Talk:Tutorial/Automatic Cobblestone Generator/@comment-5668185-20121027184241

The primary issue from a server perspective is lag- all the blocks moving through the pneumatic tubes can cause horrendous lag if you have a large array setup. Energy collectors are a lot more efficient in that regard. They can be considered overpowered though- a full array of 17 mk3 collectors surrounding 5 mk3 relays around a single energy condenser runs at almost five hundred times the EMC generation rate of a physical cobblestone generator running at maximum capacity. There's a hard limit on that even in singleplayer, and that's how many blocks a second the energy condenser is capable of dealing with (I think it's somewhere around 20).

Depending on your perspective, a cobblestone generator can be a useful stopgap on the way to getting an energy collector array set up while you focus on doing other things, something that you skip entirely in favour of mining the necessary EMC for a set of mk3 collectors (getting the destruction catalys early makes this actually quite easy), or just something you build because you think it looks cool. My reasons for building them are a little from option 1, a little from option 3. I like the way they look and it's less tedious to build a couple of these arrays than it is to go on long mining forays.

Having said that, I can mine EMC much faster than a maxed-out cobblestone generator makes it if I have a D-Cat available.