Unique Energy, Your Set-Ups and Plans.

[Moezso]

In my new world I'll be starting soon (just working out some stuff in the configs to fix my needs [increasing redstone height spawn, etc]) I'll be going only MJ/Charge/Steam, no EU.

I haven't tried it out yet but I'm thinking about going more of a wood/sawdust powered energy line with maybe a bit of steam. What's the easiest way to get a little bit of steam? I've never done it, again, and I just don't want it to explode on me and wreck my base.

A small boiler or power converters, only ways I know of to get steam. Boilers are safe as long as they have water. An aqueous accumulator will make plenty for even the biggest boiler, so a small one shouldn't be a worry. I myself have never seen a boiler explode.

Edit: I just blew up a 1lp boiler to see how big a crater it made, about the size of a creeper hole, a little deeper though. Heating a 8lp now to see if it's bigger.

 

[QuantumPugilist]

I've been powering my current world entirely from bees. EU from energetic bees (they cause lightning) and a bio-generator filling honey crystals; MJ from fuel bees. I'm even doing biomass from fruity bees (juice), fungal (mushrooms) and/or rural/farmed bees (wheat/plantballs), and spoiled bees (compost).

 

[JDGBOLT]

One chain I've been trying to get is boilers powered by a nitro-coalfuel setup powered with AE and a T5 wither skeleton and enderman spawner. You can actually get quite a bit of energy from it, but it is kind of fiddly with the times that each of the machines take and everything else.

 

[DoctorOr]

I can beat your zombie spawner hands down. Witches.
Spider eyes have the same conversion to methane as rotten flesh, and using the anvil getting a tier5 spawner is trivial.
You can even use transformation powder on a skeleton druid in the twilight forest to turn it into a witch to start the whole thing off.

Plus it drops redstone, glowstone, gunpowder, sticks, and glass bottles. Healing potions as well if you kill with turtles

There is, however, a bonus:
Get a Tome of Alkahesh (easy enough, just needs one wither head and some junk)

Setup a fabricator for Tome + Clay block + 1 Redstone. Which makes 2 clay blocks profit. (And no, it doesn't use up the tome)
Pipe redstone in and clay out however you want.
Pulverize/macerate clay block
Electrolyze clay dust. Takes 8 dust, 5 empty cells, 10k EU and a measly 10 seconds.
Lithium cell: 60k EU or 24k heat in a boiler.
Sodium cells: 30k EU each, total 60k EU (Does not work in a boiler)

The aluminium and silicon cell are waste products. Do what you will with them.

Semi fluid generators are low output, only 8EU/t, so you need 16 just to make 128EU/t, but they're also cheap. Just a generator and aluminium (you'll have lots, after all) two base circuits, and one hardened glass from TE.

The above works on 1.4.7 Ultimate. It won't work on 1.5.1.

Alternative method:
Tome + Redstone + Soul Sand makes four soul sand profit
16 Soul Sand in a centrifuge, 12,500 EU in 125 seconds.
Produces one cell of oil. Process it like any other infinite oil source.
Waste products of Coal dust if you need diamonds, and Saltpeter dust if you're into forestry multiblocks.

 

[netmc]

I have used sugar cane -> plantballs -> compressed plantballs -> biocell -> ic2 biofuel -> diesel generator

I have about 3/4 of a max size old sugar cane farm on xycraft soil. I am running 3 compressors, 1 canning machine, 2 extractors and 2 diesel generators. this feeds my small AE network. (only 15 energy units) I have some extra eu that feeds the other machines as needed.

I also have a cobble gen -> sand -> glass -> glass bottles -> water bottles -> water mills. (2eu/tick each)

I am running 12 mills in my current setup with the limiting factor being the glass production.

 

[Chocorate]

I am running 12 mills in my current setup with the limiting factor being the glass production.

I commend you. This is pretty unusual.

 

[biomirth]

Turtle on fir trees. Tree in a water box lined with sulfur torches. Sulfur Goo --> chest --> turtle: uses as bonemeal . This makes so much charcoal and biomass it is unbelievable. 1 turtle is running 3 36 HP charcoal boilers and 2 36 HP biogas boilers and I run the turtle only for a few hours a day, every other day. Otherwise I'd just spew charcoal everywhere.

