You will find contained herein for your crafting enjoyment the following high quality devices: The Charging Bench, the Battery Station, and the Storage Monitor (plus the Adjustable Emitter for creative play).
Welcome! This mod adds several new blocks to Industrial Craft 2 to help you manage your energy grid. The scope of the mod has expanded since the original version, and it is no longer named for the single block it originally added. You will now find contained herein for your crafting enjoyment the following high quality devices: The Charging Bench, the Battery Station, and the Storage Monitor (plus the Adjustable Emitter for creative play).
The charging bench allows you to charge up to 12 items simultaneously! It comes in three tiers with each tier capable of charging all items at its tier level and below, but not above. If you want to charge your Quantum armor you'll need to craft a HV version - there's no getting around the need for that specialized high-power equipment, sadly. :)
LV Charging Bench
The low voltage charging bench has a maximum input energy of 32 EU/t, and a base energy storage of 40,000 EU.
Crafting recipe: 1 Batbox 3 Insulated Copper Cable 1 Electronic Circuit 4 Wooden Planks
MV Charging Bench
The medium voltage charging bench has a maximum input energy of 128 EU/t, and a base energy storage of 600,000 EU.
Crafting recipe: 1 MFE 3 2x Insulated Gold Cable 1 Electronic Circuit 4 Wooden Planks
HV Charging Bench
The high voltage charging bench has a maximum input energy of 512 EU/t, and a base energy storage of 10,000,000 EU.
Crafting recipe: 1 MFSU 3 4x Insulated HV (Iron) Cable 1 Electronic Circuit 4 Wooden Planks
Crafting pattern for all charging benches: CCC C = Cable, W = Wood, WEW E = Electronic Circuit, WSW S = Storage Unit (Batbox, etc)
Due to advances in over-current circuit protection designs, a Charging Bench will not explode if exposed to higher than acceptable current but simply pop off onto the ground in a safe manner, ejecting any items it contained.
A charging bench will automatically direct valid electrical items shift-clicked from your inventory into the charging area if there is space free. Excess will be placed into the input slot. Once an item is done charging, it will be automatically moved to the output slot, if there is space, and another item from the input slot will be added to the main charging area. In this way, you can shift-click a full stack of RE-Batteries into the Charging Bench, and it will automatically unstack and charge them. You can quickly and easily collect all of them by shift-clicking repeatedly on the output slot.
While using a charging bench, you will have easy access to your equipped armor slots. If you are wearing electrical armor, you can shift-click it directly from your armor slots into the bench. When it's done charging, simply shift-click it from the output slot (or the charging area, if you've let some other item loiter in the output slot) and it will automatically equip the armor in the correct location. It doesn't get much easier than that!
And we're not done yet with the awesome features of this mod! Each charging bench now includes a pair of indicators visible right on the outside of the bench. The storage meter lets you see just how much power is available for charging up your items, and the charging light lets you know if those energy- hungry items are done charging without even opening the GUI. You can toss in your quantum armor, lapotron crystals, mining laser, etc, and walk away, and with merely a glance across the room, you'll know when they're ready to be picked up! Even the battery slot is wired up, so that if you're filling a remote bench using items, you'll know when it's time to swap out the battery without having to stand around waiting for it to discharge completely.
All three tiers of the Charging Bench accept the standard array of upgrades, with each having a very specific effect.
The transformer upgrade will allow the lower tier benches to accept higher input energy, including energy crystals, lappacks, and lapotrons in the power input slot.
The energy storage upgrade will increase the maximum energy storage of the device. The LV bench now gains 10,000 EU per upgrade, the same amount the battery used to craft the upgrade would be able to store. The MV bench gains 60,000 EU or 10% of its base storage capacity for each upgrade installed. And the HV bench gains a whopping 500,000 EU capacity per upgrade!
The overclocker upgrade lets you push your Charging Bench to the limit. By using quantum tunneling technology, the Charging Bench is able to carefully manage the voltage and current levels used to charge items and allow items to safely exceed their normal charge rates. This unfortunately has the same drawback that always accompanies the use of overclockers: The amount of power consumed increases even as the time required to charge an item decreases. Specifically, each upgrade increases the amount of energy transferred to an item per tick by 30% and the amount of energy drained from the bench's internal storage by 50%, growing exponentially with every overclocker added. Since it's hard to do that kind of math in your head, here's an example: Five overclockers approximately doubles the energy used to charge any given item, but the time required to charge it is reduced by nearly 75%!
