getting started with Thermal Expansion?

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CaelThunderwing

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Jul 29, 2019
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ok i'll admit since i did play tekkit alot i got use dto getting started using Just normal IC2, though im starting to get told when it comes to FTB, the best way to start is with Thermal expansion.

whati do know off hand, is the pulverizer is basicly a macerator, and the powered furnace is the same as the eletric furance, but it seems normal Steam Engines are replaced w/ all new of these engines.

whats the best way really with FTB to get going with ? and can anyone explain these new steam engines?
 

TheSandwichMakr

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Buildcraft steam engines were renamed to sterling engines Im pretty sure to prevent confusion with railcraft steam engines that actually run on steam. I started with a peat farm and used peat engines.
 

SilvasRuin

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Build a Pulverizer with much the same pacing you would build a Macerator. It does indeed serve an extremely similar role and it costs similar resources... with just a little more even distribution across the needed resources. (The Generator is actually what causes starting with IC2 to cost more.) The Pulverizer and an engine to power it are really the only two things you "need" to get started. So long as you're getting the most out of your ores until you've sufficiently built up, the rest isn't so important. You will find that all of the Thermal Expansion machines are worth looking into, however, and the Induction Smelter will be getting a little more valuable when the Universal or Tech World packs for 1.4.5 are released and/or when the Magic World pack updates its TE version.



The Steam Engine you know is now called the Stirling Engine. This is appropriate as the others actually do use heat and water to produce power whereas the Stirling Engine does not use water.

The Thermal Expansion Steam Engine is an intelligent engine that works well with TE's machines, Redstone Energy Cell, and Redstone Energy Conduits. It requires any sort of fuel a Furnace will accept + water. An Aqueous Accumulator can act as an infinite spring + Pump when placed as such, and can easily provide the water a Steam Engine needs by placing it just under the engine, no pipes needed.

The other steam engines are from Railcraft. The Hobbyist Steam Engine functions mostly like the TE one, but can also accept steam from a Boiler. The two higher tier steam engines require steam piped from a Boiler. These are the engines you want to work your way up to using if you want powerful engines from a renewable fuel.
 

Vovk

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Engine listing. I am calling any object with an inventory a machine. 20 seconds to a tick. Sometimes this value fluctuates due to server lag, but if B is displayed in seconds and A is displayed in ticks, then A is always 20x faster than B. Unless marked with a *, none of these engines will explode unless you plug one into the back of another for long periods of time OR if you output directly into a full machine without going through a pipe or conduit first.

Buildcraft:
Redstone Engine - produces 1 MJ per second. Only really useful for drawing items into pipes from machines
Stirling Engine - produces 1 MJ per tick. Requires any fuel that would burn in a furnace.
Combustion Engine* - produces 1 MJ per tick on lava, 3 MJ per tick on oil, 5 MJ per tick on biofuel and 6 MJ per tick on fuel. A bucket of fuel will produce 600,000 MJ. Yes this is 100,000 ticks, which is 5000 seconds which is around an hour and a half. This engine will explode if it runs out of water at green heat or above.

Thermal Expansion:
Steam Engine - produces 2 MJ per tick, runs on any fuel, requires constant supply of water to operate (use an aqueous accumulator). Will shut down instead of exploding. can be run without a redstone signal.
Magmatic Engine - produces 4 MJ per tick, runs only on lava, will shut down instead of exploding. can be run without a redstone signal.
Redstone Energy Cell - not a true engine, but worth mentioning. Stores up to 500,000 MJ with configurable input and output ranging from 0 to 125 MJ/tick. Can run a quarry to bedrock from layer 70 off 6 MJ/tick output.

