Weird dreams, great ideas

Ok, sorry for the quick update, byproduct of a random mind in a hellish speed thanks to too many hours toying with Minecraft...

Anyway, I was making automatic factories in my new base, in a new world, and enjoying the speed you can build stuff with Equivalent Exchange installed (the destruction catalyst allows me to make a room in the mountain quite quickly ^^), when I realized something (two somethings, actually... One being that I need the rotary macerator from the IC2 Advanced Machines' addon XD). That something was that a solar power station is not enough to cover my hunger for energy, so nuclear power should be harnessed! However, Mark 1 and Mark 2 reactors are too bad at producing energy at the levels I want it, so... I want to make a Mk III. And that means a reactor that needs babysitting... theoretically.

Let's have a look at a screenshot I made with a small circuit as a proof of concept, shall we?

You can expand the image, by the way XD.

I'm using Redpower 2 here, the parts that didn't changed much (if at all) from 1.7.3. You can see a big, glowing block, that is a placeholder for the nuclear reactor. The rest? Two clocks, a toggle latch and a counter.
The idea behind the contraption is to make a clock that will activate and then deactivate something for a given amount of time, once every X time. In the screen:

• Clock connected to green cable ("long Clock"): this marks the time between activations, for example once every 30 seconds it will tick.
• Counter connected to a clock, a green cable and a white cable: the counter is connected by the substraction side (set at "2") to the long clock using the green cable, this acts as resetting. The white cable blocks the short clock from ticking (unless the counter is "reset"), and the adding part is directly connected to the short clock (maximun count: "2").
• Clock connected to counter and white cables ("short Clock"): This one activates and deactivates the target device by moving the setting of the toggle latch twice.
• Toggle Latch: this keeps the device on/off.

How does this works?

It's simple, really, if you have trouble understanding this is because I'm bad at explanations (I always got blamed for the missing cookies...). First, the long clock ticks, moving the counter's powered side and thus liberating the short clock. Then the short clock does one cycle and ticks, moving the Toggle Latch's powered side, which in this situation will stop sending redstone current (and allowing the nuclear reactor to start producing power for a full cycle of the short clock); the second tick of the short clock will take the counter to a position where it blocks the short clock from ticking, and at the same time it changes again the Toggle Latch, returning everything to the starting position.

Option two: I found this on the official Industrialcraft 2 forums here.

Obviously, I am NOT the author of this one, and it has a really clean and streamlined distribution (also, I have tested it and it works). The way it is settled, the upper clock is sets the time the reactor will be "on", and the lower clock will set the time it is "cooling down".

I also found an interesting java app that allows to test the time of your reactor's disposition. Again, in the official forums of IC2, in this thread, but you can go directly from here (I'll add soon a link in the sidebar).

My next project will be an attempt to exploit Equivalent Exchange capabilities to allow for an endless (and safe) BC2's Combustion engines power plant.

Ah, on a sidenote, I published a video a few days ago with how to make IC2's solar plants now that you don't need to use the solar flower disposition. Here you have it for reference.

See ya!

Redpower 2 prerelease 3, Minefactory revisited

Well, Eloraam made it again. I didn't install it yet (I'm currently downloading it), and you can get it at her blog. She also included a compact recipe list in there (or you can go directly to check it here).
I'm mostly interested in the ore dictionary support added to RP2, and how will it affect ore spawning rates (overflowing tin! And copper! Yay! XD). Because, frankly, using Risugami's recipebook was quite a nightmare, considering there are seven possible cuts of any block in the game (cobble, smooth stone, iron blocks, clay, wood...) multiplied for seven or so again (the saw, diamond saw, and the new gem-type saws...). She also added an item detection block, and I suppose I will look into the differences between this and the one in the BetterThanWolves mod (which is more an "entity detector" than an item).

Edit:

Ok, everything went better than expected. No crash, no weird stuff... or at least it looks like it (there was a file I had to put inside minecraft.jar that got me nervous, since I already had another of the same name XD). On the bad news, my recipebook now has 1209 entries (about 800 or so are different applications of saws to blocks...).

So new stuff... The detector block, is like her old redstone pipe for Buildcraft, but only for Redpower2 pipes. New stuff, hidden in the package? Yes, there is. Solar panels, electricity cables (take the red alloy wires, and change the red alloy bars for blue alloy bars), and an electric furnace. Aside from that, three icons I don't have the slightest idea of what are they used for, but by name and position might be related to the red and blue alloy bars in the future (silicon boule, and blue and red silicon wafers).

