Show off your Botania mana generation

[Yusunoha]

if you're like me, you've been trying out all kinds of designs to generate alot of mana in Botania. most people would've used a couple dozen thermalillies, but in recent versions the thermalillies have been nerfed, thus people start to find other ways of generation alot of mana.

I've posted some designs here and there and they're by no far the most efficient, but I though it'd be a good idea for people to share their builds for mana generation. there's also another topic for mana generation, but that's more meant for early game, while this topic can be used for any kind of mana generation.

I previously posted this design in that other topic...

Spoiler

this time I put together something like this...

it's basically a vertical column of the hydro's, following this pattern

and without water it looks like this

the design can be both vertically and hortizontally expanded, though if you decide to get horizontally I'd suggest adding more mana spreaders because there's a range to how far the flowers can send mana to spreaders and if you go vertically I'd suggest either using higher tier spreaders or to use focusses, because the normal mana spreaders can only send so much mana.

the top side looks like this

so it's possible to use this setup completely underground and have the mana be send upwards to the mana pool that's above ground.
it's important to keep a water layer above the highest hydro, because that water layer will make sure the water won't run out (hydro's can only absorb water horizontally, not vertically from what I noticed)
it's also important to not have all the hydro's on the same level, but to switch them up, this way they shouldn't be able to drain all the water.
and lastly, be sure to first place the water and then the hydro's, becasue these suckers can suck unbelievably fast

I should also note that I came up with this design by watchign a similar design from watching a livestream from @ZeekDaGeek
also note that I have no idea if this is an efficient setup or not, but it's simple mana generation in bulk

and while it isn't fast, it's a simple build that requires no further attention.

today I've messed around and I came up with this build...

Spoiler

the build exists out of 4 parts, the tree generation, the charcoal generation, the mana generation and the mana storage.

Spoiler

the tree generation is made out of a 9x9x1 dirt platform with sapplings being plated on it by a planter. the harvester will then chop any trees that grow. under the platform there's 4 munchdews, 4 agricarnations and a hopperhock. the munchdews gobble up the leaves from the trees generating mana, this mana is send to a pool by 4 spreaders. the agricarnations take the mana from that pool to speed up the tree growing. but when the agricarnation gobble up the leaves the leaves will drop sapplings and apples, that's why there's a hopperhock aswell, which is being provided with mana by a spreader placed onto the pool, which will gather any sapplings or apples that fall to the ground, which get send to the adjacent chest. the munchdews actually create more mana then the agricarnations and the hopperhock uses, so there's a mana void under the pool to make sure the munchdews keep gobbling leaves even when the pool is full, because the munchdews actually helps the harvester alot with chopping the trees.

next part is the charcoal generation. any resources that come from either the harvester or the hopperhock chest gets send to 3 barrels, one for wood, one for sapplings and another for apples. if any of the 3 barrels is full, any extra gets send to a trash bin. the sapppling barrel will send any sappling it has towards the planter if the planted needs them. any wood from the wood barrel gets send to any of the 4 alloy smelters which smelt the wood into charcoal. the charcoal then gets send to a charcoal barrel which will send any charcoal to any of the 4 generators who need charcoal. the generators provide RF power for the harvester, planter and alloy smelters. any sludge being produced is send into a bedrockium drum, but that's only if you're planning on using the sludge, you can also just leave it sitting inside the harvester. both the generators and alloy smelters all have an octadic capacitor

next up is the mana generation. this part looks complicated but is actually very simple. the center is a steve's factory manager, with on one side a charcoal barrel, another side a Botania's open crate and ontop a redstone receiver. below the open crate is a pressure plate which send a redstoen signal to a signal terminal. this signal terminal is connected to another signal terminal which send a redstone signal to the redstone receiver. the manager is set up so if there's no redstone signal, the manager will take 16 charcoal out of the barrel and transfers them to the open crate which drops the charcoal straight onto the pressure plate, which will send a redstone signal which stops the manager from sending more charcoal until that redstone signal disappears. the charcoal is picked up by alot of endoflames that are placed around. the mana they produce is received by the 4 gaia mana spreaders that sends the mana to a pool. the pool has an automatic switch, so if the pool is full a redstone signal is send by another signal terminal which will also stop the manager from sending charcoal. all the spreaders have potency lenses because the endoflames produce a large amount of mana.

