Gregtech-centric progression advice?

[KirinDave]

In our brave new Ultimate worlds, we have a mix of gregtech and TE. Gregtech also has included variants of the core machines that have automation capabilities somewhat comparable to the TE machines ("Automated ____"). Given this, and that I've built a few TE-centric workshops now, I was curious if people had advice on how to build a IC2-centric workshop in a gregtech world.

Please assume hardmode, but personally I think we're going to turn off the expensive macerator in our server because it makes a lot less sense in the mixed modpack games; especially now that AE's grindstone exists.

Specifically, I'd like some insight on these things:

1. In a TE-driven workshop, TE's Steam Engines and pipes are your first goal. You should then drive aggressively towards getting redstone conduits and at least one redstone energy cell so that you can capture and keep energy outputted from long-burning engines that prefer sustained workloads.
   
   What is the Gregtech "first plan?" You aim for ore doubing but I can see several machines you want fairly fast that accept medium power. What does a reasonable early GT progression look like?
2. What are some cool early tricks you should aim for with GT-based machines? DoctorOr has turned me on to centrifuging lava as a solid plan. Seems centrifuging clay so you can save on refined iron (for steel) is a good call too.
3. What sort of solutions are good long-term renewable power in the GregTech mixed-mod world? Probably the best Buildcraft-y solution we have in our modpacks is to use Forestry and Steve's Carts to make biofuel for a steam boiler; it arrives at easy and sustainable rigs w/ at least 72 mj/t.
4. Are any of the alternative energy storage blocks in GT worth considering early on? That lapis-heavy one seems slick.

 

[Chrono]

For energy I use full forestry, but that is because I am a sucker for that mod.
You can centrifuge rubber trees for methane, which can be used on gas turbines for eu.
Also consider the IC2 miners as an very early quarry, the ability to skip all that useless shit wen you don't have a bunch of recycling is something to consider.

 

[netmc]

Well, for power generation, IC2 biofuel in a diesel generator is actually one of the best IC2-centric methods. It's not a lot numbers wise, but for percentages, it's the best early/mid game. Centrifuging rubberwood will get you methane along with plant balls, so you get a bit of bonus fuel out of the process, and not just the single methane that most people count.

Centrifuging clay is good for the lithium which can help with some storage and machine creation, plus the lithium batpack stores a lot more energy than the normal ic2 version. Clay can be created from redrock, or from river bees.

If you get into bee breeding, you can use propolis -> sticky resin, then place in an industrial centrifuge for rubber and some fuel (aka plant balls). You never need to worry about making treetaps, or harvesting rubber wood again.

 

[CodaPDX]

For IC2 power, I usually start out with a generator and batbox powering a macerator, compressor, and extractor, with the plan of upgrading the generator to a geothermal and replacing the batbox with an MFE (the batbox can go into a jetpack). I then turn the geothermal generator into a thermal generator, make a stack of cells, fill them up with lava, and that should satisfy my power needs until I can get a charcoal or biofuel boiler going.

As for the gregtech storage blocks, well, they're nice, but they're insanely expensive and pretty much overkill unless you're planning on using lightning rods or a fusion reactor. The lapis ones are cheaper, yes, but to just match an MFE's output you would need one LESU control block and 123 storage blocks. Sure, it would store a couple orders of magnitude more EU, but you really don't need buffers that large unless, again, you're messing around with fusion reactors and lightning rods.

 

[noskk]

I'm using fuel+diesel generators for my hungry GT machines, although you can get more eu with combustion engine and magma crucible. I am thinking of changing to lava for uum since I need them for ultimate solar helmet , maybe I'll make the GT advanced pump and empty the nether with it .

Always try to use calcium carbonate cell (from centrifuging marble dust) and mercury (from centrifuging redstone) to triple your iron and gold ore yield; always use electrum for glass fibres and circuit recipes.

Always use the electric crafting table if you are crafting something that has cell as part of it. If you don't need the cell you can always macerate it to get the 4 tiny pile of tin per cell back. (I think this will change based on your tin/cell config). The best one is that you can craft 1 carbon fibre from 9 carbon cells.

Electric crafting table has a lot of mode that you might be interested in like the dust mode which is pretty useful to turn tiny pile of dust to dust.

Always scroll through the recipe to see whether GT has added alternate recipe of it. (i.e. aluminium can be used as a substitute of iron at some recipes)

 

[TangentialThreat]

The industrial electrolyzer is a hidden gem and relatively cheap for the return on investment. There's pyrite in the nether and you can come home with stacks and stacks of it. Each piece of pyrite dust will become one iron dust and two pieces of sulfur without consuming any cells. Having this colossal supply of iron will help with the rest of this PITA tech tree and you can toss the extra sulfur into a recycler.

You already know about the exploity copper, tin and electrum bars from the centrifuge. Again, having more basic resources will help you more than anything else.

