The First Project: A Fisher

I wanted to pick an easy first project. Thumbing through the pages of machines, I chose to build the Fisher. Looks simple enough, I thought. I'll have a reasonable supply of food, I thought. Good.

If the fisher was my only possible source of food, I would have starved to death.

More than once.

I haven't played with Tekkit Classic very much, so my knowledge base is woefully limited. I have, however, played with it a little bit. Tekkit Lite has just enough similarities to hang myself with. I don't fully understand MJ (BuildCraft power) or EU (Industrial Craft 2 power), but according to the wiki article the Fisher could use both. Good.

Because I had extremely limited knowledge as well as resources, I had to choose very basic power sources. Would a nuclear reactor or some sort of flux capacitor thingie be a much better power source? Definitely. Do I, personally, have any chance of making one on my survival server? Not in the slightest.

In the end, here's what I learned about how the Fisher works:

On Power: Redstone Engines aren't enough to power it. They won't even start pumping. You need at least a Combustion Engine, and even then, they're ridiculously slow. If you're poor like me, use power from Industrial Craft 2. I used 4 Water Mills. I hear Solar Panels are good, too.

On orientation: Don't try to plug power cables into the bottom. It needs that area clear to fish. The caught fish pop out the hole in the top, so don't plug it in there. It doesn't seem to use the sides, though, so plug it in there.

On being completely submerged: Still operational!

On its interface: If you see any red pop up on the far left column, then you know it's getting some power. When the middle column fills up with green, a fish will pop out the top. If the right column fills up with blue, it's resting for some reason. You know it's getting some power, but maybe it needs more or maybe something else is wrong.

On storage: Regular ol' pipes work great, assuming you attach them at the top. You can pipe them into a furnace to cook them automatically, too. If you don't want ugly pipes running all the way to dry land, you can even plop a chest directly on top of the fisher, no pipe needed.

My finished product was 4 Water Mills deep underwater, all connected together and run up to the Fisher with Ultra-Low-Current Cable. I used some cobblestone pipe to transport the fish to a wooden chest I had on shore, but now that I know better, I'll probably take the pipe out, and give my Fisher a fashionable wooden chest hat, which they tell me is all the rave this season. (Tekkit Lite Version 0.5.2)