[Guide]Thermal Expansion for Newbies

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Thermal Expansion for Newbies​

(A reference guide for the rest of us)​

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So, first off, what does this mod do?​

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• It brings your production to the industrial age, with machines which more efficiently smelt, and even get a higher rate of return on your ores!
• It also revolutionizes your MJ Power System. More on this later.
• It also has machines which provide utility. This can either be ease of use, or it can be lag-reducing techniques.

Why might you want to use this mod?

• You can't find a rubber tree among all the extra biomes around your immediate spawn, and you want to get your industrial setup going anyways
• You are wanting to get started with another mod, and there's a machine which requires a lot of water supplied to it
• You are wanting a reliable source of lava without all the lag that pumping lava pools out of the nether can provide
• You are wanting to set up an extensive power network with mods other than IC2 (and addons to IC2)
• You are wanting to set up a fully automated refinery which you can deposit any kind of ore into and have it automatically produce ingots, particularly if you have space constraints or are wanting a very compact design.

What mods does this mod work well with?​

• Forestry and Buildcraft are both synergistic with this mod. Several Forestry machines require a steady water supply, which this mod can provide. The machines in this mod can also be configured to automatically output to an attached pipe or inventory. Both also have alternate methods of producing the same type of power.
• Railcraft also plays well with this mod, as it uses the same type of power, and also has additional means of producing it.

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To begin with this mod, you will need to have already accomplished the following:​

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• Established a 'home' or 'base' that will at least keep the creepers off of you
• Done a bit of mining, down to gold/redstone level. No diamonds are necessary to get started
• Have about a half stack of iron, and at least a dozen copper and tin, as well as some gold and a half stack of redstone. You might also need a little bit of silver.
• You will also need a good bit of glass to get started, so sand is something you'll actually want to snap up as you come across it. About a half a stack will get you started.
• One of your first machines will also need a couple of brick blocks, so if you see any clay, grab it.

That's really about it. Once you get some iron, gold, silver, tin, copper, and redstone... you're ready to get started!

The Basics: MOAR POWER!​

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Many, but not all, of these machines require power to run. This power is measured in MJ, or Minecraft Joules and produced by Engines. Output of engines which produce MJ is generally measured in MJ/t or Minecraft Joules per tick. There are generally twenty ticks per second, although those on servers might experience varying numbers due to lag. Power draw for these machines is also generally measured in MJ/t.​

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So, let's get to generating power! The first step is deciding which engine to use. There's lots of different engines which have differing outputs, differing fuel sources, and differing mechanics. If you haven't checked it out yet, go look up the NEI Tutorial and then search for the word 'engine'.​

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Yea, there's a lot of them, aren't there? Well, don't let that confuse you. Right now, our requirements are: Easy to make, can be made with the materials we have on hand, can produce enough MJ to keep our initial machines powered, and runs on a fuel you have easy access to. For this reason, I would suggest the Steam Engine, which is also a part of this mod. Note: This is not the <something> Steam Engine, nor is it the Sterling Engine. The complete name for this is the Steam Engine. It's the one that requires something called a 'redstone transmission coil' in the recipe.​

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Now then, this engine runs on coal or charcoal, and also requires water to convert into steam to run itself. Coal is easily found, and charcoal is simply logs which have been cooked in an oven, but a supply of water? Fortunately, there's a solution to that as well. This machine is called the Aqueous Accumulator. Don't worry, it doesn't require any power to run at all. Look up the recipe in NEI.​

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Get used to that Machine Frame, it's needed in virtually all of the machines in this mod. However, this isn't particularly painful to make... a piece of gold, some iron and some glass. Next, you'll need the servo, which requires some redstone, iron, and more glass. Then you'll need a bucket, still more glass, and some tin. I hope you found some sand nearby.​

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Right. So, what does this thing do? Well, if you put a water sourceblock on two sides of this machine, it will function as an infinite water source which automatically pumps water out. Nifty, huh? Also, take some time to check out the interface, there's some new things here that I want to point out to you now.​

