This is what it comes down to imho. New tends to be fun. The first time I setup the whole forestry chain for sustained output it was fun. Looking at doing it again it looks tedious. The first time I setup a steve's carts farms it was fun, now after 3 goes even that looks tedious. Now I am happy with how easy MFR is making these basic logistic hurdles, so that I can instead focus on some other areas I had yet to explore. (this is my first time really using gregtech for example, aside from a brief brush in the beta pack). I have done several varieties of auto-mining, so I am enjoying exploring other sustainable resource generation now. The real key to getting maximum fun out of the pack is to never do the same thing twice imho.
Steam Boilers vs IC2 EU generators.
- Thread starter Mash
- Start date
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This is what it comes down to imho. New tends to be fun. The first time I setup the whole forestry chain for sustained output it was fun. Looking at doing it again it looks tedious. The first time I setup a steve's carts farms it was fun, now after 3 goes even that looks tedious. Now I am happy with how easy MFR is making these basic logistic hurdles, so that I can instead focus on some other areas I had yet to explore. (this is my first time really using gregtech for example, aside from a brief brush in the beta pack). I have done several varieties of auto-mining, so I am enjoying exploring other sustainable resource generation now. The real key to getting maximum fun out of the pack is to never do the same thing twice imho.
Yeah, DoctorOr is having great results with the tree farm. I'm converting mine over, although I actually want the wood output. MFR treefarms output wood at a crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy rate. Like a wooden chest of uncut wood every 3m or so on less than an LV power supply, so this seems like a more obvious win for running a boiler. The fact that industrial fertilizer can be accumulated from farms and said fertilizer works on trees means that it's one of the best solid fuel outputs we have access to.
See, I think my problem is I don't have the epic efficiency of the steam boiler to loop back into the system. Maybe it's energy positive once you have a steam boiler eating the fuel because liquid boilers get crazy efficient once heated. I'm pretty certain it is not energy positive w/out something like this. I'm also considering setting up a factorization solar boiler with my spare silver, running to a few industrial steam engines to fill a redstone cell. I suspect this energy input would even me out over the course of a minecraft day. I am aware that it's much harder to make forestry biomass farms energy positive unless you have a "freebie" input system like computercraft, Steve's Carts, or something else semi-perpetual. I suspect that adding some high-output MJs to the system from solar will solve my problem.
Possibly! I think it's probably just a way to grab surplus farm products and convert them to fuel as a bonus. I really do suspect there could be a breakeven point with wheat farms feeding forestry fermenters and stills if you could just make the farms big enough and your fertilizer supply absurd enough, and I suspect when you hit that point it's like a massive breakthrough. The trick would be to use the sludge boiler dirt output and wheat to make compost. AE could do this nicely, as could anything hooked up to fabricators. But as it stands I wouldn't recommend it as an energy generator by itself.
What do you mean it isn't energy-positive?
How can it not be energy positive if it's impossible for it to be energy negative? The thing doesn't consume any energy.
And if I were to run... two MFR farms with fertilizers, I could probably have this thing singlehandedly produce enough biofuel to run any amount of boilers that I could possibly ever want. I could not say the same for Fermenters and stills, who produced it so fucking slowly that I'd have literally died during the process of waiting for my 10k bucket tank to fill.
I considered the problem, and I have a feeling what is going on for you with wheat farms is that you are simply wasting power. My guess is that a small wheat farm is not drawing nearly as much power as you are producing, or it is only drawing it in bursts (MFR machines have a pretty small storage themselves, and only use power when actually doing something). Have you tried putting a redstone cell between the engine and the farm to act as a buffer? Alternatively you could try using IC to automatically only produce as much power as you are using. This may be why trees work so well, the harvest phase is constant and prolonged, eating the power at a nice steady rate. It could also be that harvesting is much more power efficient than planting and fertilizing, causing the high rate of plant and fertilize for wheat to create the loss.
It's already running off a battery box.
The worst was hooking the bio-generator up directly to forestry machines. My 10 block tall tank could be seen to visibly decline like someone was drinking a giant orange soda.
