Need help automating a peat farm.

[Coyote81]

I have one single issue and I'm trying to figure out a way to make it work. I'm sure there is but I can't think of it so far.

So the question is about making bog earth in an autocrafting table. You can use buckets of water to make 6 or water cells to make 8. I don't want to waste all the tin it makes to make water cells (due to the autcrafting table useing the cell up completely when making bog earth. But I can't seem to get the autocrafting table to accept buckets due to the non-stacking nature of buckets.

Can anyone tell me how to automate it using buckets? Thsi combined with a tree far would effectively allow me to setup up and infite loop of peatfarm adn tree farm and peat engines to making infinite bogearth for the peat farm and humus for the tree farm.

 

[Meldiron]

Place a chest next to the autocraft table and put the buckets there.
You could also use a moistener or squeeser to produce mulch and make the bog earth and humus in a carpenter instead.

 

[Coyote81]

I tried using a liquid transposer to fill buckets and send them to the autocrafting table, and it failed to work, if I put and chest next to the autocrafting table with buckets in it will it take them use thema nd put the empty ones back in there?

 

[DoctorOr]

You can use a crafting turtle to fill buckets and use those. There's at least one script on computercraft forum.

 

[Peppe]

I tried using a liquid transposer to fill buckets and send them to the autocrafting table, and it failed to work, if I put and chest next to the autocrafting table with buckets in it will it take them use thema nd put the empty ones back in there?

Autocrafting table will use full buckets in any adjacent chest and leave the empty bucket wherever the full one was.

If you like redpower you can use filters to pull the buckets out and a deployer to refill them and another filter to pull them out of the deployer to send back to the chest.
Put everything on a timer and it should maintain your buckets for you.

 

[Coyote81]

The server I'm playing on is using mod pack A, so not redpower sadly. I really love the handsaw and microblocks.

But if I can use a filter to put them back out that would solve all my problems, and I could just funnel them back to the transposer.

 

[Peppe]

The server I'm playing on is using mod pack A, so not redpower sadly. I really love the handsaw and microblocks.

But if I can use a filter to put them back out that would solve all my problems, and I could just funnel them back to the transposer.

I believe a vanilla dispenser + buildcraft pipe + BC gate (emit redstone on item in inventory) will refill a bucket. If you hook up a redstone engine to that it will automatically pull it out after it has been filled. Should be able to create a loop with maybe multiple buckets, or just one to be safe.

It won't be as precise as red power, but it will get the job done.

Last time i did that you had to give each dispenser a block or two space as they are very sensative to redstone signals when they are already powered.

You can also drop the redstone engine if you use an iron or better aurarchic gate (send a redstone signal to fill bucket + energize/pump item mode).

 

[netmc]

With liquid transposers from TE, you can fill the buckets and place them in the chest. You can connect a gold AND/OR gate to the chest and have it check for an empty bucket and supply a redstone signal to an engine and pump the empty bucket back into the liquid transposer to be filled. Since you normally don't need tons and tons of bog earth, the delay with only having one bucket in the system should be minimal.

Another option would be to get cranking with bees for the wax capsules and fill them with water.

 

[Vovk]

my favorite non-red power solution for this is a small railcraft loop. Item loaders can choose to only remove buckets from an inventory, load them into a chest cart and then an unloader can take from the chest cart and throw into a liquid transposer. Then you can load from the transposer back into the cart and unload into the chest near the crafting table.

 

[Coyote81]

Oh, i"ve been meaning to use some railcraft stuff for fun, and item unloader/loader sound just perfect, thanks!

 

[whythisname]

Maybe the auto crafting table can also use buckets straight from a vanilla Dispenser.

With RP2 the easiest solution would be to just have a Depolyer next to the crafting table, it will take any full buckets in the Deployer for crafting without a need for moving the buckets from 1 inventory to another. If you make the Deployer face a Half Slab (and perhaps any other transparent block) it won't empty any full buckets either (so it has an infinite spring in front and behind that half slabs to hold the water in place). The only issue is that it needs a Timer and that you need some room around your crafting table to set it up, but otherwise I think it's the most compact and reliable solution.

That's also why I think a vanilla Dispenser might work similarly. If it does the only issue I see is that the Half Slab trick won't work with Dispensers, but that shouldn't be a huge issue as Bog Earth production doesn't have to be lightning fast to keep up with a Peat farm.

Alternatively there is the GregTech Electric crafting table (is that in beta A? I think it is?), which has an inventory and thus will accept buckets without issues. You can take out the empty buckets from any side other than the input/output sides, so that's also pretty easy to automate. The main challenge with that though will be regulating the Dirt/Sand/Water bucket input, so it gets enough of each resource and doesn't end up with an inventory full of Sand for example.

 

[Wild Wail]

I did something where I used a filter setup to extract from a CHEST (not the table) the empty bucket. It then leads into a deployer whose head is facing an infinite water pool and is on the same timer as the filter. It fills it and sends it to a tube back to the chest. You will need at least two buckets.

My original setup was with liquid transposers until I decided to refrain from using solar power

 

[ThemsAllTook]

I had a lot of fun setting up something to do this in a similar manner to what previous posters have described. A crafty turtle is by far the easiest solution (assuming you're comfortable doing a bit of Lua scripting), but there are ways to get it working with autocrafting tables, pipes, and liquid transposers. The hard part with this setup is (or rather, was; more on that in a moment) getting the empty bucket out of the chest next to the autocrafting table back into the liquid transposer without pulling full buckets out. I tried a lot of different methods for this, and my current setup (actually for crafting wooden ties with creosote oil, but same principle as bog earth) uses a gate on the pipe coming off the autocrafting table to send a redstone signal when items are traversing. This redstone signal toggles an RS NOR latch, which activates an autarchic gate on the bucket chest, feeds the bucket back into the liquid transposer, and resets the latch. The purpose of this is to time the two so that the bucket gets pulled out only AFTER the autocrafting table has used its liquid up.

The newest Buildcraft (available in v8 of the Mindcrack mod pack, if that's what you're using) includes the emerald transport pipe, which makes this much easier. It works like a wooden pipe that can distinguish item types when pulling from a chest, so you could set it to only pull empty buckets from the bucket chest and just leave your autarchic gates/redstone engines on all the time without having to worry about timing.