[Tutorial] How To Get Lots Of Redstone Energy (MJ) Early

[Jijeras97]

In this tutorial you will be taught how to get lots of redstone energy from Thermal Expansion. If you don't know how to start from scratch, please look at this thread: http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/guide-thermal-expansion-for-newbies.4219/

Once you get the picture that the poster of that thread mentioned (thanks to him) and you make the Magma Crucible and the Liquid Transposer, here's how to start. I personally like redstone energy which is Buildcraft Energy with is MJ. Then later on, EU.

Engines. As a start, use Steam Engines to power your Magma Crucible and your Liquid Transposer, I prefer 3 at the most. And the T.E Steam Engines.
Minerals. Get lots of iron and redstone. At the most, 2 stacks of redstone. Thats really all you need at the moment. Mine as much lead and gold as possible. Some diamonds, too.
If you have went to the Nether and have not found a nether fortress, collect soul sand and netherrack and throw in one soul sand and 4 netherrack to an Induction Smelter to make 2 nether brick which is used to make the Magma Crucible.

The power producing is mainly Combustion Engines. And you need fuel for that. Yeah. You need to find an oil well.
If the oil well is far from your house, craft Ender Tanks to transport the liquid from one ender tank to another. You should need about 3 Combustion Engines. Probably the most important part is to make some Hardened Glass for the Redstone Energy Cell and the Conduits. If you want to get a headstart with the Steam Engines, produce some Molten Redstone now.

Find an oil well. If you have experience using Buildcraft Pumps, then you know what to do. If you don't, craft a Pump and 4 Redstone engines to pump it. Place the pump a block over the source block of the oil. Most oil wells on the surface extend down to a cave or an underground oil well. Then, setup a little bit of golden waterproof pipes leading to the Ender Tank. If you don't know how to use those, right click the little circle in the middle. I'm pretty sure the Blue is to send and the orange is to receive. If I'm wrong please correct me.

Place the ender tank where your working room is. In my survival I have a basement under my T.E machines for engines and such. So, you would place the Ender Tank right next to a Refinery. It is made with 3 tanks, a diamond, and 2 redstone torches. This also needs power. Note, if you have already made the Combustion Engines, you may use the raw oil for now until you have enough buildcraft energy to power the Refinery, because thats what I did.

Lead the waterproof pipes to the Combustion Engines and let it fill up with oil. The most important part is the temperature. Without water it will explode massively. For this, craft an Aqueous Accumulator. Place that in the middle of water and some waterproof pipes exporting it out to the Combustion Engines. If the oil well is far from your home, place a chunk loader.

Now, apply a redstone signal to the Combustion engines pumping through Conductive pipes (until you have conduits) to the machines and it should be receiving nice amount of power. Raw oil is 3 MJ per tick and Fuel which comes from the Refinery is 6 MJ per tick. 6 x 3 = 18 MJ for the Crucible alone while its working.

Make some Hardened Glass with Pulverized Obsidian and Lead. Make Electrum Ingots which you just throw in a gold ingot and lead in an Induction Smelter to get 2 Electrum Ingots to make the Empty Conduits. Start melting some redstone in the Magma Crucible. Please note you need a Liquid Transposer next to it or you cannot fill up the cell or the conduits. To transfer, go to the config settings in the Crucible (IN THE GAME!) and set the output (orange) to the right side and for the Liquid Transposer set the input to the left side (blue).

Once you have atleast over a quarter of molten redstone, throw in some Conduits. They should fill up with no problem consuming 50 mB of molten redstone. Now, go back to the work room and replace all the energy conductors with conduits.
NOTE: IF YOU MISPLACE A FILLED CONDUIT, SHIFT RIGHT CLICK WITH A WRENCH TO GET THE FILLED ONE BACK.
The conduits should conduct the power produced by the Combustion Engines. Get your wrench and right click the arrows on the conduits to orange so it would output power.

