Two platinum == Limitless iridium

[DoctorOr]

Note that "shiny metal" is platinum, and works interchangeably.

First, all you need is two platinum dusts. You can get it from pulverizing (not macerating) ferrous metal 5% of the time, or if you use an industrial grinder, every 4 ferrous ores will give you bonus enough to make one platinum dust.

The only other machine you need is an induction smelter, and some quantity of rich slag. Simply smelt two ore using the rich slag on the left, and you get three ingots. Pulverize / macerate / industrial grinder the ingot to get back to dust. Repeat until you have 10 platinum.

You then take 8 platinum dust to an industrial centrifuge. 15 minutes later, you have an iridium ore, and can take the two platinum left back to the induction smelter.

This isn't the only probable problem with the rich slag mechanic, its just a very obvious one. Basically, being able to use rich slag on dust in order to turn 2 into 3 is going to create these cycles. The mechanic needs to switch to be only be usable on ore.

 

[TheLoneWolfling]

I fail to see the issue. This isn't "platinum as a catalyst makes limitless iridium for free". It's "Bunches of ores that have been turned into slag can be used to make iridium".

 

[Skyqula]

Isnt rich slag sortoff limited? As in it requires you to supply ores to make it aswell as giving up ~30% of your ingot income in order to choose the ingot type you would like extra off. This is a rather cool and actually pretty balanced tradeoff.

To me this looks more like a little misscommunication/missunderstanding between the mod authors. Obviously either shiney dust shoudnt convert to platinum or shiney dust shoudnt be usable with rich slag.

Or this could actually be an intended route that requires quite some machines and mods working together.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

So you need 8 platinium dust, plus some spare.
Essentially 8 rich slag per iridium (plus pulverising, smelting and centrifuging costs).

As the only way to make rich slag is smelting metallic ores, and 5 ores per slag- so around 40 ore for an iridium. You're going to need a fairly sizeable quarry setup to manufacture any significant amount of iridium.
(Bearing in mind GT heavily nerfs the quarry).
Also raw iridium is about as useful as a chocolate oven, its 4 iridium per plate (old style)- so you need 160 ore blocks, or about 2 1/2 stacks to do anything useful.
This isnt exactly in infinite supply, but somewhat easier then dealing with a matterfab.

 

[SilvasRuin]

That's only as "limitless" in the way Iron Ore in the ground is. That's actually finite, and while it is practically limitless, you have to keep hunting more, and more, and more ore down, and sacrifice what could have been more Iron, or Copper, or Silver, or Lead, or Tin in order to get more of that Platinum. That's not what I'd call an exploit. Where Thermal Expansion is concerned, it's working as intended. At worse, the exploit would be that GregTech recognizes Shiny Dust/Ingots as Platinum. Considering that Greg knows about Redpower 2 gemstones and their frequency, and considering that he could easily make them not work for his recipes in the same fashion his gemstones don't work for Eloraam's but he did not, I'd say the similar situation with the Shiny Dust must not bother him.

 

[DoctorOr]

That's only as "limitless" in the way Iron Ore in the ground is.

There's a huge game difference between the rarity of iron and the rarity of Iridium. Ferrous is rarer, but you only need two 5% chances to pan out, so roughly 40 ores to kick start the process off. Or 8 with a grinder.

And yes, you need Rich Slag to do this, 8 per Iridium, but that's not exactly rare. I have over a stack just sitting in a box. 1 in 5 ores you smelt with the Induction Smelter will give you a rich slag. You should be processing all ores in the smelter until and unless you build an industrial grinder - and maybe even after.

exploit would be that GregTech recognizes Shiny Dust/Ingots as Platinum

That's the Forge dictionary.

 

[SilvasRuin]

Firstly, I wasn't making a comment on commonality, I was making a comment on the nature of being "limitless" with a basic comparison. Any of the other ores would have worked; don't get hung up on Iron.

Secondly, Greg could have ignored the Ore Dictionary for his Platinum, as I pointed out. He chose to use the Forge Ore Dictionary for the gemstones despite the abundance of Redpower 2 gemstones. He's knowingly accommodated it. Eloraam, meanwhile, did not use the Ore Dictionary for her gemstone tools. This is a conscious decision on Greg's part. So how is the Shiny Dust different? I'm pretty sure Greg knows about Thermal Expansion and its frequent inclusion alongside his mod, just as he's well aware of Redpower 2.

It's only an exploit if it goes against the mod makers' intentions.

 

[DoctorOr]

Secondly, Greg could have ignored the Ore Dictionary for his Platinum, as I pointed out.

TE's use of shiny dust is new, you're presuming a lot of intent on not having instantly reacted to a change and having that change included in FTB.

It's rational to connect ores to the dictionary, by default, but I think a presumption on maintaining the general rarity of an item - particularly a "real life" metal - is also rational. "Shiny dust" as an equivalent to platinum is reasonably rare, but the creation and in particular the nearly limitless chain creation, of extra ingots isn't.

It's not even a hard fix either, the smelter should only use rich slag with actual ores, not dust. That keeps the mechanic in place, but removes the exploitability of it. This even makes better sense from a "realistic" viewpoint.

 

[Skyqula]

It's not even a hard fix either, the smelter should only use rich slag with actual ores, not dust.