For those interested, the formulas for some useful values are: Speed: S = (1.3^x) Time required: T = 1/S Energy consumed: E = (1.5^x)/S where x is the number of overclockers. (Just multiply the normal values by S, T, or E.)
The Charging Bench's input, output and power slots are exposed to pipes, tubes, and other devices. Input is on top, output is on bottom and the power slot is from all sides. While the GUI restricts items placed into each of the slots to appropriate types there is no such restriction for pipe/tube access. It is up to the player to design their systems so that the wrong types of items don't get tossed onto the bench. But not to worry, there are no negative consequences to inserting incorrect items, aside from temporarily clogging up the slot; the bench simply will not do anything with items that it can't process.
Valid electrical items placed into the charging bench via tubes will automatically be moved from the input slot to an available charging slot, then moved to the output slot once fully charged. In this way, you can easily automate recharging of items!
Using a simple toolkit and a charging bench in your crafting window, you can disassemble it into its components, which you can then use to upgrade an already-placed charging bench simply by right-clicking on the bench using the components. (You can also downgrade a bench, should you wish, but use caution regarding the voltage of any attached cables if you do.) You will receive a component kit for the bench you replaced, and can just as easily reassemble the components into a complete bench, ready to be placed. This means that you'll never lose a bench through this process! Additionally, if you no longer have any need for a bench, you can strip the components to scavenge the useful parts from them by right-clicking while holding sneak (as a safety measure), but be warned that the wood planks are not returned - they're custom cut for the shape of the bench, after all, and the scavenging process often requires breaking them up to remove more delicate parts. (Plus there's no way to know what kind of wood was used.)
The toolkit required to convert a charging bench into a component kit and vice versa is very simple, requiring only one iron ingot and two sticks in the following pattern to craft:
I S S
Sure, a charging bench lets you fill up a lot of items at the same time with ease, but what if you want to do the opposite and drain power from a lot of items? That's what the brand new Battery Station allows you to do!
The battery station comes in the same three tiers as the charging bench, but where the bench is crafted with an energy storage unit, the battery station requires a transformer instead.
LV Battery Station
The low voltage battery station outputs energy in 32 EU packets, and can drain RE-batteries and other tier 1 power source items like the batpack.
Crafting recipe: 1 LV-Transformer 3 Insulated Copper Cable 1 Electronic Circuit 4 Wooden Planks
MV Battery Station
The medium voltage battery station outputs energy in 128 EU packets, and can drain energy crystals and other tier 2 power source items like the lappack, plus tier 1 power sources.
Crafting recipe: 1 MV-Transformer 3 2x Insulated Gold Cable 1 Electronic Circuit 4 Wooden Planks
HV Battery Station
The high voltage battery station outputs energy in 512 EU packets, and can drain lapotron crystals and other tier 3 power source items, as well as all lower tier power sources.
Crafting recipe: 1 HV-Transformer 3 4x Insulated HV (Iron) Cable 1 Electronic Circuit 4 Wooden Planks
Crafting pattern for all battery stations: CCC C = Cable, W = Wood, WEW E = Electronic Circuit, WTW T = Transformer
Each battery station will output one packet of energy every tick, if it's able to drain enough EU from the items in its inventory. Remember that different energy storage items have different transfer rates, so a single battery in a HV Battery Station will not allow it to provide power every tick. It will take multiple ticks for the station to drain sufficient EU from one battery into its buffer.
To avoid potential problems with excessive energy loss over cabling, a battery station will never transmit a packet of EU less than its rated output. Instead it carries over the buffered EU from one tick to the next until it has enough EU stored to output a full packet.
A battery station can drain multiple items at once, if it doesn't get enough energy from the first item to be able to emit EU (but it will only drain the minimum number of items needed for it to be able to send one packet per tick). This allows a MV (or HV) battery station to run at maximum efficiency even if supplied only with charged RE-batteries (and/or energy crystals) instead of the more expensive lapotron crystals.