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Redstone and Configuration panels​

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Notice on the right hand side, there's two little tabs? Let's go over them briefly. They are unique to this mod, so far, and are one of the revolutionary concepts which makes this mod so interesting.​

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The first one is a redstone dust picture on the tab. Clicking on it opens up a cute little panel that looks a little confusing at first. Basically, this panel determines how redstone alters the function of the machine. Clicking on the redstone dust button will disable reacting to a redstone signal or lack thereof. It will just work when it has work, and not work when it doesn't. It'll also tell you under Control Status if redstone signals are enabled or disabled. The other button determines if it needs a redstone signal to function (the picture of the lit redstone torch, with Signal Required: High) or if applying a redstone signal will disable the machine (picture of the unlit redstone torch, with Signal Required: Low). This helps you better automate your machines, and make more compact designs with redstone running near machines that won't affect them if you don't want it to.

The second is the config panel, which is where a lot of the magic of this mod happens. You might have noticed the orange squares on all of the sides other than the front face. You might also notice in this panel how there are also orange panels on all of the icons other than the front face. Yes, the two are directly connected, and it also has to do with why the liquid bar has an orange outline.

You see, when making very compact machine layouts, you can often have situations in which you really want to automatically pass the output of one machine to another, always. However, there are also situations where you don't want the output of one machine to go to another machine. This helps you customize that.

Unlike any other mod that I am aware of, Thermal Engineering machines will automatically output to an adjacent valid inventory or machine. In the case of the Aqueous Accumulator, it will automatically output water to anything that can accept water as a liquid directly adjacent to any side other than the front face. However, you can also click on the sides in this panel, and you notice that you can make the orange disappear, and you can make the face appear 'flush'. The colorless face is useful for inputting energy and is used primarily for Redpower2 Tube compatibility. The 'flush' face is a side of the machine that will not input OR output ANYTHING from that side. So if you are wanting to run a pipe right behind your Aqueous Accumulator which is handling some other kind of liquid, and you don't want to get water in that pipeline, you can click that side to flush and it won't.

Go ahead, play around with it a bit so you can get a feel for which sides corrolate to which of the buttons on the panel. It orients itself according to the direction the front face is pointing, rather than any arbitrary cardinal direction, so placement facing has a large part in this. Also the front face will never connect to anything.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Back to Basics​

Right, now you've got a feel for this cute little mechanic, and you're wanting to go ahead and get this done already. No problem. So, determine where your want your machines. You're going to want this engine to be about three or four blocks behind it. Yes, you do need some room, you'll grow into it, don't worry.​

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One block below where you want your engine, put your Aqueous Accumulator. Also dig out a one block hole on the left and right, and fill these with water. Open up your AA's interface, and you should see it rapidly filling with water. Good, it's working. Now to make your engine.​

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You'll need 11 copper for this engine,, plus eight sticks and eight cobble, as well as a Piston (which is cobble, wood planks, one iron ingot, and one redstone), and something called a 'redstone transmission coil'. Let's look up that recipe in NEI. Looks like it's one Silver ingot and a couple of redstone, so not too bad.

Look up the recipie for the gears in the NEI. It's basically four sticks, then four cobble around the wooden gear, then four copper ingots around the stone gear... and you'll need two of them.

Right, so we get the engine made. Let's drop it directly on top of the AA and click on it. Hey cool, we've got water automatically flowing into the engine! Now it just needs some coal or charcoal to get fired up and it can start producing power! Unlike most Buildcraft-style engines, as long as you have Redstone configuration set to Enabled/Low, you won't even need a redstone signal to make it start running!

But first, we're going to have to figure out how to transmit that power. For now, we're going to have to use Conductive Pipe. You're going to need a Wooden Conductive Pipe and some Gold Conductive Pipe. The Wooden Conductive Pipe is your 'input' energy pipe. Engines have to be facing a wooden conductive pipe to be able to transmit energy through the pipes. The golden conductive pipes transit energy with minimal energy loss over distance.