Forestry:
Peat Fired Engine - produces 1 MJ per tick up to 5000 MJ on peat or 2 MJ per tick to 12000 MJ on bituminous peat. Will constantly build up ash at a slow rate which must be removed once 256 are built up. Runs for hours on a single stack of peat.
Biogas Engine - requires lava to start from a cold stop. does not require lava to continue running once started. produces 1 MJ/t off water but constantly burns its lava to do so. 1 MJ/tick off honey and 1MJ/tick off milk - the milk lasts longer. 3 MJ/tick off seed oil, 5 MJ/tick off biomas. Does not run off biofuel.
Electric Engine - produces 2 MJ per tick off 6 Industrialcraft EU per tick. Can be upgraded by using a soldering iron's right click interface to attach electron tubes to circuit boards.

Forestry Electric Engine Upgrades:
Type of tubeEffect (Max stack)Change in input EUChange in output MJ
Copper Choke(1) -2 EU/t -1 MJ/t
Tin Boost I(2) +7 EU/t +2 MJ/t
Bronze Boost II(2) +15 EU/t +4 MJ/t
Iron Efficiency(1) -1 EU/t No change

Railcraft:
Steam Boilers* - boilers can be low or high pressure and can be liquid or solid fueled. boilers above 100C will constantly output steam at the same rate of 10 steam/tick off low pressure boilers per tank and 20 steam/tick off high pressure boilers per tank. Low pressure boilers take less fuel to heat up, but also cool down faster. High pressure boilers take more fuel to heat up and cool down slower. Boilers are meant to run 24/7 - the hotter a boiler runs, the more fuel efficient it becomes. Boilers don't need to have fuel in them to produce steam, they just need their temperature level to be above 100C. You can pipe the steam into whatever machine needs it OR stick machines directly onto the side of the boiler. Due to the nature of steam as a fluid, you can store it in tanks - however you'll find that you will never be able to build a big enough tank to hold any supply of steam for any length of time. It takes up too much room, is produced too quickly and is used just as quickly. Railcraft engines running off steam have godlike fuel efficiency at top tiers. A single bucket of buildcraft fuel can last 5 minutes in a 36H liquid boiler. It will essentially power all machines taking steam from that boiler at once, up to 720 steam per tick. Energy can be gained at a rate of 1 steam/tick to 0.2 MJ/tick OR 1 steam/tick to 1.25 EU/tick. That is 144 MJ/tick for 5 minutes off a bucket of fuel or 200 EU per tick for 5 minutes off a bucket of fuel. The EU only comes in packets of 50, and the MJ comes in 2, 4 or 8 as shown below. Boilers will run forever off just fuel but will only output steam if they have water. Putting cold water into a boiler that has become dry and hot can be.... exciting.

Hobbyist Steam Engine*- Has its own internal boiler and can run off any fuel + water source at 1.6 MJ/tick . You can pipe 10 steam/tick into it from an external boiler to achieve 2 MJ/tick
Commercial Steam Engine - 4 MJ/tick off 20 Steam/tick piped in externally.
Industrial Steam Engine - 8 MJ/tick off 40 Steam/tick piped in externally.

Cobblestone waterproof pipes hold 10 liquid per tick
Golden waterproof pipes hold 40 liquid per tick

Any machine that requires steam can be sat right next to a boiler without piping. So far these machines are the hobbyist steam engine, the commercial steam engine, the industrial steam engine and the steam turbine.



And that's all the ways to generate power in buildcraft :D

Please feel free to correct me if you see anything wrong or if I am missing something

Eloraam is also adding a bluelectric engine in Red Power that will allow a conversion from bluelectric solar, wind and thermal into BC energy, which will be quite nice for machines that need small trickles of 1/2 MJ constantly and who don't feel like making a blasphemous industrialcraft solar panel :D


PS: Just to underscore the fuel efficiency of a 36H steam boiler (36 high pressure, the max output and size of a steam boiler)

1 Bucket of fuel in a combustion engine is 600,000 MJ over the course of an hour and a half.
1 Bucket of fuel in a 36H boiler is 864,000 MJ over the course of 5 minutes.

PPS: Boilers are hella inefficient when they are cold, however. a 36H boiler will heat up or cool down in around 6 hours or so. at 100C it will use 8x as much fuel as usual. at 500C it will use around 2x as much. etc etc. Note that the cooldown period is long as well, so a boiler with water but no fuel can run for quite some time before grinding to a halt.

