What does YOUR Power Room look like?

[Omicron]

That looks neat! But how does it all work? What's the self-replicating mystery fuel you're using there?

EDIT: Too slow!

But honestly, magma crucibles aren't really a self-replicating, no-external-fuel system. At some point you need to supply netherrack, so netherrack becomes your fuel. It's an extremely plentiful and easy to acquire fuel, but nevertheless it must be gathered and supplied in some way.

 

[Meldiron]

I should have been clearer on that part
There are 9 magma crucibles in the pictures, 4 are for keeping the boiler warm, 5 are for lava production when needed.

 

[Meldiron]

But honestly, magma crucibles aren't really a self-replicating, no-external-fuel system. At some point you need to supply netherrack, so netherrack becomes your fuel. It's an extremely plentiful and easy to acquire fuel, but nevertheless it must be gathered and supplied in some way.

Nope, this system runs on cobblestone generated infenetly by igneous extruders.
There is no maintainance whatsoever, no filling of anything.

 

[SilvasRuin]

I think the crux of the setup, Omicron, is the steam boiler.

Boilers aren't quite a direct fuel to energy conversion. They work on a temperature mechanic. You know how engines have a warm up when initially turned on? The boilers have a gradual cool down after the fuel is used up as well. Basically more buckets of lava are able to be supplied, even by cobblestone, in time to keep its temperature high enough to continue providing a surplus of energy.

 

[Meldiron]

Actualy, at max temp on a max size boiler, 4 magma crucibles running on cobble is enough to keep the temperature at max.
No temperature fall or anything. It's infinite free power (at a rate of 72MJ/t).

 

[Evil Hamster]

Actualy, at max temp on a max size boiler, 4 magma crucibles running on cobble is enough to keep the temperature at max.
No temperature fall or anything. It's infinite free power (at a rate of 72MJ/t).

Looks like I have to go learn a few new machines. I've been focusing on solar panel - powered electric engines for my MJ up to this point. Upgrading the solar panels all to advanced at the moment and it's a pain, but worth it because I don't run out of power anymore if it rains first thing in the morning

I wouldn't even need to build a cobble generator, I'm getting so much overflow cobble from my quarry it's not funny...

 

[Omicron]

Ooooh right, the boilers return more than the standard 20k MJ per bucket. That's what I forgot. I should be ashamed, considering how I always go on about how much I like boilers

 

[Zelfana]

You'r looking at 72 maintainance free MJ/t.
It doesn't require refueling (it's selfrefueling), it's relatively small (the closest magma crusible cluster isn't a part of the power generation, it's just my on request lava production, the 4 in the back are all that's needed to keep it warm).
Trying my best to use up all that power but it's turning out to be hard.
Next stop is a no fuel boiler producing 100EU/T!

(also, what happened to the thumbnail feature?)

If you need an use for that power hook it up to a couple rock crushers and crush cobble to gravel to sand. You get flint, diamonds and gold nuggets as byproducts. That uses 30 MJ/t. The chances for diamonds and gold nuggets are low but the whole system doesn't need user input at all. You can pipe the sand for smelting or something, too. You could double that with your setup if you want.

 

[Meldiron]

If you need an use for that power hook it up to a couple rock crushers and crush cobble to gravel to sand. You get flint, diamonds and gold nuggets as byproducts. That uses 30 MJ/t. The chances for diamonds and gold nuggets are low but the whole system doesn't need user input at all. You can pipe the sand for smelting or something, too. You could double that with your setup if you want.

Thanks for the tip!
I've just found out how to get produce unlimited gold, iron, tin, sulphur and wolfram as well
By canning excess lava and running it trough an gregtech centrifuge i'll get back tin equal to the cost of the cans + 8, in addition to 4 gold bars, 1 wolfram and 32 pyrite (equal to 10 iron dust and 20 sulphur dust).
And with all my left over energy having been going to lava production am i currently swiming in the stuff! Figuratively
Time to set up more boilers!

 

[Bluehorazon]

I don't really care about it being maintainance-free... but it looks very clean and compact. My power-rooms or anything else normally looks like a mess, because I build first and think about it later

 

[NosajDraw]

Lava buckets filled by magma crucibles powered by the boiler itself (it consumes half of the 144MJ/T production to keep it heated)

What powers the boiler? I'm confused, Railcraft wiki says quite explicitly that lava is not an acceptable fuel for boilers and that that was a deliberate design decision.