Production Line - Getting the most out of your ores​

Okay, now you've got power! So, what do we do with it?

Well, first, let's go over some of the materials we're going to need for this step:

• 4 Gold, some iron, glass, redstone, and Copper. No tin or silver this time.
• You'll also need a couple of brick blocks, so get some clay. I hope you're near a shoreline. You'll also need some flint.

Well, the first machines we're probably going to want is going to be the Pulverizer and the Powered Furnace. Let's start with the pulverizer. Look up the recipe in NEI.

Yep, you guessed it, another Machine Frame. This time, however, you're also going to need a Redstone Reception Coil. That's a gold and two redstone. This is going to be used in any machine in this mod which requires power input to function.

So, in addition to those two things, you'll need a couple of copper, a couple of flint, and a piston. Not too hard. Now drop it down and let's look at the GUI.

Well, that's a bit more colourful of an interface, isn't it? Go ahead and pull up your Config tab and we'll figure this out.

This time, for colours, you have Blue, Yellow, Red, and Orange. Blue will represent your Input. Red will be your Primary Output. Yellow will be your Secondary Output, and Orange is BOTH your primary AND secondary output.

Wait... primary and secondary output? What's up with that?

Well, some ores have a 5-10% chance of not only doubling your ore's production by producing two pulverized ores of the same type, but also producing an additional pulverized ore of a different kind. With Copper, there's a very small chance of producing a bonus pulverized gold, and with gold, there's a chance of getting a bonus pulverized copper. Silver and lead also share the same relationship. This bonus ore goes into the yellow slot.

Now then, throw some fuel into your engine and fire it up! You will notice, if you look at the Pulverizer, that there's a blue bar on the left which is starting to fill up. This machine can store up to 4800 MJ of energy in its Redstone Reception Coil, giving you an energy buffer if you run out of fuel. Also, the speed of the machine will be determined by how full the power is. If the machine detects that it is running low on power, it will throttle its speed to conserve the remaining power. So for maximum speed, you're going to want it to be more than halfway charged.

Another cute thing about these machines, with respect to power, is that it won't draw or ask for power when it doesn't need it. This is exceedingly handy if you have several machines hooked up to the same power pipe, so it won't be drawing power which is needed elsewhere, and allows you to be more efficient with your power output.

]So, wooden conductive pipe in front of your engine, some gold conductive pipes hooked up to the back of your pulverizer, and now it's running. Great, time for the next machine, the Powered Furnace.

Now, don't get me wrong, your plain ol' vanilla furnace has helped you get here, but it's rather... inefficient. You have to smelt things in groups of eight, or you 'waste' fuel. It also isn't the fastest in the world. Time for an upgrade. Let's look at the recipe in NEI.

Yep, just like the pulverizer, this one also needs a redstone reception coil and a machine frame. Then it's just a couple of copper, a piece of redstone, and a couple of brick blocks, which might be your tripping point if you aren't near a body of water. I would suggest putting this underneath your pulverizer for now, and setting the bottom face to orange (all output). Don't forget to hook up a golden conductive pipe in the back. Now make yourself a chest (for now), and put it to the right of the furnace, I want to show you something cool.

Open up your GUI for the powered furnace. Nothing too fancy here, one input in blue and one output in orange. Set up your Input to be the top face and your Output slot to be the right face. Now throw an ore into your Pulverizer.

When the Pulverizer is done, it should automatically eject the pulverized ore into the Powered Furnace, which in turn should automatically start up and smelt the pulverized ore and deposit it into the adjacent chest.

Cool, we've got some automation going!

By now, we have:

MJ power production, a Pulverizer, a Powered Furnace, and we've configured them to automatically pulverize and smelt all of your ores while you're off doing something more important.