and lastly is the mana storage, the most simple part. mana from the first mana pool gets send to a mana distributor with 4 adjacent pools. all 4 pools have a spark with recessive augments which send the mana to any other nearby sparks. you can easily expand the setup using more pools and sparks.

this whole build actually produces quite alot of mana and when build doesn't really require any additional attention, though it's wise to keep an eye on the sapplings as the sappling count does tend to decline bit by bit.

I'm also trying to find a way to automate other mana producing flowers, but if you've one yourself, go ahead and share them with the rest of us.

 

[Yusunoha]

here's another build I did a few days ago using entropinnyums and tiny tnt from Applied Energistics...

Spoiler

I'm using Steve's Factory Manager to deploy a tiny tnt every 4 seconds.
the block gate will deploy the tiny tnt and on the opposite side is a redstone block to activate the tiny tnt.

the tiny tnt ignites and drops down to the floor, where there's 24 entropinnyums who'll absorb the blast.
I used warded glass around the setup to diminish any explosions that could happen if things would go wrong, but it's not really that needed.
the gaia spreader is used to transfer the mana as fast as possible so the entropinnyums don't get backlogged with mana.

next to the pool is a comparator that'll produce a redstone signal when the pool is full.
I did this because entropinnyums actually stop absorbing explosion damage from tnt if they're full of mana, so if the pool is full, the spreader is full and all entropinnyums are full and tnt still gets ignited and dropped, the tnt would at one point actually start exploding and destroying everything.

I haven't really supersized this build yet because both tnt and tiny tnt aren't exactly easy to produce in large quantities at fast speed, though it should be possible but it would probably not be a compact build.

 

[ratchet freak]

with a creeper farm and cobble gen you can use regular TNT

 

[netmc]

I just posted this to the bases thread, but probably a bit better to be posted here. I didn't go into any detail on the farms producing the items, but this is just the conversion of the food into mana.

-------

Tiny base update - Mana generation and gourmaryllis setup using automagy, hopperducts and thaumcraft.

I thought it would be cool to just have mirrors dumping the items to the gourmaryllis to eat. I thought about the open crates, but I couldn't couldn't think of a good way to stick them out in the room. The generating flowers are in the main room with the portal to alfheim, with all the mana operations neatly tucked away underneath.



Hopperducts' ducts react to redstone the same way that vanilla hoppers do. I needed the extra duct in order to still collect items from the main duct line even when the feed to the open crate was disabled. The upgraded hourglass from automagy is configured for a negative pulse. Each timer is specifically configured for the different food items. Each mirror is linked to the one in the room above.

I used the dense and dim redcrystals from automagy as an isolator. The output from the hourglass is normally at level 15. The dim crystal drops it to 13. (Any level will work to deactivate the ducts.) As the mana pool fills, the comparator will increase its output. When the mana pool is nearly filled (14), the dense redcrystal will allow the signal to traverse and disable both the hopper duct and the hourglass as the same time. This way, I won't have animated timers running in the world when not needed, and it cuts off the flow of items to the gourmaryllis. Once the hopper fills up with 5 stacks of items, the excess will continue down the main line to the disposal (currently my alchemical furnace). Once the level in the mana pool decreases, the system automatically comes back on. The lever in the picture was just there for testing.

--------

Edit: One of the things I just found out is that the more hunger bars the food fills up, the more mana is produced. A basic mana spreader on its own cannot keep up with the mana generation from baked potatoes. I had to use a potency lense on the mana spreader to keep up with the mana output of the gourmaryllis. Carrots and bread seem to be fine with the basic mana spreader.

 

[Yusunoha]

here's another build I just did using kekimurus...

