What does YOUR Power Room look like?

[Hydra]

Hmm... interesting... I never thought of using cacti instead of reeds.

Reeds are more efficient. They grow faster and you can also stack more in a 21x21 area (a single harvester) because although reeds need water, cactii can't be next to each other. So a simple reed-setup with rows nets you with 14x21 (7 rows needed for water) = 294 reeds. For cactii it's only 21x21/2 = 220. And as far as I know cactii grow slower.

This is my farm:

I found out that 2 layers aren't enough to keep a single fermenter topped off so I build a 3rd. That fermenter ferments faster than 3 stills can digest. I use it to feed my liquid fuel 3x3 boiler. I'm currently thinking of a back-up plan to be able to restart my fuel production system in the case I for some reason run out of fuel, because I have a bit of an issue there.

I have a low pressure 3x3x4 steam boiler that delivers 72MJ/t. More than enough for my base but if I leave my system running my fermenter will run out of compost and in the end that will result in my boiler running out of fuel and stopping. Then I will have a chicken / egg situation where I don't have to power to generate fuel I need to generate power.

So basically there are three options:
-A: easy, just use some biomass engines that can be used to kick-start the production again.
-B: bit more complex: I have craptons of coal I can feed steam engines with
-C: even more complex: make a separate smaller solid fuel boiler that I can use to kickstart my entire base untill my main boiler can take over.

Since C is by far the most complex option it's the one I'm picking

 

[Hydra]

Ok, here's my little biofuel production facility utilizing cactus: http://imgur.com/a/n9xaL#1RiKS

It's greatly expendable and currently making 45 Mj/t which is enough to feed 10 layers of cactus farms, 3 fermenters and 3 refineries. At the current rate it's making 1 bucket of biofuel every 20-30 seconds but I can add about 15 more layers of cactus if needed.

FYI: Refineries are SLOW and very expensive and for biofuel a still gives a slightly better conversion ratio than a refinery. A single fermenter can ferment more biomass than 3 stills can convert to biofuel. And as far as I know, a still is atleast just as fast as a refinery. And a still doesn't require 4 diamonds like a refinery does.

 

[Hydra]

Magma crucibles burning cobble to lava, which is then burned in a geothermal for EU. 20k MJ -> 20k EU

Indeed. And you can place a Igneous Extruder right next to the crucible generating the cobble for it. It will feed it straight into the crucible (if you set it up correctly) so you won't have an overflow of cobble. It also doesn't need any power.

(It's good we don't have EE2 in this pack, this would be horribly broken and would lead people just generating craptons of cobble just to create diamonds out of thin air).

 

[thezeronumber]

My mind is clouding up with all of these different concepts and designs. I never thought it would be so in-depth and confusing, at least from my newbie perspective!

I have some experience with Tekkit but I only dabbled with IC2 energy and even that has changed due to GregTech so at the moment I am running a few macerators and electric furnaces from a couple of generators. Those are powered by charcoal which I am manually chopping and re-planting the trees for. And that's about it! To be fair I only need them for the ores I have gathered (1 gold chest almost full of raw and 1 gold chest almost full of refined) and all of that has been from manual caving. You can see I have spent a fair bit of time in the FTB world but I've barely touched the power-generating side of things and it's something I should really be getting into, however I don't really know where to start. I would hate to go down one route only to find out later it's a horribly inefficient method. I guess I have some reading to do!

 

[Daemonblue]

FYI: Refineries are SLOW and very expensive and for biofuel a still gives a slightly better conversion ratio than a refinery. A single fermenter can ferment more biomass than 3 stills can convert to biofuel. And as far as I know, a still is atleast just as fast as a refinery. And a still doesn't require 4 diamonds like a refinery does.

I've had a fermenter that was running on water support 4 stills with some biomass to spare. That same fermenter couldn't support two refineries, and the refineries produced less biofuel overall. With those four stills, I was able to keep two liquid boilers filled with biofuel (after they heated up).

Basically, if you can keep a fermenter running non-stop, you can produce a ton of power. Also, these were two max sized HP boilers, not the weakling LP ones. As for a solid fuel boiler, can't you also run them with peat, making them fairly easy to maintain?