The other machine you may want to consider at this stage is the Sawmill. It increases the amount of planks you can get from logs. It can also be used to reclaim resources from wooden objects, which can also get you back other resources. For example, if you put a bed into the sawmill, you get three planks back and you get your three wool back as well.

But wait! There's more! Stay tuned for our next episode, in which we kick it up another notch and discover a few other machines along the way!​

 

[Cloud]

More picture would help, since its GUI is one of the more confusing ones to newbies.
Other than that, great guide!

 

[SlipperyJim]

Cloud has a valid point

Good guide though!

The Jimbat
Agreeable

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Kicking it into high gear: More Advanced Thermal Expansion Stuff​

Okay, so you've got your basic setup running. But you notice that while it will run, if you put in enough ore, it can slow down to a crawl sometimes. Well, the solution to that is MOAR POWER!

You have some options here. You can hook up yet another steam engine to your already existing network. It'll require a waterproof pipe and maybe re-arranging your water source blocks to get it going, but it shouldn't be much of a problem. And that is probably acceptable for now, but you're going to be wanting other sources of energy than coal and water.

If you've hit a lot of lava, and you're not sure what to do with it, then look up the Magmatic Engine in NEI. Almost identical to your steam engine's recipie, except that it needs tin instead of copper. It runs on lava, which you can either pipe in with waterproof piping, or fill manually with buckets. It can produce twice as much energy, so 4 MJ/t.

UPDATE!: This just in! The recipe here was changed to require Invar ingots instead of Tin. Invar is an alloy. To make it, you will need to Pulverize Iron. There's a 5-10% chance that when you pulverize Iron, you will get Pulverized Ferrous Metal (yes, for the scientifically savvy, iron is a ferrous ore, in fact the word ferrous is just the latin name for iron, but let's assume that this is some sort of iron with some impurities such as chrome or nickel which will produce a good alloy which is stronger than wrought or cast iron). One pulverized ferrous metal plus two pulverized iron equals three invar blend. Cook up the invar blend to make invar ingots. Please note that you cannot combine the ingots themselves, you have to mix the pulverized metals then smelt them together.

If lava isn't an option yet, say you haven't broken into the Nether yet, then you're going to have to look outside this mod for power sources. You may wish to consider Forestry Biogas Engines, which also produce 4 MJ/t and run on renewable Biomass, which is created in a Fermentor. And hey, the Fermentor needs a constant water supply... looks like a job for the AA! If you have an oil spawn nearby, you can also try making a Refinery to make Fuel for a Combustion engine. Which needs water to keep cool. Hey, yet another use for that AA, it's a pretty handy machine.

Now, there's another machine I'd like to introduce you to. A pair of them, actually. And they're going to help you with your power network. But first, we're going to want some extra production. So let's start there.

Now then, you're going to need about 4 MJ/t to power this setup, so however you manage that is up to you, but I wouldn't build too many more conductive pipes, because when we get done here, we're going to make them obsolete.

So, your furnace isn't bad, but you find that it gets easily outpaced by the pulverizer, who sometimes has to wait for it. Don't you wish you had something that could smelt things faster? Well, let's look up the Induction Smelter in NEI. Fairly inexpensive, isn't it? Your standard Machine Frame and Redstone Reception Coil, plus some copper, some sand, and a bucket. Pretty easy, eh? Drop it down next to your pulverizer, on top of the chest next to your furnace. Now let's check out the GUI.

Holy Rainbow Bright, Batman... that's a lot of colours. Don't worry, let's sort this out. Pull up the config panel while we're at it. Options for colors include: Green (input 1), Purple (Input 2), Blue (Input both), Red (Primary output), Yellow (Secondary output) and Orange (both outputs). Whew. But why in the name of Murphy does it have all these inputs and outputs?

