Combustion Engines are the third tier of engine. They are crafted from iron instead of wood or cobblestone, making them the most expensive engine and run on lava, oil, or fuel. Combustion Engines are the most powerful engine. Combustion engines draw full stacks when used on a Wooden Pipe & move a Quarry without delays between each action.

When switching off the engine, it will take several minutes for it to cool back down before resuming operations again.

Contents 1 Recipe 2 Set Up Demonstration 3 Overheating 4 Cooling 4.1 Operation Without Cooling 5 Power Source 6 Usage 7 Energy 8 Comments

RecipeEdit

Ingredients:

• 3 x Iron Ingot
• 2 x Iron Gear
• 1 x Piston
• 1 x Glass

Produces: 1 x Combustion Engine

Set Up DemonstrationEdit

Combustion Engine - Tekkit In Less Than 90 Seconds(01:20)
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OverheatingEdit

Combustion engines can overheat, leading to a large explosion, if they are not properly cooled with water. Intially the engine will be blue. After being powered for several minutes, the engine will change color depending on whether it is being cooled or not. The engine can be 1 of 4 colors:

• Blue: The engine is in its intial phase.
• Green: The engine is being cooled properly.
• Yellow: The engine is running at its full potential.
• Red: The engine is in danger of exploding, and must be cooled.

An uncooled combustion engine running on fuel will explode in approximately 16 minutes. It will go from blue, to green, to yellow, to red, every 4 minutes. Engines powered by oil and lava will heat up much more slowly.

CoolingEdit

Buildcraft version 2.2.0 introduced the need to cool Combustion Engines. Combustion Engines can be powered for a long time without overheating, provided you keep them cooled with water. A combustion engine that has become yellow/red for even a few minutes will require two buckets of water to regain "green" status. Water can be pumped into them to fill this need. Alternatively, buckets of water can be placed into the engine to keep it filled up. While active, the engine will consume the water stored inside it. The current water level can be seen in the engine's GUI. Pumping water into an engine is preferable to manually filling it with buckets because provided the supply is adequate and set up correctly it is guaranteed that the engines will not overheat.

If a Combustion Engine is shut off, it will not turn back on until it cools to 0º C.  To avoid waiting for the engine to cool before turning it back on, which can take some time if it gets really hot, provided you don't mind losing the contained fuel it can be broken and immediately replaced which will enable it to start right away.

Operation Without CoolingEdit

Combustion engines build up heat per stroke.  In the current build the combustion engine will not start again after it's power has been cut until it's heat has reached zero.

In the past combustion engines could run forever without the need of water cooling by connecting the engine(s) to a redstone repeater 4/5 clock.  Having a continuous cycle of running/resting would keep the engine running at near zero heat, eliminating the need for the expensive pumping systems and the space-consuming piping that went with it.  This technique also eliminated the explosion hazards that buggy pipes often caused (It should be noted that on slower machines this procedure would produce lag with each switching cycle, which increased as more engines were added.  However, sitting your engine array at the bedrock level will allow the game to run smoothly).

Power SourceEdit

The combustion engine runs on oil, fuel, or lava , which can be either deposited into the machine via waterproof pipes, or through putting a bucket of your fuel of choice in the fuel slot one at a time. It is recommended to refine the oil into fuel using a refinery, as it is more efficient.

A combustion engine also produces power at different rates based on the type of fuel:

Lava: 1MJ/t

Oil: 3MJ/t

Fuel 6MJ/t

These values are currently being tweaked so will be different depending on BC version however fuel is always superior to oil, which is in turn superior to lava.

For example, a Refinery can be fully powered (green) by 4 Combustion Engines powered by Oil or 2 Combustion Engines powered by Fuel. This may be the cause of some explosions as people power their refineries with 4 Combustion Engines only to eventually power them with fuel later, causing problems.

UsageEdit

Combustion engines need to be cooled by water, which can be pumped in with waterproof pipes, or added in with buckets. For this reason they are normally used in generation plants connected to machinery via conductive pipes, these generation plants can use space efficent designs that allow a redstone current, water, electrical pipes and fuel to access the engine.

See the Pump page for information on tapping water sources.

EnergyEdit

A Wooden Conductive Pipe can be used to draw energy from the engine to various machines, such as a Quarry. Making a loop with the Conductive Pipes will make a giant square of power. If you accidentally placed too much Fuel in an combustion engine, Conductive Pipes can be used to transfer the power over instead of wasting the Fuel. Using Conductive Pipes will result in a bit of energy loss: 1% per Stone pipe or just 0.01% per Gold pipe.