PPPS: Thanks for the peat correction. Tested and added new info.
 

CaelThunderwing

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Jul 29, 2019
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till i get use dto FTB mods :3 i'm doing it in SP. plus gonna be hard to find a nice FTB Server where people arent taking advantage of no locking chests etc, (and atleast is using keepInventory and mobGriefing gamerules.

ohh is Silver veins suppose dto be Huge in FTB? i've found Two now that yeild over a stack of the ore. (used seed kindlek4mini )
 

SilvasRuin

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The huge silver veins are from Factorization, one vein being just enough to get a Factorization ore processing machine set built usually. It uses a lot of lead, which is extracted from that silver ore with the Slag Furnace to start with, then obtained in greater amounts once you have all of its ore processing machines up and running. It's actually more important for the lead than it is the silver.
 

Vovk

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Jul 29, 2019
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only 1 silver vein from factorization can spawn per chunk. Not all chunks have a silver vein. You need a helluvalot of silver for factorization to work. 8 per mirrior, which most machines needing 5 or so mirrors of power each. Any machine with induction coils (read furnace heaters, grinders, mixers, turbines) need 8 lead per coil. So to get a setup with a furnace heater powering a slag furnace, you need (excluding wires and batteries) 40 silver for the mirrors, at least 32 lead for the turbine, and at least 48 lead for the furnace heater.

mix those costs in with the rest of the machines you need for factorization and you will quickly run out of silver and lead if you are following that tech path.

That's not to say the factorization ore processing tech path is bad. It is most certainly not bad. Only by paying those silver and lead costs can you hope to get 300% ore output from processing with factorization. The process takes around 20 minutes for ~1.5 stacks of ore, but if you pay the silver/lead cost several times over and implement a railcraft sorting system you can automate the whole thing.
 

potter

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Jul 29, 2019
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Vovk, good post. Just one thing to note, the bituminous peat runs at 2 MJ/t.
 

netmc

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Back to the original question with getting started with TE. A Pulverizer and an engine are needed first to start doubling ores. You also occasionally get bonus ore output (about 5%)

An induction smelter is next, but needs a source of sand to quickly turn pulverized ore into bars. It only costs 80MJ + 1 sand for 2 pulverized ores vs 320MJ per each (640MJ total) in the powered furnace.

For a sand source, as soon as you find some lava, you can chain an igneous extruder to a pulverizer for the sand.

hook it all together with some pipes, a hopper, and some power, and you get a nice automated ore processing center.

2012-12-09_12.48.31.png


This is the setup I use, but there may be better ways.

All the secondary outputs are placed in the pipes, which end up in the chest. The hopper feeds the pulverizer and is where all the ores go. The pipe to the right of it is for all the bonus outputs. The induction smelter needs 2 pulverized ores to work, so the single bonuses would gum up the works. When I have enough I just place them in the induction smelter manually. You could also replace the single pipe with a powered furnace to automatically turn any bonus ores into bars directly, then place them in the chest.

To make TE's redstone conduits, you need a magma crucible which requires nether brick and a liquid transposer. With the latest version of TE, you don't need to find a nether fortress for the brick. 1 soul sand and 4 netherrack can be placed in the induction smelter for 2 nether brick.


Here is a trick for obsidian with TE. with the igneous extruder, you can easily make lots and lots of obsidian without mining it. Once you have some lava, simply pipe or place lava buckets and water buckets directly in the igneous extruder, and set to obsidian. You can then easily get to the nether without a diamond pick or make lots of obsidian for that blast proof mage's tower you always wanted to build.
 

Vovk

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Jul 29, 2019
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Thanks for the bituminous peat info. I always assumed it just ran longer, now that I know it actually runs more MJ per tick I might have to make a bituminous peat production line.

The ash I would have to get from my other peat fire engines running the bogs and forestry farms. The propolis I would have to get from beeeeeeeees.... never done anything with them before, might be fun.