On a sidenote, my inifinitely supplied BC2 combustion engine seems to be working without any trouble, for more than 90 minutes without any overheating at all.Here you have a video with it:

Now on the Minefactory update... This mod has gone out of hand! No, really! They changed some stuff, and added compatibilities for BC2. And, not happy with that, new machines to convert power between BC2 and IC2!!! It also includes an Oil making machine (it takes 625.000 EU to craft a single bucket, however, so maybe it's better to just convert electricity to pneumatic power...).

Amazingly, however, I regained 3 free item ID's even installing the power converters, the IC2 addon and the mod itself ^^. Now it uses 1 ID per rail and another for the conveyor belt, one for all the basic "machines" and one for the all the power converters, for a total of 8.

Oh, I almost forgot, the IC2 addon allows, among other things, to transform refined iron into steel, which is a little exploit (because 1 steel takes 4 coal and 1 iron bar... it compensates itself, however, with the fact that coal is really needed by IC2 for coal dust, which you use to make the solar panels, artificial diamonds and other stuff).

Actualizations all across the board... more or less XD

Ok, so first: Buildcraft is now on version 2.23, but about 90% of the changes between this version and 2.22 are SMP fixes.

Second, new version of the teleporting pipes, and they now include a redstone pipe (the distribution pipe is no longer red, but now black). This redstone pipe, from what I looked in the forum, seems to NOT be a revision of Eloraam's, but a new one, daughter of the orginal redstone pipe and the telepoting pipes (in short, it seems to give a signal in a frequency). So now we seem to have 4 "channels" in the Teleporting pipes mod: items, liquids, power and detection. Add the fifth channel that would be Wireless Redstone... And in a big server I foresee more "radiation" from wireless signals than on Mercury's surface during a solar storm ^^.

Will check, anyway, and suggest a new pipe for more lazy people (like me): a teleporting Wooden-sucking pipe. In essence, you put this pipe under (or at any side) of a chest (let's call these ones "sending pipes"), then in other chest/pipe system you put another (let's call this the "receiving pipe"). Then you set a number of items inside the GUI of the pipe (which would be the same as the Advanced wooden pipe), apply a BC engine to this, and see how the receiving pipe takes the required items from all chests connected to a sending pipe!

Edit: I checked, got a world crash, but it seems like nothing went wrong in the end (I had a whole backup of the game, anyway xD). The new Redstone Pipe is, at the end, the one from Eloraam, actualized to 1.8.1 (sadly, it doesn't seem to emit redstone power, ot at least I wasn't able to find an item that would receive the current, so it seems like it will only light up, at least for now :S).

There is also a new functionality, the F9 key will show (on the sky) a blue grid not much different to one you can make with Buildcraft, a marker and some redstone power. This grid marks the chunks in the game. This is important if you use Fraps, because I think the default key for recording is F9... Anyway, I actualized my Fraps version and now it seems like I can record videos with audio without crashing the game. Sadly, more than 3.95 Gb (about 6 minutes or so in Minecraft) and I get more than one video... Oh, well.

Finally, in this ecclectic collection of ramblings I'll advice you to check a youtube channel if you want to see some stuff about Industrialcraft 2: Direwolf20's channel is quite interesting. I'll add it to the sidebar.

See ya!

IndustrialCraft 2 v1.22

So here we are, a new version of IC2, and I'll try it out ASAP. You can get it in Alblaka's forum. Remember to update Minecraft Forge too.

EDIT: now there's version 1.23 out, with some fixes (apparently the miner was not mining redstone ore or lapis, and the quantum helmet wasn't expending energy to keep you fed).

How to install it? Just delete the old .jar file you had in your .minecraft\mods folder and put that one instead (if you are doing a clean installation, be sure you have the pre-required mods before!). Also, don't use any mod for IC2 since they have not been updated yet (and I'm talking about the Advanced machines that expands the induction furnace to cover macerators, extractors and compressors, specifically).

Also, DO A BACKUP of the game!

If you have a problem of ID conflicts, then I advice you to reinstall the ID resolver mod if you were using it, since Alblaka added some new blocks.

I'll be back as soon as I patch the disaster in my worlds... all pipes got exchanged for Equivalent Exchange's  Nova Catalysts and exploded. Messy.

Edit: solved, I had deleted the config files for the IDresolver mod, restoring them and running the game again assigned fresh ID's only to the new blocks, so nothing got changed.

As for the new goodies, constructive foam and scaffolding are the new blocks (with some dependant sub-blocks you cannot craft but aid in the using of the foam), and some new derived items (pellets and foam-firing gun) and new icons for some stuff like the nuclear chambers, the terraformer and the electrical wrench.

