Those little things that irk you about Minecraft

[Greystoke]

Actually, i don't mind the various stone types. What I mind is them taking up more than one inventory slot.

What I'd like is ... get ready for this ... **BACKPACKS** that actually work!

Have you ever used the forestry backpacks? In theory, one backpack holds all the blocks of one type. My original plan was to have all those stone types, and use backpacks, so that instead of taking up lots and lots of space, it would still only take up one slot.

So what went wrong?

1. Forestry backpacks are horrible for determining what they can hold for modded stuff. I can't really blame forestry. I cannot believe that there (apparently) *still* is no consistent way for items to be grouped/classed for this type of behavior.

2. BLEEPING BLEEPING BLEEPEDNESS of saying that the normal backpacks only hold a tiny number of slots, and you need advanced forestry activity before you can make a halfway decent sized backpack.

Seriously, with other backpack mods making a backpack equal to a double chest, and these are how small?

3. Horribly UI for getting something out of a backpack and into another inventory, or even just accessing the backpack and your own inventory at the same time. Yea, in general, needing to access the player inventory, and two other inventories (one carried, one in-world, or two different carried) is another thing that *should be a common, forge-provided GUI setup given how many items have inventories and the user sanity factor*.

4. Heck, you can't even easily switch between backpacks to examine their contents. First, a backpack has to be in your hand to open (you can't access them from the inventory screen); second, you can't move a pack into your inventory from the hotbar while open; third, you have to close out, select the other pack, and then open that.

Nice idea(*), but the logistics made it unworkable in practice.

5. Forestry only allows for one single user-defined pack.

6. I actually talked with a modder about making a backpack mod, that could fill in / improve the forestry ones. Independent of forestry. The idea being that it would use the same API, but instead of being backed by the forestry packs, it would be backed by this different mod. So the problem?

Turns out that as far as Forge is concerned, the backpacks are *Forestry*, and it is impossible for another mod to implement the API without calling itself Forestry. (Primarily the IMC messages to register backpack information). There either is no way for an API to exist outside of the mod implementing it, or else Forestry never used that.

So, no concept of "this mod implements a better version of this API".


(*): I really wanted to be able to have lots of different materials to build with.

The Iron Backpacks mod by Gr8pefish (?) sounds like it fits your backpack wishlist. Four different tiers of backpacks with increasing levels of capacity, mod slots to add item/mod type filters, auto-crafting functionality, and even the capability to access nested inventories; backpacks stored inside other backpacks. Played one mod pack that had this mod installed, it rapidly became indispensable.

 

[keybounce]

Actually, backpacks inside backpacks is the kind of abuse that I want to avoid. That's the "nearly infinite inventory" issue.

1. There is a config file that makes it very easy to add new items to the backpacks. If they dont accept items, then you can blame the modpack makers for not configuring it properly.

How many mods actually have a list of what they add? How much are you expected to check out of a mod before you know what is in it?

Heck, what about mods that deliberately hide part of what they have for you to learn through playing?

Assume that "Forestry" was not already supported by backpacks, and you wanted to add it to the lumber backpack. Got a list of the woods that it adds anywhere?

Yes, Oredict support gets 50-75% of blocks without any effort. Tracking down what it does not, and then having to stop, edit, restart a server every time you find another block becomes super annoying super fast, and it's worse when you are not the server operator, but just a player.

2. "Advanced forestry"? All you need is to go get some Tropical bees in a jungle(no breeding required, Ignoble bees will do fine for several backpacks), stick them in an Apiary(you can steal those in a village). And then build a Centrifuge for the combs. And you are done.

I had not found a village apiary. (That's the mid-level beehive, right?). I didn't even realize that an "entry-level" bee would do it, but in fairness, 1.7 makes jungles too hard to find and too big once you do find them. (i.e.: that may have worked fine up to 164, but it's no longer easy anymore).

You do make it sound much easier than it seemed when I was trying to backtrack recipes in NEI to understand what I needed to do.

 

[Greystoke]

Actually, backpacks inside backpacks is the kind of abuse that I want to avoid. That's the "nearly infinite inventory" issue.

That's just one of the Iron Backpack upgrade options, others do include one-click dump to inventories like chests or Drawers, as well as the option to only insert in an inventory if it has a matching block to what's in your backpack. Quite flexible, and the upgrade/functionality path is nicely scaled in terms of required resources. IMHO, of course.

 

[keybounce]

Good. Got link?

