Question: Efficiency and what to do next, Fusion race!

[Wonton_Freak]

Good evening fellow beast feeders and minecrafters, I'm Wonton Freak, turning to the community with a little "problem" I'm stuck with.

Okay, so I'm playing on this server that I'm hosting via Fragnet with my friends (Running FTB Ultimate 1.1.2), and we've been playing together in a huge cavern we found a few hours after we started the server. But after a couple of weeks I got tired of living in the dark all the time, and moved to the surface and built myself a medieval styled home with a basic underground complex of industrial tech.

After a while my friends got tired for the same reasons and move out to different places, one made some huge nuclear cooling towers in a desert very close by and another made house in a volcano in the sea..

After that, we decided to have a technological race for high end stuff in a few mods like gregtech and other things, and I decided to move again. 4k blocks away i found a remote island in a ocean biome, built myself a base. To give you an overview of where my standpoint is, I'm going to post some pictures and describe a little what I have built so far, then I'll follow up with questions

Map of the Island

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Warehouse with Automatic sorting system

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Competition needs resources, resources need space

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Warehouse built with warded stone and covered to look medieval/nordic

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The inside storage, and the sorting system

Automatic farmland

I know this isn't optimal as I have to supply it with the resources like peat, bog earth and seeds manually, but I haven't really bothered yet as getting my Industrial compound running is first priority. I don't really need the food/wood at the moment so automatic harvesting is good enough for now.

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Bee Farm and a Brewery

This is something I don't work with, the houses are made for my friend and it's the only thing he does when he's online, as he's trying out the forestry mods and want to focus into that branch of the Ultimate pack.

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Brewery

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Bee Farm

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Energy Production/Coal Processing

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Coal Processing and liquid storage

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Coal Coke room

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Liquid Storage

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Geothermal Power Plant

The geothermal power plant runs a setup of 15 generators which are fueled by a set of 1 pipe run by 3 redstone engines for each 5 generators. The generators are then connected to a MFSU as a buffer and High voltage transformation for "less" loss when it sends it to the Energy Storage House.

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Energy Storage House

This setup takes in the power from the geothermals, into a parallel coupled MFSU cluster for equal storage, it then takes the power from the MFSUs into a central line that is hooked up to a single MFSU that distributes high voltage to the whole island beneath the roads.

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Storage House to the left, Basic machines to the right

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Paralell Coupled MFSUs

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Main Output MFSU

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Basic Machines

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two electric furnaces, two macerators, extractor, compressor and a plate bending machine

That's my current progress, and this is where I'm stuck. For this race to be won, I need the communitys help to distribute my resources correctly and win the race to have a matter fabricator, and a fusion generator.

As it is now, I've had 6 turtles running to get my resources, and just with that, I've had problems pumping out all my cobble into lava. When the race started, I used a portion of my resources to expand my turtle army, and 18 more to a total of 24 turtles. I then went down to the mine and placed 12 at bedrock, 20 blocks apart from eachother, then 12 more at layer 35 to get some copper too.. At the time my warehouse had 1 ender chest, and 1 router, with 5 barrels designated for cobblestone.

I fired up all the turtles, to dig a 20x20x50 deep hole each and this made my whole warehouse overflow, and so did the mine.. after just 10 minutes my cobble barrels, AND my overflow chests where full, and resources where dropping from the turtles. I ran around and stopped all of them, upgraded the warehouse with 2 more routers and 4 Extradimensional barrels for cobble, and still.. after just a little while, cobble was going into overflow, turtles had to be stopped and I haven't been running them since.

As for resources, the turtles are stand by and only needs the code to start, when I have a proper system to take all the stuff in.

What I want do do now, is to create a self sustained, high efficient industrial compound which will contain all the industrial machines and things that I will need.

Here's where I plan to put it:

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The yellow square is the power storage, and the red is the area for the compound to be built, It's not very big, but I can build in the height and below the ground so it's not really an issue.

Now for the Questions:
- What should I aim for to get a matter fabricator up and running?
- What are the best tools to take in and sort all the resources from 24 turtles?
- What kind of power source and power storage should I use?

Sorry for long post, but I'm actually quite clueless about what to do next, so I hope people would like to help me win this

Kind Regards
¨~ Chris

 

[Wonton_Freak]

For the informational purposes, I'm posting what I know about my friends bases too

First friends base:

This guy has alread built the first gregtech machines, he's built a nuclear reactor, but he doesn't dare take it higher than mark 1 because he doesn't want it to explode, he also exhausted all of his resources on creating quantum legs and boots. He also doesn't use turtles or quarries to mine, he likes to do it manually by caving.

