Underrated/lesser used techniques and items

[kittle]

Hang gliders. Combine these with a jetpack and you got an easy yet pretty darn efficent way of flight.

+1 for this. Just dont let your jetpack run out when your 2k blocks from home.


While this isnt new -- ive always been a fan of biomass power. With the new compression dynamo from TE, ethanol burns for LONG time.

 

[darkeshrine]

What you call expensive is offset by the capability of the router to service many machines at the same time. For example 1 router can supply 50+ alvearies with frames.
And I don't follow what you are saying about them being slow. Their transfer rate is instant, there is a little delay between machines which the speed upgrade negates. Bandwidth upgrade makes it move stacks at the time.
For what it does/is capable of I think it is pretty cheap.

As for the Dark Iron, there is no such thing as a "lava level". The dark iron spawns in connection with bedrock or very close to it. It is true that there is an increased chance of lava at that depth, but it is pretty easy to find spots to mine down to bedrock without any lava(Zans minimap's cave mode is a great help for this).

One item at a time is pretty slow when it's depositing items into a row of DSU or a wall of Barrels, which is why the Bandwidth and/or Speed upgrades are needed for a lot of projects. Dark Iron itself isn't as easy to acquire anymore. I'm probably the only person that doesn't think that the Wrath Igniter is all that expensive, and i enjoyed just going and lighting a block of iron on fire. A decent amount of dark iron now requires just as decent amount of time to mine it or the infrastructure to refine it properly. My commenting about a "lava Level" is solely a lack of a better term referring to the lava lakes at level 10 and down. For some reason i always dig down after finding a nice place to build and find lava lakes. My mining for dark iron is typically about a hundred blocks away from my base for that reason, in which Zan's Minimap is indeed a great help for.

Now, i'd like to apologize because my previous comment did seem rather hostile toward the Router. I was simply stating the few things that make them quite off putting for those that haven't used them.

 

[kaovalin]

Routers were the basis for creating black boxes that processed large amounts of stuff. They are hands down the best thing to cram together machines in ways you couldnt with any other mod. When no direct piping is required, it makes builds much more simple in terms of routing power and I/O. They also dont draw any power for how powerful they are. I cant imagine not using them once I scale up.

More to the thread's point, FZ caliometric burners need more love. I power my whole FZ setup this way. I saw DW20 use them in his latest SSP LP series. I dont want to build solars and clutter up my canyon's geometry.

 

[YX33A]

Everyone who uses Mekinism knows about the Hydrogen Generation system which is fueled by water and can power a base of decent size, assuming you can kickstart the setup anytime you have no power. But Engineer's Tool Box has an addon called Gascraft with a way to generate Hydrogen for free, called the Photobioreactor. It needs Algae, a resource that can be easily automated in ETB for free, or just gather in massive amounts by finding a swamp and grabbing it all. You also need water, aka easy to obtain. The whole thing costs very little to get started, requiring an ender pearl as the most expensive item, and even GasCraft has a way to power your base with just hydrogen, with it's two gas-powered generator sockets. One is kinda meh, generating the same amount of power for all gases for a somewhat short time that doesn't change per gas, and one that has a variable output but only works on some gasses. The second one even can generate smoke for you if you set things up correctly.

Also throwing my hat in for Golems for TC4.1, way easier to get into, and still just as cool.

Also worth trying out is Blood Magic and it's Lava Crystal. Most people go straight for lava powering systems and tell you all about the Serenade of the Nether, and it's pretty sweet, I won't lie. But earlier then that is a T1 item called the Lava Crystal, which consumes 25 LP for one "smelt" in a furnace, aka the amount of power needed to smelt one item in a furnace. Coal is worth 8 smelt, wood 1.5, etc etc. But while Lava is great, not every system will allow it's use. But the Lava Crystal works in anything that uses "generic furnace fuel", so powering anything with a bit of blood is easy if you can use normal furnace fuels to power it. Best of all? It won't kill you if you run out of LP, just make you nauseous. Hence why when I finally end up doing my bit in Refuge to Regent Challenge, I will allow for somewhat techy things, if I power then via arcane means.

 

[kaovalin]

Also worth trying out is Blood Magic and it's Lava Crystal. Most people go straight for lava powering systems and tell you all about the Serenade of the Nether, and it's pretty sweet, I won't lie. But earlier then that is a T1 item called the Lava Crystal, which consumes 25 LP for one "smelt" in a furnace, aka the amount of power needed to smelt one item in a furnace. Coal is worth 8 smelt, wood 1.5, etc etc. But while Lava is great, not every system will allow it's use. But the Lava Crystal works in anything that uses "generic furnace fuel", so powering anything with a bit of blood is easy if you can use normal furnace fuels to power it. Best of all? It won't kill you if you run out of LP, just make you nauseous. Hence why when I finally end up doing my bit in Refuge to Regent Challenge, I will allow for somewhat techy things, if I power then via arcane means.