 

[Greystoke]

Good. Got link?

https://github.com/gr8pefish/IronBackpacks

 

[keybounce]

Thanks

 

[malicious_bloke]

Be me.
Be setting up a shaft power bus chain.
Notice that the power output i'm trying to optimise is starting to drop.
Look over at turbine and see it's slowing down and then stopping.
Check steam line with angular transducer and see the reactor isn't producing much, if anything all of a sudden.

Conclude that it just needs more neutrons, swap out uranium pellets for the new plutonium I haven't got round to using just yet.

Still no more steam produced.

Scratch head.

Then notice that a couple of the fuel cores have depleted pellets and waste that hasn't been extracted by Colin.

Fix missing channels in ME setup, watch waste get sucked out of cores, then turn round and get a nuclear meltdown in the face.

Plutonium goes from 0-OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE in under 30 seconds O_O

 

[Someone Else 37]

Be me.
Be setting up a shaft power bus chain.
Notice that the power output i'm trying to optimise is starting to drop.
Look over at turbine and see it's slowing down and then stopping.
Check steam line with angular transducer and see the reactor isn't producing much, if anything all of a sudden.

Conclude that it just needs more neutrons, swap out uranium pellets for the new plutonium I haven't got round to using just yet.

Still no more steam produced.

Scratch head.

Then notice that a couple of the fuel cores have depleted pellets and waste that hasn't been extracted by Colin.

Fix missing channels in ME setup, watch waste get sucked out of cores, then turn round and get a nuclear meltdown in the face.

Plutonium goes from 0-OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE in under 30 seconds O_O

Yeah, plutonium has an annoying tendency to burn faster the hotter it gets... or maybe that was breeders; I don't remember off the top of my head. At any rate, control rods and lots of spare boilers are your friends.

 

[malicious_bloke]

Yeah, plutonium has an annoying tendency to burn faster the hotter it gets... or maybe that was breeders; I don't remember off the top of my head. At any rate, control rods and lots of spare boilers are your friends.

Yeah i'll definitely need to tinker with my setup before I use it.

In the meanwhile, here's something i've been tinkering with in my test world to reduce wasting power.



What's coming out of my power bus is 4096Nm at 131072 rad/s (1/16th of the output from my Turbine)

This is way too much for a single dynamo. So I needed to subdivide it a wee bit...

 

[RavynousHunter]

Good god damn, dude. Why not just use a turbine generator? Though, I guess you'd need a setup like that if you want both shaft power and RF.

 

[malicious_bloke]

Good god damn, dude. Why not just use a turbine generator? Though, I guess you'd need a setup like that if you want both shaft power and RF.

That's basically it. I want to siphon off most of the power for extractors and borers etc and just have the small remainder for RF.

But yeah, that's just my test world, in my actual legit world I'll be using a second shaft power bus setup to split things down for the dynamos.

Still works out to be pretty mad. Upgraded rotational dynamos can accept 2048Nm @ 8192 rad/s. The HP turbine puts out 65536Nm @ 131072 rad/s.

Stepping down even 1/16th of that output to be accepted without loss by the dynamos gets pretty silly (32 in a nice tidy row )

 

[Someone Else 37]

That's basically it. I want to siphon off most of the power for extractors and borers etc and just have the small remainder for RF.

But yeah, that's just my test world, in my actual legit world I'll be using a second shaft power bus setup to split things down for the dynamos.

Still works out to be pretty mad. Upgraded rotational dynamos can accept 2048Nm @ 8192 rad/s. The HP turbine puts out 65536Nm @ 131072 rad/s.

Stepping down even 1/16th of that output to be accepted without loss by the dynamos gets pretty silly (32 in a nice tidy row )

You could send most of your steam into a turbine to produce shaft power for your extractors, then send the rest into another turbine with a turbine dynamo for RF-generating purposes. (is there a way to divide steam up like that? Not sure. Maybe the pipe pump can act as a sort of valve?)

Or just use Electricraft to split up the power however you want... but then again, you'd still have to turn it back into shaft power to run those dynamos. Hm.

 

[RavynousHunter]

Alas, ReactorCraft steam isn't, technically, a fluid; you can't, for example, transport it with RotaryCraft bedrock pipes, only steam lines carry it and they store volume (m^3) instead of pressure (kPa). Granted, that's a bit of an oversimplification, but the jist is the same, meaning pipe pumps and the like won't interface with steam lines. Only things other than HP turbines and steam grates they connect to, as fat as I know, are ChromatiCraft world rifts, and that's only for transport across long distances and/or dimensions.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

You could always run it all as Rf, and make use of the fully upgraded magnetostatic engines.