Look at the liquid fuel valies

http://railcraft.wikispaces.com/Steam+Boiler+(Device)

 

[Bibble]

What powers the boiler? I'm confused, Railcraft wiki says quite explicitly that lava is not an acceptable fuel for boilers and that that was a deliberate design decision.

Lava is not, in the liquid fueled firebox. However, lava cells and buckets are fine in the solid-fueled firebox, because they are valid inputs to furnaces (the list from which most mods take their cues). I suspect that this might be removed later.

On the other hand, the hasstle of canning the lava, or removing the spent buckets might outweigh the need for it to be removed. You can't just pipe the lava in and leave it be.

 

[Meldiron]

On the other hand, the hasstle of canning the lava, or removing the spent buckets might outweigh the need for it to be removed. You can't just pipe the lava in and leave it be.

That is taken care of by a single liquid transposer and a wooden pipe.

 

[NosajDraw]

Ah! OK.

 

[Zelfana]

What powers the boiler? I'm confused, Railcraft wiki says quite explicitly that lava is not an acceptable fuel for boilers and that that was a deliberate design decision.

You can't pump liquid lava into it but you can use the solid fuel firebox that accepts everything that a furnace would so it uses buckets of lava and even gives the bucket back. That's the design decision. You have to use solid fuel firebox instead. Magma crucibles feed liquid transposers that fill the buckets with the lava and they can then feed those into the boiler directly. Then you just pipe the empty buckets back into the transposers. I just built the setup to test it out and made the crushers, too.

That is taken care of by a single liquid transposer and a wooden pipe.

You have only one transposer? I put one for each crucible. One can handle all of them I guess. Makes the pipework a bit better. I had this long pipe round the boiler filling the transposers with empty buckets.

 

[Meldiron]

You have only one transposer? I put one for each crucible. One can handle all of them I guess. Makes the pipework a bit better. I had this long pipe round the boiler filling the transposers with empty buckets.

Yeah. the liquid transposers are incredibly quick, even when the boiler is at low temperatures and i feed it with tons of lava it still keeps up rather good.
The wooden pipe on the other hand is quite a bottleneck, had to put a lot more then a redstone engine and an autarchick gate on it to make it keep up with the phase.

Also, attaching a wooden pipe with an autarchic gate set to power when the inventory is empty is an excellent way of warming up the boiler.
Connected to a chest with lava cells i ended up using only 5 stacks of lava cells to heat the boiler to max temperature compared to the 9 stacks of lava cells normaly used to reach max temperature.
This was done on a system with 9 magma crucibles and using all the boilers power to produce lava from cobble.
If you take a trip to the nether and make the magma crucibles run on cobble instead you'll probably not need any other fuel at all to heat it up.

 

[Poppycocks]

Thanks for the tip!
I've just found out how to get produce unlimited gold, iron, tin, sulphur and wolfram as well
By canning excess lava and running it trough an gregtech centrifuge i'll get back tin equal to the cost of the cans + 8, in addition to 4 gold bars, 1 wolfram and 32 pyrite (equal to 10 iron dust and 20 sulphur dust).
And with all my left over energy having been going to lava production am i currently swiming in the stuff! Figuratively
Time to set up more boilers!

I think I love you .

 

[b0bst3r]

Meldiron any chance of a youtube vid showing how to set all that up?

Looks impressive but just looking at a picture I can't tell what everything is or how it all hooks up.

 

[Meldiron]

Sure, i could try putting together some sort of guide for my build
Just going to try to make it look neat with the rock crushers / industrial centrifuges first.

 

[Omicron]

I find it hilarious that it is always GregTech of all mods that gets used in cross-mod resource exploits like this. There's another one using GregTech, EE3 prerelease and Mystcraft already that produces essentially infinite diamonds, and now we also have infinite gold/iron/tin as well.

And here we all thought GregTech existed only to make things harder, not easier! That said, steam boilers have always been grossly overpowered, and Thermal Expansion gives you infinite lava, so it's not entirely Greg's fault... still, those centrifuge recipes give you a little too much leeway in converting materials back and forth.