The MafiaScum Minecraft Thread - AllTheMods 9!!! - NEW Vanilla?

[fuzzybutternut]

Rhinox, explore and find apiaries. They're quite simple to find. In fact, I'll find you some.

[Claus]

I Feel your pain Rhinox.

I find that it gets easier if you use as few mods as possible at a time, and slowly adds them over time. I rather prefer BC over IC, so I will try to explain how you would do that using the BC route as much as possible.

Goal: Generate power for a bee operation.
Source: Steam from M's tesseract.

First: yes, the tesseract needs to be chunkloaded from M's end. Ask M to plump a chunkloader there.
Second: Don't bother with fluid pipes - liquiducts are much, much, much easier to deal with, and only need two machines, one of which you should already have.

The two machines you need for liquiducts are: A grinder of some sort (can be a macerator or pulverizer), and a induction smelter.

To make an induction smelter: you need two iron dust and one ferrous dust to make (by hand) three invar dust. Smelt the invar dust into ingots, and use the ingots in the induction smelter recipe.
With the induction smelter, you can smelt one lead (powered or ingot, doesn't matter) and two obsidian dust (macerate or pulverize obsidian), into two hardened glass. Two copper and one hardened glass in a crafting table gives you 4 liquiducts.

Now you need a tank to store the steam. Forget about iron tanks. Use Xycraft tanks. Seriously, unless you want to make a 3x3x3 tank, xycraft tanks are superior in every aspect to iron tanks. To make a xycraft tank, all you need is to make xycraft valves (no machines required, other than smelting the xycraft gems). Simply make a box of wood or cobblestone (or prettier material), and stick a xycraft valve somewhere in that box, and right click it, and you have your tank. You might want two valves for input/output, but the default recipe gives you 4, so no problem.

So, connect your tesseract to the xycraft valve (I think they can be connected directly), make sure the tesseract is configured to "output only", and on the right channel. Connect the other valve to the engine via liquiducts - use at least two liquiducts. Right click the liquiduct that is connected to the valve with a wrench - an output "arrow" should appear in it. Apply a redstone signal to the output tube: a lever will do. Done

Let me know if you if have any questions (pm or reply here), I'd be happy to give more info.

[Maestro]

I'll just add on to that, shall I?

Rhinox: Steam Engines are a slightly higher tier engine that are a little more complicated to use than Vanilla BuildCraft Engines. I would suggest you stick to these for now (or at least the Stirling Engine) since they are 10x easier to understand and don't have as many of the prerequisite problems you've been running up against. All of what Claus advises is awesome, do that. Liquiducts and most Thermal Expansion BuildCraft upgrades (Energy Conduits, etc.) are WAY more efficient and effective than their Vanilla BC counterparts. Liquiducts are most definitely the way to go.

If you still have the Tesseract I gave you, I'll need to do some modifications with it and with my tank before you can take all the steam you want out of it, but my main advice for now would be to switch to the more everyday BuildCraft engines for use until you're a little more solid with BC3/IC2, Forestry, etc.

Here's exactly what you need for EACH Stirling Engine:

(1 Glass, 1 Iron Ingot, 1 Redstone, 7 Wooden Planks, 15 Cobblestone)
Craft a Piston from some of the materials above.

Spoiler: Just in case anybody forgot...

(You should have 1 Glass, 4 Wooden Planks, 11 Cobblestone, 1 Piston)
Craft 8 Sticks from the Wooden Planks and craft the Sticks into Wooden Gears, as shown in the next spoiler.
Use the Wooden Gears and the Cobblestone to make Stone Gears, the next Gear tier (lol) in the spoiler.

Spoiler: BuildCraft Gears

At this point, you're pretty much done. Then just craft it all together as it says here.
If you check out the wiki page I just linked, you'll notice that Stirling Engines run on Vanilla fuel (Logs, Planks, Sticks, Saplings, Lava, etc.).
They do sometimes explode, but this should only happen if the Engine is supplying more power than the thing it's powering can safely intake.

They're a modest-output Engines to start out with, I assure you it's less complicated then you're making it.

Lemme know if you need any more help Rhino!

[Klazam]

It may be true that i accomplished more in 1 hour on THIS server, but this is my third attempt at FTB. On the very first we had a 5 or 6 person collective cooperatively working together and teaching each other about everything. It took us around 2-3 weeks to figure everything out. THEN WE RESTARTED AND I DID IT ALL AGAIN. then M messed up and i did it again, then now on this server. Im sure that if you had the same amount of time, you'd be doing as much as me.