Spoiler

kekimurus eat cake that's placed down into the world and produce mana. it can actually be quite difficult to automatically place down a cake.
sure, you could use a golem, but I don't really like to use golems in automated builds.
in the end I found out that a block placer from OpenBlocks is able to properly place down a cake, and using that block I was able to make this build.

it starts out with a simple 3x3 farm made with crops from agricraft. 3 crops are wheat, 3 are sugarcane and 3 are soybeans.
their growth is boosted using the sprinklers from agricraft, and the crops are harvested using a harvester from MFR.
the output is send to 3 barrels.

from the barrels I'm using Steve's Factory Manager to craft cheesecake from pam's harvestcraft, which can actually be placed down into the world and kekimurus can gobble them.
I chose the cheesecake because it's such an easy recipe to do. I use SFM to craft both the sugar and flour, but for the silk and firm tofu I need to use the presser from pam's harvestcraft.
the presser's are actually the part of the build that slows things down, so if you want to speed things up, use more presser's.
as you can see I'm using 3 pressers, one for soybean > soy milk, one for soy milk > silk tofu and the last is silk tofu > firm tofu.
as soon as all the required components are gathered into the chest, a cheesecake gets crafted and the output is send to the barrel.

from that barrel 1 cheesecake is send each time to the culinairy generator from Extra Utilities to provide RF that's needed for the harvester.
the other cheesecakes are send to the openblock's block placer if there's more then 16 cheesecakes in the barrel.
lastly a redstone pulse is provided to the block placer if there's more then 1 cheesecake in the block placer, which causes the cheesecake to be placed down so the kekimurus can gobble them up.

any producded mana is send to a mana pool using a gaia spreader because the kekimurus can actually produce quite some mana.
lastly, if the pool is full a comparator will send out a redstone signal which will stop the block placer from placing down more cheesecakes.

the build can be done much bigger then this, but as mentioned the problem lies with the presser's that are quite slow, so if you are planning on making this build bigger by using more kekimurus, also add more presser's to the build.

 

[Yusunoha]

and my very last build using gourmaryllisis, which actually was more difficult than I thought.

Spoiler

9x9 carrot farm using crop sticks from Agriculture being farmed by a MFR harvester.
the inner 3x3 center is sugarcane, where the resources are being send to barrels.
the sugarcane is send into a pulverizer which produces sugar, which gets send to an alloy smelter who smelts it into sugar charcoal.
the sugar charcoal then gets send into a generator producing RF for the alloy smelter, pulverizer and harvester.

the carrot gets turned into carrot juice by Steve's Factory Manager and the carrot juice is send to the open crate from Botania which drops 8 carrot juice at a time.
the gourmaryllisis produce mana, the gaia spreader picks it up and send it to the pool.

then there's a few more spreaders sending the mana to a pool beneath the farm which supplies mana to 4 agricarnations which speed up the growth of the crops.

the difficult part is actually gaining more mana, because I am able to fill one of the pools, but the second never gets filled.
it's also difficult to figure out if all the gourmaryllisis absorb the carrot juice, or if there's just 1 gourmaryllisis hogging all the carrot juice and destroying the rest of the carrot juice.

but it technically does produce atleast a pool worth of mana so...

 

[netmc]

The gourmaryllis had a range of just over a block. That is why my setup has 2 blocks between the plants. I wanted to make sure there was no chance of the wrong plant picking it up.

A way you can verify your setup is to take away the mana spreader and then drop 8 carrot juice. If each gourmarllis has mana in it, the build will work as intended.

I really love how vazskii has added all the various ways to create mana. If you can farm it or grow it or gain it, it can be converted to mana.

What I look for in the various builds people show off, is not the number of mods that are used, or the complexity of the builds, but in the regulation. To set up a system where it can be completely hands off and run 24/7 without any other player input. That is the real beauty and skill.

Right now, most of my builds just dump the excess into the advanced alchemical furnace--basically an expensive garbage can. My end game is to have it all self regulate and actually shut down the farms or fully use the output instead of what I have now. I am slowly working towards that, but it does take a while to implement.