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Overall view of base

Inside coolant tower nr1 he has 1 nuclear reactor running

Pre built MFSU cluster

Machine room

Second friends base:

This guy knows much about FTB, but hasn't started with any IC2/GT items yet (moved to new location 2 days ago). He's made himself the biggest steamboiler inside his so called fortress. This guy likes to use turtles, but hasn't built any yet as he doesn't have a nether portal but he's very quick to set up as soon as he begins.

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Volcano Island

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Multitanks in the wall, he's producing fuel

Steam boiler, furnace and coke ovens

 

[Wekmor]

You took alot of screenshots!

But to your question:

- What should I aim for to get a matter fabricator up and running?
Some massive power generation. I would start by building some Steam boilers to create steam for eu production. To power the steam boilers I think a MFR tree farm is the best.

- What are the best tools to take in and sort all the resources from 24 turtles?
The best would be AE, I just recently started using it and it's fantastic! You can also set it to export excess cobble stone into DSU/upgraded barrels so it doesn't take too much storage away.

- What kind of power source and power storage should I use?
As said steam boilers. The produce a good amount of steam that can be used to generate MJ or EU


Of course, you can use Ligtning rods or other GT machines, but I don't know if you can afford such stuff yet

(I'm away for a couple of hours now, so I can't answer any further question you now have xD)

 

[Runo]

there quite a few ways to get massive power generation quickly:

like the above guy said, steam boilers. each full sized boiler produces 320eu/t constantly if fueled properly. you can do this via biofuel/plank automation, or if you have nearby oil fields, you can use those with pumps and tesseracts/ender tanks. it only takes 2000 oil to fuel a day to provide for 8-9 boilers. when rushing uum, ive used boiler arrays while flying around oil prospecting with an advanced jetpack and a few pump sets for 1-2 hours a day.

nuclear is powerful for this purpose as well, but if you arent experienced with it, it will be more trouble than its worth in a race especially considering you arent running a full sized quarry-equivalent twice a day yet. thats the ore requirements to maintain 3000eu/t, and it costs even more to set up.

id use boilers and expanded lava production to launch uu production, then supplement with solars. fusion is end-game of the process but you wont make it there before someone beats you.

AE is an absolute must for storage, start switching to it. you can start with 4-5 4k drives and 4 DSUs set for dirt, cobble, sand, and marble (your choise on last two). then focus on getting the gregtech machines in place, such as the industrial blast furnace and industrial grinder.

i also suggest adding rubber to your multifarms (i think thats what those are?) and setting up a dedicated centrifuge for it for ic2 progression as well. it becomes annoying if you dont have a good supply of it.

 

[Wekmor]

For AE: Start to set up some auto crafting as soon as possible. It saves you so much trouble with making all these storage disks all the time

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i also suggest adding rubber to your multifarms (i think thats what those are?) and setting up a dedicated centrifuge for it for ic2 progression as well. it becomes annoying if you dont have a good supply of it.

As far as I can tell these are the old forestry farms. They use way too much MJ tho. I would suggest you to switch over to MFR

 

[Wonton_Freak]

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there quite a few ways to get massive power generation quickly:

like the above guy said, steam boilers. each full sized boiler produces 320eu/t constantly if fueled properly. you can do this via biofuel/plank automation, or if you have nearby oil fields, you can use those with pumps and tesseracts/ender tanks. it only takes 2000 oil to fuel a day to provide for 8-9 boilers. when rushing uum, ive used boiler arrays while flying around oil prospecting with an advanced jetpack and a few pump sets for 1-2 hours a day.

nuclear is powerful for this purpose as well, but if you arent experienced with it, it will be more trouble than its worth in a race especially considering you arent running a full sized quarry-equivalent twice a day yet. thats the ore requirements to maintain 3000eu/t, and it costs even more to set up.

id use boilers and expanded lava production to launch uu production, then supplement with solars. fusion is end-game of the process but you wont make it there before someone beats you.

AE is an absolute must for storage, start switching to it. you can start with 4-5 4k drives and 4 DSUs set for dirt, cobble, sand, and marble (your choise on last two). then focus on getting the gregtech machines in place, such as the industrial blast furnace and industrial grinder.

i also suggest adding rubber to your multifarms (i think thats what those are?) and setting up a dedicated centrifuge for it for ic2 progression as well. it becomes annoying if you dont have a good supply of it.

Thanks to all of you for some great answers, I really appreciate it, and I hope it's ok with some follow up questions for you

I Know it's expensive with nuclear reactors, and you say that I will need quarrys to maintain the costs of running one. Currently I have over 2000+ UNREFINED of all the basic minerals like tin and copper. I also had to expand with an EDU for my barrel with iron, and with Uranium, I have about 500-600 of it already.

most of these resources is just from running my 6 turtle setup constantly before I moved to the island, now I have 24 of them stand by until I can make a proper system which can handle 4-5 EDU barrels of cobble per run.

