Tutorial
In this tutorial I will go in detail over the entire process as presented in this screenshot:
The numbers used on the screenshot will also be mentioned in the tutorial below.
First a bit of information about the numbers. RCL (resonating crystal liquid) and crystals have three important attributes in common:
- Purity: this is how pure the crystal is. Purity has an effect on the total power and RF/t (see below) as well as how much radiation (pollution) will be generated when the crystal is generating power. It is very important to get purity as high as you can as this reduces radiation as well as increases power efficiency.
- Strength: this is a number between 0 and 100% and it indicates the total amount of RF that this crystal can produce (given optimal purity). A crystal with strength 100% (and purity 100%) would produce 1 billion RF total.
- Efficiency: this is a number between 0 and 100% and it indicates how efficient the crystal is at producing that RF. In other words, this number corresponds to the RF/t. A crystal with 100% efficiency (and purity 100%) would produce 20000 RF/t.
In addition to those three attributes a crystal also has a total amount of power that is left. A crystal that is freshly created will have 100% power. A depleted crystal will have 0% power.
RCL also has an additional attribute which is the quality. The quality of a liquid is a very important attribute that is determined at the very first stage when the liquid is first created (by the smelter). It is important to have this quality at 100% as otherwise all further stages of the RCL processing will be affected negatively. For example, it will not be possible to purify bad quality RCL as high and future (not implemented) enhancing processes will also not work as effecitvely.
First a general remark about the Deep Resonance tanks. In principle you can also store RCL in tanks from other mods as it is just a liquid. However, RCL has special attributes and only Deep Resonance tanks know how to mix two different RCL instances with different attributes (i.e. inserting 10% pure RCL into a tank containing just as much 20% pure RCL will result in 15% pure RCL). Also the Deep Resonance machines can only work directly with Deep Resonance tanks.
The smelter (2) is where it all starts. This machine needs a little bit of RF to melt resonating ore into RCL. In addition to RF this machine also needs a tank filled with lava below the smelter (1). It is important that the tank contains between 40 and 60% lava! Here is what happens depending on the amount of lava in the tank:
- Below 25%: nothing happens. No RCL is produced, no ore is wasted.
- Between 25 and 40%: RCL is produced but with reduced quality and at slower speeds
- Between 40 and 60%: RCL is produced with best quality (quality equal to 100%). Closer to 60% will make it produce RCL faster but be careful not to exceed 60%
- Between 60 and 75%: RCL is produced at higher speeds but strongly reduced quality. Avoid this at all costs!
- Beyond 75%: the ore is simply wasted. It is melted but no liquid is procuded
To get a lava tank constantly filled between 40 and 60% you can use a vanilla comparator on the tank (and some other redstone logic) or you can use the RFTools liquid monitor.
If all goes well the smelter will produce RCL of quality 100%, efficiency 10%, strength 10% and purity 10% and insert it in the tank above the smelter (3).
Even the best RCL as produced by the smelter is still not very good. Most importantly the purity is only 10%. Raising that will decrease radiation as well as increase the amount of power you can get out of the final crystal. So in our setup the liquid is piped out of the destination tank directly into the purification tank (4). In the middle of our purification tank there is the Purifier (5). The purifier will take liquid from the top tank, purify it and then insert it into the bottom tank. In our setup the top and bottom tanks are actually the same tank so the purifier will simply purify the RCL in-place.
To purify RCL the purifier needs filter material. This filter material is made out of charcoal/coal, gravel, and sand so it can be easily automated. The chest where we store the new filter material (6) is at the back of the purifier and cannot be seen on the screenshot. Using an item conduit we pipe this filter material into the purifier (it has a single slot that can hold 64 items). When the filter material is used up it is ejected. If there is an adjacent chest (7) then that is used. Otherwise it gets thrown into the air.
Every purification step adds 25% of purity to a small amount of liquid. So the speed of this process also depends on how much liquid the tank contains. Note that it doesn't really matter if the tank has a lot of liquid or not. The purified liquid is correctly mixed with whatever liquid is already inside.
Note that the purifiers can only purify up to about 84-85% purity due to limitations in this process. For further purification you will need more advanced machines that are not in the mod yet.
So the RCL in the purification tank will keep on getting purified (and re-filled from the smelter) for as long as it isn't enough quality. The valve (8) takes care of removing the liquid from the top tank to the bottom tank (9) as long as certain quality numbers are reached. In this setup the valve is set to allow RCL of quality 84% and more through.
So when RCL goes through the valve we know that it will be RCL of 100% quality, 10% strength, 10% efficiency and 84% purity. Note that floating point numbers are used internally so it is possible that it is actually only 9.9999%.
Finally the RCL needs to be formed into a crystal in the Crystalizer (10). The crystalizer needs a little bit of RF to work and it will take RCL out of the bottom tank (9). This takes a while but when it is done a freshly formed crystal will be waiting for you in the machine. In the setup above an item conduit makes sure that the new crystal will immediatelly be sent to the pedestal (11). Note that with the setup above the resulting crystal will be able to generate about 1700 RF/t.
The Pedestal is a simple device that will place new crystals in front (or on top depending on how it is placed) and it will also automatically remove spent crystals and put them in a nearby chest (or eject them in the world if there is no such chest). The pedestal also makes sure that a nearby generator will know about the new crystal and it will immediatelly start generating power when the generator is on.
Note! Keep the spent crystals. These will become important later!
The Energy Collector (12) will collect energy from all nearby crystals. This is visualized as a strong beam of light (laser) connecting every crystal with the collector. The Energy Collector needs to be placed on top of a Generator (13). One generator block can handle up to two crystals and can handle maximum 10000 RF/t. So if you would have a single crystal of 20000 RF/t you also need two generator blocks.
Finally the Generator Controller (14) is the device that can turn on/off the generator. It needs a redstone signal (like a lever) to do that.
To generate crystals with more power you need to use the laser/lens system. This will be covered in future tutorials.