Good! Now you have energy conduits, Combustion Engines for better power, now, you would now make the Redstone Energy Cell! This can store 600k Minecraft Joules produced by the Engines. And it's portable!

Make 4 Electrum Ingots and 4 Hardened Glass. When you make those, put 4 Electrum on the corners of the crafting table, Hardened Glass in a diamond shape and a diamond in the middle, and you get a Energy Cell Frame. These are not placeable in the world. Throw it in to a Liquid Transposer and it will fill up in about 10-20 seconds. If you don't have enough molten redstone it will not fill up.

When it fills up, it is still not placeable in the world. Why? You need to make it to a Redstone Energy CELL.
Make 4 electrum ingots, one for the Conductance coil with redstone and 3 in the recipe. Grab two lead, and here's the recipe:
[_]E[_]
E F E
L RC L
Legend: E = Electrum Ingot
F = Redstone Energy Frame (FULL)
L = Lead
RC = Conductance coil

There you go! You have made the Redstone Energy Cell! Now that is placeable.
Go to your working room and place it in between the line through the machines and where the Combustion Engines are pumping (remove one conduit). Now it should be gathering power! You could adjust how much power it gets and how much power it lets out.

When you have the ingredients to make a refinery, connect more conduits from the Redstone Energy Cell to the Refinery.
Try to atleast wait for the raw oil to get used by the Combustion Engines or just break them and place it again. The refinery should start getting oil from the Ender Tank and start working. To output the fuel, place a wooden waterproof pipe with an engine/gate to power it leading to the Combustion Engines, and whala! You got fresh fuel which produces 6 Minecraft Joules per tick.

And there you go! You should be able to keep the machines powered when they work because of the power used by the Energy Cell than straight from the Conduit. You could make more conduits and run more line to Forestry Machines to power your forestry farms and quarries.

I hope this guide has helped alot of newbies who have been struggling with Thermal Expansion power. I too, was struggling, but applied the process of trial and error. You try something and it goes wrong, learn from your mistakes and think about common sense. As always, keep a backup of your world!

Feedback would be appreciated as it took time to type this all! Here is a picture of my working room and the pump (My base is practically a 9x9x6, which is a Direwolf base, heh).

 

[Harvest88]

Why not be more eco friendly? Just fire up a small LP boiler on a small MFR tree farm and bam power you won't have to worry about fossil fuels again.

 

[Jijeras97]

Why not be more eco friendly? Just fire up a small LP boiler on a small MFR tree farm and bam power you won't have to worry about fossil fuels again.

I should really try this.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Better idea:

MFR's Bio Reactor and Bio Generator. 16 MJ/t and runs off of seeds and saplings. More different types of seeds and saplings means more efficiency. Set up a couple of tree farms (oak, birch, and pine all do well), and a couple of other types of cropping (potatoes, carrots, seeds, and barley seeds all work), and set up the auto-feed.

Requires less infrastructure, does not require diamonds (the refinery requires a Diamond GEAR, not a Diamond... that's four of them), does not require endertanks or liquid tesseracts. and can be set up early-game.

 

[Dravarden]

is called minecraft joules not redstone energy.

 

[AliveGhost]

An ender tank is the opposite of what you said; orange to output, blue for input.

Sent from my HTC Desire X using Tapatalk 2

 

[Hydra]

is called minecraft joules not redstone energy.

That. And aside from this, going for fuel power is hardly considered "early" power since you need to refine the oil into fuel AND make sure your combustion engines don't blow up. Aside from that stuff like ender tanks are pretty expensive and take a long time to set up.

Early on it's much simpler just to go for a bunch of hobbyist steam engines powered by charcoal. They are very efficient. You can also easily scale this up to a steam boiler if you have a proper wood farm working.

 

[Jijeras97]

Better idea:

MFR's Bio Reactor and Bio Generator. 16 MJ/t and runs off of seeds and saplings. More different types of seeds and saplings means more efficiency. Set up a couple of tree farms (oak, birch, and pine all do well), and a couple of other types of cropping (potatoes, carrots, seeds, and barley seeds all work), and set up the auto-feed.