Geothermal plant MkII

Hi again, I just finished with my small project of base in the Nether, with the primary objective being the development of a self-sufficient energy generation base. In this instance, that means Lava Cells production to feed geothermal generators. By adding the Equivalent Exchange mod (see the sidebar for the forum link) and with the help of the Teleporting Pipes mod (again, sidebar for the link) I was able to make a base that would require only Tin Bars from outside the Nether (since Tin is an IndustrialCraft 2 resource, it cannot be produced by Equivalent Exchange).

The tricky part, you might think, is the cobblestone generator, since it requires a water source. Leaving aside that you can use inventory editors and such (as I mentioned before), Equivalent Exchange has a recipe for crafting an ice block with the philosopher's stone and 8 glass blocks. You can then place the ice block in the nether, and break it to have a water source, solving the problem.

Another trick I used to avoid too much trouble with the limited capacity of Buildcraft 2's crafting tables was to connect the pipes to chests, which gives a greater buffer. For item distribution I used one of the extra pipes included in the Teleport Pipes mod, from where I also picked the pipes that teleport power and the ones that teleport liquids (in this case, the lava). The Wireless Redstone mod allows me to control the lava being send or not to the base (though it is mostly a redundant capacity, since I control the energy I send to the pump).

Essentially, the base is divided on two parts: Part one provides endless energy, while Part two crafts the lava cells proper.
While the base of the Lava Cell generator is the same I showed in the Geothermal Generator video, I made a more compact design, thanks mostly to the Advanced Wooden Pipes (from the Teleport Pipes mod), a version of the wooden pipes that applies a filter to what it gets or not (from the deployer, for example, it will take only lava-filled buckets, while from the chest where those go it will only take empty ones) and to the trick of putting the chests adjacent to the crafting table.
The energy generation "plant", on the other hand, I left it without any automated feeding to the steam engines to avoid... unfortunately explosions, let's say (I'd like to tell you that directly attaching a steam engine to a pump with 14 coal or less won't explode... but by putting a wooden pipe between engine and pump the overheating problems nearly dissapear). Anyway, 5 steam engines are a little overkill for a single pump XD.

Back to topic, the energy production part goes as follows: the cobblestone generator produces 1 cobble every 4 seconds. 5 cobblestone get transformed into 20 dirt, which produces (with 20 saplings) 40 wood. 20 wood go to the furnaces (powered by a Klein Star, an item from Equivalent Exchange that provides infinite burning power to vanilla items. If that item becomes fully usable with steam engines... right now it acts like a single piece of coal) which in turn makes them into 20 charcoal. The other 20 wood blocks go for another alchemical transformation... producing 20 saplings. That means I turn 5 cobble into 20 charcoal, if I'm not mistaken. And when the redstone engines are really hot, the furnaces cannot keep the rythm (I think adding a fourth furnace would relieve most of the problem, though).
The worrying thing, of course, is that with Equivalent Exhange, some cobblestone generators and some base mats, using Buildcraf 2 we can stop farming forever...

Oh, and I made a diamond factory with Equivalent Exchange and the cobble generators, too. But that has been covered enough in the mod's forum thread ^^

Have fun!

Geothermal plant

So I was the other day mailing Eloraam because the deployer didn't interact with Buildcraft's tanks, when she told me that yes, they do... and I realized what my problem was. Anyway, I was able to end my project of an automated factory that needs only one input from the player in order to produce industrialcraft's energy. Here you have a video with the idea:

Explanations:

• The tanks need to be at the same height than the deployer, or it wont work (that was my mistake: I tend to bury half the tank).
• The charcoal can be kept being put thanks to a nearby tree farm, or put there manually (in the video, I did the second option).
• You can change the stone engines for the combustion ones (which can be powered by lava), but they overheat quicker and the only way to have water sources in the nether is cheating (place a water block, itemID 8, without using a bucket... and it can be placed).
• I lack BC2.2.2 extra pipes (bouncing and insertion, to be precise), and I didn't test the teletransport pipes.
• The input you cannot avoid is tin bars. You will get a 4:1 ratio in lava cells per each tin bar (you need 4 bars per 16 empty cells).
• The factory will consume lava, coal and tin. It will produce, in exchange, lava cells.
• The idea is to put this factory in the Nether, near a lava lake. once you have emptied the lake and the lava reserve from the tanks, you can pack all the system and go to another place.
• The energy production requires the player to take manually the lava cells from the nether to a geothermal generator in the "real" world, where they are used to produce energy. You can also put a geothermal generator in the nether in order to produce energy for your tools (the chainsaw, the energy sword, the drill,, the mining laser, and the armor).

