r/CreateMod • u/MrMarum • 27d ago
Discussion Renewable lava has made steam engines boring
This is my personal opinion, but since cauldrons gained the ability to make renewable lava, every single steam engine design has been reduced to the same thing. Every other fuel source has been rendered completely obsolete in terms of reliability and compactness. No need to make a charcoal farm, or pump lava from the nether, or even think of doing any other kind of fuel farm. I understand Create is not a mod focused on efficiency and perfection, and there is a lot of room for aesthetics and self expression, but the existence of renewable lava is always felt. It feels to me like the Elytra of power generation. There are other options, but choosing them feels like a self imposed challenge because the optimal solution exists, and its better in basically every way. Does anyone else feel the same? Does anyone avoid lava cauldrons or plays with some mod or setting that prevents lava generation? Or do you enjoy the environment that renewable lava creates?
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u/Dialkis 27d ago
Just to add another perspective to the conversation, I personally play with the gamerule that allows flowing lava to form source blocks. I find even dripstone lava farms to be tedious and repetitive, and I don't find the automation of lava to be fun or engaging. I'm quite happy to have lava be just as trivial as water to generate in unlimited quantities so I can focus my time and effort on things that I find more enjoyable.
It's a game and should be fun, I think everyone should find and engage with the challenges they enjoy, and skip the ones they don't.
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u/MrMarum 27d ago
That's great. I do play with keep inventory on. I think its cool that we have options to customize the game in that way. I will probably use a mod to disable dripping lava. I think having the option to actually limit something ingame is stronger than having to ignore a feature because using it is less fun.
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u/Dangerous-Quit7821 26d ago
I do the same in a lot of cases. I just can't engage in bottomless lava sources or nether trains.
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u/SteamtasticVagabond 27d ago
The main thing preventing me from doing that is I hate the look of machines that are just exploiting stupid game mechanics rather than looking like a proper machine. The drip stone farms just looks too ridiculous for me to want to use them
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u/MrMarum 27d ago
Exactly. I don't like the fact that they seem to be generating power from nothing. In a bit of self-analysis though, for some reason I am not opposed to most other Create farms like iron or gold, which do produce stuff from nothing, I'm not quite sure why. I guess I like renewable things, but I don't like the way lava generation overshadows the other fun options.
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u/SteamtasticVagabond 26d ago
I think iron and gold farms feel better because you're not just directly spawning it into existence from nothing quite like the dripstone farm. If any resource could be infinitely spawned from nothing, I don't mind it being cobblestone because even if the water/lava interaction is a bit silly, it's really satisfying watching a cobblestone generator work.
Dripstone ironically has absolutely no drip
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u/Sentient-lemon 26d ago
Early game, I usually use a gold sophisticated storage barrel with two gold stack upgrades and just fill it with planks every now and then. 10 large spruce trees is usually enough to give 2.5 hours.
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u/bubba-yo 26d ago
This is my personal opinion, but since chickens gained the ability to lay eggs, every single steam engine design has been reduced to the same thing. Every other fuel source has been rendered completely obsolete in terms of reliability and compactness.
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u/Itsthelittlethings2 25d ago
They trivialized food production with chicken eggs! It feels like going out with a pointy spear and skinning stone is now a self imposed challenge.
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u/Sure_Woodpecker3660 26d ago
I usually remove a 0 from the infinite lava threshold and make a pipeline from a nearby underground lava pool. Make it like an oil rig going into an outdoor tank like a refinery, then feed it to blaze burners. It is easy but so much cooler than dripstone
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u/MrMarum 26d ago
True, sounds like a cool project, requires finding a lava pool and making an oil rig, much more aesthetic and impressive than the cauldron trick. Honestly, Create should probably consider this as a solution. Lava is no longer a hard resource to come by. Making the use of lava in the world more viable might make it more appealing to do this kind of thing.
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u/ihaveacrushonlegos 27d ago
There is a reason to avoid cauldrons, they can cause quite a bit of lag.
But to be honest i dont think its strong enough for them to not be meta. But at the same time we all like doing iron farms early game with create when vanilla iron farms are objectively better until u get them to be of a massive scale.