Requires less infrastructure, does not require diamonds (the refinery requires a Diamond GEAR, not a Diamond... that's four of them), does not require endertanks or liquid tesseracts. and can be set up early-game.

Isn't that what Direwolf made?

 

[giesergast]

no its not

 

[RedBoss]

is called minecraft joules not redstone energy.

That made me barely skim that wall of text.

 

[gattsuru]

MFR's Bio Reactor and Bio Generator. 16 MJ/t and runs off of seeds and saplings. More different types of seeds and saplings means more efficiency. Set up a couple of tree farms (oak, birch, and pine all do well), and a couple of other types of cropping (potatoes, carrots, seeds, and barley seeds all work), and set up the auto-feed.

Requires less infrastructure, does not require diamonds (the refinery requires a Diamond GEAR, not a Diamond... that's four of them), does not require endertanks or liquid tesseracts. and can be set up early-game.

And if you're going biofuel/ethanol and don't have MineFactory Reloaded, it's still more efficient to set up a batch of Fermenters and Stills, which still don't require diamonds /and/ are more efficient with biofuel than a Refinery. The refinery only makes sense for oil, and barely for that -- even hand-feeding a chunk worth of wheat into the Fermenter is a lot more reliable mid-game than trying to find enough oil and set up infrastructure without a creeper deciding to level your short-term base.

Early on, a battery of steam engines running on charcoal (or, if you've got a use for Creosote Oil, coke coal) won't be winning any speed awards, but they'll get the job done, are quick to warm up for on/off power, and require significantly fewer resources to keep stocked.

 

[dgdas9]

If you have datcraf, you can have a force engine running out of water at 2mj per tick...

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Isn't that what Direwolf made?

Not unless you are talking about his MFR three-part spotlight.

Forestry is what DW20 used in his last series, for Biofuel. It requires a Fermentor and Stills to produce the Biofuel (now Ethanol) to put in his Steam Boiler.

MFR only requires a single block that doesn't need any power to produce biofuel, but you will need multiple different types of items if you want to get anywhere close to resource efficiency. And the produce can go straight into a Steam Boiler's Liquid Fueled Firebox.

The Bio-Generator is probably too powerful. I'm strongly considering removing it by default in the ShneekeyCraft mod pack (setting it to ID 0 ought to do the trick if there isn't a config option to remove it). 16 MJ/t is the most I've seen out of a single engine, and it doesn't require a whole lot to get going. It's decidedly superior to a boiler, which means it is probably over the top.

 

[Peppe]

Not unless you are talking about his MFR three-part spotlight.

Forestry is what DW20 used in his last series, for Biofuel. It requires a Fermentor and Stills to produce the Biofuel (now Ethanol) to put in his Steam Boiler.

MFR only requires a single block that doesn't need any power to produce biofuel, but you will need multiple different types of items if you want to get anywhere close to resource efficiency. And the produce can go straight into a Steam Boiler's Liquid Fueled Firebox.

The Bio-Generator is probably too powerful. I'm strongly considering removing it by default in the ShneekeyCraft mod pack (setting it to ID 0 ought to do the trick if there isn't a config option to remove it). 16 MJ/t is the most I've seen out of a single engine, and it doesn't require a whole lot to get going. It's decidedly superior to a boiler, which means it is probably over the top.

Bio-Generator is pretty well balanced. Of the three MJ options it has the highest output and lowest efficiency. Depending on the recipe set you use it may be too cheap, but vanilla recipes for most of MFR are very cheap for what they do.

Efficiency per bucket
Biogen, 1 bucket of biofuel = 160k mj.
Combustion Engine, 1 bucket = 200k mj.
Boiler, 1 bucket ~290k mj.

