Alder Planetary Spark Generator

Location: Alder, just to the south of the Portal Seekers Hub at 1631N, 278E, 64 alt.

I am not much of a builder so this is my first actual build. It’s really just my crafting workshop, bling’d up a bit. There was a giant version of a spark generator in EA also, but mine’s bigger. :wink: Please visit and let me know what you think. The basement is currently WIP and locked. (It’s a mess down there, lol.)

FYI: She weighs in at about 400K prestige. Not bad for a single building. I still have a lot to finish in the basement. Gotta get a lot more advanced coils.

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This is awesome!

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That’s a lot of iron!

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That looks awesome dude!

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OMG, you have no idea… Lol :joy: I am so tired of smelting, compacting, refining, machining, and falling to my death from the upper ring.

I did cheat though. It was actually a lot of copper and changing chisels.

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  1. This is awesome, great build.

  2. Is there a plan for this to be functional? I have had this idea for my (much smaller) city to run a centralized spark network and run lines under the roads up to people’s builds so they don’t need to maintain a network for themselves. If it works for PS it should work in my 5 man village for sure.

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That was actually my thought! I wanted to start the first utility company in the game: Boundless Power Inc. The limiting factor is the length of spark link. From the generator any one spark link branch can only have 100 connected spark links (unless that’s been changed. I haven’t tested it in awhile).

It’s fully possible to share spark across plots with different owners. The only thing I’d like to see is a way to charge coin for spark and raising the spark link limit.

https://forum.playboundless.com/t/spark-thievery/21058?u=jtanner28

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Yeah… spark cord limit kills the ability to offer spark as a utility on a city wide scale unfortunately.

This killed my plans for New Berlyn City way back in alpha

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I didn’t know about the link length limit. That is a bummer. I did notice that you can hook multiple generator blocks up to the same spark lines, though, and machines will have the sum total of all generators available. Maybe there is some way to daisy-chain them together like that (something like have 1 block, run the link to 100 length, have the new generator off to the side and then have a line coming out of it lock into the 100, and then run the other way off of it as it’s only 1 link from the new block)?

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One way to fix it would be to have a local sub-station. A single spark generator that can be fed by the main bank of generators. This would allow long range spark transmission.

I’d love to have relays and all that to allow long spark cords, but the culprit is the mesh limit. Spark cord is limited to prevent lag and to prevent it from conflicting with the chunk mesh limit in busy cities.

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If you have something set up like G-------G—W where the Gs are generators and the W is a workbench, will W see the spark from both generators or just the middle one? My testing just had a central line coming off between the 2 generators and then feeding into the workbench.

Just the middle one. The generator itself doesn’t conduct spark.

Correct, spark is not like redstone.

I’ve never played Minecraft, so I only have a vague understanding on redstone (the stuff people use to make circuits up to playable versions of minecraft within minecraft). I’m sure this would be super low priority, but I’d be cool if the Devs looked at that link limit. A spark network would be a cool thing to offer to incentivize people to settle in your town (assuming everyone is cool kicking a bit of fuel in to keep it running).

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But hey, for a small settlement, it’s still viable. You can stretch your spark link 204 blocks (100 spark link - 4 generators - 100 spark link). That’s a little over 25 plots in a line. With good planning, a village could be powered off one set of spark generators.

Totally agree! One of my old petitions for spark cord was that once they have better optimized the game to support meshes with lower impact on the game, that they would revisit spark cord limits.

It’s been confirmed that the existing limit is an arbitrary numeric value that can be changed with ease. Previously there was no limit to spark cords, but people abused them to cause localized lag.

For the 100 link, do you know how it counts forking? If I have a link that I split into one build and then continue running to another, is it 100 from generator to each endpoint, or 100 total between the 2 forks?

100 total connected links, regardless of geometry. But you can connect multiple circuits to your generator.

Sorry to hijack your awesome build, btw. I had always wondered by I didn’t see people do the central network thing, didn’t realize it was a game limitation. I knew I couldn’t be the only one with the idea.

Back on topic, that is a really great build. Like, it gets better the more I look at it and see the little details.

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