The battery station supports automation features much like the charging bench! It will move full batteries, crystals, or other storage devices from its input slot to its discharging area, and empty items to its output slot. When an item is removed from the discharging area the other items present will be advanced automatically, so that newly added items will not 'cut in line'. That is to say, the battery station operates in a FIFO (First-In, First-Out) manner, as long as you don't rearrange items within its inventory manually, of course. ;) Like the charging bench, you can use pipes, tubes, machines, or other methods to automatically add and remove electrical items capable of being used as a power source. In concert with a charging bench, you can even create systems to automatically transport EU from one location to another, storing it in items to avoid the inefficiency and material expense of long cable runs.
The input slot is accessed from the top or bottom of a battery station, and the output slot is accessed from any side. Note that this layout is different from the charging bench, because the battery station only has two slots that need to be accessible. Cabling to accept the EU output from the battery station may be attached to any face (top, bottom, or sides), or the station may be placed directly adjacent to the machines you want it to power.
Finally, the battery station has two more features similar to those of the charging bench. One is an activity indicator light, which will be lit while it is draining items or sending out EU. The other is that a redstone signal will deactivate the battery station, preventing it from performing any actions at all.
Everyone who's tried to set up an energy monitoring system of some sort knows that the redstone signals from your batbox, MFE, or MFSU are very challenging to make use of in an effective manner - not to mention the fact that if you have a lot of wiring connected to the storage unit, it can be very tricky to get a redstone signal out of it, too, especially using vanilla redstone mechanics! Fret no more, because the storage monitor allows you to remotely monitor an energy storage unit in an easy and user-friendly way. It will start emitting redstone when the power level falls below a certain threshold, and stop when the power rises above another threshold.
But that's not all! It allows you to easily configure the thresholds at which the redstone signal turns on and off, so that you can customize its behavior to your precise needs. Hook it up to activate your nuclear reactor only when your MFSU's power is below 10%, so that renewable sources of energy will be used to refill your power reserves as often as possible... or make certain your high power consumption factory floor never runs out of juice by activating it any time the power falls below 80 or 90%!
Just craft a link card and connect it to the device you wish to monitor by right-clicking on the batbox, MFE, or MFSU with the card. You can even monitor a charging bench, or other mods' EU storage blocks, if they implement the IEnergyStorage interface from the IC2 API! Once you have encoded the card with the storage unit's unique ID and location, insert the card into the Storage Monitor and use the controls to configure its behavior. Or you can just keep the default settings, and the redstone signal will turn on when power falls below 60% and shut off when it rises to 90%.
If you need to move your energy storage unit or want to reuse a link card elsewhere, there's no need to throw it away and craft a new one. You can wipe a link card clean by holding it in your hand and right-clicking in the air while holding your sneak key (as a safety feature to prevent accidental erasure). It will revert to a blank link card creator which you can then reuse on any storage unit you'd like.
Storage monitor 1 Gold Cable (No insulation) 1 Electronic Circuit 1 Redstone Dust 2 Glass 4 Wooden Planks
Pattern: WUW U = Uninsulated Gold Cable, GEG W = Wood, E = Electronic Circuit, WRW G = Glass, R = Redstone Dust
Link Card Creator 1 Insulated Copper Cable 1 Electronic Circuit 1 Paper
Pattern: C C = Cable, E E = Electronic Circuit, P P = Paper
Originally created for testing purposes, we have added these Emitter blocks to the creative inventory as a bonus for people playing in creative mode or wanting to test electrical builds without having to constantly spawn lapotron crystals and MFSUs.
There are five versions available. They have no crafting recipes, and must be acquired from the creative inventory or via tools like NEI.
LV Emitter
MV Emitter
HV Emitter
EV Emitter
Adjustable Emitter
Original idea: Drashian Original Charging Bench graphics: Starlight Battery Station textures: Tallinu Emitter and Storage Monitor textures: Pantheis Charging Bench and Battery Station GUIs: Tallinu Storage Monitor and Adjustable Emitter GUIs: Pantheis and Tallinu Charging Bench toolkit and upgrade item textures: Tallinu Storage Monitor link card item textures: Pantheis Code: Pantheis and Tallinu
Special thanks to the original Charging Bench mod. Without your ideas for inspiration, this mod wouldn't exist.