If you power them with a bio-reactor constantly running you get a bucket every 1000 ticks. So you can run:
10 Bio generators (1 bucket runs 10k ticks).
40 Combustion engines (1 bucket runs 40k ticks).
2 36 Tank HP Boilers (1 bucket runs ~2k ticks)

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Bio-Generator is pretty well balanced. Of the three MJ options it has the highest output and lowest efficiency. Depending on the recipe set you use it may be too cheap, but vanilla recipes for most of MFR are very cheap for what they do.

Efficiency per bucket
Biogen, 1 bucket of biofuel = 160k mj.
Combustion Engine, 1 bucket = 200k mj.
Boiler, 1 bucket ~290k mj.

If you power them with a bio-reactor constantly running you get a bucket every 1000 ticks. So you can run:
10 Bio generators (1 bucket runs 10k ticks).
40 Combustion engines (1 bucket runs 40k ticks).
2 36 Tank HP Boilers (1 bucket runs ~2k ticks)

Here's the problem with that...

Let's look at Steam vs Biogen, because combustion engines are just going to get curb-stomped no matter what metric we use

First off, it's trivially easy to set up multiple bio reactors. They're stupidly inexpensive, and run off of things that you will have coming out of your ears, particularly if you have more than four different types of items being fed into your bio reactor.

A 36 HP Boiler + 18 Industrial Steam Engines is not inexpensive. That's 72 steel plates for the boiler, plus another 54 for the engines, and 36 steel GEARS.

The only thing bio-generators will cost you are blaze rods, which are farmable.

9 Bio Reactors will produce as much EU/t as a 36 HP Boiler and 14 Industrial Steam Engines. So you've got a smaller footprint just looking at the engines themsevles, completely omitting the boiler.

Now let's look at the startup costs. The boiler starts off hugely inefficient. It takes *HOURS* for it to heat up to optimal temperature. Until it hits that, Bio Generators are actually the more fuel efficient method. Furthermore, Bio Generators can produce 'On Demand' power, meaning when you don't have power draw, they won't suck up fuel. So the Bio Generators are, in most games, going to actually end up being the more fuel efficient means, simply because it likely won't be running at least half the time, unless you have a system which is constantly sucking down 144+ MJ/t nonstop.

 

[Peppe]

Here's the problem with that...

Let's look at Steam vs Biogen, because combustion engines are just going to get curb-stomped no matter what metric we use

First off, it's trivially easy to set up multiple bio reactors. They're stupidly inexpensive, and run off of things that you will have coming out of your ears, particularly if you have more than four different types of items being fed into your bio reactor.

A 36 HP Boiler + 18 Industrial Steam Engines is not inexpensive. That's 72 steel plates for the boiler, plus another 54 for the engines, and 36 steel GEARS.

The only thing bio-generators will cost you are blaze rods, which are farmable.

9 Bio Reactors will produce as much EU/t as a 36 HP Boiler and 14 Industrial Steam Engines. So you've got a smaller footprint just looking at the engines themsevles, completely omitting the boiler.

Now let's look at the startup costs. The boiler starts off hugely inefficient. It takes *HOURS* for it to heat up to optimal temperature. Until it hits that, Bio Generators are actually the more fuel efficient method. Furthermore, Bio Generators can produce 'On Demand' power, meaning when you don't have power draw, they won't suck up fuel. So the Bio Generators are, in most games, going to actually end up being the more fuel efficient means, simply because it likely won't be running at least half the time, unless you have a system which is constantly sucking down 144+ MJ/t nonstop.

On bio-fuel after a while it does not matter if you are wasting fuel to keep a boiler hot or not wasting fuel with smart MFR generators or toggling combustion engines. If you stop using fuel your farmables will pile up and you will eventually either start incinerating them or use deep storage and never use the farmables anyway.

Bio-generator is nice, but when you start looking at running a mining laser the MJ/t efficiency of combustion or boilers becomes worth it. I tried to go pure bio-generators for my base and retired them after 40 to run just HP boilers. Actually added a few reactors to run more boilers and now run four MFR Mining Lasers at max speed (~420MJ/t) with some MJ to spare to run the rest of the base.