To smelt ore, it will also need sand as a flux material. It will consume one sand per ore or per two pulverized ores. However, it runs MUCH faster than the powered furnace does. So why not remove the powered furnace and use it exclusively? Well... remember those 'bonus ores' it can sometimes crank out? Yea... they tend to gum up an Induction Smelter, because it's expecting TWO pulverized ores, not one. So we're going to need a lot of sand to keep this thing going, and we're going to need to re-configure the pulverizer.

UPDATE: In more current versions of this mod, Rich Slag will only increase the output of actual ores you smelt, it won't work with pulverized ores anymore. However, it's still a pretty good deal if you need more of a specific ore type and have some ore lying around. Also, Gold no longer has a bonus ore, so you can just throw it directly into the Induction Smelter for a chance at Rich Slag.

Okay, so you want the primary output (two pulverized ores) to go sideways into the Induction Smelter. You want the bonus ores to keep going down into the powered furnace so they won't gum up the works. So, set bottom to yellow and the correct side to red. Done.

Back to the Induction Smelter. Set the face adjacent to the pulverizer to one of the two inputs, either purple or green, take your pick. For purposes of this example, we're going to call that the green input, but it can be either one. Just not blue, that would gum up the works.

Now you see it filling up nicely with pulverized ores, two by two, hands of bl... ahem sorry about that. Anyways, now it needs power, so hook it up behind the machine, and sand.

Now then, if you aren't in a desert biome, sand might start to be getting scarce, but no worries, there's a solution to that. You've probably got one or more barrels or chests full of cobblestone by now, thanks to your mining operations. You can pulverize that into sand. So we're going to build a second pulverizer, and put it on the other side of the Smelter and throw some cobble into it. Put the Red output facing the Smelter, and in the Smelter's config, set the Purple (or the OTHER input slot) to facing the new pulverizer. Make sure to hook it up to power.

But what if you don't have a plethora of Cobblestone? What if you just build a cobblestone tree garden in your nether base? What if you've already started Recycling all your cobblestone? Well, have no fear, There's a Machine For That (tm). It's called the Igneous Extruder. Let's look it up.

Nothing to be worried over. It uses one of those Pnumatic Servos, just like the AA does, a machine frame of course, some tin, some glass, and a piston. And guess what, also like the AA, it doesn't require power. Drop it down opposite the smelter adjacent to your new pulverizer and open up the interface.

Well, there's two inputs, and they both seem to be liquid. There's one output. And there's a picture of Cobblestone, Stone, and Obsidian. This block reproduces some vanilla functions of what happens when water and lava mix. If flowing water and flowing lava mix, it makes cobblestone. If you get lava on top of water, you get smooth stone. And if you get water on top of lava, you get obsidian. That's a vanilla mechanic, nothing too fancy. This block just automates it for you.

So we set it to Cobblestone (sometimes called 'Cobble Gen', after the tactic used in skyblock maps), and set the orange output to the left, facing the new pulverizer.

One other thing about the pulverizer crushing cobblestone into sand... it has about a 10% chance of producing gravel as a secondary output. So put a stone or cobblestone pipe (look it up in NEI) underneath the new pulverizer and set bottom face to yellow.

Your output chest can fill up quite rapidly now, I'd suggest upgrading it to one of the Iron Chests type chests. Look up 'chest' in NEI and you'll see the recipes. Also note the 'upgrades', so you won't need to break it to upgrade it. Alternately, it might be time to set up a sorting system and hook up a pipe instead of a chest which feeds to your sorting system.

Now we're automatically making cobblestone, pulverizing it into sand, to feed to our induction smelter, which is smelting ores at a much faster rate. If you have a surplus of cobble already, you don't need the Igneous extruder, however it has the advantage of being a fully contained and automated system which doesn't need anything piped in periodically. It should look something like this

One other thing to note. You end up with a lot of Slag while smelting ores directly, or by smelting ore dusts (from a macerator). Slag can be smelted into Rockwool, which functions like regular wool, can be dyed just like wool, but has explosion resistance and fireproofing of stone. It lets you lay down carpet without worrying about a stray spark sending it all up in flames.