Perhaps it's also that seeds, carrots and potatos just have crazy-low yield. Wood is better for this anyways because then you can also get solid fuel boilers. It does take more consideration with farm layout to keep your sapling output high, I'm finding. The "Solid epic 8x8 wood cube" is fun but then I go negative on sapling count.
My MFR Redwood farm without a fertilizer and my Bio Reactor made roughly 1000~ buckets of biofuel in about 6 hours.
How many HP boilers would you have to run to burn through that?
If my math isn't wrong, then it should be roughly 3 fully stacked, max heat HP boilers would about break even on the biofuel production.
And the bottleneck here isn't the reactor. It's the farm. If I add a fertilizer, and maybe a second harvester, then I could probably double-triple that output.
How many HP boilers would you have to run to burn through that?
If my math isn't wrong, then it should be roughly 3 fully stacked, max heat HP boilers would about break even on the biofuel production.
And the bottleneck here isn't the reactor. It's the farm. If I add a fertilizer, and maybe a second harvester, then I could probably double-triple that output.
I'm talking explicitly about produce farms. I tried to make that clear. Tree farms in MFR are obscenely profitable (although I suspect that the wood is the real winner).
Well, I thought we were talking about the Bio Reactor, not the means that you use to power it.
From what I understand, the Bio Reactor tosses efficiency in favor of speed. If the bottleneck in your system is fuel, then you favor efficiency over speed. At that point, you can either upgrade your system to produce more fuel, or you don't. Either way, I don't see how it's the Bio Reactor's fault that you're bottlenecking yourself.
Also, if you want to be absolutely sure that you're clear that you're referring to a produce farm, and not just farms in general, you may want to refrain from saying things like;
If you put wood into sawmills, they yield a lot more. Wood gives you 6 wooden planks and 1 sawdust.9 sawdust=1 compressed sawdust=one charcoal in the furnace. Then put them into boiler(s). Or you can put all this wood into ic2 generators to give you 870 eu per plank. Someone do the math for me comparing these options...
This is actually a good idea. I didn't want to use solid fueled boilers, but I may just make a giant generator room where I feed my excess wood into.
Because so far, after I stuffed a dimensional barrel with 300 stacks of redwood logs, I've been void piping it.
Are you on ultimate? Because the Deep Storage Unit has basically infinite storage and can keep you from wasting wood like that. Which is very important because solid boilers can eat wood like nobody's business. Pretty sure I've gone from 300 stacks to empty in about a day while heating up a couple of solid boilers when my forestry treefarm got bottlenecked for lack of humus.
I am. And I may actually do that. Just looked up the deep storage unit spotlight, and it seems pretty sweet.
I have an E shaped SC farm and a peat bog to feed two poilers. One boiler for solids : planks (logs go through the sawmill), charcoal (from small leftovers of the sawmill, idon't remember the name) and peat. the liquid one from saplin biomass (actually i convert the biomass to bio fuel before).
these two beasts are so coool! especially with tesseracts. I have all the energy i want, they are full auto, always hot . I have 20 industrial steam engines on each, and i don't even use all of the steam they can produce.. and It was my first source of energy (after my beloved generator that i dropped the third day.. mouahahaha).
In my previous setup, i ran on solar panels... it's not interesing.. kinda cheap
these two beasts are so coool! especially with tesseracts. I have all the energy i want, they are full auto, always hot . I have 20 industrial steam engines on each, and i don't even use all of the steam they can produce.. and It was my first source of energy (after my beloved generator that i dropped the third day.. mouahahaha).
In my previous setup, i ran on solar panels... it's not interesing.. kinda cheap
I'd be interested to see how far the nerf actually goes. At the moment, my setup is very sapling/mulch positive, the system is always backed up because the still(s) can't process the biomass fast enough. If the nerf simply means that the fermenters burn through it quicker, then it might not affect me too much. Otherwise I might have to look into other methods. I'm not spectacularly keen on the slowness/geographical dependancies of tree breeding. I'm happy to do things close to my base, but, until we get Extra Trees with the handy manipulation machines, I'll probably stay out if it.