The fermenters are supplied with mulch from wheat from a golem wheat farm below the fir tree on xycraft soil.

Fir trees have the interesting property that they'll grow even if there are still leaves above them meaning that the wood production often far surpasses the sapling production.

The code I'm working with is just slightly altered Ultimate Wood Chopper (computercraft site), but any repeating 2x2 tree chopping program could be made to work.

 

[DoctorOr]

I also have a cobble gen -> sand -> glass -> glass bottles -> water bottles -> water mills. (2eu/tick each)

Did you find some mod to disable buckets in your world?

 

[abculatter_2]

Couple ideas;

1. Try centrifuging either mycelium. Mycelium would be best and is actually the easiest to set up sustainably, since it can be made from wheat, seeds, water and darkness in a forestry moistener. This yields 2 of each kind of mushroom, 1 clay, and some sand from every 8 mycelium, mushrooms can be fermented while the clay can be macerated at a block then electrolyzed for aluminium, lithium, and sodium. Oh, and you'll also get a LOT of mulch from the moisteners as a by-product as well.
This mulch can then be turned into bog earth, which can be quite effectively farmed by a digging turtle to yield peat and dirt from the sand and mulch by-products. I unfortunately have not actually made this program yet, but I know it's perfectly possible to do. (You can silk touch matured bog earth, by the way) Most of the dirt should be used to make more bog earth, though the excess can be centrifuged for plantballs, more clay, and more sand.

2. You can also try burning scrap or scrap boxes in steam boilers. A very useful hint is that, because of how IC2 rounds EU use, you can use 1 overclocker in a recycler and actually use LESS energy to go faster, and using two overclockers makes it double in speed for double the energy cost.

3. Auto-harvest stickreeds for sticky resin, then centrifuge it for plantballs and rubber. Scrap the rubber for fertilizer and mass fabrication, and burn the plantballs as IC2 biofuel in diesel generators.
The above is also quite effective if you use a GT sawmill with any kind of rubberwood. This yields one resin and 16 saw dust per block of wood.

 

[DoctorOr]

3. Auto-harvest stickreeds for sticky resin, then centrifuge it for plantballs and rubber. Scrap the rubber for fertilizer and mass fabrication, and burn the plantballs as IC2 biofuel in diesel generators.
The above is also quite effective if you use a GT sawmill with any kind of rubberwood. This yields one resin and 16 saw dust per block of wood.

Why would you do that instead of growing rubber trees (preferably in a MFR planter/harvester/fertilizer setup) and centrifuging the wood for plantballs, more resin than your sawmill and methane. You can then centrifuge the resin again if you're so inclined.

 

[Mash]

Why would you do that instead of growing rubber trees (preferably in a MFR planter/harvester/fertilizer setup) and centrifuging the wood for plantballs, more resin than your sawmill and methane. You can then centrifuge the resin again if you're so inclined.

Why would someone use a zombie juicer instead of solar panels?

Because they can.

 

[DoctorOr]

Why would someone use a zombie juicer instead of solar panels?

Because they can.

Because using solar panels is admitting that you suck at IC2.

 

[netmc]

Did you find some mod to disable buckets in your world?

No. IC2 recently changed the watermill. If you use buckets (or anything that returns the container), you only get 1eu/tick in the watermill. If you use something that is consumed, you get 2eu/tick. Consumable containers include water bottles, water capsules, water cans and cells (although not worth the tin).

Spoiler

The powered furnace is the slowest link in the chain. I can reliably keep 10 of the 12 watermills running all the time. If I add some extra glass to the fabricator from time to time, I can run all 12. I will probably redo this soon and use a couple blueletric furnaces instead.

 

[DoctorOr]

No. IC2 recently changed the watermill. If you use buckets (or anything that returns the container), you only get 1eu/tick in the watermill. If you use something that is consumed, you get 2eu/tick. Consumable containers include water bottles, water capsules, water cans and cells (although not worth the tin).

Curious, I just tested if wax capsules from bees wax works as a consumable water

It does.

 

[Mash]

Because using solar panels is admitting that you suck at IC2.

Maybe using rubber trees is admitting that you suck at IC2.

Because I say so and have the arbitrary authority to make such a ridiculous claim.