 

[malicious_bloke]

Alas, ReactorCraft steam isn't, technically, a fluid; you can't, for example, transport it with RotaryCraft bedrock pipes, only steam lines carry it and they store volume (m^3) instead of pressure (kPa). Granted, that's a bit of an oversimplification, but the jist is the same, meaning pipe pumps and the like won't interface with steam lines. Only things other than HP turbines and steam grates they connect to, as fat as I know, are ChromatiCraft world rifts, and that's only for transport across long distances and/or dimensions.

To the best of my knowledge this is true.

However the basic idea of having two turbines running off the same steam line is fairly standard. I'm just not sure my reactor can max two HP turbines out.

Could run the turbine generator off the unmaxed one just so I don't have to mess about with flywheels and the like.

You could always run it all as Rf, and make use of the fully upgraded magnetostatic engines.

tbh, I could. But at that point I get bottlenecked by the 20000-odd RF/t limit on enderIO conduits. I can abuse the lack of said limit for inputting power into a pylon direct via tesseract, but exporting it is a bit different...

 

[RavynousHunter]

Assuming you have ElectriCraft, you could make the RF transfer cables. They can transport any amount and are totally configurable, in that regard, no loss. Though, converting from RF in large amounts requires tremendous amounts of liquid nitrogen.

 

[Someone Else 37]

Alas, ReactorCraft steam isn't, technically, a fluid; you can't, for example, transport it with RotaryCraft bedrock pipes, only steam lines carry it and they store volume (m^3) instead of pressure (kPa). Granted, that's a bit of an oversimplification, but the jist is the same, meaning pipe pumps and the like won't interface with steam lines. Only things other than HP turbines and steam grates they connect to, as fat as I know, are ChromatiCraft world rifts, and that's only for transport across long distances and/or dimensions.

I thought the pipe pump was designed to suck steam out of ReC steam lines specifically. I could be wrong, of course, but if the pipe pump does work with steam lines, and the if rate at which it pumps steam depends on the shaft power fed into it and not how much steam is in the input pipe, then it could be used as a sort of valve to limit the amount of steam that passes through.

To the best of my knowledge this is true.

However the basic idea of having two turbines running off the same steam line is fairly standard. I'm just not sure my reactor can max two HP turbines out.

Could run the turbine generator off the unmaxed one just so I don't have to mess about with flywheels and the like.



tbh, I could. But at that point I get bottlenecked by the 20000-odd RF/t limit on enderIO conduits. I can abuse the lack of said limit for inputting power into a pylon direct via tesseract, but exporting it is a bit different...

You could use a low-pressure turbine to to power your RF stuff. They don't need or use as much steam as the HP turbines.

Also, AFAIK, the turbine flywheel is specifically meant for when you're using an LP turbine (or an unmaxed HP turbine) to run a generator from Electricraft, because ElC really wants its inputs and outputs to be very consistent, because whenever an input or output changes it recalculates the whole network and causes a bunch of lag. You shouldn't need it if you just want RF.

...oh, you're using EnderIO? That could be a problem. The turbine dynamo was designed with tesseracts in mind, which have infinite throughput, unlike EnderIO's alternatives. I mean, sure, you could probably set up a massive capacitor bank that has a high enough RF/tick/side to cope with a turbine... but if you don't have access to tesseracts (or at least cryo-stabilized fluxducts), you may well be better off with a gazillion shaft junctions and rotational dynamos.

 

[RavynousHunter]

I think you're thinking of another machine entirely, one that turns ReC steam into regular Railcraft steam (and only does so one-way). Again, I've not actually tested this, so I could well be wrong, but the only thing I know what pipe pumps work on are RotaryCraft fluid pipes. Though, a steam valve would probably be a neat thing to add, dunno if @Reika would go for it, though, since its uses would be fairly niche.

 

[Reika]

I think you're thinking of another machine entirely, one that turns ReC steam into regular Railcraft steam (and only does so one-way). Again, I've not actually tested this, so I could well be wrong, but the only thing I know what pipe pumps work on are RotaryCraft fluid pipes. Though, a steam valve would probably be a neat thing to add, dunno if @Reika would go for it, though, since its uses would be fairly niche.

No, it would not be worth the effort to implement.

 

[RavynousHunter]

Didn't think so, but figured it couldn't hurt to propose it.