As it has been stated, the Nerf will be that normal vanilla saplings will count as if they had the slowest sappiness, which will give 50% of what it currently gives, or 0,4 mB per Sapling. Would be logica to expectf everything else as 25% increments of that, so slower = 75%, average = 100% (0,8 mB), faster 125% (1 mB), fastest (1,2 mB).
That's not actually a nerf. That's a boost. High Sappiness also increases how much fruit a tree yields, it's a very desirable trait if you want to produce apples for fermenters, and also a very desirable trait to have for your Walnuts & Chestnut trees, to get more seed oil per cycle. Tree Breeding is a relatively easy and passive process, it's not that hard to get to EOL for trees, but i bet it will get progressively harder as more trees and combinations are added.
That's not actually a nerf. That's a boost. High Sappiness also increases how much fruit a tree yields, it's a very desirable trait if you want to produce apples for fermenters, and also a very desirable trait to have for your Walnuts & Chestnut trees, to get more seed oil per cycle. Tree Breeding is a relatively easy and passive process, it's not that hard to get to EOL for trees, but i bet it will get progressively harder as more trees and combinations are added.
That sums up my thoughts too.
It seems with this mod pack once you get something running smoothly and just how you want it after spending many real life days/weeks building everything and perfecting it, along comes the mod author and pulls the rug out from under you. Sengir will soon overtake Greg in the "you will play the game MY way" stakes if this continues. First it was the multi-farms (that no-one wanted - see the very lengthy thread on this forum) and now we're being forced into spending weeks grinding bees and trees (and no doubt fertiliser too as they probably won't work with SC tree farms) to keep our boilers running on biofuel.
Bees are very much love or hate and try as I might to get 'into' them, it just ain't happening. I play the game to have fun and spending hour after hour grinding bees together over and over again to get me a breed that will "make" me some (arguably) mediocre item is about as far detached from being fun as it gets.
If the saps don't work in SC tree farms then I predict that a large number of players will just bin off the biomass route altogether because of having to babysit the bee breeding, tree breeding and multi-farm with fertiliser, and instead just up the wood production from SC and have all their boilers running on solids.
Naw, we'll probably just get our biomass from sugarcane.
Personally, I've already transitioned from saplings to bees to fuel my liquid boilers. 6 alvearies (3 with 8 frames apiece, 3 without) with distilled bees provide more than enough oil to keep 4 36HP boilers going. Once I get the other 3 with frames I think I'll be able to add another 4 boilers. Oil bees are surprisingly easy to get.
The yield from vanilla saplings will only be 1/4 of what they are now(0.8), unfortunately, so off a single fermenter you can now only run a single still even if you use fertilizer and liquid honey/juice (according to my calculations, correct me if I'm wrong). That's pretty bad :x Maybe there's a chance Steve's carts will be compatible with forestry saplings in 1.5?
That being said, there's quite the potential for making biomass; the highest yield is more than double than the previous vanilla, when they are made available...
From Sengir's website:
Fermentation Change
As noted above, saplings in the fermenter won't give the current amount (800 mB) anymore. The base yield of saplings is reduced to 200 mB. However the genetic trait sappiness now affects the yield dramatically.
Lowest
Vanilla: 200 mB
Lower
Balsa, Larch, Pine, Lime, others: 400 mB
Low
Cherry, Kapok, Ebony, Mahogany, Chestnut, Willow, others: 600 mB
Average
Walnut: 800 mB
High
Mahoe: 1200 mB
Higher
n/a (yet): 1600 mB
Highest
n/a (yet): 2000 mB
That being said, there's quite the potential for making biomass; the highest yield is more than double than the previous vanilla, when they are made available...
From Sengir's website:
Fermentation Change
As noted above, saplings in the fermenter won't give the current amount (800 mB) anymore. The base yield of saplings is reduced to 200 mB. However the genetic trait sappiness now affects the yield dramatically.
Lowest
Vanilla: 200 mB
Lower
Balsa, Larch, Pine, Lime, others: 400 mB
Low
Cherry, Kapok, Ebony, Mahogany, Chestnut, Willow, others: 600 mB
Average
Walnut: 800 mB
High
Mahoe: 1200 mB
Higher
n/a (yet): 1600 mB
Highest
n/a (yet): 2000 mB