Thats actually not such a good fix. Say i want gold. I can use the whole factorization setup to get 3 dust per ore. If i had to use rich slag would i then get 4? Without having to setup the whole line? As thats what i can do right now.

 

[DoctorOr]

Excuse the thread-necro (six days is a necro?) but the newest Guude video is amusing. He explains Nebris used this very exploit/bug/oversight/issue to generate the iridium for the matterfab he has.

"Cheaty Nebris" after all.

 

[Skyqula]

Well the mindcrack pack got updated to v7 and this wasnt changed in anny way shape or form that i can find annyway. So this seems like it is intended. No "cheaty Nebris" after all x)

 

[DoctorOr]

Well the mindcrack pack got updated to v7 and this wasnt changed in anny way shape or form that i can find annyway. So this seems like it is intended. No "cheaty Nebris" after all x)

GT's author expressly refers to the process as an exploit on the IC2 forums. I'd presume that the fix just didn't get pushed to this version and will be coming soon.

And it is an exploit by any rational observation. It would be one thing to take two ingots and turn them into three - once. But to take two, make it three, make it four, make it five, etc ,etc is clearly cheating. To create the 8 iridium necessary for a matter fabricator would take running the process on those original two platinum dusts 64 times (62 if you don't want to still have two at the end). I have five stacks of rich slag sitting in a box. How much should I simplify my game by suddenly generating 40 iridium out of thin air?

 

[ItharianEngineering]

Actually because there is a second way to make the Energy Flow Circuits that only requires a lapotron crystal, platinum/shiny ingot, and an advanced circuit you only need 4 iridium since it goes around the recipe that requires the plate and tungsten. So you only need 4 iridium for the one plate for the Lapotronic Energy Orb.

 

[noskk]

Actually 20% to get rich slag is pretty crazy.. 2-5% is probably better..

The other thing that cause the exploit is that you can convert 8 platinum to 1 iridium, if the number of platinum needed increases from 8 to 32, this will somewhat solve the problem??

 

[Dragonfel]

You MUST keep mining ores to maintain rich slag. So this method isn't really exploitative because it means you must continually provide ore and sand, while sacrificing your potential extra gains (using the rich slag for other metals like tin or gold, or the 5% chance on pulverizer to make extra dust).

If this unbalances platinum/iridium, then greg should not make shiny ingots interchangeable with platinum. Shiny ingots are Thermal Expansion and are still sort of a work in progress as there are no machines that use them yet. Or perhaps Platinum should migrate to the industrial blast furnace to avoid the dust being used with the induction furnace.

 

[raiju]

You MUST keep mining ores to maintain rich slag. So this method isn't really exploitative because it means you must continually provide ore and sand, while sacrificing your potential extra gains (using the rich slag for other metals like tin or gold, or the 5% chance on pulverizer to make extra dust).

Any form of autofarmer can supply you with endless iridium at low cost via this method. Exploit.

Greg will be fixing this if he hasn't already, hindsight is a beautiful thing though.

 

[Vovk]

I have to agree with dragonfel - it's not so much of an exploit when you realize you're giving up a sizeable percentage of all of your ore in order to generate iridium, don't forget gregtech isn't the only mod with expensive ore costs. A turbine and boiler to run it are over 600 steel (600 iron and 600 coal coke) and nuclear reactors cost insane amounts of copper and tin and iron to make. You're giving up reaching those 2 powerful energy generators anytime soon if you've been dumping all your ore in an induction furnace in the hopes of getting slag.


PS: you mean a turtle or quarry raiju?

 

[Dragonfel]

Any form of autofarmer can supply you with endless iridium at low cost via this method. Exploit.

Greg will be fixing this if he hasn't already, hindsight is a beautiful thing though.

Any sort of autofarmer will also get you endless iridium from digging it out of the ground anyway.

 

[raiju]

I have to agree with dragonfel - it's not so much of an exploit when you realize you're giving up a sizeable percentage of all of your ore in order to generate iridium, don't forget gregtech isn't the only mod with expensive ore costs. A turbine and boiler to run it are over 600 steel (600 iron and 600 coal coke) and nuclear reactors cost insane amounts of copper and tin and iron to make. You're giving up reaching those 2 powerful energy generators anytime soon if you've been dumping all your ore in an induction furnace in the hopes of getting slag.


PS: you mean a turtle or quarry raiju?

Turtle, quarry, mining platform etc. etc. etc. There are so many ways to get so many ores per minute.

Any sort of autofarmer will also get you endless iridium from digging it out of the ground anyway.

Ok I'll rephrase: Any form of autofarmer can supply you with endless iridium at low cost within minutes via this method, as oppose to the days/weeks low cost methods others would take. It would still take days if you put in hundreds of miners/quarries/thousands of turtles, but you still couldn't come close to matching this exploit.

 

[TruculentMC]

If there was a hypothetical method that made it so instead of being able to turn 64 Coal -> 1 Diamond, you could turn 2 Coal -> 1 Diamond instead. Would that be exploitative?

There is 1 iridium ore per 5 chunks. In those same 5 chunks, you can expect around 1225 other ores (varies based on biome, caves, etc) which yield Rich Slag, or around 245 Rich Slag. As you need 8 Rich Slag to make an Iridium, you have increased the amount by over 30x -- or nearly the same as with the hypothetical 2 Coal -> 1 Diamond scenario.