Tutorial/Mass-Fab Macerator

Mass-Fab Macerator
The Mass-Fab Macerator (MFM) is a factory that uses macerators to fabricate EMC extremely rapidly, far exceeding the output of a Power Flower. However, the MFM requires EU to run, and Solar Panels and arrays are tedious to manufacture without a factory of their own. However, the player can start small and slowly upgrade the MFM over time, making it more and more effective.

This is not to be confused with the Mass Fabricator, which is a separate entity.



Basic Principle
A Macerater can process either Bones or Blaze Rods into more EMC than it was fed (unlike a crafting table). The product is then fed into an Energy Condenser to turn it back into a bone or blaze rod, starting the process over again. The macerator grinds a bone into 5 bone meal instead of 3, creating 64 free EMC. It grinds a blaze rod into 5 blaze powders instead of 2, creating a massive bonus of 2304 EMC per iteration. Bone is plentiful, but the player should acquire a blaze rod as soon as possible because it makes the MFM 36 times faster at generating EMC! This is equivalent to having 10 overclockers in the macerator and enough power to run it.

Construction
The final goal is a small factory composed of 2 Macerators, 4-5 Filters, 2 Energy Condensers, 10+ Pneumatic Tubes, 2-4 Timers, a Blaze Rod, and enough power to run the macerators at full speed with 16 Overclocker Upgrades each (plus 3 Transformer Upgrades and ~8 Energy Storage Upgrades as necessary). Typically that means 3-4 HV Solar Arrays and 1-2 MFSUs. However, that's a lot to build, particularly in early game. Luckily you can start small and build up as you find or produce more materials.

Construction of the MFM factory is split into 6 stages, each stage getting progressively more effective.

Stage 1: Manual Fabrication
This step is simple: build a standard macerator, power it with a solar panel and bat box, and feed it bones to make bone meal. Put the bone meal in an energy condensor to turn it back into bones, and repeat the process. This is slow and tedious, but produces EMC faster than hunting around and gathering by pickaxe. The disadvantage is the energy condensor requirement, which is heavy on exotic materials like diamond and covalence dust. It's also painfully slow -- mining trees and tossing those in the condensor is probably more worth your time. You want to get out of this stage as soon as you can.

Stage 2: Basic Automation
This stage turns the macerator into a proper factory, so you can step away and let it fabricate while you do productive things of your own. To do this, you should upgrade the macerator to a Rotary Macerator, and build some redstone engines and pipes.

Use one redstone engine and some wooden pipe to send bones from the condenser to the top of the macerator. Use 4 engines to pipe bone meal from the side of the macerator back into the condenser. Power the macerator with a bat box and solar panel. This configuration has a flaw, however: once it warms up, the single redstone engine will pipe bone into the macerator faster than it can process it; extra bone falls to the ground and eventually disappears. To solve this, build an overflow pipe that takes bones back to the condensor.

A better solution is to use filters and pneumatic tubes, but those take more effort to manufacture. Build them when you can.

Overall, this factory produces about 17-20 extra bones per minute when it's working right (not dumping bones or starving the macerator), equaling about 1600 - 2000 EMC per minute. Not bad. However, the machine could still use major improvements, so continue on to the next step.

Stage 3: Improved Speed & Reliability
In this stage we want to accomplish three major tasks:
 * 1) Replace the redstone engines and pipes with Filters and Pneumatic Tubes (if we haven't already)
 * 2) Add an output path for our surplus EMC
 * 3) Replace Bones with Blaze RodsMFM_With_Filters.png

Step 1: Filters
Filters and Pneumatic Tubes are more of a pain to manufacture, but once you have them you'll never want to go back. They're more reliable than redstone engines and common pipes because they won't dump items on the floor. They also allow specifying which items they pump and how much, which will be valuable both for feeding the macerator and for creating an output path. It's a pain to build the red-doped wafers for filters, and timers are also time-consuming... but the payoff is big.

First, we want to make our machine reliable and well-tuned. Position the condenser two blocks above the macerator, with a filter in the middle. Use a screwdriver to point the filter in the correct direction. Place another filter to pull from the side of the macerator. Use pneumatic tubes to pipe the powders back to the condenser.

Now to configure the filters. Right-click the first filter and put 1 bone inside. Right-click the second filter and place 5 bone meal inside. Last of all, place a bone in the top slot of the condenser. Now place a timer in the corner between the two filters (with a dirt or stone block in the back to hold the timer up). Use a screwdriver to turn it so it powers both filters. Finally, right-click it and set its time to the lowest interval: 0.2 seconds.

Step 2: Output
Next we want to add an output. This requires another condenser, filter and timer. Add a filter to the side of the condenser. Right-click the filter and add 64 bone and 64 bone meal. Place a stone or dirt block behind and above the filter and place a timer above it. Set the timer's interval to one second. Place the condenser on the output of the filter, and right-click it. Place a higher EMC item such as a diamond or diamond block in the condenser's upper-right slot. The main condenser fills up with bone quickly, but any time it has a stack of 64 bone or bone meal, the output filter will suck it out and use it to produce diamond blocks instead. This allows higher-density storage.

Step 3: Blaze Rods
This is a difficult step because Blaze Rods can only be obtained in a Nether Fortress. Tekkit adds Jetpacks and other items that make this easier, however, so you should find a fortress and grab at least 1 blaze rod asap. A much easier alternative is to get a Philosopher's Stone and use the mob transmutation (default R) to turn pigmen into other Nether mobs until you get a Blaze. Blazes are a rare transmutation so bring plenty of fuel or a Klein Star so you can perform enough transmutations to get a Blaze. Once you have a Blaze Rod use a Condenser to produce lots of copies of it, and start replacing all bones in your factory with Blaze Rods, and all bone meal with Blaze Powder.