Also, M's suggestion is good.

[Maruchan]

I suck at machines/engines.

I'm trying to set up my bee operation. I still need apiaries. To make apiaries I need to make seed oil. To make seed oil I need a squeezer (have) and need to power it with an engine. Since M has a ton of steam apparently, I'm wanting to power my squeezer with a steam engine.

First I need to set up my tank. I set up my big iron tank which was a gift for helping M with something and now I need to figure out how to get the steam to it. M gave me a tesseract linked to his steam but first I need to craft a second valve for my tank (so I have a valve for steam in and another for steam out). Well I need a rolling machine to make iron plates to make a valve and I don't have an engine yet to power a rolling maching (I tried a redstone engine but apparently its not powerful enough).

So I figured well I can always set up the tank with the one valve to start collecting steam lets make some pipes to get steam from the tesseract to the tank. Fluid pipes I don't have the machines to make. Waterproof pipes yeah thats pretty much why I built the cactus farm, and I already have the redstone engine I can power it with (waterproof pipes need to be powered right?) but I'm pretty much pulling an "ain't nobody got time" to be smelting cactus tonight.

Last attempt was going to be to connect the tesseract directly to the valve and hope that would work but I already shut down and didn't feel like waiting to boot FTB back up.

Also I was wondering M, does the tesseract still give me steam if nobody is by your steam tank to keep the chunks loaded there?


This is why I was afraid to branch out from vanilla so much to learn its overwhelming. I'm pretty sure klaz accomplished more in the first hour of the server than I've accomplished the whole time since I've joined.

/frustrated rant

you've accomplished more than me. I understand how to make quarries work!!!!!!!!! (thats all i know)

[Rhinox]

Thanks for the help and support guys. I know I'll eventually figure it all out, I'm just frustrated because lately it seems like I only have smaller chunks of time to get on, and I'm ready to actually start seeing results rather than perpetual set-up. I've been "starting bees and trees" for 2 weeks now.

Rhinox, explore and find apiaries. They're quite simple to find. In fact, I'll find you some.

I know I can go find some in villages, but I'll still need to go through this whole spiel to set up a centrifuge to process the combs so I might as well not bother wasting time just wandering around and kill 2 birds with one stone. I also want the seed oil for biogas engines, since I'm trying to master forestry an' all.

you've accomplished more than me. I understand how to make quarries work!!!!!!!!! (thats all i know)

Well considering the only thing non-vanilla I've accomplished so far has been a macerator/generator, and a xycraft block floor for my portal room, I think you're still ahead of me.

I find that it gets easier if you use as few mods as possible at a time, and slowly adds them over time.

Thats my plan. I was going to start with railcraft but then decided I wanted to start out with something a little simpler. Forestry seemed simpler, and I get something IMO useful out of it (new wood colors). Unfortunately it seems like in order to do anything with forestry I need to have already got a good hold on some other mods, which I don't.


Basically I think I'm going to be doing some research today. Especially on buildcraft and thermal expansion, and maybe industrial craft. I need to have a better understanding of these foundational mods before I can hope to do anything productive with any other mod like forestry, railcraft, anything really.

[Claus]

Thanks for the help and support guys. I know I'll eventually figure it all out, I'm just frustrated because lately it seems like I only have smaller chunks of time to get on, and I'm ready to actually start seeing results rather than perpetual set-up. I've been "starting bees and trees" for 2 weeks now.

Heh, you picked one of the largest mods to start with

If you feel frustrated, take a break from "climbing the tech tree", and use the cool natural blocks (marble, basalt, autumn trees) to just build architectural stuff.

Thats my plan. I was going to start with railcraft but then decided I wanted to start out with something a little simpler. Forestry seemed simpler, and I get something IMO useful out of it (new wood colors).

Well, both Railcraft AND forestry are expansions to Buildcraft, so you can't really get into any of these without learning a bit of BC first. Here is my particular breakdown of mods, maybe it can help you to see which are related:

Buildcraft tree:
* Buildcraft (BC): Adds tree engines, "tubes" transport system, quarries and fillers, marble and basalt and a few machines to automatically process ore.
* Thermal expansion (TE): Adds more engines, better tubes and energy transport system, resource teleportation, more machines to process ores. Depends a bit on Buildcraft to get started, but can be done without BC if you really know the mod.