The industrial grinder is good because it at least doubles your ores plus a bit more in tiny piles. It requires steel to make but you can get that from other mods (Traincraft is the easiest) and skip a few steps. It really likes silk touched ores, and if you picked up some spare cinnabar while mining in the nether then you'll have mercury cells to throw in it.

Energywise? The steam turbine makes 100 eu/t, which seems like a lot until you turn on your industrial grinder. Your typical GregTech base with a mat fab and everything will want several hundred eu/t. If solar is set to easy then go that route. Even if it is not set to easy, you may still want to go that route.

 

[JasonZZ]

@William Van Bokkelen--or you can take the sulfur, and some sodium from your clay, and further increase your copper output.

 

[Vovk]

I've started my latest SMP with gregtech in mind and this is the progression I followed:

#1 - slag furnace and temporary diamond finding layer 10 mining pit. You need a few diamonds for everything else to work smoothly

#2 - you should have found some nikolite in your diamond searching - make a blulectric furnace - if you have enough nikolite to make 10-15 solar panels, make 2 bluelectric furnaces. The fuel saving alone is worth every scrap of dust.

#3 - hobbyist steam engines, aqueous accumulators and TE machines. I started on 4 engines, 1 accumulator, 2 pulverizers, 1 induction smelter, and 1 extruder. The extruder and 1 pulverizer were used in a cobble->sand gen and the sand was used for rich slag, glass, and all other sand based goodness. Do NOT pulverize any ferrous ore you find.

#4 - now that we have good ore processing techniques, spend a few hours in the twilight forest looting and mining. This should give you AMPLE resources to being gregteching.

#5 - at this point you should build your nether portal and find the fortress - you need a blast furnace for your first bits of steel and your aluminium. As of yet, no IC2 machines need to be built.

#6 - once you have your steel production going - start thinking about the IC2 fuel you want. You have access to lava, extra coal (your steam engines are efficient and your smelting is free), peat, and lots of TF charcoal (which you could make in coke ovens if you wish). My personal choice was actually buildcraft oil and fuel in petrogens. The first IC2 machines I made were a macerator, 2 extractors and a compressor. I quickly added a centrifuge as well. You should also have your magma crucible from TE and your rolling machine from railcraft. I used the fuel for a bank of combustion engines as well as the petrogenerators so BC energy was plentiful. The fun thing about combustion engines is that you can turn them off when not in use and be very efficient with the amount of fuel you burn.

#7 - now you should get into the electrolyzer and eventually the industrial blast furnace. Keep in mind that using aluminium, silicon plates and TE electrum greatly reduces the cost of circuits, advanced circuits and the machines crafted with them. Your TF excursions should be able to fill your coffers with enough stuff to keep you loaded for a while. For lighting, don't waste coal and charcoal on torches - use your nether connection to get vast quantities of sulphur and use the sulphur with xcraft aluminum to create aluminum torches which are exceedingly cheap and a good source of light.This is the step where you start making your diamond jackhammer, your diamond drill and your rock cutter.

#8 - the idea by this step is that you were saving resources the whole time - fuel conservation through blulectricity (you could even use blulectric engines to supplement your BC power), fuel conservation through aluminum torches, iron conservation through aluminum and silicon in circuits, rubber conservation through electrum. Centrifuging lava should be a constant thing at this point as you will need more copper than you can get. Your ind blast furnace should be powered now by at least an MFE, though you can probably afford an MFSU at this point.

#9 - if you wish, you can start making solar panels now - though I tend to shun them for the challenge. if you do make solar panels, you should be able to consistently make enough to supply your machines ample power. After the new blast furnace, you're gonna want to make a grinder. Around this time you should also be getting your quarries online and maybe even have an energy tesseract to power them. You'll want the constant supply of resources.

#10 - the next step is the implosion compressor - after it's built, use your mercury from the nether and from TC2 quicksilver in your grinder with your ferrous ore stockpile. This will give you 1 platinum per ferrous ore. You will want to then process the platinum into iridium and get your matterfab/recycler online.

#11 - while the matterfab is running, start building your nuclear power plants. These will help. a lot.

After you have nuclear power and your matterfab, your quarry and your ind blast furnace + machines, start getting chrome from your ruby dust and redstone and upgrade your blast furnace with advanced machine casings. Make your vacuum freezer at the same time so that you can make tungstensteel - which will save you TONS of resources by reducing the cost of advanced alloys.


This is the point I'm at in the SMP world - I should probably get a chemical reactor and start messing around with it, as there are tons of recipes made with the different reacted chemicals. The point is - gregtech makes the recipes harder, but also makes it easier to use a little time to conserve a lot of resources. Saving resources every step of the way ensures you keep your sanity with the GT recipes

EDIT: This was all done in mindcrack. You are of course allowed to use applied energistics to help sort your base out, and the toys in Xreliquary would come in super handy for dealing with the nether and mobs in general.