Doing this amplifies your EMC production by about 36x.

Stage 4: High Speed
It's time to start adding upgrades to the macerator. Each overclocker upgrade adds speed (up to a maximum of 16), but also increases power consumption drastically. This means upgrading your solar arrays to medium at least. Transformer upgrades allow the macerator to accept higher power levels (you'll only ever need 2 even for HV Solar Arrays). Last of all, Energy Storage Upgrades add to the energy buffer the macerator holds, making it easier to apply greater numbers of overclockers. You don't need the maximum of 16 overclockers yet: start with 4-8 in this stage.

At this point, you should probably switch to a higher-density output object. Diamonds are likely to fill up chests very quickly unless you're piping them directly into another machine for processing. Dark Matter, Red Matter, and Red Matter Furnaces are excellent choices for high-density storage. The DM pedestal is the highest EMC item in the game (save for a Klein Star, but that's another matter).

Stage 5: Maximum Speed
In the final stage, it's time to throw out that Rotary Macerator and replace it with a normal Macerator. Why would you do such a thing?! Because once you hit a certain point of upgrades, the rotary macerator becomes inferior. My test with 16 overclocker upgrades in a rotary and normal macerator showed that the normal macerator keeps up with the rotary one perfectly, and maybe goes slightly faster. But the rotary macerator can be much harder to get up to 16 overclockers. You have to do so slowly, letting it spin up and refill its power storage. Do it wrong and it may take forever to spin up, or never get there. The normal macerator just works -- shove more overclockers in it, and it just runs faster.

Hexus One says once you get to the 9th overclocker or so (over 100 EU/t), the normal macerator makes better use of power than the rotary macerator. So replace it once you can feed that much power and build the upgrades.

To complete your factory, get the macerator up to 16 overclocker upgrades, 2 transformer upgrades, and 8+ energy storage upgrades. Power it with an MFSU and 2 HV Solar Arrays. Consider adding a second macerator (feed this one with the same filter, using pneumatic tubes). This one doesn't need to be rotary, so it will be simpler to construct.

Stage 6: Mass-Production
Now that you've perfected your factory (or perhaps even before), it's time to start mass-producing copies of it to further amplify production.

Simply make another MFM next to the first one. You can share power thorugh a centralized cluster of HV arrays and MFSUs, improving efficiency of components. Now that you're fabricating EMC so quickly, you can probably skip the first few stages and jump to maximum speed for each new factory you build. Eventually you'll run out of uses for more EMC... or will you?

Other MFM Models
Newer forms of MFMs are still being discussed and developed. Examples are discussed below.

Redstone MFM


The Redstone MFM uses no solar panels or power generators: it's run entirely on Redstone Dust. Some of the blaze rods or powders go to a condenser producing redstone dust, which pumps the dust into the macerator. Because the macerator's power source comes from its own output (with ample EMC to spare), this MFM model is entirely self-contained. The condenser producing redstone requires very little of the macerator's output, so the system still produces substantial amounts of surplus EMC. (Note: On a multiplayer server I timed one at 27 diamond blocks in 5 minutes, or around 400,000 EMC/minute).



Cons
The main disadvantage is the hard limit on how fast redstone can be consumed as a fuel. 12 overclockers is the maximum a Redstone MFM can handle before it can't consume its fuel fast enough to power itself effectively (tested in both multiplayer and singleplayer).

This means you should build a second Redstone MFM if the first isn't producing fast enough, instead of trying to power more overclockers.

Pros
1) Scaling: The system is self-scaling. From 0 overclockers to 12, the design of the MFM doesn't change at all. In contrast, models powered by generators or solar panels require further investment and/or redesign of their power supply and layout.

2) Simplicity: Another advantage is it's easier to duplicate this MFM for mass-production. There's still a lot that must be manufactured (preferably by dedicated factories), but the most heavy-investment components (the 3 condensers) can simply be condensed from the output of your first MFM. Excluding generators and solar panels means a lot less work, particularly when dealing with MV or HV Solar Arrays, MFSUs, etc.

Materials that must be constructed:


 * 1 macerator


 * 4 pneumatic tubes


 * 12 overclocker upgrades


 * 3 filters


 * 1 timer

These are the only non-condensable materials. These materials can be condensed from the output of your first MFM: In contrast, MFMs powered by solar panels or generators must also duplicate or scale those power sources, which is expensive and time-consuming without extensive support factories (HV Solar Arrays and MFSUs are a lot of work). Skipped components include:
 * 4 red alloy wire
 * 3 condensers
 * starting redstone dust, blaze rods, and blaze powders
 * electric cables/wires
 * MV or HV Solar Arrays
 * MFSU to store energy for night-time operation

This also means the redstone MFM is easier to construct initially, as labor- and component-intensive solar panels and other power sources are cut out of the process entirely. However, an additional condenser and filter are required for feeding redstone dust to the macerator, contributing to the initial investment.

The Redstone MFM also requires fewer upgrades, as transformer upgrades are pointless and energy storage upgrades appear to be unnecessary as well. And it won't explode in your face from attaching to too much power -- redstone dust won't make the macerator explode no matter how much you pump into it.

3) Compact and Convenient: A solar-powered MFM has to expose its solar panels to sunlight somehow. This makes it inconvenient and invasive to operate one at bedrock level or inside a large building. Non-solar power supplies (like geothermal) take up extra space and must be fed fuel by some means (automated or otherwise).

In contrast, a redstone MFM is compact, self-contained and self-sufficient. It requires no power wires, external power sources, or other dangling bits. The whole factory fits inside a 2x3x4 meter area.