The following three depends on having a basic BC or TE system stablished:
* Railcraft: Changes the rail system of vanilla, adds tons of options to rails, adds steam power and liquid tanks. Adds automatic feeders.
* Forestry: adds biofuel, automatic farming, backpacks (these are super useful, and not dependent on the rest of the mod)
* Bees/Extra Bees: Adds new ways to generate resources, new trees, colored glasses

IC Tree:
* As buildcraft, adds an energy system, lots of machines for processing ore. Also adds many tiers of tools and armor. Some interesting "offshoots" in the mod are the crops system (farming resources, super time intensive) and nuclear generation of energy.
* Important: IC does not include an "Item transport" system - so you have to either move everything by hand, or mix it with BC a bit.
* Modular Powersuits: Not exactly an extension of IC, but depends on IC for power, and the recipes based on IC are simpler. This is a very fun to play armor system: you create an armor and add/remove abilities to it to make different configurations.

Thaumcraft:
An independent, really large and in-depth mod about magic items. It has almost all the functionalities as the other mods, but in a slightly different order. Includes a fair number of new blocks as well.

RedPower2:
Unlike BC and IC, where you have "machines" with complex functions, in RP2 you have blocks with very simple functions that can be put together to make large machines. So you have a block that breaks other blocks, and you have a block that moves other blocks - you can combine both (and a few other stuff) to build a machine that breaks a line of blocks and move itself forward to break the next line. Includes a lot of "redstone gates" blocks, to make building redstone mechanisms simpler.

Redpower2 also includes the "microblocks" that can be great for improving builds.

ComputerCraft:
Includes a computer and a robot (turtle), both can understand a programming language called LUA. The computer can send wireless signals to other computers, set redstone signals around it, and write to a piece of paper or to a large "monitor" block. The turtle can do all of the above, and also move around and use tools like a player.

Factorization:
Includes machines for processing ores but, frankly, they are kinda clunky. Has the famous barrels, and upgrades to those barrels, as well as a "magic" sorting machine (the router).

Twilight Forest and Mystcraft: adds new worlds to explore, so there is not really a tech tree to climb here. Twilight forest adds a bunch of new blocks and mobs in itself.

Xycraft: Adds a lot of new crafting blocks, and a few "magic" machines that work well along with other mods, such as an auto crafting table, a tank, a block that destroys liquids, a block that creates ice, etc, etc.

I might be forgetting a few ones, but these are the main ones that involve new blocks.

[Rhinox]

Heh, you picked one of the largest mods to start with

If you feel frustrated, take a break from "climbing the tech tree", and use the cool natural blocks (marble, basalt, autumn trees) to just build architectural stuff.

Well bee and tree breeding, it didn't seem like there was that much involved to get started with it. I'm not planning on getting into the rest of the forestry stuff like the multiblock farms and whatnot until later on. I'm mostly just concerned with producing all the different kinds of trees, and to do that I need to get the bees going. heh maybe I would be better off just finding a couple village apiaries and forgetting about the machines until I am more established with buildcraft stuff.

And that's exactly what I've been doing when I get frustrated - building architectural stuff. I've been expanding my house near spawn, and I built an enclosure where I intend to set up my initial apiaries and trees for breeding. I did some work in the nether to connect my new base to my house, and I've been working on setting up a new storage room at my new base. But eventually I want to do something with all this stuff.

<snip mod summary>

That actually does help quite a bit, thanks.

I do think I'm most interested in the buildcraft stuff and expansions. So... with the idea that my primary interests involve buildcraft stuff, whats the best way to go about climbing the tech tree? Start working towards quarries and refineries and combustion engines? Maybe work towards a buildcraft energy production base with all my fuels and engines and whatnot in one place, and use tesseracts to ship that energy around wherever I need it?

[blake5135]

I'd honestly work toward the latter one, with the addition of a quarry. Some of this stuff gets expensive if you don't have the minerals flowing in.

So start off with a simple engine would be a magmatic engine powering a quarry. Lava? Nether. That'd cut out from you making a refinery and powering that AND the quarry.


ALSO GUYS. I will be producing free MJ's. Just look at an energy tesseract and the MJ's will be there.

[Kinetic]

I'm still a little noob on some things. Free MJs?

[Mist7676]

I'm still a little noob on some things. Free MJs?

