EMC generator without using collectors

I was asked a couple of days ago to make a tutorial on how to craft the darkroom used to turn bonemeal into lost of EMC, and here is the video.

The materials used are:

• 1 transposer (top)
• 1 deployer (bottom)
• 1 Filter
• 3 pieces of bonemeal
• 1 RP timer
• 1 lever
• 9 pieces of dirt
• 18 pieces of smooth stone
• 2 collectors (the most expensive part of all... and they are cheaper than mk1 collectors)
• A bunch of RP2 redstone tubes (made with glass, tin, copper and redstone dust)
• Some stone jacketed wire

And the tools used are a RP diamond handsaw (but in this case, one made with any of the RP gems should suffice) and a RP screwdriver.

For comparison, I placed a full setup of mkII collectors (12), 2 mk1 relays and 1 condenser, and we can see it is slower than this contraption (and compare the 12 diamonds invested in the whole contraption, against the 18 used only by the two relays... and the more than 200 diamonds for those 12 mk collectors!)

Lava factory Mk IV

This is a new update for the lava production facility (for using Lava with Combustion Engines in Buildcraft) using Equivalent Exchange, Redpower 2 and Buildcraft 2. As I say in the video, I'm not using Buildcraft pipes (aside from the wooden pipes) because without Zeldo's distribution pipe I cannot control how the redstone will distribute itself in the system.

I'll give you a first episode and a peek on my next Let's Play on Friday ^^.

Updating the production lines

As promised, here you have it. a short video about two factory lines: one to produce diamonds and the other to produce lava.

Fully automated Wheat Farm

Here we are again, revising an old concept. We already have an wheat farm with automated harvesting options, but the planting process is a nightmare. Ok, there is this mod called Minefactory Reloaded (llok for it in the sidebar) which gives us a "planter" block; a block that will put a seed or sapling on the prepared dirt block over itself when it receives a redstone pulse.

With this and Buildcraft pipes we can make this:

EDIT: New version of the video, with fixed audio and better quality.

I used the distribution pipes from Additional Pipes mod (previously called Teleport Pipes). As you can see, I added a small part on the end of the video about using Redpower 2 logic blocks to make it fully automated (so we won't need to do anything but receive the stuff). However, I left a mistake on the video and put a comment on the description telling the people to come here and look at the fully functional version. I know, I'm evil... or a little annoyed with the people who don't bother looking the description. So here it is, the solution to the enigma:

As you can see, I added two logic blocks and some cabling between the piston control and the planting control. The toggle latch will allow the timer to start working once the pistons unpower (and release the water), so that timer needs a value equal to the time it takes for the water to take all the wheat and seeds to reach the collecting channel and dissapear (it will be different for each farm, depending on how long they are). That new timer will repower the toggle latch (blocking itself) and start the planting process.

And for my next update, I promise you an infinite source of pneumatic power using combustion engines. Equivalent Exchange and lava are involved, and the release will be first in this blog (with a video, of course), and some time later in my youtube channel.

Have fun!

Edit: Since I had a crash in the game, I can put a full list of my mods, here you have it ^^


modLoader Beta 1.8.1
mod_AdditionalBuildcraftObjects 0.5b (MC 1.8.1, BC 2.2.4)
mod_BuildCraftCore 2.2.5
mod_BuildCraftBuilders 2.2.5
mod_BuildCraftEnergy 2.2.5
mod_BuildCraftFactory 2.2.5
mod_BuildCraftTransport 2.2.5
mod_EE 1.8.1
mod_IC2 v1.23
mod_IC2_AdvMachine v2.1 modded by CPW
mod_MineFactory 1.8.1R1.3.1
mod_MineFactoryCompat_Grass 1.3.0B
mod_MineFactoryReloaded_Compat_IndustrialCraft 1.0.0
mod_mocreatures v2.13 (MC 1.8_1)
mod_PortalGun 1.8.1v1
mod_PowerConverters 1.8.1R1.0.1
mod_RedPowerArray 2.0pr3b
mod_RedPowerCore 2.0pr3b
mod_RedPowerLighting 2.0pr3b
mod_RedPowerLogic 2.0pr3b
mod_RedPowerMachine 2.0pr3b
mod_RedPowerWiring 2.0pr3b
mod_RedPowerWorld 2.0pr3b
mod_HeroesGuild 1.8.1
mod_zAdditionalPipes Rev26
mod_WirelessRemote 0.4
mod_WirelessRedstone 1.4
mod_IDResolver 1.8.1 - Update 0
mod_TooManyItems 1.8.1 2011-09-27
mod_FCBetterThanWolves 2.95
mod_WorldEditCUI v0.9.1 for mc1.8
mod_RecipeBook Beta 1.8

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...