Expanding the idea:

By cheating and placing water into the nether, we can make several cobblestone generators, run the cobble through a recycler and use the scrap and energy produced by this plant to create universal matter, that we will use later to make tin ore that we will macerate and then smelt into bars that we turn into cells. Or we can use Equivalent Exchange (which I am really reticent to).

Edit: I went home and made some tests.
First, 3 Universal matter are required to get 5 tin ore => 10 tin dust => 10 tin bars => 32 empty cells & 2 tin bars. Each Universal Matter needs 1.000.000 of energy, and each lava cell produces 20.000 energy. Without much looking into it, with 4 tin ore we can produce 32 lava cells => 640.000 energy, meaning the process won't yield any benefit. As for boosting the mass fabricator with scrap, 640.000 energy and 129 scrap (2 stacks plus a single unit) produces 3 UU-matter and the 83% of a fourth one, meaning the process can be kept self-sustaining by a really small margin that allows nearly no errors (testing method: an MFSU, 10 stacks of one use batteries => 640.000 energy. Connect to a Mass fabricator with a stack of scrap, and keep the fabricator with scrap).

Second, I installed the teleporting pipes, and the conclussions are quite clear, also: you cannot teleport stuff from the nether to the "real" world. You can, however, set up the factory near the portal, so you only will need to move the pump, steam engines and teleporting pipe.

And yes, I'll be testing Equivalent Exchange. I still have 17 block IDs left, after all, and 77 sprite IDs...

Redpower 2: The Deployer and a cobblestone generator

Ok, I've been toying around with the machines from Redpower 2, and the deployer, while it's quite interesting, it's not the godlike machine I thought it was going to be XD.  First let's take a look at the block, and its innards:

 The funny thing of a deployer is that does almost the same thing Steve? does with a right click of the mouse wehn receiving a redstone current pulse. However, some items require a little care (for example, you can use the deployer to empty a bucket of water, or to retake the water source if there is an empty bucket inside the deployer, as long as there is a block to support the water, the same way you cannot place a water source in the middle of the air). Doing this allows me to place a music disk when I want:

And here we go with Portal: not only can the deployer put turrents in front of him (yeah, it can put 9 turrets in the same block), but he can fire portal guns too!!

 This made me though about IC2's mining laser...

And yes, it works. It also consumes less energy (I had put the laser into long range... but it was consuming like mining only).
The deployer can also plant seeds, however, it only plants in the block in front of him, so it's not really efficient.

Let's make a catapult... with Portals, again:

The range is a litte short, but it's an easier way to make a catapult than the usual with pistons. Also, I checked and the deployer accepts Buildcraft's pipes, allowing for endless supplies. And with the block breaker, it also allows for other things (but you can usually do that kind of things with one of the blocks from Better than Wolves, so it's not as useful unless you don't want to install that mod).

And since we are talking about the block breaker, I made a small video about making a cobblestone generator with this machine. Quite more efficient and cheap than Buildcraft's based ones were!

I'll now try to complete my small world, since I now have RedPower 2 cabling and logic gates (but I still miss the extra pipes... oh hell... XD).

Redpower 2 prerelease 2

So, Eloraam has released the second prerelease of Redpower 2. I'd like to mention that the mod is again modular, and that the saves made using the prerelease 1 are compatible (for what she said, I have no save with anything from RP2 ^^U).

Anyway, she added new machines, among them the "deployer", which is a quite interesting machine that acts like a player, and I really want to test it, so I'll stop for a day or two my work with the BC2 world and I'll try to see what's new (and later I'll add the things from RP2 that I needed in my world).

You can get the mod at her blog, up to seven files (plus server versions!) with SMP support that might be a little buggy. Anyway, tomorrow I'll post something about what I found, and maybe a video or two.

Work and head-banging

Weeeeell... Here I am, realizing how spoiled I've become when I notice the few mods I cannot use but I'm too used to have...

The good news are that I'm making a nearly 100% automated farm for wheat (and hemp or any single-block based plant, that is, not for pumpkins nor melons... nor, obviously, sugar cane, wood, cactus...), thanks to Minefactory Reloaded, which solved the usual problem we always found: replanting the stuff.

Here, have some screenshots of the prototype (I have a much bigger farm in process):

The upper view does not differ much from the usual wheat farm's design (aside from using three blocks wide plantations, instead of two). One detail that I didn't applied here is that I'm planning to make each "echelon" only 6 blocks in length, so each echelon will need two seeders.