AE storage seems to be the way to go for me then, so I'll start preparing an AE Storage system and upgrade the barrel room ASAP.

Then to the boilers, If they're capable of producing about 320 eu/t each, I'm gonna have a problem spending it all, as my eu/t geofarm already fills up more than I can use (not that I'm using anything though..)
If I'm correct, I overheard my friend talking about fueling the boilers with the excess creosote from all the coke ovens, is this possible?

so here's my priority list:

1: Get automatic rubber farm going (Takes 20 minutes top, so I can do this first) <-- Done!

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2: Get a couple of refineries going from the nearby oil sources. <--- DONE!

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3: Upgrade the Warehouse into an automatic AE Storage system

4: Get up a proper power supply 5-10 boilers or/and 4 Nuclear Reactors

5: Rush Matter Fabricator

oh, and by the way, I've been to the end and gathered 3 stacks of sheldonite ore, AND I've already got 8 iridium ore from the turtles. so I guess that's a good start..

Regards

¨~ Chris

 

[Runo]

thats not nearly enough to start a proper reactor, even though it seems like a lot. for low maintenance low running cost reactors, a 2500eu/t stack is going to burn about 6000 copper and several thousand tin and iron. then to maximize the uranium its going to cost about 2,000 copper for the breeder with a few more of the materials previously mentioned.

Then comes the running cost. Since your bud appears to be a long ways off from uranium bees and/or you might not be allowed to cooperate in a race, you'll have to breed uranium to make it reasonably efficient from the amount you dig up. At 2500 EU/t with 3.8 efficiency, my reactor stack used 1000 uranium cells a day. So you take that number and divide by 8 for uranium ore (125), match with tin (1000) and multiply by 2 with coal (2000). That is the per-day cost. You can reduce the uranium and tin cost with more efficient designs, but it rapidly increases the copper cost. With bees, you don't need the coal or the breeder since its cheaper to use straight unrefined uranium so uranium becomes trivial and you only need 1000 tin/day. Copper and tin arent that bad with lava centrifuging, its the coal that gets you which is unavoidable without bees and the high resource startup costs.

Not only that, you burn up the uranium you need for Solaris if you go that route. Its a labor of love/complexity/masochists.

Another option you could use is lightning rods but I don't like their lack of dependability. They will produce around 10-20uu/ real world chunkloaded day on a matter fab in the over world.

If you want to tech fusion, the limiter will be chrome, which will take insane amounts of quarrying to create or some kind of redstone farm via witch/plants, 90 redstone per one chrome and you need like 750 of it.

 

[Wonton_Freak]

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thats not nearly enough to start a proper reactor, even though it seems like a lot. for low maintenance low running cost reactors, a 2500eu/t stack is going to burn about 6000 copper and several thousand tin and iron. then to maximize the uranium its going to cost about 2,000 copper for the breeder with a few more of the materials previously mentioned.

Then comes the running cost. Since your bud appears to be a long ways off from uranium bees and/or you might not be allowed to cooperate in a race, you'll have to breed uranium to make it reasonably efficient from the amount you dig up. At 2500 EU/t with 3.8 efficiency, my reactor stack used 1000 uranium cells a day. So you take that number and divide by 8 for uranium ore (125), match with tin (1000) and multiply by 2 with coal (2000). That is the per-day cost. You can reduce the uranium and tin cost with more efficient designs, but it rapidly increases the copper cost. With bees, you don't need the coal or the breeder since its cheaper to use straight unrefined uranium so uranium becomes trivial and you only need 1000 tin/day. Copper and tin arent that bad with lava centrifuging, its the coal that gets you which is unavoidable without bees and the high resource startup costs.

Not only that, you burn up the uranium you need for Solaris if you go that route. Its a labor of love/complexity/masochists.

Another option you could use is lightning rods but I don't like their lack of dependability. They will produce around 10-20uu/ real world chunkloaded day on a matter fab in the over world.

If you want to tech fusion, the limiter will be chrome, which will take insane amounts of quarrying to create or some kind of redstone farm via witch/plants, 90 redstone per one chrome and you need like 750 of it.

Okay, that seems like an insane ammount of resources, so I'll just ask a "simple" question. I have the pages needed to make a relatively "stable" dense ores world with mystcraft.

Would you recommend quarrying there instead?

 

[eric167]

Okay, that seems like an insane ammount of resources, so I'll just ask a "simple" question. I have the pages needed to make a relatively "stable" dense ores world with mystcraft.

Would you recommend quarrying there instead?

yes.

 

[Runo]

BTW, I should mention, very nice building style and town layout. Impressive looking setup.