 

[Hydra]

I've had a fermenter that was running on water support 4 stills with some biomass to spare. That same fermenter couldn't support two refineries, and the refineries produced less biofuel overall. With those four stills, I was able to keep two liquid boilers filled with biofuel (after they heated up).

Basically, if you can keep a fermenter running non-stop, you can produce a ton of power. Also, these were two max sized HP boilers, not the weakling LP ones. As for a solid fuel boiler, can't you also run them with peat, making them fairly easy to maintain?

Wierd. Perhaps I wan't providing enough power to those refineries then.

And yeah, that's the plan basically. I have tons of peat and coal to spare and a solid boiler can use both. And an auto-feeding system is easy to set up.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

I'm a bit OCPD about correcting people using OCD when they mean OCPD.

OCD = Compulsion to repeat actions or avoid actions. IE, washing your hands exactly 20 times, never stepping on cracks, locking each lock exactly 3 times is OCD.
OCPD = A compulsion to set disorder into order. IE, alphabetizing the books in a bookstore when you don't work there or making sure all your steam pipes coming out of your boiler are symmetrical.

I have OCDC.

Its like OCD, except it rocks!


kidding aside- I see a lot of you using cactus and powering a forestry harvester to collect it- Why not use water channels and place blocks up and across so they self-harvest without using any fuel? (the water channels can push it into an obsidian pipe/transposer)

I'm taking a quick look at Refinery Vs Still, update due in an hour or so...


Also it looks like steam turbines are getting a useful boost in the next update- they can now produce 100Eu/t (ditto for universal electricity), and take 320 steam/tick. (luckily its easy to get 8 golden pipes on one)

 

[Rakankrad]

(It's good we don't have EE2 in this pack, this would be horribly broken and would lead people just generating craptons of cobble just to create diamonds out of thin air).

Until EE3 comes out and gets an actual recipe for the PStone. Unless he changed that one to have durability like the Minium Stone (it didn't have one when I used it in one of the early alphas I got).

 

[MilConDoin]

I'm taking a quick look at Refinery Vs Still, update due in an hour or so..

The still has max speed at 5 MJ/t (tested via redstone cell), the refinery (if I'm not mistaken) at 10 MJ/t.

 

[Greyed]

kidding aside- I see a lot of you using cactus and powering a forestry harvester to collect it- Why not use water channels and place blocks up and across so they self-harvest without using any fuel?

Because the sound of running water would drive me absolutely batty! Besides in my build that machine is connected to the same RECell as my Fermenter which is throttled to 1MJ/t. 1 MJ/t to not have a ceaseless running water noise is a fair trade off.

And to be honest, I forgot reeds could ferment as well. I could really go powerless and have a reed farm tended by TC golems.

 

[Daemonblue]

Another thing to note about the still vs refinery thing. Due to the conversion ratios of 4:1 mass>fuel in a refinery and 10:3 mass>fuel in a still, for the same amount of biomass being put into the system a still is 20% more efficient. This means that 4 stills would be 80% more effective than 2 refineries when converting biomass to biofuel, at the cost of taking up slightly more room (taking the 5 mj/t and 10 mj/t power consumption noted above into account).

Edit: Just looked at the wiki for BC and unless the values change a refinery needs 25 MJ/t to run top speed http://minecraftbuildcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Oil_Refinery Looking further in the wiki has this list http://minecraftbuildcraft.wikia.com/wiki/Energy_Quick_Reference which shows still energy usage at 5 mj/t.

 

[Tauro]

I replaced my refineries with stills and the stills couldn't keep up with biomass so I'd say refineries work faster than stills at least in my observations. Now I've added another still and 3 more engines which should keep it going.

 

[Daemonblue]

I replaced my refineries with stills and the stills couldn't keep up with biomass so I'd say refineries work faster than stills at least in my observations. Now I've added another still and 3 more engines which should keep it going.

Yes, a single refinery would be faster than a single still, but you sacrifice biofuel output and MJ/t for that speed.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

Powering a still and refinery off separate cells, and ran 6 buckets of biomass through each.

The still used 15721 MJ, and the refinery 16000MJ - so there's no significant difference with energy efficiency.
(per bucket of biomass thats 2620 and 2666MJ respectively, about 2% difference)

However the still converts 30% of the biomass into fuel, where the refinery only returns 25% (see forestry wiki)
So to produce 1 bucket of biofuel you need 8733MJ from the still, or 10666MJ from the refinery.
-which makes the still about 20% cooler more efficient.