Energy for machines like Electrical Furnaces, Macerators, Compressors, etc...

[Rhinox]

I'm still a little noob on some things. Free MJs?

Energy for machines like Electrical Furnaces, Macerators, Compressors, etc...

Thats wrong I think. MJ's are produced from engines, and Macerators run on EU ie generator. I think.

[Maestro]

Rhinox is right.

MJ = Minecraft Joule, which is BuildCraft's kinetic

lol

energy
(basically energy of motion, from engines of some kind: Redstone Engines, Stirling Engines, Combustion Engines, Electrical Engines, etc.)

EU = Electrical Unit, which is IndustrialCraft's electricital energy
(exclusively from generators of some kind: Heat Generators, Geothermal Generators, Solar Panels, Nuclear Reactors, etc.)

[Maestro]

I'm still a little noob on some things. Free MJs?

Energy for machines like Electrical Furnaces, Macerators, Compressors, etc...

yeah in fact all of these machines Mist mentions are from IndustrialCraft, so they run on EU, not MJ

[Mist7676]

Minecraft noob here, what can I say?

[Rhinox]

yay I learned something today

[Rhinox]

Anyways I'm going with M's suggestion for now and running my forestry stuff off of simple Stirling engines for now. I'll only run them when I'm there to monitor so I should be able to prevent them from ever asploding.

In the little time I was able to be on tonight, I built a Stirling engine, set it up next to my squeezer, and set up a lever post to turn it on and off. Its all ready to start making me seed oil. Tomorrow's project.

Once I get bees and trees going with this stuff, I'll start to think about expanding into more complex buildcraft energy production when I get bored.



About MJ and EU, are there machines that convert energy from one form to another and vice verse?

[Maestro]

Yes, several:

The Electrical Engine I mentioned is the most basic form of conversion, in my opinion.

It takes input in the form of EU (IndustrialCraft electrical energy) and outputs it in the form of MJ (BuildCraft/Thermal Expansion/Forestry kinetic energy). All you need to do is wire Copper/Gold/Glass Fibre Cable from something that produces EU* and plug it into the Engine, then switch it on with Redstone - voila! MJ production from IndustrialCraft Solar Panels or Geothermal Generators!

(P.S. This is what our friendly neighborhood Oso is doing. Ask him about it as well - he'll have some good tips from a "person who started out with all this crazy shit rather recently" viewpoint.)

*WRT EU production voltage: from experience, I believe Electrical Engines actually ignore voltage, so you could technically power them straight from the most volatile Nuclear Reactor...

Most options I can think of off the top of my head right now:
- (EU -> MJ) IndustrialCraft Generators of any kind plugged into Electrical Engine(s); couldn't be simpler really!
- (MJ -> EU) Biomass / Biofuel in a Bio Generator; a somewhat lengthy process that involves several Forestry machines (Fermenter, Still, etc.) but can be the most eco-friendly way of doing things if you have an unlimited Tree Farm like dappyscroo or Blake.
- (RailCraft Steam -> EU) Steam Boilers are a REALLY complicated thing to get set up (ask Blake - he's got a long way to go before he's got a big steam producer running) but once you get them hot enough the extra Steam you're generating can go straight into a Steam Turbine - which generates EU!
- (RedPower Blutricity -> MJ) Blulectric Engines are the single most powerful BuildCraft-style Engines in the game. Period. If you have the RedPower technology and you want to get Minecraft Joules, there's no better way than the Blulectric Engine. Blutricity can be DAMN complicated to set up, and requires some kind of godlike affinity for finding Nikolite (because yes, you will use up all 50 Stacks you've found, and you'll use it up VERY quickly), but if you can manage it, there's nothing you can't power with MJ.

Pretty sure there's another big one that even I've used, but I can't be fucked to remember right now.

[Maestro]

Oh, another MJ -> EU conversion would be a Magma Crucible chugging through Netherrack/Cobble and pouring it's output into a Geothermal Generator.
(Anybody can feel free to steal this idea if they wish. Not sure how efficient it would be but who knows? EDIT: lol y'all're Nether pumpin' for your lava, I forgot)

[Rhinox]

Thanks for the info M.

OK More question time:

1) How do chunk loaders work for our server? I read in one of the wiki's I was researching yesterday that it was possible for a server to restrict the number of chunks individual users may have chunkloaded, and to set them so they only operate when the user who placed them is online. what are the rules for chunkloaders on our server?