The issue is that JUST running peat fired engines off bituminous peat seems a bit of a waste unless you are using more than 1 engine for any application. I guess I could wire them into my bases power grid and run em off bituminous, but the issue is that 2 normal peat + 2 ash + propolis will have to go into these things, basically turning 10,000 MJ + 10,000 MJ ye'v already spent in the form of ash + opportunity cost of spending the propolis into 12,000 MJ. If you already HAVE a lot of peat fired engines running off normal peat, this conversion is a no brainer since you already have all the ash, you have a net gain of 2000 MJ, and your new engines run faster. If you are setting up a system to ONLY use bituminous peat, you will have to cook the peat in (Hopefully) factorization furnace heated furnaces. Even then you are turning 4 peat into 2 peat and 2 ash into 1 bituminous peat, going from 20,000 MJ over the course of ~17 minutes into 12,000 MJ over the course of 5 minutes. The output of the power plant doubles, but the fuel efficiency gets significantly cut.

Hmm... I have decided that I will not run many machines off bituminous peat and instead just chuck the peat into my 36H like I always do.
 

ShneekeyTheLost

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The other cute thing about pulverizers and powered furnaces is that you can set them directly adjacent and automatically smelt the pulverized ore without needing pipes. Stick a hopper on top, dump in your ores, hook up an output chest, go do something else and come back to fully refined metal ingots.

At the very beginning, I would suggest a TE steam engine. It's fairly intelligent, you can drop it on an Aqueous Accumulator, it produces 2 Mj/tic, runs on charcoal (since coal will be needed for other things), and can power both of your machines at the same time. When you begin wanting an induction smelter, upgrade to some other form of power that can produce at least 4 MJ/tic. By then, you should also be considering replacing your conductive pipes with redstone conduit.
 

SilvasRuin

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The newest Thermal Expansion update has made things... interesting. Specifically the Rich Slag mechanic. The gist of it is smelting ores directly in the Induction Smelter has a chance of giving you Rich Slag, which when smelted with the 2 dusts of a Pulverized metal give you three ingots instead of two. This creates an interesting dynamic where complete automation may not be desired.

You could go the simple way where you abandon the chance of extra dust from the Pulverizer and place all your bets into accumulating Rich Slag, Pulverizing two ingots of whatever type you're wanting to produce an extra of at the time.
Or... let's say you have more Gold than you know what to do with, especially from all the Kobolds, skeletal Druids, and Zombie Pigmen you've been killing, but you're really needing more Copper. Since Pulverizing Copper Ore occasionally gives you Pulverized Gold and vice versa, you could Smelt your Copper Ore to try and get Rich Slag from it, Pulverize your Gold Ore to try to get extra Pulverized Copper out of it, Pulverize any of the resulting Copper Ingots you need to in order to be appropriately double the amount of your Rich Slag, then run the Pulverized Copper and Rich Slag through the Smelter again.

Keep in mind that Iron has no chance of an extra dust and thus should always be run through the Smelter.
...also keep in mind that if you're using Factorization, that probably remains the better choice for any metals it is compatible with.
 

ICountFrom0

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Here's an even more complex one, where you sort your metals by rarity and worth.

Anything that makes a top tier metal product goes through factorization, to get tripled.
Anything that makes a top tier byproduct, goes through Thermal expansion.
Anything that only makes low tier product or byproduct is sacrificed into slag smelting, rich slag is saved.
Top tier metal is then smelted out from crystals, pulverized back into dust, and then smelted with the rich slag to give you more top tier metal for every slag you farm from low tier ore smelting.
 
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Vovk

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hmm... factorization can do Tin, Copper, Lead, Iron, Silver, Gold.

Tin pulverizes into bonus iron
Copper pulverizes into bonus gold
gold into bonus copper (apparently, never noticed it meself)
silver into bonus lead
lead into bonus silver

Rich slag mechanic - Assume for now, 100% of ore into rich slag - we'll be redoing calculations with less %chance in order to see if there's an optimal percentage that needs to be tested for in order to always go one way or another. I'm assuming we're using railcraft or red power 2 to sort, so in the case that i:=0 points out, we should be able to set up a lever mechanism to switch cart tracks OR a computer mechanism to resort ores to whichever output we want. Goal is to completely automate the smelting process with perhaps an option to set your line to create more of 1 type of product, more of another, or balanced production. We're assuming ample power production and self sustaining fuel generation is already in place.

