Thermal Expansion 3 is boring (actually just RF)

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Suterusu

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Imo, TE3 is fine at it's power gen options and even limits. For mods that consumes power at a greater rate best come up with their own form of higher tiered power generation.
I mean, KL could probably give us a multi-block high tier power generation option but what is in TE3 that requires it? If we talk about just within TE3 itself, 10, 000 RF/t is already too high for it's own use.

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KL mentioned in the original TE3 post that RF is meant as a mod standard for power. As you said, other mods that require such power will need to add their own means of power generation (like the forestry biofuel engine for BC). Fingers crossed the other modders will add interesting means of such high levels of power gen.
 

Not_Steve

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Not saying the methods you mentioned aren't valid, but I steer away from passive energy sources as they are boring. A setup and forget that has no moving parts.
All systems ( at least that I've built) have had the goal of automating or getting me closer to full auto. Everything is fire and forget eventually. Boilers are not systems you have to mess with ( if done correctly). I don't see how that is different from mekanisms passive generation. At least mekanism has the dignity to make it's gen give almost no power (about 1 rf every other tick). So when you say passive system what you trying to say is small system


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Suterusu

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The point of TE is to show the basic ways of using RF, and possibly establish a solid base for some tech mods. Do not confuse that with RF, however.

Dynamos aren't necessarily meant to be amazingly innovative, I'll go ahead and admit that. Although, they do have local feedback which helps to keep the system running at a steady state. And redstone control settings. They're quite a bit more capable than you might think, especially if your baseline is really going to be BC engine or IC2 generator.

The thing is this - TE3 doesn't currently have anything with a *massive* power draw. It'd be stupid to add tiered generation without having likewise tiered machines. Or vice versa. Neither option is fun - requiring 1000 dynamos for a single machine is dumb, and powering 1000 machines off a single source is also kind of dumb.

As far as RF goes...RF itself is freeform, quite flexible, and lightweight. Can a conduit be made that is > 10000 RF/t? Sure. Should it be? I'm not sure. If MFFS is running into the limit there, then I question if MFFS is scaled properly at all.


This thread wasn't meant to hate on your mod at all, it was more to spark discussion that if RF does become the "industry standard" that there would be more interesting ways for power generation.

I understand that if your machines don't require crazy amounts of RF/t, there is no real reason to create power methods that generate it.
 

Iskandar

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And if you need more power and don't want to stack dynamos, try Big Reactors. It is more or less a nuclear power plant option for RF. It isn't quite as polished as IC2's version, but it is still undergoing development.
 

Suterusu

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And if you need more power and don't want to stack dynamos, try Big Reactors. It is more or less a nuclear power plant option for RF. It isn't quite as polished as IC2's version, but it is still undergoing development.

This is the kind of thing I am hoping for. If it's complex in its operations, it may be a great addition to the methods listed prior in RF production.
 

snooder

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As far as RF goes...RF itself is freeform, quite flexible, and lightweight. Can a conduit be made that is > 10000 RF/t? Sure. Should it be? I'm not sure. If MFFS is running into the limit there, then I question if MFFS is scaled properly at all.

The problem we're pointing out is that TE is the testbed for RF. If TE doesn't introduce at least a bit of tiered power production, it is unlikely that some third party modder will step in to remedy the situation. Not everyone is imaginative enough to think of how to expand the flexibility in RF from the basics in TE, and not all of THOSE people are both willing and able to create a mod to take advantage of it. Nor is there a guarantee that said mod will make into the modpacks. And in the absence of tiered power, people will simply continue to spam hundreds of dynamos until they get bored and move on to a different power system.

As far as capping conduits at 10,000 RF/t, I think a problem is that you don't quite concieve of what that means in terms of scale. I mentioned the conversion to MJ/t for a reason. Back when I was playing in Ultimate, I routinely made 1000MJ/t in order to power a matter fabricator. That's not an inappropriate scale. Even in Unleashed, I was pouring out far more than that to power my base, given that I had multiple bee machines for running in parallel, an ME system that sucked up several hundred MJ/t (4 quantum bridges and enough export buses to run 40 apiaries will do that) as well as 3 MFR laser drills. My preferred base design involves having machines grouped together by function. So all power will be a centralized power plant, all my farms are in a farm area, etc. If the entire base consumes more than 10,000 RF/t (very, very easy to do) then the trunk line from the power plant becomes a bottleneck.