 

[netmc]

I set this up in my test world as I wanted to see if it was possible to automate the spectrolus. This is the flower that consumes the colored wool in order to make mana. It was a little tricky to set this up, but not really hard overall, just very repetitive. Even though I used redcrystal from automagy, this could be done with vanilla redstone just as well. You would just need to offset the pressure plates (and everything linked to them), in a zig-zag pattern rather than a straight line as I have shown. (This is so the redstone under the pressure plates doesn't interfere with the one next to it.) The hopper ducts could easily be swapped out for botania's redstring or your item tubes of choice.

With the position of the redstone torches, it not only controls the hoppers under the wool barrels, but also gives a redstone signal to the open crate. This prevents the hopper hock from picking up the wool immediately and allows the wool to activate the next color. Two hopper hocks were needed for this long of a line.

Under each of the lapis blocks is a sticky piston facing upwards. This is the circuit breaker pulse circuit as show here.

The button and stuff on the right of the first picture is what I used to get the whole thing started. in production, you would take the output from the very last pressure plate and route it back to the first to form a continuous loop.

There is about a 1/2 second delay for each color. This allows the wool to be sent to the spectrolus in the correct order after a single piece has been dropped from the storage barrels.

Spoiler

To get the repeaters to send a pulse using redcrystal (to allow only one wool to drop of each color) the repeaters had to be set to the 2nd position.

For those not familiar with red crystal, the red dots in direction shows which way the redstone signal will be sent. The long line of redcrystal at the bottom, is not one continuous line, but broken up into 2 block wide sections.

Even though great pains were taken to make this system fool proof, if you run out of any specific color wool, the whole thing would stop. You would need to connect some sort of comparator to the barrels and make sure they had wool in all of them before you started a color cycle. The number of AND gates needed (using vanilla) would probably be quite large for 16 items, not to mention requiring a lot of space. Other mods could make this part quite simple and compact. Using a MFR rednet controller would make this trivial. (Not to mention making the whole system quite a bit more compact.)

 

[ratchet freak]

actually inverting the signal from the barrel (on is when the barrel is empty) lets you use a single redstone wire as a giant OR which is on when one of the barrels is empty. this lets you prevent the cycle from running.

 

[netmc]

actually inverting the signal from the barrel (on is when the barrel is empty) lets you use a single redstone wire as a giant OR which is on when one of the barrels is empty. this lets you prevent the cycle from running.

I had thought about sending the redstone signal down to the hopper, but this wouldn't let it resume the cycle midway through when items are added to the system, but if I send the redstone control face to the top, I can use that as a big OR output as you suggested. connect that line along with the signal from the back pressure plate so the next cycle gets "frozen" when the barrel runs out of wool.

Connect the pulse from the last wool color over to a R/S latch which will turn on when it receives a signal. Take the output of the R/S latch and AND it together with an inverted output from the OR switch on the barrels. Finally send that back through the pulse circuit that I use to start the whole thing. (Also send this pulse around to the reset input of the R/S latch to reset the switch for the next cycle.) This will let it always run a full cycle, but if one of the barrels becomes empty, the next cycle will "wait" until there is wool in the barrel again.

That will definitely work! Unfortunately, having a redstone signal along the top doesn't allow for the barrels to be filled as it will stop hopper systems, but since this is Vazkii, we can use her mods to fix this. Redstring from botania, or the transvector interface from TT will give a way to fill the barrels remotely and automatically without worrying about all the "sides" of the block being blocked.

Thanks ratchet freak! This is now a fully automatic system. Now I need to go see some sheep about some wool....

 

[Yusunoha]

The gourmaryllis had a range of just over a block. That is why my setup has 2 blocks between the plants. I wanted to make sure there was no chance of the wrong plant picking it up.

after reading this bit of information I tried to redo the setup and I've greatly increased the efficiency of the build
I'm now able to fill both pools with mana, though because the agricarnations keep consuming mana the setup never turns off, though that shouldn't be a very big problem.

if I've some time and if I remember I'll try to post some new screenshots tomorrow of the build.