1 Ore through the full factorization process is 3 dust at the end with a final pulverization after smelting.
20 Ore through the pulverizer is 40 dust and 1 bonus (It is in fact random, but this will make the math simpler)
1 Ore through the new smelter = 2 dust + 1 rich slag -> 3 dust at 100% rich ore production.

Already, I can see a problem with running the pulverization bonus through the smelter with the rich slag - it's unnecessary. Even at 100% chance of rich slag, the smelter will actually produce enough dust to keep up with the resmelting. A red power computer with the new sortron upgrade could watch a slag furnace for rich ore output and when it finds one, can pull ingots from a finished chest into a waiting pulverizer and resmelt for the bonus. This can also be achieved with autarchic gates on a barrel especially for rich slag. hooked up to another 2 autarchic gates on a chest full of 1 specific ore output.

Because the new rich slag is produced as a byproduct of 2 ingots and requires 2 ingots to smelt and get the 3rd, you will never need to pipe bonus ores back into the smelter unless you get multiple rich slag from the same smelt (read, over 100% chance of getting rich slag). You can use the same ingots you just smelted to immediately give the bonus. This might be a balance issue. I'm guessing the balance has to be above 5% slag got from each smelt in order to be better than a pulverizer and lower than 100% in order to not overshadow factorization entirely. This is also assuming sand and dirt are free (which they basically are) along with ample energy production.

Thus, the best thing to do would be to have a factorization line set up for everything that it can handle - then have an option to pipe ores instead into pulverizers + powered furnaces or induction smelters in order to convert 20/60 of your total output into 3/60 bonus. So you would get for a total input of 20 ore, 40 ingots and 1 bonus instead of 60 ingots. Unless you're starving for a specific resource, it would seem better to just set up another quarry instead of wasting so much ore.

Please correct me if you see a problem with the math, icountfrom0.

PS: If you're going for max useful production of by-products, you could set your factory for max production of clay and 300% output or max production of rockwool for 200% + 0%<bonus<100% output. IMO the clay is straight up more useful and better for stylish houses and lithium production - but rockwool is more expensive and thus more prestigious if you build your whole house out of it - as it essentially represents a ~1/3 ingot production waste in order to produce. This also assumes you also have automated dirt, sand, and MJ production. In a world of limited MJ, dirt and sand - all these numbers get skewed and the math becomes nigh impossible without knowing the proper situation.
 

SilvasRuin

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The problem I see is that your focus was on producing the most ingots in general. Probably a good goal when using Thaumcraft's metal transmutation extensively, but more packs are likely going to have Factorization + Thermal Expansion than packs that have Thaumcraft at all, AND extensive transmutations can add up to burn through a significant amount of your seemingly finite aura. Anecdotal evidence suggests at least one type of node can produce Aura from thin air, but even if that is the case, it is the second most rare type of node if not the second most and the most rare types.

ICountFrom0's stated plan was to use TE's Rich Slag mechanic to weight the final yield even more heavily to the more valuable metals... most likely Copper, Tin, and perhaps Iron at the expense of Gold and possibly Lead and Silver once an appropriate Factorization assembly line is finished.

A few other notes: The chance for Rich Slag is 20%.
Slag can still be produced by repeatedly Pulverizing ingots and resmelting them with Sand, which means it is a renewable resource. As plentiful as Factorization makes Clay, it is not a renewable resource except from IC2 machines.

Okay, I just double checked with the older Beta Pack A. I must have imagined the Copper from Gold. Lead DID have a 10% chance from Silver though, and has since been bumped down to 5%. The fact that Gold doesn't have a byproduct and tends to be so available (and is the easiest to renewably farm) in most cases makes it really good fodder for producing Rich slag.
 

