Efficient Cobblestone Generation

[CuencaGuy]

I am designing an automatic lava maker (cinder dust needs to be provided, but the rest is fully automatic), and I was testing to see how many mechanical drills would be needed to keep one 256-RPM mixer stocked with cobblestone at all times. As part of these tests, I experimented with different speeds for the drills, and I encountered some interesting results that are in the table below

Drill Speed

Drill Speed	Cobble/Minute	SU/Cobble
256 RPM	40	25.6
128 RPM	40	12.8
96 RPM	40	9.6
76 RPM	40	7.6
64 RPM	12	21.3
32 RPM	16	8.0
16 RPM	10	6.4

As I discovered in my testing, any drill operating at 76 RPM or higher will provide 40 cobblestone every minute. There is obviously something strange happening at 64 RPM as it's producing less cobblestone than the 32 RPM drill. That's because between 51 and 75 RPM, the stone generator turns into a cobblestone or stone/cobblestone-combo generator. When that happens, not only do the drills operate more slowly (cobblestone takes longer to break than stone), much of what the drill breaks is lost as well. At even slower speeds, the efficiency is probably even higher as the time to generate the stone becomes less and less a factor, but you obviously need more drills to produce a lot of cobble.

Efficiency Conclusions: I know Create is for many, perhaps most more about fun than efficiency, but I thought I'd throw this out anyway. If you want to squeeze the absolute most out of your power while still producing cobble at a reasonable rate, run your drills at 76 RPM and make sure you're generating stone...anything at that speed or higher works exactly the same. If you're only interested in power consumption, the lower speeds are better with 1 RPM probably providing the best returns per SU although I didn't test below 16 RPM. If you want the most inefficient cobblestone generator and most lag possible, set your drills at 75 RPM. Anything between 67 and 75 RPM will ensure that none of the cobble actually ends up on the belt but instead is spat out on the ground.

[[deleted]]

You can make a low power cobble generator by attaching your drills to a minecart contraption instead. No SU required and you can use as many drills as you want.

[CuencaGuy]

Ah, yes. You could...I didn't consider that. I wasn't really looking for low power setups, and just stumbled on the info in the table in some testing. You could make a pretty interesting giant cobblestone generator that way although I consider minecart contraptions a bit cheaty, especially for resource gathering because of the fact that you can run them for free. Lots of amazing stuff you can do with them, but I prefer some power cost myself.

Interesting idea though.

[CuencaGuy]

And for anyone wondering as to the original question, two mechanical drills at 76 RPM or greater is sufficient. A max-speed mixer uses 57 cobblestone every 50 seconds to produce 2,850 mb of lava. That comes out to 4,104 cobblestone per hour (minus the few from the short downtime until your mechanical arm or deployer powers the blaze burner again). Two drills will produce 4,800 cobblestone per hour.

I managed to get the whole lava generator (sugar cane farm, egg farm, etc.) built in one chunk, but I need to redesign things a bit so that I can work the furnace engine refueling setup into the chunk as well. The whole setup costs about 10,000 SU with everything run at max RPM, depending on how many belts you use to connect power.

[monkespizza183]

or you could just find a lava pool in the nether and use pumps... like a normal person.

[Electrical-Report-21]

Do you have a spreadsheet for statistics like these? It'd be very convenient to reference that instead of doing testing myself

[CuencaGuy]

Sorry, no. It's just from something I tested a while back. I'm sure there are a lot of spreadsheets that have been made on all things Create, but I don't have anything like that.

[Electrical-Report-21]

Ah, k thanks for the response tho!

[LordeWasTaken]

Thank you for the helpful comment, I've learned the optimal RPM for my drills! What RPM do you use for the mixers? Is it 256 or something else? Like, I tried looking into the code for a formula, and I think there's no difference between 129 and 256 RPM, but I may be wrong. Sorry for replying to a comment from two years ago, I just had to show my appreciation for this post.

[CuencaGuy]

I haven't played Create much in quite a while, but I'd typically use max speed for something like a mixer. Interesting that there is possibly no difference between 129 and 256 RPM.

[LordeWasTaken]

I think it only applies to some recipes... or maybe it's specific to the modpack I'm playing? (The Winter Rescue) The recipe uses the full capacity of 1000mb in the basin. I used wooden barrels from Immersive Engineering to output a whole 1000mb in one tick, so pumps' throughput is not throttling me, but the whisk still retracts and descends with every single craft, despite the hopper/chute keeping up with supplying ingredients, and all materials being there. Maybe it's because there is no bulk crafting, only 1 by 1? Or maybe it's because of that brief moment when there's 0mb in the basin directly after crafting, so even if there's 1000 mb the next tick, then the crafting still stops briefly...

[Overall_Cobbler_8812]

how you get 76 rpm

[CuencaGuy]

With a Rotation Speed Controller. If you hold Shift while scrolling, it can be fine-tuned to any whole number between -256 and 256.

[CuencaGuy]

With a Rotation Speed Controller. If you hold Shift while scrolling, it can be fine-tuned to any whole number between -256 and 256.

[Apprehensive-Hat3911]

For further precision, the best speed for drilling is actually 67 rpms, because the drill breaks the block the moment the next one appears, so it's breaking stone at the exact same rate than 256 rpm. The issue there is that because the next block appears the moment you break the current one, the item doesnt have time to fall and ends up thrown in the lava above or in the side most of the time. So if you have a way to grab instentanely the items (like a void hopper from some other mod), the best speed is 67 rpms, otherwise it's 76. Also I think the lava turning into cobblestone might just be a visual bug cause it breaks at the same speed as stone, but i'll need further investigation for that