I am creating a setup that will use 10 thermal generators and create massive EU. I need to know how I can pump lava from the nether as fast as possible, multiple buckets per second even. Anyone know how to do this?
22 Answers
Just use multiple pumps. There are very few ways to pump lava (three blocks, I believe), none of which can be sped up in any way other than using many at once.
An important caveat, though: the faster you pump lava, the more lava flow block recalculations have to be done each tick and the more lag it causes, so there's a point where "fast" becomes "unplayably slow". When exactly you reach the point of negative returns (in terms of real-world speed and slideshow frame rates) will vary with the power of the machine running the server portion of the game. If you're playing multiplayer? This will almost certainly kill the server and get you a stern talking to / banning from the admins.
1Even if you were running all of your generators constantly you don't actually need to pump lava very fast at all to keep up with the usage rate.
A thermal generator will generate 30k EU per bucket at 24EU per tick. This means that each bucket will last 1250 ticks, or 62.5 seconds. If you're planning to run 10 generators this means that being able to pump 10 blocks per minute.
Given that a Buildcraft pump takes 10MJ per block pumped and a full speed redstone engine generates 1MJ per second a single pump powered by 4 redstone engines can (after a bit of warmup time) pump up to 24 blocks per minute, approximately 2.5 times the rate required to keep up with your generators.
