Solar Tower Boiler
The Solar Tower Boiler is an earlygame machine that can use sunlight from heliostat mirrors to boil water.
Crafting
Usage
The solar tower boiler gets heat from heliostat mirrors pointed at it. Aiming a mirror at the boiler can be done using the mirror adjustment tool, right-click on the boiler will save its position to the tool, and subsequently clicking on mirrors will aim them at the linked boiler. The maximum range for mirrors is 25 blocks, mirror efficiency does not degrade with range. A boiler consumes 1mB of water for every 12.5 mirrors each tick at full sunlight level, and 100mB of steam per mB of water consumed. However, the water consumption rate is rounded down to the millibucket. Thus it takes 13 mirrors to raise your first 100mB/t of steam, 12 mirrors for the next hundred, then 13, 12, and so on. The theoretical maximum rate at which Steam can be generated is 10000mB/t, however in practice this may be limited by the amount of water and steam in the buffers. The exact functions are shown in detail by this calculator.
As the heat provided by each mirror is based on sunlight, mirrors with solid blocks above them will not work, and the amount of heat diminishes with the amount of light in the evening until it produces no heat at night. The resulting steam can be used in a steam engine or turbine, which produce low-pressure steam that either has to be condensed to recycle the water, or vented.
The solar tower boiler can only produce regular steam, and thus the liquid type cannot be changed using fluid identifiers.