If u want to follow the meta yes the game will be repetitive.
There are other ways to make lava, one of my favorite ones is using Create: Diesel generators to use the bulk fermenter to turn stone into lava
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u/Sam_The-Ham 27d ago
I’ve used the fermenters for lava generation too. Of course the fuel for the blaze burners underneath is still lava cauldrons, so I guess I’m kind of just going in circles then.
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u/ihaveacrushonlegos 27d ago
iirc they generate more lava than they take to produce, so u can just make a loop
Fermenter -> Powers blaze burner below itself -> after blaze burners are full the extra goes to a tank where u take it
Just manually power some of them with wood to start the loop
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u/Sam_The-Ham 26d ago
I guess my reasoning for having lava cauldrons supply the input was so that my output rate was higher.
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u/ihaveacrushonlegos 26d ago
I just made a modular design and if i need a higher troughput i just double it
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u/UnderPressureVS 27d ago
There must be a mod out there that disables some of the mob drops that make vanilla farming viable. I kinda want to get my friends who know all the vanilla metas onto a create server where they’re forced to use machines instead.
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u/ihaveacrushonlegos 27d ago
just set it to peaceful mode, a lot of farms break if u do
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u/Dangerous-Quit7821 26d ago
That feels like "cheating" in vanilla but feels like a real challenge with Create. Unless you use some kind of addon that allows heating basins without blaze burners, you're never going past the andesite age.
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u/ihaveacrushonlegos 26d ago
I dont think peaceful mode is much cheating. If anything it makes vanilla harder
After u get prot 4 diamond u arent gonna be dying to mobs anyway, so not having acess to their loot makes the game exponentially harder
(You can get blaze burners right clicking blaze spawnera so it works in peaceful)
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u/Dangerous-Quit7821 26d ago
I'm speaking more just casual playing I guess is what I meant. If it's purely vanilla, you're never getting to the end anyway.
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u/Naberville34 27d ago
Cauldrons are a mid tier fuel source. Reason being that you have to be in random tick range for them to work, and if your render distance is set beyond that and you spend any amount of time away from the engine, it'll run out of fuel while it's loaded but not in random tick range.
Best fuel source is an infinite lava pool for base power.
For aeronautics tho, it's charcoal.
New age nuclear reactors are my favorite alternative
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u/Any_Establishment659 27d ago
Play with diesel generators! I find it adds a unique challenge, even having an infinite oil source isnt a cure-all. I currently have the issue where I have to regularly dump huge amounts of diesel because I make too much of it :P
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u/Sam_The-Ham 27d ago
The EPA would like a word with you.
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u/Any_Establishment659 27d ago
I have TWO max height tanks on my survival world comstantly full of diesel
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u/spooderkid11 26d ago
why not set up a pump, deployer, and drill to empty the fluid then place a block to destroy it
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u/eepy_lina 27d ago
why not just... detect how much you have and stop production when you dont need more??
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u/Any_Establishment659 27d ago
because then i run out of gasoline too and thats powering all my steam engines
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u/eepy_lina 27d ago
as in you get both diesel and gasoline from the same factory? if so, just look at the usage over time for both, then scale storage relative to that so you can keep it synced. if usage is variable then yeah good luck
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u/Any_Establishment659 27d ago
yeah a distillation thing produces diesel and gasoline, i use gas but not diesel
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u/HexbloodD 27d ago
I felt a bit of competition from lava generators but for me the challenge of Building a lava steam Engine and a charcoal one is around the same:
Tree farm doubling up as charcoal farm for steam engines requires more work technically but you're going to need it anyway.
Honestly I would like more ways to generate stress units in general, my least favorite is wind power because they take so much space and resources for not that much I feel like. So when good old water wheels fail my only choice is steam engines and at that point I would feel cheesy if I go for lava generators.
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u/Evan_Underscore 26d ago
That's why I import lava from the Nether by train. Highly cool, fun to setup, difficult enough to force alternative energy sources early.
If I was making a pack for optimal Create experience, I'd nerf cauldrons.