 

[RandomMoped]

my goodness, your friend is managing a boiler with just coal coke?

 

[Wonton_Freak]

BTW, I should mention, very nice building style and town layout. Impressive looking setup.

Thank you

my goodness, your friend is managing a boiler with just coal coke?

No, he's using a hidden xycraft tank with fuel. I think he had a major setback because he said something like "fkin combustion engines" in skype and ragequitted so I'm guessing everything blew up over there..

Just went to check and it seems the xycraft tank with fuel and his refinery setup is broken from an explosion.

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[Wekmor]

aslong as the valve of the tank didn't break his fuel is not lost ;O

 

[Wonton_Freak]

aslong as the valve of the tank didn't break his fuel is not lost ;O

From the looks of it, the whole thing is gone. It was place in the hole behind that ender tank on the picture which is now completely empty :/

 

[eric167]

Thank you



No, he's using a hidden xycraft tank with fuel. I think he had a major setback because he said something like "fkin combustion engines" in skype and ragequitted so I'm guessing everything blew up over there..

Just went to check and it seems the xycraft tank with fuel and his refinery setup is broken from an explosion.

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and thats why you make sure the water connections work BEFORE turning everything on.
seperating your storage and production also helps. oops.
i also think GT makes everything go boom if something so much as sneezes on a machine if you dont change the configs.

 

[netmc]

If you haven't already, go for bees. The bees that create redstone aren't too far down the breeding path. I believe you breed with cultivated bees to make the next species that will produce redstone from the combs. You needs them or a witch spawner as already stated to get enough redstone for the chrome. That is really going to be your limiting factor.

By the time you have enough chrome to build the reactor, you should have enough of the other resources needed to build all the centrifuges and stuff to power it.

 

[Wonton_Freak]

A question for you all, I've managed to prepare the bastement of the WIP Industrial complex to become a steam boiler room. But I'm wondering, should I just pump the steam directly into a steam consumer or should I use a turbine.. According to some people the Steam Consumer is the best option and will give an EU output of 350 EU/t.

At the moment I've almost filled a 2 million MB Iron Tank with oil and will soon start to refine it.

Here's the steam room:

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[Someone Else 37]

Last I checked (and this might've changed- it was a while ago, turbines have been buffed since) Power Converters were much more efficient than turbines- even using steam engines to produce MJ, to melt cobblestone into lava in a Magma Crucible, and burning that in a geothermal was more efficient than running a Steam Turbine- without even counting the entirely ridiculous steel cost of the turbine rotor thing itself, which eventually will break and need replacing.

So yeah, use a steam consumer to convert the steam into both MJ and EU.

Also be aware that boilers are extremely inefficient as they warm up- I'm not sure how much fuel you'll need to stockpile before trying to burn any of it, but I'd say you'll need at least a few hundred buckets of it.

For fusionreactors, you'll need LOTS of chrome and berylium. I'd recommend setting up several centrifuges for rubies as soon as possible (you might want to look into ruby bees for this), and several more for enderpearls (with an ender farm, of course).

You'll also need a lot more iridium- try to get a matterfab running as soon as possible. And some recyclers, of course- you've already said that you have far too much cobblestone, so no problem there.

I should also note that Modular Powersuits offer protection on par with Quantum, and a lot more versatility. They generally require more of the less expensive materials (iron, tin, copper, etc.) and less of the more expensive materials (iridium) than Quantum suits, and so may be more affordable for you. However, your server might have only the GregTech recipes for MPS enabled, so I can't say for sure that it would be cheaper on the iridium.

 

[vince959]

A question for you all, I've managed to prepare the bastement of the WIP Industrial complex to become a steam boiler room. But I'm wondering, should I just pump the steam directly into a steam consumer or should I use a turbine.. According to some people the Steam Consumer is the best option and will give an EU output of 350 EU/t.

At the moment I've almost filled a 2 million MB Iron Tank with oil and will soon start to refine it.

Here's the steam room:

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It takes a lot of fuel to heat up the boilers so try to heat the boilers up one by one instead all at once. Once you get it heats up you don't want your fuel runs out and let the boiler cool again. It would be very inefficient.
In a long run, it's better to get the MFR tree farm up and running the boilers with biofuel instead of relying on fuel and oil. Biofuel is pretty much self-sustainable and zero maintenance.

I'd suggest you leave 3 blocks in between every other boiler so the steam consumers on each pair of boilers can share one energy bridge. Less messy but it is up to you, if you can afford the resources.

Once you get a better and stabler power source, setup the AE storage system and keep running quarry. Since you are playing in Ultimate, with the frame motor, you can actually automate the quarry.

 

[The classless]

expand the island so you make a village to houses villager