 

[hotblack desiato]

MFR has this automated fishing machine.

fish --> centrifuge --> methane --> gas turbine or boiler --> ??? --> profit

 

[abculatter_2]

Why would you do that instead of growing rubber trees (preferably in a MFR planter/harvester/fertilizer setup) and centrifuging the wood for plantballs, more resin than your sawmill and methane. You can then centrifuge the resin again if you're so inclined.

Because that centrifuge recipe requires 16 blocks of rubber wood to make, and gives you;
1 methane (45,000 EU)
8 sticky resin (28 rubber (3.5 scrap on average) 4 plantballs (24,000EU))
6 plantballs (36,000 EU in IC2 biofuel)
4 carbon (net total of about 20,000 EU each, so 80,000 EU total)
Which is a grand total of 185,000 EU per 16 blocks of wood.
And, mind you, this requires completely dedicated compressors, canning machines, extractors, diesel generators, gas turbines, chemical combiners, and industrial electrolyzers.
(I also did not factor in EU costs for anything other then the carbon cells, either)

However, with GREGTECH sawmills, you get 16 sawdust and 1 sticky resin per log, at the cost of 6,400 EU. Compressing 8 sawdust gives you a wood plates, which is basically charcoal for all burny purposes. This means that, even if all you did was chuck the wood plates into generators (which is the most inefficient thing you could possibly do, except maybe burn the sawdust directly) you would still get a profit of 1,600 EU per log, not including the .5 plantballs (which is something around 3,000 more EU) and 3.5 scrap from the sticky resin.
All while requiring sawmills, generators, compressors, canning machines, extractors, and diesel generators.
Burning the wood plates in a max-sized full-heat steam boiler, meanwhile, (like a sensible human being) would yield 28800 MJ. I can't remember exactly what the conversion ratio is for the magma crucibles > thermal gen conversion method is, but I do know that using lava fabricators instead would yield 36,000 EU, per log, not including the biofuel. Which makes it about 39,000 EU per log.
Multiply this by 16, and you get 624,000 EU this way, as opposed to 185,000 EU by simply centrifuging.

MFR has this automated fishing machine.
fish --> centrifuge --> methane --> gas turbine or boiler --> ??? --> profit

MFR fisheries are too energy-intensive for that to be profitable. You end up loosing energy in the end.

 

[whythisname]

No. IC2 recently changed the watermill. If you use buckets (or anything that returns the container), you only get 1eu/tick in the watermill. If you use something that is consumed, you get 2eu/tick. Consumable containers include water bottles, water capsules, water cans and cells (although not worth the tin).

Spoiler

View attachment 3618

The powered furnace is the slowest link in the chain. I can reliably keep 10 of the 12 watermills running all the time. If I add some extra glass to the fabricator from time to time, I can run all 12. I will probably redo this soon and use a couple blueletric furnaces instead.

You should try the Rotary Macerator and Induction furnace, they're really fast and really energy efficient and can run of the power your Mills produce. I once built a setup with hundreds of Mills "burning" water bottles in Creative and it scaled quite nicely.

Here are some screens of it: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qe47p826lkjyssy/ZaDxQDAyI5

I made the setup more modular as well in the end, but the world got corrupted.

 

[abculatter_2]

You should try the Rotary Macerator and Induction furnace, they're really fast and really energy efficient and can run of the power your Mills produce. I once built a setup with hundreds of Mills "burning" water bottles in Creative and it scaled quite nicely.

Here are some screens of it: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qe47p826lkjyssy/ZaDxQDAyI5

I made the setup more modular as well in the end, but the world got corrupted.

Ahhh, I remember designing similar systems...
If I remember correctly, the numbers are 4 extruders per rotary macerator, with 2 macerators per induction furnace (they both go the same speed, but the furnace smelts 2 at a time)
These 12 machines (plus a fabricator and a router or two) are, I think, capable of maintaining 125 watermills, producing 250 eu/t in total at the cost of 16 * 3 = 48 eu/t.
So basically 200 eu/t forever, at the cost of space.

 

[Maul_Junior]

Maybe using rubber trees is admitting that you suck at IC2.

Because I say so and have the arbitrary authority to make such a ridiculous claim.

Using IC2 is admitting you suck at IC2

/thread



figured I'd take this to the logical conclusion, and spare you folks some time.