Now for processing time- no contest really, the refinery is significantly faster (about half the processing time).
-So running at full moo the refinery will produce about 45% more biofuel than the still over a set time.

Generally you're better off running 2 stills than a refinery.

 

[MilConDoin]

Just tested a bit:
Refinery has max speed@just above 10 MJ/t and uses exactly 26000 MJ in 125 seconds
Still has max speed@5 MJ/t and uses a bit more than 25000 MJ in 250 seconds (usage was differing a bit)

The Fermenter has max speed@just above 16 MJ/t and uses (for 10 saplings with fertilizer) ~12900 MJ in 40 seconds (usage was differing a bit)

One Fermenter at 16 MJ/t (on fertilizer with saplings) produces 10 Buckets of Biomass in 50 seconds. You need 5 stills@5 MJ/t to be on par with that, meaning a production of 3 Buckets of Biofuel in 50 seconds for a cost of (16+5*5)MJ/t * 20t/s * 50s = 41000 MJ. One Bucket of Biofuel produces 5 MJ/t over 40k ticks = 200k MJ in a combustion engine.

(The last calculation has a few rounding errors, but the gist should be correct.)

Edit for Celestials reply:
I used ~25300 MJ (differed between tries) in the still vs 26000 MJ in the refinery for 10 Buckets. Different numbers per bucket than you, but the still is still ~2.7% more efficient.

 

[Daemonblue]

One thing to note, I did actually try a 5 still to 1 fermenter setup before and over time I was using up my reserved biomass, so while the number crunching might show you can use that many stills in practice it's slightly too many.

Also, I brought this up in some other threads, that same bucket of biofuel can net you slightly over 290k MJ in a fully heated, max sized boiler (my preference is HP), so as long as you can keep one of those heated up and powering the whole system you can come out with a near 50% efficiency gain over combustion engines, with the bonus of your rig not exploding unless you set it up horribly wrong. For a max sized HP boiler, the power generated comes out to 144 MJ/t after converting the steam into power, so that's something else to keep in mind.

 

[Evil Hamster]

So basically there are three options:
-A: easy, just use some biomass engines that can be used to kick-start the production again.
-B: bit more complex: I have craptons of coal I can feed steam engines with
-C: even more complex: make a separate smaller solid fuel boiler that I can use to kickstart my entire base untill my main boiler can take over.

Since C is by far the most complex option it's the one I'm picking

D: build a dozen advanced solar panels connected to an MFS to 4 electrical engines. Plenty of backup power for startups

 

[mfgamesys]

here is my high pressure boiler that creates 144mj/t with 18 industrial steam engines which are on a single lever using red pipe wire and regular iron AND gates. And how i keep the system fueled with 4 refineries that empty into a 2000 bucket iron tank(so if my oil well drys up I have a few days to find another oil source to pump). I really like thermal expansion for its power system really compact and much more intuitive with setting if power goes to a machine or not.

 

[Golrith]

My mind is clouding up with all of these different concepts and designs. I never thought it would be so in-depth and confusing, at least from my newbie perspective!

I have some experience with Tekkit but I only dabbled with IC2 energy and even that has changed due to GregTech so at the moment I am running a few macerators and electric furnaces from a couple of generators. Those are powered by charcoal which I am manually chopping and re-planting the trees for. And that's about it! To be fair I only need them for the ores I have gathered (1 gold chest almost full of raw and 1 gold chest almost full of refined) and all of that has been from manual caving. You can see I have spent a fair bit of time in the FTB world but I've barely touched the power-generating side of things and it's something I should really be getting into, however I don't really know where to start. I would hate to go down one route only to find out later it's a horribly inefficient method. I guess I have some reading to do!

In a game of near infinite resources, does it matter if a build is inefficient? As long as you enjoy building it, that's what counts.
If it's inefficient, just go build something else to support it

 

[zahfelade]

In a game of near infinite resources, does it matter if a build is inefficient? As long as you enjoy building it, that's what counts.
If it's inefficient, just go build something else to support it

Yes....as long as it looks good and is symmetrical