The underpart is also quite "traditional": a chest to gather the wheat, and the diamond pipe will send the seeds to other storage.

And the last one is the good one: the planting blocks (that cover a 3x3 block surface), fed by the pipes. I'm missing bouncing pipes here... and Eloraam's cabling and clock. In fact, my idea includes the sequencer, not the clock, for the full automation of the farm, but until a new and stable version of RP2 is realeased, I'm a little bound here.

As for what goodies does Minecraft Factory reloaded includes, well, it has the old harvester, seeder, fertilizer and the conveyor blocks. But it added four new rail blocks (cargo pickup, cargo dropoff, passengers pickup and passengers dropoff), a fisher (same as harvester, but for fishing!), and a rancher (same as the harvester, but for animals). the only "problem" of the rancher is that at least the sheeps tend to die after producing 5-6 whool blocks, most likely because I suspect the rancher block "hits" them with the same strenght as an unarmed Steve?. I'm using the cargo pickup and dropoff rails to move goods from the different "farms" to the main base.

My plan is to make a map that inlcudes all the farms and some stuff I usually end making in a map, and my plans are to make:

• Mushroom farm
• Wheat farm (in process)
• Sugar cane farm (done)
• Quarry (I already set up three for autonomous work)
• Monster grinder
• Animal farm (mostly finished, I need to eliminate all other blocks with grass from around)
• Fish farm
• Cactus farm (actually, I'll cheat and use a .schematic file I made two weeks ago from the cacti farm in my last video)
• Cobblestone generator
• Wood farm (done)
• Universal Matter farm (meaning a really big solar array too, and connected to the cacti farm)
• Scrap farm (between the cacti farm and the Universal Matter farm)
• A fully electric house (meaning extractors, compressors, electric-dependant furnaces, recyclers, macerators, a magnetizer's supported access, a canning machine and even a teleporter).

Sadly, all the projects will require some sort of support from RedPower 2, so "done" means "waiting for cables" XD. 

If you want some other farm or detail included, please tell me, and I'll try to include it.

Mod updates

So, for all of you who are interested, the 1.8.1 compatible version of several mods has been released. Currently, we have:

• Industrialcraft (with SMP support! Expect a few bugs, however)
• Better tha Wolves
• Minecraft Forge (obviously, since you need it for some of these mods XD)
• Portal
• Mo's Creatures
• RedPower 2

However, you should know some details:

First, Redpower 2 is an ALPHA, a pre-release with probably tons of bugs (according to Eloraam herself), with some nasty possibilities about corrupting your savegames. You have been warned!

Second, Buildcraft's thread seems to not show in the usual URL... nor can it be found using the search... However, I manually found it here, and I updated the link in the sidetab. Also, SpaceToad has opened a contest for the best 5 worlds made using Buildcraft (using the default config file, and maybe only minecraft... sadly).

It also seems like MineFactory has found some loving modder that not only updated the mod for 1.8.1, but also added some really interesting features for those people who don't have machines that can keep up with thousands of tiny blocks flowing around pipes, or laying down a pipe system kilometers in length... now it includes minecart support! so carts will pick up/drop out stuff inside chests! Also, Minefactory reloaded is SMP-compatible!

I'll try to upgrade all my stuff to Minecraft 1.8.1 and make a huuuuge map with all the stuff integrated. Before sunday, I hope. Bets are on the table, I'll start in about 14 hours...

Edit: it's all working, at least for now... The IDresolver mod (see the sidebar for the link XD) has proven to be extremely useful, and my only regret is that I couldn't install Steamcraft (the game runs out of terrain sprites). Right now, I have installed the following mods in my 1.8.1 version of the game:

• Modloader, Audiomod, Minecraft Forge, Modloader MP, IDresolver, SingleplayerCommands, ToomanyItems, and the GUIAPI
• Wireless redstone and Wireless remote
• Better than Wolves
• Buildcraft 2.2.0
• Industrialcraft2 1.15 (plus the "patches". The working sound fix is here (apply last))
• Minefactory reloaded
• Redpower2 (currently disabled, but I'm waiting for a TMI compatible-version).

For now, the only trouble I found was solved by changing the order of the mods in the .minecraft/mods folder (put first Industrialcraft2), and that TooManyItems doesn't show all the goodies after some RP2 ones. Oh, and that the game went from 16Mb of the basic version to 64Mb without any map loaded... and that my texture packs no longer work fine because of the hunger bar ^^.