As an alternate measure of scale let's use quarries. A simple BC quarry running at full speed takes ~800RF. how much is a full MFFS system that places a forcefield around 25 chunks worth? I don't think it's unreasonable for that much protection to eat the same amount of power as 10 quarries. Nor is it unreasonable to want to run both the MFFS system and the quarries from the same power plant.

As I said, the current numbers make sense for a BC centered system that is very low power. Low power production, low power consumption. But in the greater body of modded minecraft, especially if RF is intended to be a good efficient power system for multiple mods to produce and consume, sticking to the BC paradigm is a mistake. A lot of mods are intended to deal with much, much bigger numbers than BC ever dreamt of.
 

Not_Steve

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The problem we're pointing out is that TE is the testbed for RF. If TE doesn't introduce at least a bit of tiered power production, it is unlikely that some third party modder will step in to remedy the situation. Not everyone is imaginative enough to think of how to expand the flexibility in RF from the basics in TE, and not all of THOSE people are both willing and able to create a mod to take advantage of it. Nor is there a guarantee that said mod will make into the modpacks. And in the absence of tiered power, people will simply continue to spam hundreds of dynamos until they get bored and move on to a different power system.

As far as capping conduits at 10,000 RF/t, I think a problem is that you don't quite concieve of what that means in terms of scale. I mentioned the conversion to MJ/t for a reason. Back when I was playing in Ultimate, I routinely made 1000MJ/t in order to power a matter fabricator. That's not an inappropriate scale. Even in Unleashed, I was pouring out far more than that to power my base, given that I had multiple bee machines for running in parallel, an ME system that sucked up several hundred MJ/t (4 quantum bridges and enough export buses to run 40 apiaries will do that) as well as 3 MFR laser drills. My preferred base design involves having machines grouped together by function. So all power will be a centralized power plant, all my farms are in a farm area, etc. If the entire base consumes more than 10,000 RF/t (very, very easy to do) then the trunk line from the power plant becomes a bottleneck.

As an alternate measure of scale let's use quarries. A simple BC quarry running at full speed takes ~800RF. how much is a full MFFS system that places a forcefield around 25 chunks worth? I don't think it's unreasonable for that much protection to eat the same amount of power as 10 quarries. Nor is it unreasonable to want to run both the MFFS system and the quarries from the same power plant.

As I said, the current numbers make sense for a BC centered system that is very low power. Low power production, low power consumption. But in the greater body of modded minecraft, especially if RF is intended to be a good efficient power system for multiple mods to produce and consume, sticking to the BC paradigm is a mistake. A lot of mods are intended to deal with much, much bigger numbers than BC ever dreamt of.
Your thinking of power conduits in the complete wrong way. It's not like BC where it is limited by block is a system. From each port out of the system you can have up to 10000 rf flowing out as long as you are producing enough anywhere in the system it can output that much.

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Zenthon_127

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This thread wasn't meant to hate on your mod at all, it was more to spark discussion that if RF does become the "industry standard" that there would be more interesting ways for power generation.
Except they're already out there (though I admit BigReactors is a new guy on the scene for a lot of people). The issue I had with your post is that it wasn't criticizing RF, it was criticizing TE3 (dynamos are TE, RF is just a unit of power) when TE3 is, IMO, still more interesting than either IC2 or BC (+Forestry/RC) just by itself in terms of power gen. My opinion, though.

Look at TE3 as a base mod, like IC2, except with actual useful content. It's not meant to be the crazy innovative big numbers mod, its ecosystem of mods (Mek/Big Reactors/XU) do that for it. The awesome thing about TE is that it still IS crazy innovative, and we can thank KL for that. Now all we really need is an addon mod for TE adding hyper-late game content, like a 100000 RF/t cable or something.


On the subject of MFFS, that mod's power consumption scales worse than even AE by a significant margin. It's pretty stupid atm with any power type.
 
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kaovalin

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from each port out of the system you can have up to 10000 rf flowing out as long as you are producing enough anywhere in the system it can output that much.

This has not shown in my testing.

That aside you can create circuits of 10000 rf each by having all your power go into a tesseract and having 10000 rf circuits come out of them. Tesseracts have no limit to what they can pass, its only the cables that do. Even the generation side can have multiple circuits going into a main channel for rf power.

I did this in 1.4.7 as well when the limit per conduit network was a measely 500mj/t (475 with power loss). If anything the cables are better now. Though i frequently bypassed this limit with the power converters mod but shhhh.

TE is fantastic the way it is. Not every mod needs to add an entire gaming experience on its own. Sometimes its nice to have a mod ecosystem.
 

