Disclaimer: This goes completely opposite to what Vaskii intended with Botania. I am using the latest version, R1.5 - 170.
Botania - By the numbers
Recently, I started up a new Infinity world, and thought to myself, "I want to do things differently. Maybe not efficiently, but differently." Seeing as I normally start with Tinker's tools, followed by Ender IO with Extra Utilities powering my machines, I decided to go a new route. One less travelled. So much so, you could see the flowers on the path.
Yes, I decided to use Botania.
Quickly crafting my Lexica Botania, I poked around the book, looking for new and exciting things. I found the Mana Fluxfield, and began to craft. Four redstone blocks, one manasteel, and four livingrock later, I had it.
Now, at this point, I had very few resources, and didn't want to waste them. So, I jumped into a creative world and began to experiment. I found that the fluxfield produced 1,600 RF per mana burst, fired from 2 blocks away.
Starting with Dayblooms, a mana spreader, and a fluxfield next to a leadstone energy cell, I found that the dayblooms produce a burst once every 200 seconds, for a rate of nearly nothing per flower (.4 RF/t, to be exact). That's not going to cut it, and niether will nightshades, which produce mana at the same rate. Next up was Hydroangeas. These produce a burst every 30 seconds, making power at a little less than ten times the rate of a Daybloom.
Yikes. Passive production wasn't going to cut it for powering machines. Time to step it up. An Endoflame is a good next step. At this point, I don't care about RF/t, I care about RF/fuel. Feeding the flower one piece of coal, it produces 16,000 RF. Not bad, but only a fraction of what a survivalist generator would make, though much faster. The Entropynnyum wasn't much better, producing 65,600 RF per TNT. Sounds good, until you realize that the TNT generator makes 480,000 RF per TNT.
Next, a breakthrough. The Kekimurus produced 107,000 RF for a cake, and the culinary generator produced 96,000 RF. The Gormaryllis chewed up a steak and spat out 52,800 RF worth of mana, whereas the same generator made 46,112 RF.
Finally, the big gap appeared. Lava power. The Thermalily made 104,000 RF per lava bucket, whereas the lava generator made a measly 40,000 RF. Hey, not as much as the magmatic dynamo's 180,000 base for a bucket, but I didn't need invar.
tl;dr: Lava power may be done to death, but the thermalily is much better than the Extra Utilities lava generator. Also, I get to have particles flying all over my base! Yay!