2) With tesseracts, it's possible to have multiple inputs/outputs per channel, right? For example, can I have 3 oil wells, and all 3 send their oil to the same 2 tanks? Assuming all inputs and outputs are chunkloaded in that scenario, would the oil be evenly split between the 2 tanks? or how would it work exactly? Same with energy, if I have 4 different systems producing MJ, can I send all the outputs to the same tesseract channel so anywhere in the world I can be pulling MJ from the same pool?

3) If I create a powerstation that produced say 50MJ/t and send it into a tesseract, what happens if the combined usage of everything running on the output tesseracts is less than 50MJ/t? will that potentially cause my pipes/engines to blow up?

I'm just trying to work out in my head how exactly I would go about setting up a safe, stable, MJ production grid. Trying to determine if it would be better to do something like pool fuels (oil, fuel, lava, water, etc) at a central location and use tesseracts to send the fuel wherever needed, having an appropriate engine or engines where ever I need the MJ that I can just turn on and off whenever.... OR, to have a central pool of engines generating MJ/t, and use tesseracts to ship the energy around wherever needed to my machines directly?

[Claus]

1- an OP/Maru should be able to answer this.
2- Yes, you can have multiple outputs out of different Tesseracts in the same channel. If I remember correctly, each Tesseract has an input/output limit of 100MJ/t (so you WANT more tesseracts if you want a higher throughput). I don't know the output limit per tesseract for liquids. I don't know if they are evenly split.
3- I'm not sure if the pipes will blow up or not, but I KNOW energy conduits don't blow up. Use them.

[dappyscroo]

...

3) If I create a powerstation that produced say 50MJ/t and send it into a tesseract, what happens if the combined usage of everything running on the output tesseracts is less than 50MJ/t? will that potentially cause my pipes/engines to blow up?

...

Some engines throttle back their output if they're not being fully utilized. I know magmatic engines do this if they are running through redstone energy conduits. This saves the problem of them producing more MJs than are being used. If you want to get all technical later on, you can do the following:

*Run all your engines into a redstone energy cell
*Have a gate on the cell that detects when the cell is full
*When it's full turn off all the engines for a few minutes

This totally avoids overproduction of MJs from any type of engine. The control circuit you need only requires a pulse former, a state cell, a not gate and a nand gate -- I'll try to post a diagram if anyone's interested.

[Maestro]

1) We've always had a kindof, common sense limit PER CHUNKLOADER (I think 25 chunks for non-Ops, but only because Op's through Chunkloaders down for things like communal Mob Farms, etc.) and we've had a per-player limit of 2 Chunkloading machines since the first iteration of the FTB server (yes that include Quarries). Not sure how many follow it anymore, because we've been a bit lax in enforcing that rule...but most people don't NEED more than one or 2 to chunkload what they have.

2) Everything Claus said. Tesseract channels are fully configurable - you can have them set to public or private and you can have as many inputs and/or outputs on a channel that you want. I didn't know that they capped off at 100 MJ/t actually, but it's hardly likely whatever machine(s) you're powering will need TONS more power than that.

RE - Tanks: Xycraft tanks (technically the Xycraft Valve Block) are the only things I know of that actively even out the liquid between two Tanks. But I'm pretty sure PIPES will always try to do that, as long as it's the same liquid, obviously.

3) If your power usage is ever < your power production, Conductive Pipes will eventually contain the energy in a backlog and explode. As Claus says, Redstone Energy Conduits will not do this, and I believe they also stop drawing power from Redstone Energy Cells when there's nothing requesting power, but that could only be for Thermal Expansion machines.

If you ever think your MJ production will surpass your usage, you should look into the process of building Redstone Energy Cells. They are similar to the IndustrialCraft BatBox/MFE/MFSU except they contain Minecraft Joules and can output it when requested or what triggered. If you want a tutorial on Redstone Energy Cells, you could ask Oso, or build an Induction Smelter, Magma Crucible, and Liquid Transposer - all Thermal Expansion machines, the same you'd use to build a Tesseract - then come find me.

P-Edit: dappy, don't confuse the poor chap now. I think we're the only two on-server who EVER use Gates.

[izakthegoomba]

Actually, there is a config'able option for limiting the total number of chunks a player can load with chunkloaders, but we never set it up properly. It's set much higher than it really should be, but we never came to any kind of agreement on a good number.

[Maestro]

*shrugsies*