King Lemming

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The problem we're pointing out is that TE is the testbed for RF. If TE doesn't introduce at least a bit of tiered power production, it is unlikely that some third party modder will step in to remedy the situation. Not everyone is imaginative enough to think of how to expand the flexibility in RF from the basics in TE, and not all of THOSE people are both willing and able to create a mod to take advantage of it. Nor is there a guarantee that said mod will make into the modpacks. And in the absence of tiered power, people will simply continue to spam hundreds of dynamos until they get bored and move on to a different power system.

As far as capping conduits at 10,000 RF/t, I think a problem is that you don't quite concieve of what that means in terms of scale. I mentioned the conversion to MJ/t for a reason. Back when I was playing in Ultimate, I routinely made 1000MJ/t in order to power a matter fabricator. That's not an inappropriate scale. Even in Unleashed, I was pouring out far more than that to power my base, given that I had multiple bee machines for running in parallel, an ME system that sucked up several hundred MJ/t (4 quantum bridges and enough export buses to run 40 apiaries will do that) as well as 3 MFR laser drills. My preferred base design involves having machines grouped together by function. So all power will be a centralized power plant, all my farms are in a farm area, etc. If the entire base consumes more than 10,000 RF/t (very, very easy to do) then the trunk line from the power plant becomes a bottleneck.

As an alternate measure of scale let's use quarries. A simple BC quarry running at full speed takes ~800RF. how much is a full MFFS system that places a forcefield around 25 chunks worth? I don't think it's unreasonable for that much protection to eat the same amount of power as 10 quarries. Nor is it unreasonable to want to run both the MFFS system and the quarries from the same power plant.

As I said, the current numbers make sense for a BC centered system that is very low power. Low power production, low power consumption. But in the greater body of modded minecraft, especially if RF is intended to be a good efficient power system for multiple mods to produce and consume, sticking to the BC paradigm is a mistake. A lot of mods are intended to deal with much, much bigger numbers than BC ever dreamt of.

The trunk isn't a cap at all. The 10000 RF/t limit is on a given face of a given conduit. The actual throughput of a network? Unlimited. No single machine should need that much energy on a *single* connection face. If it does, it should be a multiblock, and you should need to feed it in multiple places. So no, I absolutely understand the sense of scale here. A machine that consumes nearly one piece of coal per tick should indeed need multiple connection points for energy connections. When it comes to "trunk bandwidth", Redstone Energy Conduit has no real issues at all - it's far more capable than even EHV cable.
 

SkyBoy96

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...I'd like to see tiered power generation much like IC2/BC offer...
I'll give you BC, but unless they changed something in exp, I'm pretty sure the only "tiers" were solars, geo/standard gen, wind/watergens and nukes. There were 5 generators in vanilla IC2. The windmills were spammed by the few people that used it, and had so many restrictions were made almost useless. The water gens were only used when RP2 was around to automate bucket filling, and made a paltry 2 eu/t. The solars made 1 eu/t, and so were spammed to fill several chunks. The normal generators make 20 eu/t, and eat coal like it's going out of season. The geo generators also make 20 eu/t, but are more efficient with their fuel. These were also spammed to make enough power. Finally, we have nuclear reactors, which cost so much copper that only the most hardcore players use them. Tell me, what "tiers" are you referring to?
 

snooder

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The trunk isn't a cap at all. The 10000 RF/t limit is on a given face of a given conduit. The actual throughput of a network? Unlimited. No single machine should need that much energy on a *single* connection face. If it does, it should be a multiblock, and you should need to feed it in multiple places. So no, I absolutely understand the sense of scale here. A machine that consumes nearly one piece of coal per tick should indeed need multiple connection points for energy connections. When it comes to "trunk bandwidth", Redstone Energy Conduit has no real issues at all - it's far more capable than even EHV cable.

Ah, ok. That simplifies my design ideas a little bit. Although I disagree that any multiblock that needs more than 10,000RF/t should be fed from multiple connection points. That kinda defeats the point of having a multiblock in the first place in my opinion.
 

King Lemming

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Ah, ok. That simplifies my design ideas a little bit. Although I disagree that any multiblock that needs more than 10,000RF/t should be fed from multiple connection points. That kinda defeats the point of having a multiblock in the first place in my opinion.

One of the reasons to make something a multiblock is to increase the surface area for the purposes of interaction. I'm not sure how actually using that defeats the purpose. If anything, it seems like it would be playing to the strengths. Without that, a multiblock is just a laggier, less efficient structure which does a thing.

