A water block becomes a source block when there's at least 2 other source blocks next to it (not counting diagonally). You start with the very edge and place two water blocks like so. This will give you a 2×2 square of water sources.
__________
|Wo |
|oW |
| |
| |
| |
W = water source placed by you
o = water source generated by the water mechanics
Now, simply scoop up any source block (it will refill), and dump it diagonally from the outermost block.
__________
|Woo |
|oWo |
|ooW |
| |
| |
Repeat until you hit an edge. Which source block you take doesn't matter, they are all infinite (as in, will refill instantly) at this point.
__________
|Woooo |
|oWooo |
|ooWoo |
|oooWo |
|ooooW |
As you can see, to fill an n-long square, you need n bucket loads (actually, only 2, since after that, you can refill from the pool).
To fill the entire rectangle, dump a bucket every other row on one side. The very edge block always has to be filled.
__________
|Wooooooo|
|oWoooooo|
|ooWooooo|
|oooWoooo|
|ooooWWoW|
So to fill an n×m block rectangle, you need n + ceil((m - n) / 2) water sources, with m being the longer side. Again, only 2 if you're talking resources, because after that, you're drawing from an infinite pool.
Here's a video of a guy using this technique on a square:
(Note that he always refills from the still source blocks for some reason, but as noted above, any source block will do.)
I made a pretty quick and dirty XP farm as such:
Find a zombie spawner, punch out all the blocks around it, leave 3ish blocks of space all around it, making a big dark room around the spawner.
Put water source(s) at one end of the room, pulling every zombie that drops to the other side of the room. Make a 1-wide hallway for the water to flow into. Where the water stream ends, put in a 1x1 vertical shaft for the zombie to drop down (place this RIGHT AFTER the water, don't let water flow down the hole).
Make the bottom of the "tube" out of glass so you can see the zombies inside the "kill zone". Leave a single block at the bottom so that you can swing your sword at the zombie's feet.
I made my vertical shaft high enough to take away ALMOST all the zombie's health. If the fall kills them, no XP bubbles. I got mine to the perfect height that I can 1-shot all the zombies with a stone sword (you wouldn't believe how fast this goes through swords).
Hope my description isn't gibberish, I'll get some screenshots later if this isn't clear. =)
|
|
S <-zombie spawner |
|
|
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW |
| | <- vertical shaft - experiment with height
| |
G G <- glass
G G
<- air for swinging sword
xxxxxxxx <- floor
Best Answer
For infinite power, near infinite expansion capabilities and relatively low level tech, I've used a Forestry mod tree farm in conjunction with a Railcraft steam boiler/steam engine configuration. Downsides include massive space requirements, but once you have a designated site the system can be easily upgraded with more boilers and a second tree farm if and when necessary.
Have the tree farm up and running, use piping to get the saplings back to the machine and separate the junk to somewhere else(if you're using trees that have fruit, this is an infinite food source as well), direct the wood to furnaces, and charcoal from the furnaces to a storage space between the furnace and the boiler. A 3*3 boiler will take A LOT of charcoal to get heated up, but once it gets to the maximum temperature, the consumption of coal plummets down. It's been a while since I've done this, but a full iron chest of charcoal probably isn't enough to fully warm up a single Boiler. Once it is at the optimal temperature, you can run three or four boilers off a single farm.
As long as the piping filters all items to their correct storage spaces and there's water to the boilers, this setup will provide infinite energy with no hands-on required.
From Thaumcraft, you can also look into some golem based solutions, though I'm not convinced the energy output will compete with the aforementioned steam boiler one.
This setup (one tree farm and 4 boilers) is/was sufficient to run a fully automated base that harvests materials off three different Mystcraft worlds with quarries that transmit all the materials back and that has a a fully automated crafting/ordering system via Applied Energetics and Industrycraft. It wasn't a Direwolf20 world, I believe we were running Techworld at the time, but the relevant mods are all the same.
Another, arguably more novel approach is to use bees. There are bees that produce oil. You can further refine the oil to gasoline and burn that for energy. Producing new strains of bees takes a long time and it took me roughly three weeks of active playing to acquire the correct bee lineages, but it's a fun one. You can further refine the bee lineages to ignore sunlight and flowers entirely, so this solution can be installed to wherever your base is. The initial workload is huge as you need to find several different bees to start the breeding, but as you get a few of the critical lineages purified and a stable supply of their workers, you can pretty much change any queen to any other strand within hours. This system is also much faster if you have the machines for genetic manipulation and you can simply extract the specific traits from the bees you wish to have on your super-bees.
The bee method also requires quite a large space to function, as you need to have a large supply of apiaries(20+ single block apiaries), then machinery to extract the oil, container for the oil, a refinery to turn the oil to gas, another container for the gas, and the generators themselves. But again, once the machinery is operational, the system is fully automatic.