Quarrying on hold outside of Mindcrack Overworld

[Brew]

This brings up a great question that I am working on right now. What is the best way to power a quarry? For my last run, I used four steam engines fed with Charcoal. This took a lot of effort to create the 360+ charcoal that I needed to complete the run.

I was considering a combustion engine or two running on fuel, but that means that I need to figure out how to get the oil, refine it to fuel, and then transport it aound. The notes all say that this is more efficient than a steam engine, but how much more so? It sounds like if I run a combustion engine running from a tank of fuel, I will need to load the tank, use wooden pipe and an engine out of the tank for the fuel, run a pump and engines out of a water supply for cooling, etc. How much more energy does the fuel produce than charcoal, and is there really any benefit to all that complexity?

Should I just invest in the (rather expensive) solar panels and use an electric engine to convert the energy? What sort of arrays and storage should I be shooting for?

[DaedalusAlpha]

I see a couple of options.
You could for example automate your charcoal production, using a tree farm and automatic machines for all steps. That would make that route a lot more manageble.

Other than that I'm partial to magmatic engines. It's pretty easy to find lava around, and if you just can't find any, there is tons of it in the nether that you can use by setting up automated transport lines between the nether and the overworld.

And then of course you have the solar panels, hard to get started, but once you get there they are very neat.

[Brew]

Well, I certainly know where some lava is, thanks to my last quarry run.

I'll have to investigate all three options to see the complexity/cost.

Thanks,
Brew

[Akira Doe]

Originally Posted by white_bear_84

You guys have serious setups. I have minecraft envy...

I'm finally moving out of the city so while I still have my house setup on my lot, that's it now :P No machines, or power (yet) if that makes you feel any better

[Irimar]

Originally Posted by DaedalusAlpha

Ah you're right, it's not 8 MJ as I thought, but it's not 100 either, it's 32 at most; Quarry - Minecraft buildcraft Wiki

Out of date information.

Quarry - FTB Wiki

[white_bear_84]

Originally Posted by Akira Doe

I'm finally moving out of the city so while I still have my house setup on my lot, that's it now :P No machines, or power (yet) if that makes you feel any better

Where are you going!

I have been branch mining out from my plot and have found a heap of massive caves, i am curious, can you place glass over a hole in the ground to reduce processing - or i assume since its transparent this doesnt really help.. ..does the same apply for slabs??

I think i might start an underground tree farm.. ...is that possible??

[Obsi]

Glass won't help because it's transparent. I don't know about slabs but I presume since they aren't transparent they would be ok. The cut blocks you make with a saw probably wouldn't be ok though as the game seems to ignore them when rendering the minimap and I know that light will travel through them.

As for quarries.... I power mine with 1 advanced solar panel and an electric engine. I'm not in any great hurry so the fact it slows down at night isn't a worry for me. I also don't use any fancy transportation systems. I use a diamond pipe with void pipe to void the dirt/cobble/gravel (since I have tons now) and feed the rest into a double chest. When the quarry is finished I fill up my inventory on the stuff in the chest (usually easy to fit in my inventory since it's just the "good" stuff), move the quarry to the next spot and go home to sort my goodies.

[Akira Doe]

So it is 100... damn... I had 4 of those engines upgraded with the brass tubes but since I've moved them I'll have to do that again.

The only thing that worried me about that is the upgraded ones look like they'll explode the pipes quicker when it starts looping back.

[Irimar]

Originally Posted by Akira Doe

So it is 100... damn... I had 4 of those engines upgraded with the brass tubes but since I've moved them I'll have to do that again.

The only thing that worried me about that is the upgraded ones look like they'll explode the pipes quicker when it starts looping back.

Use redstone energy conduit, it doesn't blow up and has a lower power loss for longer runs.