt - pulverize cobblestone from an igneous extruder to make more sand that you can add into the system in case you have a run of bad luck getting niter.

Edit: And something else I didn't know, you can industrial centrifuge 8 sticky resin to get 28 rubber - 4 more than an extractor - as well as 2 plant balls and 2 compressed plants.

 

[Peppe]

Yes the centrifuge is very crazy useful.

Tested out the sand thing above and so far it is holding its own without any outside help. Just one pulverizer and 3 auto crafting tables will do. One chest for sand + saltpeter and one chest for dirt.

Unfortunately the pulverizer cannot make dirt from the plant balls, but you will be centrifuging most of the rubber tree products, so getting EU for a macerator is no problem.

Here is a my first stab at the setup:

Fully automated tree farm within its own boundaries:

Spoiler

Sand inputs from the tree farm and the pulverizer.
Iron chest = dirt, regular chest is sand+salt peter

Fertilizer goes right into the bottom of the final crafting table, but it could go into a chest on any side of the final crafting table.

Sand stone crafting table inputs into the pulverizer:

Pulverizer outputs niter to the side and back to its input (iron pipe up here to hold it in the pipe until any sand is clear). Pulverizer is almost always empty though as the sand comes in slowly even with a forester on the farm.

 

[Daemonblue]

Well that's odd, coulda swore it showed you could pulverize it in NEI when I checked earlier.

Well, with the macerator costing 3 diamonds with how I'm playing it it might take me a while to get one unless I can get a good blacksmith to spawn in my village, since you can macerate diamond tools to get diamond dust which can be used in some recipes in place of diamonds. If you have enough gunpowder, which should be easy using thaumcraft, you could then make industrial tnt to turn 4 diamond dusts into 3 diamonds in the implosion compressor, centrifuge the extra dark ash, and then turn the ash from that into fertilizer. At least until you can get then uncrafting table.

 

[CrafterOfMines57]

Well, with the macerator costing 3 diamonds with how I'm playing it it might take me a while to get one unless I can get a good blacksmith to spawn in my village.

If you're short on diamonds, you could always macerate 64 coal, use 8 flint and a brick or obsidian, and make an industrial diamond (replaced by normal diamonds a while back, but I call it that)

 

[SilvasRuin]

...did you even read the statement you quoted? How can he Macerate 192 Coal to make the Macerator he can't make yet due to needing Diamonds?

 

[CrafterOfMines57]

...did you even read the statement you quoted? How can he Macerate 192 Coal to make the Macerator he can't make yet due to needing Diamonds?

GregTech Iron Mortars, I just did exactly that yesterday.

EDIT: Right, my statement did in fact use the word "macerate" I guess I forgot the purpose of the diamonds, because that is how I normally go about obtaining my diamonds.

 

[SilvasRuin]

Ah, okay. That makes sense now.

 

[TruculentMC]

Peppe, nice setup! I thought of some possible tweaks for you:
You can use a Packager + Transposer to create Sandstone, saving a block over autocraft table+woodenpipe+redstoneengine.
Perhaps feed the Sandstone and Niter into a Hopper on top of the Pulverizer, I guess the Iron Pipe trick works okay though, but a Hopper just seems to be a better choice.
Possibly, use a separate Redstone Energy Cell to power the Forestry machines, as they need less MJ/t than the Pulverizer. Though I suspect you can just set the existing one to maybe 3 MJ/t and have sufficient power, as your Pulverizer runs very infrequently.

 

[Peppe]

Yeah i had a hopper before the screenshot. I thought it was cheaper to just use pipes.

That is just a test world i just slap down energy cells to test MJ machines. In real setup you probably need very little MJ input as once the sand is gone the pulverizer is mostly idle.

I'll test out some of the other mods machines... i have the most time with BC pipes, so i trust them to do thier job. Did find the humus could overflow and spit out of the arboretum. Probably should be buffered or use RP tubes.

 

[Daemonblue]

Rp tubes are pretty damn useful if you know how to work with em. What you do for tree farms or anything else that puts items into a nearby chest is set a relay next to them. The items will treat the relays as if they were a chest, adding the items into the tube network. Also, you won't get any items spitting out of an rp system since it will clog up the system if the item has nowhere to go. What you can do, until you can get a massive system consisting of stuff like managers, is set up another relay pumping into the target system - this way any overflow will get stored in its internal buffer.

There are other rp2 machines that should be able to act as a buffer, I just can't get them to work reliably.

 

[Peppe]

Yeah i tried to rebuild the automated tree farm with redpower and its got more stuff, but runs damn smooth:

Even stacked a second farm on top and it runs fine.

Spoiler

Each arboretum is wrapped in filter / relay / filter (from top to bottom: sapling in, sand out, humus in)

An auto crafting table makes sandstone out of the sand and inputs to a pulverizer, which crushes the sand for a chance of niter. Niter is looped back to a pulverizer input to be crushed into saltpeter. Saltpeter is made into fertlizer in a auto crafting table. The pulverizer outputs to a chest below it, which the sandstone and saltpeter crafting tables are touching as well, so they have access to the sand.

Finally in the third crafting table humus is made out of the fertilizer using external source of dirt. The hummus goes to the relay used by the logger and gets routed to the two tree farms. The lower farm gets priority, but runs both stable.

I've tried to use the packager from factorization, but I don't seem to be saving anything with it. Anyone think of way to do the autocrafting without buildcraft?