 

[ratchet freak]

I had thought about sending the redstone signal down to the hopper, but this wouldn't let it resume the cycle midway through when items are added to the system, but if I send the redstone control face to the top, I can use that as a big OR output as you suggested. connect that line along with the signal from the back pressure plate so the next cycle gets "frozen" when the barrel runs out of wool.

Connect the pulse from the last wool color over to a R/S latch which will turn on when it receives a signal. Take the output of the R/S latch and AND it together with an inverted output from the OR switch on the barrels. Finally send that back through the pulse circuit that I use to start the whole thing. (Also send this pulse around to the reset input of the R/S latch to reset the switch for the next cycle.) This will let it always run a full cycle, but if one of the barrels becomes empty, the next cycle will "wait" until there is wool in the barrel again.

That will definitely work! Unfortunately, having a redstone signal along the top doesn't allow for the barrels to be filled as it will stop hopper systems, but since this is Vazkii, we can use her mods to fix this. Redstring from botania, or the transvector interface from TT will give a way to fill the barrels remotely and automatically without worrying about all the "sides" of the block being blocked.

Thanks ratchet freak! This is now a fully automatic system. Now I need to go see some sheep about some wool....

It's always handy to keep deMorgan's law in mind when constructing a logic circuit especially when OR is easier than AND

fun fact: vanilla redstone logic is built on OR (wire collecting outputs) and NOR gates (redstone torch turning off when it gets an input).

 

[netmc]

It's always handy to keep deMorgan's law in mind when constructing a logic circuit especially when OR is easier than AND

fun fact: vanilla redstone logic is built on OR (wire collecting outputs) and NOR gates (redstone torch turning off when it gets an input).

So, how would I make this into an OR equation then? There does need to be a state cell to store the final output, although I can get rid of the pulse former as it is not needed. Could the falling edge pulse former be used as in

?

I'm not very good at vanilla redstone, although I have been able to get decent at the logic and MFR rednet controllers.

 

[ratchet freak]

tl;dr replace every AND you see/need by inverting the inputs and output (keeping in mind that double inversion can be simplified)

 

[Yusunoha]

as promised, the screenshots of the updated build of the gourmaryllis setup.

Spoiler

 

[Quayludious]

if you're like me, you've been trying out all kinds of designs to generate alot of mana in Botania. most people would've used a couple dozen thermalillies, but in recent versions the thermalillies have been nerfed, thus people start to find other ways of generation alot of mana.

I've posted some designs here and there and they're by no far the most efficient, but I though it'd be a good idea for people to share their builds for mana generation. there's also another topic for mana generation, but that's more meant for early game, while this topic can be used for any kind of mana generation.

I previously posted this design in that other topic...

Spoiler

this time I put together something like this...

it's basically a vertical column of the hydro's, following this pattern

How did you get it to NOT drink all the water up? I've been playing with this in creative now for a couple of hours and I can't keep it from going dry almost instantly.

 

[Yusunoha]

How did you get it to NOT drink all the water up? I've been playing with this in creative now for a couple of hours and I can't keep it from going dry almost instantly.

@Vazkii may have done some changes to the flower (knowing she always updates like crazy) but if you check out the pattern that I've posted, I've placed the flowers in a patter so they should not be able to drink the water dry
if you check the other screenshots you can see how I've done the setup, and be sure to switch up the flowers on each layer, otherwise they may indeed be able to drink all the water

 

[Beleriond01]

All the mana generation methods aside, I still find myself struggling to come to terms with a proper and efficient way of spreading mana from 1 pool into others...

 

[Yusunoha]

All the mana generation methods aside, I still find myself struggling to come to terms with a proper and efficient way of spreading mana from 1 pool into others...

sparks is pretty much the best option with some augments on them.

 

[Beleriond01]

sparks is pretty much the best option with some augments on them.

I know...I specifically meant which augment to put on which mana pool lol. I love tlovetech's setup on the FC2 server but I've no clue how he spreads the mana across all the pools