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.

Recycling and matter making with Buildcraft

Hi people, today I'll show you some IC2 and BC2 interactions. Specifically, the recycler and the mass fabricator. Both are old friends, and they seem to work ok in the new version with BC2, as long as we put the pipes in the right places.

About energy, both get it from behind (so you can't see it in the screenshots), the recycler from a batbox and the mass fabricator from a MFS unit, both with default settings and with the relevant cables (remember the basic copper cable can't handle more than 32 EU/s, which is the batbox output, and the MFS outputs 512 EU/s, which require glass fibre cable or HV cable).

The Recycler setup:

As you can see, it takes the items to be recycled from the upper side, and the output is on one side (remember the energy goes in from behind). Other experiments I made show that you can place the wooden pipe in the back of the recycler too.

The green pipe is an Insertion Pipe and the blue & white a bouncing pipe, both from Buildcraft's Extra Pipes mod.

Personally I use a cactus farm to feed a recylcer. A big cactus farm with two chests with two wooden pipes each as buffer (but depending of the size, you might need more to keep fed the recyclers).

The Mass Fabricator setup:
Like the recycler, the output is on the side. The input, however, is under the block, since the scraps are placed in the lower part of the machine.

As a bonus, I'll show you the surface of my latest base, played in a world with the "Industrialcraft2" seed. I spent most of the time getting materials and setting up a really big cactus farm (in truth, I think I should have made the farm wider instead of so high, but since this was the first time I was trying to make a really big one...). By the way, the mass fabricator devours the scrap now, in exchange for not needing almost any energy (in the video there are about three solar panels directly connected to the mass fabricator, all the others being connected to the MFS unit). I'll admit I cheated with the cabling, since I was taking the chance to test the range and energy loss of the fiberglass cable.

And without delay, here is the video:

Farms: a new approach

Hi again people, I've been updating some ideas and concepts to the post-minecraft forge, and refining some ideas. Let's have a look, first, at some of my old designs on farming:

These are the basic designs I shared with you in July, as a compendium of sorts, for a wheat farm, a cactus farm, a sugar cane farm (fully automated), and a mushroom farm (that could be made fully automated, but I prefer semi-automated). I also made an antry for a semi-automated tree farm at the end of august. So now, I present you with the updated version of my tree farm idea and a new version of an old video of mine, the semi-automated food cans factory.

Here we are, the Quarry used to take all trees in an area and not keeping the drilling until reaching bedrock. It needs, as a minimun, a quarry, a builder, the temporary use of a template drawing table, two combustion engines, and the pipes and chests (and blocks) needed to store and distribute the harvested goods. Everything else (the lights, for example) is just some stuff I put to make things easier to manage or faster.
The concept lies around the inhability of the quarry to mine the cables introduced by Eloraam's RedPower mod, and the only "problem" of the video is that I put the quarry too close to the ground. If you use the white-crusted trees, putting the quarry block on the ninth block of elevation should suffice, but if you are using IC2's rubber trees, I'd advice to put it 15 blocks over the surface where you plant them.

Now the second encarnation of my food factory using a wheat farm, I had to encase it because I'm playing with Mo'Creatures and birds seem to be able to mess with the farmland. Sadly, right now the interaction between IC2's machines and BC2's pipe system is a little messed up, and IC2's mod team's priority seems to be the release of a stable SSP and SMP version. This means that extracting the finished product with pipes is out of the question, sadly.

Here we can see the insertion/extraction distribution I've been seeing with my pipe distribution (I'll post the screenshot next): numbers are the spots where stuff goes in, while the letters indicate the order of extraction. Yeah, it's a mess...

Here is the attempt I made to fix the problem, without any success, I'm afraid... (the idea is that if the wooden pipe extracts the wrong item, that item would be reinserted in the right pipeline). Not because the idea was wrong, but because it extracts too quickly and it tries to extract first the item being canned (2A in the previous image), quicker than the machine can process it.

Oh, and as a final reminder, porting IC2 to 1.8 will take about 4-5 weeks, so don't update your minecraft too quickly.

Enjoy the game, and leave comments!

Buildcraft 2.1.1

Hi people, sorry for the delay... In my defense, I'd like to say something: do NOT place extraction pipes with Buildcraft 2.1.1, it will crash the game... and you won't be able to keep that map. So yes, I lost the map I was working with XD.