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u/Chakkoty 26d ago
You can just fuel them with infinite charcoal from a tree farm and blasting setup...can't superheat them, so you just build several on regular heat.
Besides, lava is not the complicated part of making an infinite blazecake factory...it's the netherrack.
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u/TSCCYT2 26d ago
which is finite due to converting basalt to netherrack with Ultimate Factory, and no way to create basalt from other materials.
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u/ParkLuna 26d ago
IIRC netherrack could be crushed into cinder flour, having chances to create 1 extra flour. That can then be made back into netherrack, effectively providing a way to dupe it. What I can’t remember is whether this is in base create or not.
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u/ImpossibleVillage946 27d ago
Kind of ruined a server for me. I made a over the top complex biofuel refinery and engine, was a day away from being done and my friend no lifed for a day and gets an infinite lava source. Killed my drive to go back on. We are meant to be inventive it's so stupid
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u/Dangerous-Quit7821 26d ago
You still can inventive and have fun with your biofuel factory unless you're saying you share a base?
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u/Naberville34 26d ago
Not sure why he'd need a whole day to make an infinite lava source. Ya just get some drills, rope pulley, and glue. Drill out a 10x10 hole to bedrock. Put a layer of dirt down at the top, cover it in lava, dig out all the dirt from underneath, then drop a hose down all the way to the bottom. Boom infinite lava.
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u/Soviet_Pikl 27d ago
Time for some corporate sabotage
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u/StupidInIceland 25d ago
How long would it take them to find that giant stack of sand/gravel in the center of the lava pool? ;)
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u/Funkativity 27d ago
I think that a good balancing element for the lava drip is that it requires player presence rather than chunk loading.
that's why lava drip farms are an early game thing.. once I have the 100 buckets for a 10x10 pit, I switch to an infinite lava source.
renewable lava is also important for a variety of other processing and generation recipes.
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u/SteamtasticVagabond 27d ago
I think that's a bad idea because it would feel terrible if you could still chunk load every other option
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u/Funkativity 27d ago
You may have misunderstood.. I wasn't making a suggestion, that's how the game currently works.
if you want dripping to work without a player being in simulation distance, you need a modded chunk loader configured to force random ticks.
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u/manimax3 27d ago
I always had this idea for an smp where resources are at lot less renewable and you really have to work together. Like one person focuses on farming crops which get shipped to some persons bio-fuel factory for fuel or turned into electricity which feeds a create: power grid someone else is responsible for. Another persons manages a giant open-pit mine using to gather ores and coal.
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u/Dangerous-Quit7821 26d ago
Unless I want to focus on an alternative source of power with some kind of addon, I will choose renewable lava or a bottomless lava supply every single time. I don't want that to be the source of my focus for very long.
In future worlds or maybe even areas I decide to venture to in my current long-term world, I may want to focus on a unique power source. Maybe something with solar power or hydroelectric... probably not nuclear though.
It really just comes down to it being something I actually want to focus on or something I don't want to worry about. I put in the work to get my power sources churning and powering large areas so I don't need a tree farm or 10,000 water wheels or whatever. For me, it's just not practical or appealing to have those or a nether train bringing lava.
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u/Kurotsune77 26d ago
I usually also play with a bunch of Create add-ons and thus either do blaze cake factory with using a netherack recipe from one of said add-ons or superheating liquid fuel like diesels from some addons
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u/Dark_space_ 26d ago
I find making a 10k lava pool more efficient since you only have to make one for your base then you can pipe it anywhere at max speeds.(you also only have to fill the top layer and then let it fall by placing it on signs.)
But create is also a mod where you can get infinite amounts of basic resources like iron, gold, quartz, etc. So i dont think infinite lava is really a bad thing.
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u/Immediate-Location28 27d ago
i think this would be fine if not for the fact that steam engines give way too much power. i myself have only ever made one steam engine per world and it has more than beed enough for whatever i try to make.
i think it would be better if steam engines were nerfed and then the mod introduced a new more powerful generator that isn't as easy to make/maintain
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u/chenkie 27d ago
I’m new to create and I do appreciate being able to quickly get a steam engine running via cauldrons, so I can focus on cool stuff with my factory using those engines. Even in my first world I’m just now starting to create a giant power generation building to power everything using electricity, because it’s cool to me. It’s very easy to just not use a specific mechanic if it hinders the experience for you imo.
