Simpler power options besides Thermal Expansion?

[Drbretto]

Hi all.

Im hoping this place is a little more active than some of the other sites out there. I feel like I might be the only one still playing, lol

Anyway, I run a custom server. One of the primary mods we're using is buildcraft, and I love the idea of being able to store my energy into something like a redstone energy cell down the line for portability, but I really don't want to have to deal with a bunch of new ores to find and sort, or all the complicated craziness that that mod appears to come with. I know I saw some generators and whatnot in Extra Utilities, and I was hoping there was some lighter weight mod out there with some kind of battery you can charge up or something.

Alternatively, anyone know if it's really viable to replace combustion engines with lava generators?

 

[Pyure]

Lots of people replace everything with lava generators, especially if they have an easy method of transporting lava from the Nether to the Overworld.

In order to provide you ideas for power storage, we'd need to know which mods you have at your disposal.

What about the Thermal Expansion energy cells bothers you? It does indeed require resources, but everything in minecraft requires resources.

 

[malicious_bloke]

TE energy cells are totally simple.

You can make every single alloy used in their creation in the Tinkers Construct Smeltery except (afaik) Enderium.

I don't think you'll be able to find an energy storage setup less involved or complicated tbh.

 

[Drbretto]

The issue I have with thermal expansion is that we're just trying to keep the bloat down a little bit. It's not that you have to collect resources, it's that it adds a bunch of different types of ores that will just take up space for the most part. There's only three of us on the server and the other two aren't going to be do anything with TE (and one of them will just get overwhelmed an quit), but any time they mine, their bags will be full of ores they don't need taking up space. And I'm only interested in the energy cell, really.

But if the lava generators will work (I can use ender tanks to pull lava from the nether) then that may be all I need. It sounds to me like 1 Lava generator x8 should be about 36 MJ equivalent, if I'm reading it all right? 1 or two of those ought to run a quarry, I'd think?

Thanks for the responses!

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Insufficient data for accurate response

* What version of Minecraft are you on, or wish to be on?
* What pack/set of mods do you have to work with?
* What do you consider 'lighter weight', because ExUtil from 1.7.10 is about as lightweight as it gets for power generation. Or, perhaps, what do you consider 'excessively complex'?

 

[Inaeo]

As stated above, this becomes much easier to answer if we know what mods are in your pack.

People can and do use lava for power. Some use it on an obnoxiously obscene scale, while others merely use it as a stepping stone (again, depending on the pack). I believe the XU Lava Generator got nerfed back a while ago, so make sure the numbers on your server line up before you move from planning to execution. Wikis have a nasty tendency to fall out of date with things like that.

If you're looking for large scale power generation with only a single ore added to your world, consider Big Reactors (adds Yellorium Ore). Reactors are scalable, safe (no explosions or radiation), and if done correctly can output a metric shitton of power.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Four options: 1) Immersive Engineering. It adds a couple ores, copper, bauxite (aluminum), and nickel, but has capacitors that keep charge when broken, as well as Biodiesel that's much stronger than BC power.
2) Railcraft. It only adds poor ores, which generate nuggets, instead of ingots when smelted, but the Steam Boiler can generate a huge amount of power from charcoal or oil. It also now has the ability to move RF around via railcart.
3) Buildcraft Add-Ons. It adds a power storage mechanism, though I'm not sure how portable.
4) EnderIO. Adds no world generation, all the new stuff you need for it can be made out of stuff already in the world. And it both has awesome power generation, as well as absolutely massive power storage.

 

[Drbretto]

These are some great answers, everyone! Thank you.

For my server, the big hitters are buildcraft and thaumcraft. This is backed by openblocks and extrautilities. There are a bunch of other convenience things, like ender storage, enchanting+, etc. But I kept out things that add 150 pages to NEI or millions of useless ores every time you go mining. We're about a month into this project and we have the hang gliders from openblocks, so, as an example, when I added et futurum later in the game, I have to travel about 5km to find granite/andesite, etc.

The only reason I was thinking lava is that I am well established in the nether and can make a set-it-and-forget-it, but if that means sacrificing power and all that, I don't wanna bother. But, I'd like to condense it, lol. I set up a quarry the other night over an ocean monument. I have it pumping the oil directly from a spout, refining it into fuel and pumped directly into 8 combustion engines. The whole setup takes 11 combustion engines, 12 redstone engines, 2 refineries, a couple of barrels, and pipes all over the damn place. That was all super neat in the beginning, but it's time to upgrade to something more convenient as we ease into the stage where building quarries is just how I get my stuff.

We dont' have railcraft yet, but I think I am going to add it eventually anyway. Buildcraft add-ons and enderIO sound like they might be EXACTLY what I was looking for, though! I will research them instead of working today! Big reactors as well. It looks like it'll be down to those 3, or some combination of them.

Thank you all for the replies! This is way more of a response than I was expecting and it's all really great info!

 

[Drbretto]

Oh, looks like we have a winner with EnderIO. I'm browsing the wiki and there are a whole bunch of other things I like about it as well. This will fit with my pack nicely.

 

[Culprit]

I prefer just a magmatic dynamo hooked up to a ender tank or drum filled with lava. Then just connect to a leadstone(or redstone) energy cell and there ya go. You can also make a ender IO thing that will charge these little batterys with RF and then you can use them.

 

[Drbretto]

I prefer just a magmatic dynamo hooked up to a ender tank or drum filled with lava. Then just connect to a leadstone(or redstone) energy cell and there ya go. You can also make a ender IO thing that will charge these little batterys with RF and then you can use them.

The "complicated" part was referring to all that additional ore generation. What I was looking for was basically how to do the gist of all this without actually having to install thermal expansion.

I got my answer, though. You can do all that just with different names, without the world generation and ore bloat, with a combination of Extra Utilities (the lava generator is basically a clone of the magmatic dynamo) and EnderIO (which has the cells, along with a bunch of things that will actually fit well in my modpack).

I'm really happy with that combo. Though, I will be basically doing exactly what you just described.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Give an EnderIO tank a bucket and set it to in/out beside an EIO stirling generator and it functions like a lava generator.

 

[Drbretto]

Give an EnderIO tank a bucket and set it to in/out beside an EIO stirling generator and it functions like a lava generator.

So, that would basically be cutting out the middle man, right? Pump the lava right into the cell and have it passively charge by the lava pump/ender tank in the nether?

Edit: NM. Think I misread.

 

[Scottly318]

With the ender io tank... couldn't you just have it push into the generator instead? And with the ender tank you'd just need to set the fluid tank to pull from it

 

[KingTriaxx]

Stirling Generator can't accept lava fluid, but the tank is smart enough to pull in an empty bucket and eject one full of lava. But yes, you can have the tank filled directly by the Ender Tank.

 

[Scottly318]

Ahhh didn't know that

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Immersive Engineering's watermill attached to a kinetic dynamo is pretty good. Well, make that three watermills ganged up attached to a kinetic dynamo. Build it right, and it's roughly around 70 RF/t, completely passive. Granted, footprint is a bit large, but it's quite good once you stick your nose into the nether for the blaze powder for the blast furnace to make steel with, and will see you until you get your Diesel Generator running at 4k RF/t.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Or a bit sooner, if you get lucky and lay hands on a steel ingot in a chest. Are the World Gen IE houses back yet?