I'll be using a new block from RedPower (version 1.7.1 is out, by the way): the repeater. Yes, there is already a repeater in the game... but this (that does not replace the old one) has a maximun delay much bigger, and can be placed like any other logic gate (on a wall, under the roof...). Here is how it looks like:

Here you can see four repeaters at several delay adjustements. They seem to be a lilttle buggy, at least visually, but they work well. I'll be using them so several stacks of engines will start at slightly different times, producing three "ticks" really quickly instead of pulsing at the same time, wasting two of those ticks.

Anyway, I made a video of a strip mine operation (a quarry at its maximun coverage) and its feeds. You can see it here:

There is a reason for the separation between the oil tanks, and I'll explain it with another, much shorter video at the end of the post. Meanwhile, let's talk about the oil, the pipes, etc...

First, in case you didn't knew, oil is a new finite resource that is treated like water in regard to everything but Buildcraft 2.x.x (dolphins can spawn in oil pools, for example, if you have installed Mo'Creatures). Being a finite resource, you cannot create infinite sources like we usually do with water. Also, the only way to put oil inside pipes is by using the new oil pump (made by putting an oil tank over a mining well in the crafting grid), and there is no way to take the oil out, the only possible destination to the oil is an oil tank or a combustion engine where it will be consumed (you cannot extract oil from the combustion engines).
By the way, you can place anything connected to an oil pump, like a lever to power the attached engine.
Sadly, oil is not affected by the special effects of insertion pipes or golden pipes, but iron, stone, cobblestone and wooden pipes work as usual.
Placing a wooden pipe between two oil tanks will mean that you might have to take a wrench and rearrange manually the direction to where they point, so do as I did in the video and put a stone or cobblestone pipe between the wooden pipe and the target oil deposit.
Now about behaviour, it seems like each block of oil is "divided" into three or so chunks, so wherever you have a point where the oil can go two or more directions it will go all of them at all, stopping moving until it has enough "mass" to move (so, until more oil gets divided and makes for a full oil block in each pipe). So you will be seeing lots of "leftover" oil everywhere.

As for advice when using all this, I'm using Eloraam's light blocks to know, at a quick glance, which wooden engines are working and which ones are not. Also, remember that now the engines will cool down on their own, and they won't explode as long as they have something to do, regardless of their color (heat level).

I'll start looking into Eloraam's other new three blocks for the weekend or so (I'm quite useless with circuitry, I think I said that before ^^), since there is nothing more to do with buildcraft right now. And without further delay, here is the video about how not to place the oil tanks:

Semi-automated wood farm

First of all, the extra buildcraft pipes link has been actualized to a new one that has working versions for both BC 1.7.3 and 2.0.1.

So, as promised, I refined my idea of using buildcraft to make a self-sustaining, almost fully automated tree farm. Why semi-automated? Well, you need to use two levers (one for planting, and one for harvesting once the trees have all grown), and I didn't made any self-fueling circuit for the machines (since those take a lot of space). The only problem with this contraption is that using steam engines (the coal-powered ones made with stone) means you need to harvest and replace the engines of the fillers after each harvesting, because they overheat very quickly when powering a filler in clearing configuration.

As you can see in the screenshots, we need a Template drawing table and two blank templates, two building machines that will use the same template (the lower one will be placing dirt, and the upper one will be planting the saplings), some pipes (an obsidian pipe at the water level, two diamond pipes, and I used two gold pipes that are not really needed), and two fillers with the clearing program (9 glass in the 3x3 grid), plus some engines (that can be the ones powered by coal or by oil). I also made a small circuit using RedPower in order to need only one lever for both fillers (plus some repeaters at 0.3 or 0.4 seconds delay, so the engines won't tick at the same time).

So how does this work? First, I made the farm, in this case a 17x17 hole (plus the borders made with wood, taking an additional 2x2), and filled it with water currents (two rows going in the direction of the pipe system, then a current going from each side to the center where the obsidian pipe is), then I made the "placing template" you can see to the left of the screenshots, then the pipe system and finally I placed the machines, engines and cables.
The operation of the contraption is quite simple: activate the builders to place the dirt and plant the trees over it (in the screenshots we can see this already done), wait for the trees to grow, then activate the fillers (you can use one filler only if you prefer, but it will take much more time), and when all is cleared, repeat the process.
Of course, nothing prevents you from making a much bigger version of the contraption, up to the 64x64 or so that the land marks reach (or if you use several builders...), however that might cause a lot of lag from the huge amount of water currents. Adding a clock and a toggle latch to the circuits can, after calculating the timing, turn off the fillers and start the planting process, and limiting the amount of fuel in each engine to the minimun to perform their duty (in the case of the engines powering the fillers, at least) is a good idea.