 

[KirinDave]

Amazing, Vovk. One question though... I was under the impression that Nuclear was a fools errand compared to just making mad solars in terms of resource investment and risk. Does GT change that?

 

[Poppycocks]

Amazing, Vovk. One question though... I was under the impression that Nuclear was a fools errand compared to just making mad solars in terms of resource investment and risk. Does GT change that?

No. A common method for server owners is increase the output anywhere from 10 to 100 times.

 

[Omicron]

If you are playing with default configs, solar is always better than everything else.

However, Advanced Solars and GregTech slow down their deployment a bit, since you need a tier 2 industrial blast furnace to even begin with solar panels, and upgrading them requires an uranium ingot per panel. That means that the upgraded panel spends the first 20-30 hours of its lifetime making up for the EU you could have gotten out of that uranium in a reactor. And for the second upgrade, you need UU-matter, which as we all know is kind of a little bit expensive in GregTech. So once again, the upgraded panel will be busy for quite a while recouping its building EU cost before you truly make profit.

In the long-term though there's still no better EU source than spamming solars.

 

[DoctorOr]

The industrial grinder is good because it at least doubles your ores plus a bit more in tiny piles.

It triples gold, silver and copper with the right add-on chemicals. Use the industrial blast furnace for tripling iron.

Tin is sort of a bastard. Zinc is already abundant and so the industrial grinder isn't very useful for tin. It's the one metal I use the factorization process on even when I have an industrial grinder available.[DOUBLEPOST=1362733665][/DOUBLEPOST]

No. A common method for server owners is increase the output anywhere from 10 to 100 times.

_I'd_ use nuclear at 10x (an easy 3500EU/t per reactor on a Mark I) but I think most people would stick with solar just because of the complication and fuel factors.

 

[Vovk]

the problem with solar is the absolute boring nature of it :c

that and big wall of nether pumped thermal gens. You can get started really quickly with these 2 energy sources... but they are no challenge :c

 

[Guswut]

No. A common method for server owners is increase the output anywhere from 10 to 100 times.

Doing that (maybe only five times, or perhaps more) whilst also switching it to steam output would be fairly interesting way to balance nuclear power a good bit.

 

[Zjarek_S]

With default GT configs long term advanced solars are IMO solved, they are not a good solution as main energy source, they are useful as a powerful portable energy. It costs about 8.5 days of sun (real time) to pay off for sunarium and iridium, if you mine iridium you will get a lot better efficiency for it in other energy sources. Nuclear is very good material wise in comparison to solars, you also don't need to hog a server when you are not online. Just don't build one reactor, build for example 10. Basically don't try to use solars as main energy source unless you like grinding. Steam turbines are great, boilers excel at efficiency when run fully heated (one bucket of biofuel per 124 seconds is enough for heated 36hp, equal to 225 EU/t). Just have a few blast furnaces going and you are set. Iron is relatively easy to come by with GT by obsidian dust electrolysis. Centrifuging lava is a necessity with FTB default spawn rates, specially if you go nuclear, it burns through copper like crazy.

 

[KirinDave]

With default GT configs long term advanced solars are IMO solved, they are not a good solution as main energy source, they are useful as a powerful portable energy. It costs about 8.5 days of sun (real time) to pay off for sunarium and iridium, if you mine iridium you will get a lot better efficiency for it in other energy sources. Nuclear is very good material wise in comparison to solars, you also don't need to hog a server when you are not online. Just don't build one reactor, build for example 10. Basically don't try to use solars as main energy source unless you like grinding. Steam turbines are great, boilers excel at efficiency when run fully heated (one bucket of biofuel per 124 seconds is enough for heated 36hp, equal to 225 EU/t). Just have a few blast furnaces going and you are set. Iron is relatively easy to come by with GT by obsidian dust electrolysis. Centrifuging lava is a necessity with FTB default spawn rates, specially if you go nuclear, it burns through copper like crazy.

I thought boiler turbines maxed out at 100eu/t?

 

[Zjarek_S]

Yes, but you don't have to use only one. Add gate with "need maintenance"-> redstone signal and some lamps to know which rotor should be repaired without manually checking everyone. They can be repaired cheaply using blades.

 

[KirinDave]

Yes, but you don't have to use only one. Add gate with "need maintenance"-> redstone signal and some lamps to know which rotor should be repaired without manually checking everyone. They can be repaired cheaply using blades.

Well you said something about 225 EU/t per bucket, which must have been a typo on your part.

I think the steel investment for the turbines seems pretty ludicrous myself.

 

[Kocyk]

He mean you can get max of 225EU/t from 36HP boiler if you use all the steam it produces (by using 3 turbines).

 

[Velotican]

This thread has been a very useful read but I have a tangential question:

What can you realistically get out of a nuclear reactor with GregTech using the default config settings? I'd like to actually make nuclear power a viable option on my server but I need some guidance.