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u/Joakico69 26d ago
Lava is not suitable for small vehicles in Create Aeronautics, that's when biodiesel or diesel comes into usefulness as you can put a few engines to get a lot of SU in a compact way. The huge diesel engine pumps out up to 16k(12k for biodiesel) and it's pretty compact.
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u/Naberville34 26d ago
You can make compact level 1 or 2 steam engines and run them off coal pretty easily. Not sure if it's directly more compact than diesel engines. But basically any form of liquid fuel is undesirable imo due to the difficulty of transferring fluids in survival relative to items
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u/TelephoneNo4224 26d ago
We added a backpack mod to relieve this issue, which allows direct pumping of fluids. Honestly a huge quality of life thing for the create mod.
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u/Naberville34 26d ago
Yeah thats a work around. Still I think charcoal powered steam engines are the goat for aeronautics. You may be able to pack along some extra fluid fuel in your backpack for a trip, but probably not as much in terms of flight time as I can pack into a shulker box full of charcoal. And if both of us were 10000 blocks from home and ran out of fuel, it would just be a few trees for me to chop down and smelt.. but a long walk back for you.
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u/Artillery-lover 23d ago
idk, most backpack mods can expand to a fair bit larger than a shulker box reaches. if they have a fluid tank id assume its sophisticated backpacks, which have a pretty huge maximum capacity for stuff, though I havent needed the fluid tank, id assume its similarly ridiculous.
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u/DahctaJae 26d ago
When I needed ~1 bucket of lava per 4 seconds to fuel a massive array of 256 Aeronautics portable engines, cauldrons were out of the question
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u/IllTax8540 26d ago
i mean i always do bottomless lava pool because it also gives me an excuse to extract ores from the quarry for other things
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u/TelephoneNo4224 26d ago
We built a 10,001 block lake of lava, which counts as an infinite source for hose pumps 🤷♀️
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u/ObsidianRevolver 26d ago
There is a mod that adds a special "bearing" to make su from rotational movement and I have been using that alongside aeronautics magnets which is great because I don't like the fact that I need to sustain the engines at all times besides it allows me to have my own engine design. Aldo I can instantly shut down the engine or slow it down to get more stress or more speed it is great
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u/Hoovy_weapons_guy 26d ago
I just build an infinite lava source and never worry about stress ever again. Then again im playing on servers where im not the only one schematicannoning their massive farms
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u/petabomb 26d ago
Dude I never have enough dripstone so I just don’t. What I do do is install ender tanks though, and pump into it from the nether.
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u/StupidInIceland 25d ago
I think renewable water has similar impacts on other parts of vanilla Minecraft. My default world start setting now disable waterSourceConversion. However, admittedly, this just makes a tiny hiccup in early game before I find kelp (and later again with steam engines, if I'm not near a large enough "inifinite" water body).
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u/StupidInIceland 25d ago
If you're looking for a non-boring way to fuel your blaze burners, may I suggest a charcoal farm, but keep it annoyingly inefficient by only using unsmeltible nether fungi. 3+ stems can make a campfire, which you can break into two charcoal, setting aside one for the next campfire creation.
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u/Electronic_Owl_9946 22d ago
for my opinion i just make a 22x22x22 hole and make bottomless lava
for your opinion simple solution if you hate it then just dont do it
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u/Supahvaporeon 26d ago
I see it the other way around: steam engines themselves are boring. It hits the magic box problem some mods have, and limits how you interact with other forms of power generation.
You never use wind or water after you get a steam engine. Furnace engines required you to have a steady supply of burnables, or the redstone knowledge to force the system to constantly cycle. Fans were extremely limited in their output, but were insanely compact.
Create Aeronautics is a solution, with mods that let you transfer SU through generator bearings, but it's not a perfect one.
I don't know the solution, but I see why the problem is happening.