Without more delay, here is the video of the contraption at work:

Oh, I didn't used a quarry, but with a RedPower's circuit with a clock, it can be made without much fear of over-digging (sadly, my quarry tends to keep powered after the engines have been turned off...), or once you made enough holes till the bottom of the map, you can make the farms down there.

Have fun!

A classic monster grinder using Buildcraft

Yes, I know I promised a video... but really, a 30 minutes long video of watching how things build themselves can be a little boring, so instead I took screenshots.

My build is 37x36, with a total height of 5, with the distribution directly taken from this video of Youtube, with some small changes.
In case you are wondering, I'm using a txture pack, Ruston RPG (it doesn't need anything, just drop it into the textures folder and select it ingame).

 First I made a small setup. Here you can see the space determined, one platform made and several Buildcraft's fillers connected to wireless receivers (for no other reason than to have them all run at once XD).

Here I start the powering and the fillers fill the area.

Now finishing the basic layout. Since I don't fully trust Buildcraft's builder for anything but building with a single kind of block (you can use several, but it takes a lot of counting and calculation to arrange the blocks in the appropiate order inside the builder, so I prefer to do everything else by hand), this layout will be the one I will take into a blueprint.

There you can see the template maker making the template. I will leave it there just in case getting out and coming back into the server resets the templates (there was a problem in the SSP version when the builder first appeared, and since I don't know if it has been fixed, well, it's not like anyone will steal it XD).

You just put a blank template and the maker does all the job, it doesn't even need redstone! (But you can use a redstone torch to make a negative of the template).

In the video the player uses signs but I find very annoying the signs cannot be stacked (unless you use a mod), so I use slabs instead, which are the cheaper option. Since the slabs take a space, you could make the grinder bigger by adding one to the X and Z measures per water source needed (here you could enlarge the trap to be 41x40 or so).

I made the "mouth" a little too small, I had to remove the top layer of blocks to allow for zombies and skeletons to die there, but it's just a classic lava trap (between the lava and the water there are three ladders, and a water current under the ladders).

An aerial view of the "finished" product (save the roof XD).

Now I put a builder over the trap, and started building an upper level. The easiest way to do the upper level is to change the direction of the central water current, letting the mobs drop in the fartest (to the lava) position of the grinder.

The builder, feeded by a chest to represent the porssibility of using storaged materials from the quarrys, or having one or two quarrys feeding the builder thanks to pipes. The chests in the ground are to storage the drops from the mobs, using insertion pipes (but there is no real reason not to use simple stone pipes, really).

Here I just realized the builder is putting things in a rotated fashion... oh well XD.

So why this? Well, in the video we see the player needs a lot of time, effort and a couple of diamond pickaxes. Now, we can just make a template of an above the ground version of that trap, and then make the builder excavate it in the innards of the earth (so you wouldn't even need to feed the builder, you would need a clock, the builder and the template!). The only drawback would be the need of running and planting torches to avoid the spawning of mobs during the construction once there is a 2 blocks of height at enough distance from you.

This grinder has the following pros and cons:
+ Only 5 of height counting the roof (6 with the floor, 7 with the water channel to collect stuff).
+ Easy to made and modify.
+ Hard to spot. Glitches would show very little.
+ With Buildcraft, now you can make this trap with ease in the air, allowing for a position where the mobs can only spawn inside the grinder.
- Items get stuck if for some reason a mob dies away from the lava (the slabs or anything you put to stop the water currents from merging will also stop items). This can be a minus if you make the upper level with dirt to use it as a regular animal farm.
- You don't see the monsters dying.
- If you play with Mo's Creatures (like I do), Ogres cannot spawn in this trap. However, this also could be considered a plus, since the ogres would break the trap even if you use obsidian instead of stone: the ladders preventing the merge of water and lava would break. As of today, the only way of avoiding this is to reduce the strenght of the ogres so they don't destroy any block (or using other mods to damage the mobs, like Industrialcraft's Tesla Coils).

Farms video

So here it is the video I promised. You can see here how I make my automated farms to get wheat, cacti, mushrooms, and sugar cane (well, and wood when I set up a tree plantation in the roof or floor of a base).

About farming the flower farming: you cannot plant flowers and expect them to expand, you need to use bonemeal on grass to get more, so set up a water collector for that is quite an overkill ^^.

I expect to make a new video before next week about making a monster grinder that also doubles as a critter grinder during the day, using Buildcraft.


As for Industrialcraft, I'm currently not using the mod, because it takes so many terrain sprites, I would be limited to Eloraam's RedPower and Alblaka's Buildcraft, and I'm currently making some traps and contraptions that take much more advantage from the Better than Wolves and Portal Gun mods (see them in the links section to the right of the page).

Stay tuned!