That concludes this step. In the next step, we'll be exploring a couple of new machines, and revolutionizing our power supply lines.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Redstone Running: Revolutionizing your power lines​

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Okay, so now we've got our refinery up and running at full speed, what's next? Well, now it's time to revolutionize our power supply.​

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You see, those conductive pipes? They aren't bad, but they can produce lag, and there's some functionality they are missing. We're going to be discussing an alternative in this section, and weighing the pros and cons.​

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I'm talking about Redstone Energy Conduit here. Let's compare them against conduit pipes​

Pros:

• Less lag overall. VERY useful for servers
• More energy efficient over longer distances, less power loss with distance.
• Neater looking, and eliminates the problem with 'power loops'.

Cons:

• Gates won't attach to them, or recognize them.

So, if you are using gates and red pipe wiring to turn on and off your engines to meet power demand, this can cause complications in your life. Otherwise, it's probably best to consider it a strict upgrade.

Materials required for this step:

• LOTS of Redstone. A full stack at a minimum.
• Basic building supplies you are already familiar with for making TE machines (gold, silver, iron, glass, copper, and tin)
• Lead
• Obsidian
• Nether Brick. This means either finding a nether fortress, or using an IC2 Compressor to compress netherrack into Nether Brick. Either way, you need to have made a trip to the Nether for this step.

So, when you look up the recipe in NEI, you notice that it's actually made in some other machine, and it looks like it's being filled with liquid. That's right, it's time to do some sub-combines.

Now then, for this step, we're going to have to interrupt your smelting process and re-purpose the machines for a bit. Or, if you want, you can set up a different set of machines. If so, you'll need the Igneous Extruder (for something other than coblestone this time), a Pulverizer, and an Induction Smelter.

If you want to re-purpose your already existing machines, then follow these steps:

• Change your Igneous Extruder from Cobblestone to Obsidian. Make sure it has a proper supply of water and lava for this, it'll eat up a bucket of both per obsidian you make. You'll probably want an Aqueous Accumulator underneath it for this purpose.
• Get rid of the sand and cobble already present in the system
• Flush out any ores other than lead.

First, we're going to need to make Hardened Glass. That calls for Pulverized Obsidian and Lead. So, toss some lead ore into your first Pulverizer. If you've already done that, then just load up the lead ingots into your smelter.

Next, we're going to want to disconnect the primary pulverizer from the smelter. Then we're going to need to feed it some gold and some silver. Now we're going to take one pulverized gold and one pulverized silver and put them in the crafting square to get two pulverized electrum. Smelt that in your Powered Furnace for some Electrum Ingots. Two of those and some hardened glass will net you some empty conduits.

So, if it's empty, how do we fill them? For that, we need two new machines: The Liquid Transposer, and the Magma Crucible.

Now, let's start with the Magma Crucible. It's a multi-purpose machine. If you have established yourself in the Nether, you've probably got a few stacks of Netherrack lying around. The Magma Crucible can turn that netherrack into lava at a reasonable cost. That lava can then be used to power Magmatic Engines or Geothermal Generators, or be used to fill up the Igneous Extruder with lava, or basically anything you'd want lava for. The other thing it can do is melt Redstone into Liquid Redstone.

Yep, Liquid Redstone. That's what is going into our conduits.

Now then, the Magma Crucible does require a couple of Nether Brick. If you haven't found a nether fortress yet, you can use your IC2 Compressor to turn regular ol' netherrack into nether brick. It can also be an absolute energy hog, eating up at most 20 MJ/t! But don't worry, it can run on as little as 5 MJ/t, even if it goes slower at that rate. The rest of the components should be no surprise to you by now, a machine frame, redstone reception coil, some copper, and a bucket.

So, it makes liquid redstone. So how do we get this liquid redstone into our empty conduits? You can't just place it right into the Crucible.