I have run combustion as an end-game power in another world and when you need that extra efficiency over the bio-generators it can be worth it. After settings up and heating up almost 16 boilers in my latest world I think I will go 1-2 bio-generators to start a world and go back to combustion engines for endgame MJ. In SSP anything that makes me want to idle the world in the background isn't very compelling gameplay.

My personal pack runs MFR in the Thermal Expansion recipe mode, so every MFR machine has a iron+gold cost (TE machine block + Coil). That gold cost become a limiting factor on setting up/expanding my factory. Though even in TE mode I'd call all the MFR blocks very cost efficient. If you use vanilla recipes every block is stupid effective for what it costs. Don't know how you can single out the bio-reactor/generator recipes as too cheap for what they do when every block in MFR is powerful and does its job well at almost no cost with vanilla recipes.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

On bio-fuel after a while it does not matter if you are wasting fuel to keep a boiler hot or not wasting fuel with smart MFR generators or toggling combustion engines. If you stop using fuel your farmables will pile up and you will eventually either start incinerating them or use deep storage and never use the farmables anyway.

Bio-generator is nice, but when you start looking at running a mining laser the MJ/t efficiency of combustion or boilers becomes worth it. I tried to go pure bio-generators for my base and retired them after 40 to run just HP boilers. Actually added a few reactors to run more boilers and now run four MFR Mining Lasers at max speed (~420MJ/t) with some MJ to spare to run the rest of the base.

There's either a typo here, or some math is wrong. 40 * 16 = 640 MJ/t. So you already had some 200 MJ/t MORE than you got from your boilers, then spontaneously decided to dump all that steel into a project which was -less- efficient?

I have run combustion as an end-game power in another world and when you need that extra efficiency over the bio-generators it can be worth it. After settings up and heating up almost 16 boilers in my latest world I think I will go 1-2 bio-generators to start a world and go back to combustion engines for endgame MJ. In SSP anything that makes me want to idle the world in the background isn't very compelling gameplay.

Combustion engines running on biofuel only produce 5 MJ/t, Bio Generators produce 16 MJ/t. You would need just over three combustion engines per Bio Generator, plus pipe in water for coolant, which means an Aqueous Accumulator and some liquiducts. The Bio Reactors are cheaper, more productive, and as you just said... you're going to have biofuel coming out of your ears anyways.

My personal pack runs MFR in the Thermal Expansion recipe mode, so every MFR machine has a iron+gold cost (TE machine block + Coil). That gold cost become a limiting factor on setting up/expanding my factory. Though even in TE mode I'd call all the MFR blocks very cost efficient. If you use vanilla recipes every block is stupid effective for what it costs. Don't know how you can single out the bio-reactor/generator recipes as too cheap for what they do when every block in MFR is powerful and does its job well at almost no cost with vanilla recipes.

Even with the 4 iron and 1 gold cost (plus one silver for the coil), it's much better than a stack and a half of steel for the boiler, and another couple stacks for the engines.

I'm not singling out the Bio Reactor, just the Bio Generator for producing stupid amounts of MJ out of what you feed it. I've dialed it back to 6 MJ/t, which is still probably on the high end, but at least it is now more sane.

 

[gattsuru]

The low cost of biofuel from the bio reactor does have an impact on the overall balance -- if you needed to configure twenty stills or forty refineries, they'd make the biogen's inefficiency much more relevant. Contrasted with the refinery or still, the bioreactor's doing far too much for far too little, most obvious given that the thing can outperform any pipe attached to it. Not as badly as the biogen, but still significant.

 

[buggirlexpres]

Here's how you get lots of power starting off: Clockwork Engines!

 

[RedBoss]

Here's how you get lots of power starting off: Clockwork Engines!

If you have the gold for those, you're better off making hobbyist steam engines