Vovk

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That's the thing though - you WILL get the max bonus by just routing the smelter into itself (or even better, another smelter so your sand production can just constantly feed into the first) There doesn't seem to be a high tier bonus to be got by routing factorization output back through the induction smelter.

That's not to say I won't do testing to back up me claim :D When this new TE comes out I will sure as hell set up such a factorization/TE system and compare bonus output to just routing the induction smelter into itself.

Edit: good point about rockwool being renewable - i'd forgotten you can resmelt dust over and over again - making a rockwool house a lot less desirable than a brick one if we're going on value of materials used :)

So now, that I know the slag chance is 20% this means that your induction smelter will take 5 gold ore and turn it into 11 ingots. Following factorization will turn it into 15 ingots.

If you had 10 ore total, and put half into factorization and half into the smelter while keeping the slag separate, you'd have 25 ingots and 1 slag. you would then use 2 ingots and 1 slag to make the total into 26 ingots. If you just put it all through factorization you get 30 ingots. if you put the 5 in each line and keep them separate you still get 26 ingots. Mixing the two lines seems to do nothing.

If you had 40 copper ore and 10 gold ore and put all the gold into factorization while putting the copper into TE with smelter you would get 30 gold ingots, 80 copper and 2 gold dust which would make the total 32 gold and 80 copper. If you used 2 of your 30 factorization dust to resmelt the rich slag you would still get 32 gold and 80 copper. If you put all the copper ore into the smelter you would get 96 copper and 30 gold. If you put all the gold into the smelter you would get 96 copper and 22 gold. The highest rate for gold still seems to be pulverize copper and melt bonus while the highest overall still seems to be factorize everything.

Gah I am stupid. Does rich slag have a type? I was assuming you were getting "rich gold slag" or "rich copper slag" that had to be smelted with the correct stuff.

Of course if all rich slag is created equal and you just mixed it with previously smelted metals to get your bonus, of course you would factorize your gold and induction smelt all your copper, tin and iron, then mix the rich slag with the factorized gold in order to get the highest gold yield. Then you could use red power or a series of levers and railcraft to feed your rich slag into whichever line you wanted more yield from. You could even split the slag into multiple lines. It would basically overshadow the 5% non stacking bonus ore mechanic by allowing 20% stacking bonus ore of any type you choose as long as you have at least 2 of that type to act as a seed.

I am also assuming you ONLY get rich slag from smelting of ores, not from finished ingots or dust. If not, then you could exponentially grow the output of your gold without an aurelia farm by just feeding all the ingots back into the system.
 

SilvasRuin

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Nope, Rich Slag is Rich Slag. Source doesn't matter.


I would be far more inclined to put the Copper through Factorization, to get more of it, and Gold through the Smelter for the Rich Slag as it is the most easily/tolerably renewable metal, and then running some of the Copper through the Smelter with the Rich Slag for even more Copper. Gold is the Ore I'd be most willing to sacrifice in this manner... not including varieties of Ore Factorization doesn't recognize. Silver and Lead would follow shortly after once I was done setting up all I needed/wanted from Factorization.
 

Vovk

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Yes, I agree with you. I would even go further to say you should induction smelt all your iron, tin and gold for slag to make copper, silver and lead. With enough MJ (steam can provide easily) you can set up an infinite lava generator and centrifuge combo that constantly outputs iron, tin and gold.
 

SilvasRuin

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Ah, I wasn't considering that. But when considering the Magic World pack (which I'd be fairly well inclined to add Factorization to manually if I need to), the Centrifuge is not an option, making Iron more of a pain to farm (zombies are a painfully slow method and Iron Golems don't despawn, making farms for them risky on servers and/or when World Anchors are involved), and eliminating the ability to renew Tin. Granted, the lack of IC2 and GregTech reduce Iron consumption considerably, but Railcraft still uses a lot of it, and it is probably the least polluting and/or aura hungry ingredient for producing Thaumium. Where the Magic World pack is concerned, I think I would (eventually) toss Silver and Lead into the sacrificial pile instead and try to preserve Tin and perhaps Iron as well.