Well, for that, we need the handy-dandy Liquid Transposer, which excels at putting liquids into AND out of containers. Looking up the recipe nets nothing unusual here, another machine frame, redstone reception coil, a bucket, couple of copper and glass.

A brief glance at the GUI shows one cute little difference: There's a bucket icon which can toggle to either a full bucket or an empty one. The full bucket icon means it is going to try and fill containers, and empty bucket means it's going to try and empty it and put the liquid in its reservoir. We want it on 'fill' mode.

So, let's drop the liquid transposer immediately adjacent to the Magma Crucible, and use our Configuration tab to automatically pump the liquid redstone into the liquid transposer. Put your empty conduits in, and watch them fill up! Each one requires about one redstone worth of liquid redstone.

Now we can replace all the wooden and golden conductive pipes in our power network and replace them with redstone energy conduit!

That liquid transposer is also pretty handy when you are setting up your Forestry Peat Bog. It needs a lot of Bog Earth, and that needs a lot of encapsulated or containerized water. Since you're playing with Forestry, I'd suggest getting some basic bee production going, centrifuge the combs into beeswax, and use the wax capsules, since it is renewable. You can set up automation with an AA under the Liquid Transposer feeding it water, then feed it wax capsules to get water filled capsules for your bog earth. It's also GREAT for emptying out anything in cans or cells, because you get to keep the container. I'm sure you can think of more uses on your own.

Now for the last item in the mod... redstone energy cells. Yes, you heard me right, portable storage for MJ energy. This is gonna have a couple of sub-combines, and is currently the ONLY thing in the entire mod which actually requires a diamond.

You'll need some electrum, some hardened glass, some more lead... look it up in NEI. It's going to eat up quite a bit of redstone to fill, though. Something like 40 redstone worth, I believe. However, considering the storage capacity, and that if you crouch-click with a wrench or crescent hammer, it will retain its energy so you can move it around.

You do have to watch the conduits and how they attach to redstone cells, though. If you look closely at the joint connecting the conduit and the cell, you'll notice an arrow-like bit on the end. clicking it with a wrench or crescent hammer inverts the direction it is pointing. Pointing TO the cell means it is charging. Pointing AWAY from the cell does the reverse. No, you can't do both at once. Draw from a different side or make it in-line if you want it to be an energy buffer.

[DOUBLEPOST=1355838128][/DOUBLEPOST]

More picture would help, since its GUI is one of the more confusing ones to newbies.
Other than that, great guide!

First I wanted to write everything down, then I can go back and put the pictures in. But this was written mostly for the Wiki, and the guidelines for the wiki help pages stated that they can go in and edit and add pictures later.

Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it!

 

[Mike Kornet]

Finished 'Production Line' and I simply cannot continue this guide anymore. It's horribly confusing. You start talking about how we should start making an item and to look up the recipe. 50 lines later you actually start crafting them. There's no pictures to help. Where do I even put my items? Very bad guide.

 

[SteveLOL3_]

Look mike, he did a very good job and i am proud of him. He helped me get to the end of his guide. And since there is NEI, he does not need to put up the crafting recipes. if you are going to chose to not understand his guide then you should get the f*** out of here. But I would like a little bit more about other things like the redstone energy cell. Other than that, I give this guide a 10/10.

 

[jdlamson75]

I've always been pretty basic with my "technology" in FTB, and occasionally, and get confounded by the YouTube vids out there. They either go too quickly for my limited brain power, or they go into things I have yet to get a grasp on. I'm going to use the hell outta this guide; thank you for putting this up here.

Honestly, I find nothing confusing about it, so I don't know what all the fuss is. NEI is my friend.

Again, thanks for this bad boy. My friends and I just started a new DW20 world, and he of little technological advancements had the server's first smeltery, completely taking my fellow serverites by surprise. This guide should really make them think I'm a little less of a dimwit. As long as everyone else in this thread keeps mum about my lack of...anything, I should be good.