Sharing my steel automation setup in case other people are unsure of where to start with it. This particular instance supports 64 HU/t and 24 KU/t, and can be built with steel-level tech and without having built any machines yet (if you don’t have a compressor yet you can replace the dense invar box with something weaker like a bronze or steel box).
Two bronze boilers supply 96 Steam/t (24 KU/t) to a steel crucible which receives iron one at a time. I used a steel crucible to make it heat up slower and not melt down while waiting for the iron to become steel, but you could also use a clay crucible and pre-fill it with some steel to increase thermal mass. The number of molds is tuned to the heat output of the burning box, so increase them if you use a stronger box. There’s no auto shut-off in the screenshot, but you could easily add one.
(Will post the back in the next post since I can’t post multiple images)
When the temperature reaches 2050, wait 44 ticks and then emit a pulse to the molds. At 24 KU/t and 1000 air per iron ingot, it takes about 42 ticks to get steel. If you are feeding more KU/t then you can reduce the repeater count, which would improve efficiency since you waste less heat waiting for the steel to form. An edge detector at the end receives the rising edge from reaching 2050K, delayed by the appropriate time.
Immediately after, emit a “negative pulse” to the hopper feeding the iron (turn off the redstone for a couple ticks)
There is a lever to pump the hopper manually, for startup and test purposes.
Usage:
Start the boilers.
Pump the hopper once so that the crucible has one iron in it.
Wait for the engine to reach the red state, for full KU output (or else the timing will be too short).
Light the burning box under the crucible.
Use manual or automatic shutoff to stop the burning box once you run out of iron.
I find it interesting that you timed it with repeaters.
I’ve been using a setup where I add iron nuggets one at a time. Each time the crucible hits 2100k another nugget is added and I activate my mold. I output to an ingot mold which requires 9 nuggets, but it’ll only pour steel because it won’t use a partial amount.
I don’t have to use repeaters or redstone delays because the temperature is the key, and the delta time between 2046k and 2100k gives time for the steel conversion.
If I added iron in whole ingots, it’d not get enough KU/t during the heating phase to convert to steel.
That sounds a lot more compact than what I did, I might have to use your concept instead. Couldn’t you leave the mold permanently enabled since you’ll never have a full unit of iron in the crucible?
Or I might just use the nugget idea to reduce the number of repeaters, since heat-based timing I would have to tune for both HU/t and KU/t instead of just KU/t and would require more math or trial/error.
I have a “generic” smelting array. It’s already got 16 molds, redstone activated. Could it work w/o a mold? I think that iron melts at 1811k and steel starts at 2046k, so you’ll need molds redstone activated by temperature.
So I generally only hook up one engine, thus a static amount of KU. Then I use either bronze burning, or dense bronze burning. That’s only two things to try. =]
I have found I set the temperature for redstone to 2100k, and it reliably works with either burning box.
If the molds take 1 unit and you’re adding a nugget at a time then you will never accumulate enough iron to fill the mold because it gets converted to steel before you can get enough to fill it.
The reason I don’t want to think about the heat is just that it’s slightly less straightforward to figure out the optimal temperature threshold in terms of KU waste. With repeaters it’s easy to match up with the known time to make steel.
Btw I made a video but it won’t let me attach or link to it, how do other people post things?
Ah I see, yeah unknown domains are a typical sign of spam, obviously that sadly always hits people who host their own Stuff too. Though in case of Videos I would always recommend using Youtube, due to it converting to better and more compact File Formats.
And github seems to work nicely, just like the steel setup itself. ^^