And technically, even a single block has 6 sides, any/all can be used to power it simultaneously.
 

snooder

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One of the reasons to make something a multiblock is to increase the surface area for the purposes of interaction. I'm not sure how actually using that defeats the purpose. If anything, it seems like it would be playing to the strengths. Without that, a multiblock is just a laggier, less efficient structure which does a thing.

That's not generally the reason I see structures being made as multiblocks. Most multiblocks in minecraft exist for purely aesthetic reasons. Let's take the Coke Oven. The extra surface area is entirely unneeded. You only really need 3 contact points anyway. Or the classic multiblock of nuclear reactors, again only one contact point for power output. What those structures do over having a single block is that they are large and impressive looking, which gives them a certain aesthetic impact. A factory floor dominated by 2 coke ovens and a blast furnace looks MUCH MUCH different from a small processing line with 2 redstone furnaces and an induction smelter. Even the 'original' multiblock, the double chest, exists mostly as a way to show that it holds double the inventory space of a regular chest.

That's part of the "tiered progression" design philosophy. Early blocks are simple and small, but as you make later machines, even if it has the same general efficiency as an equivalent mass of smaller machines from a fuel/power (or power/output) ratio sense, it just looks bigger and more impressive.

If all you want is more surface area, you might as well just spam a bunch of smaller blocks and call it a day.
 
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Golrith

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Oh look, the words "End Game" got mentioned. Didn't know that Minecraft was a race with a finish line...

TE3 has basically evolved into it's own tech mod and power system. It shows what can be done. It'll be now down to other modders to expand on this solid foundation, just like they done with the other older tech mods.
This is a good thing. It gives a new environment for modders to play with.


Also, Dynamo's do have energy loss. They throttle down to 4rf/t when their buffer is full, but are still consuming fuel to do so. So, there is wastage. Oh look, just like BC machines that lots of people complain about. Sure, not as high as BC, but it's still there. Personally, I prefer having a loss at the machine end, not the power producing end. I'm hoping (read dreaming) that KL & team will have a config option to enable passive energy loss to all it's machines. It's too easy to create power when using automated farms (be it trees, biofuels, lava, etc).


TE3 doesn't need massive power generation. I'm running my base off 4 steam dynamos, when my base is idle, I'm using about 100rf/t, when all my machines (TE3, Mekanism, MFR at double power usage) are running, those 4 dynamo's can't provide enough energy. But it's very rare that all my machines are running (the power hogs are the MFR auto enchanter/disenchanter)

There are plans for machine upgrades in TE3 which will adjust power generation, usage, speed, etc, etc.
 

Revemohl

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I'll see if I can remember every possible way to generate RF.
  • Steam dynamo: needs furnace fuel or steam from an external mod
  • Magmatic dynamo: needs lava (why not drain the Nether dry and have infinite power for basically free) or other hot liquids, apparently only pyrotheum for now
  • Compression dynamo: needs liquefacted coal if all you have is TE, also accepts most combustion engine (BC) fuels
  • Reactant dynamo: needs liquid glowstone/redstone with TE alone and some other weird liquids from other mods; as well as sugar, Blaze powder or Ghast tears (probably a few more items as well)
  • (MFR) Bio-reactor: needs seeds, saplings, crops and whatever
  • (MFR) Steam reactor: needs steam from external mods and outputs as much as a steam dynamo, I don't get what's with it
  • (Ender IO) Photovoltaic cell: solar power
  • (Ender IO) Sterling something: needs furnace fuel
  • (Engineer's Toolbox) Hydrosomething: needs to be in a river, passive generation of RF
  • (ET) Solar panel: the sun again, will be nerfed soon
  • (ET) Piezoeletric panel: needs entities stepping on it
  • (Gascraft) Gas generator or something: needs hydrogen, which you make by photosynthesizing algae or something like that; or natural gas that you get by fracking and I think there's something else as well
  • (Big Reactors) ...Big Reactor: needs yellorium or that other blue recycled thing, flavor name for radioactive stuff
  • (Extra Utilities) a ton of generators: to be released soon, they use a lot of different things
  • (Extra Utilities) pretty much anything that outputs MJ: just put an energy node in front of it and it gets converted to RF
  • (ET again) MJ/EU converters: same thing, now powered by IC2 as well
  • (Power Converters) guess what
Probably forgot some things that aren't too obscure because I got tired of thinking.
Even TE alone gives you plenty of options, and I'm thankful to KL for not making the dynamos too heavily tiered or something (although I guess there is some kind of progression, since usually you'll start with a steam dynamo before realizing how much coal it uses and moving to something else). Isn't freedom to do whatever you want the entire basis of RF anyway?
 
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