Only a matter of time before blood magic is automated using an iron maiden to slowly drain the blood from your body as you slowly regenerate it back.

 

[Golrith]

To be fair, they're fairly slow to operate and almost expensive to make with the upgrades needed for most things you'd use it for. To clarify, the reason i say "almost expensive" is simply because dark iron isn't as easy to acquire as it once was, especially with it spawning just below the lava level being rather hazardous to mine for.

On a similar note, almost all of Factorization is fairly underrated and rarely used. Yeah, there's barrels and Wrath Lamps, but that's about all of what people use. There's a few accounts of people actually using it fully but are few and far in between.

I purposely set up a Factorization ore processing chain, it's pretty good (just used a TE assembler intead of a mixer for the cleaning stage). The only failure is at the Crystallization stage, you just can't really automate that without a router, which is an inconsistant level of technology/resource compared to everything else.

 

[kaovalin]

I purposely set up a Factorization ore processing chain, it's pretty good (just used a TE assembler intead of a mixer for the cleaning stage). The only failure is at the Crystallization stage, you just can't really automate that without a router, which is an inconsistant level of technology/resource compared to everything else.

But routers are cool

 

[hiroshi42]

Only a matter of time before blood magic is automated using an iron maiden to slowly drain the blood from your body as you slowly regenerate it back.

We already have this, combine ritual of the feathered knife with ritual of regeneration. In fact they are built in such a way that one can fit inside the other and the whole assembly can be squeezed in under an altar.

Also I've posted about it in several places now, but combine an iron golem farm with an automated Tinker's construct smeltery to more than double iron output. You will need something like a vacuum hopper to get the drops out of the smeltery but that's probably the most expensive item in the build.

 

[Drawde]

I sometimes like powering an MFR Bioreactor with a IC2 crops setup. One +6 upgrade in a Harvester, making a 15x15 field divided into nine section, and no need for a Planter to feed eight Biogenerators.

I also enjoy some of the little-mentioned parts of Dartcraft, such as the Force Furnace and IC2 machines. I no longer need to hunt certus quartz when I can convert nether quartz into it with an upgraded Force Furnace.

 

[rhn]

I purposely set up a Factorization ore processing chain, it's pretty good (just used a TE assembler intead of a mixer for the cleaning stage). The only failure is at the Crystallization stage, you just can't really automate that without a router, which is an inconsistant level of technology/resource compared to everything else.

I think the crystalizer step was made hard to automate on purpose to offset its huge benefit(tripple ore output)(at the time that was huge). And you would run into problems automating it other ways anyway due to the number of unique slots that cannot be treated as the same.

 

[kaovalin]

I sometimes like powering an MFR Bioreactor with a IC2 crops setup. One +6 upgrade in a Harvester, making a 15x15 field divided into nine section, and no need for a Planter to feed eight Biogenerators.

I also enjoy some of the little-mentioned parts of Dartcraft, such as the Force Furnace and IC2 machines. I no longer need to hunt certus quartz when I can convert nether quartz into it with an upgraded Force Furnace.

This may be a function of extracells but I can use nether quartz crystal and dust in place of certus quartz. I was noticing it today when I was looking at things I could do to maximise output from silk touched nether quartz ores. I dont need to convert it, it just works in place of it in the recipes.

 

[netmc]

This may be a function of extracells but I can use nether quartz crystal and dust in place of certus quartz. I was noticing it today when I was looking at things I could do to maximise output from silk touched nether quartz ores. I dont need to convert it, it just works in place of it in the recipes.

I think AE has had this in place for quite some time. Only fluix crystals and dust require both kinds of quartz. everything else can use either one.

 

[hiroshi42]

This may be a function of extracells but I can use nether quartz crystal and dust in place of certus quartz. I was noticing it today when I was looking at things I could do to maximise output from silk touched nether quartz ores. I dont need to convert it, it just works in place of it in the recipes.

In what recipes can you replace nether for certus?

 

[kaovalin]

In what recipes can you replace nether for certus?

The silicon (confirmed via overly eager redstone furnace), gold/diamond chips (ones that need to be cooked), the quartz tools/wrench I specifically remember. It seemed pretty universal like it was ore dictionary.

 

[hiroshi42]

hmm, well the silicone and knife has been that way for a long time and the processors don't need quartz in normal AE.
Meh, was just curious, never really played much with extra cells and never noticed a crafting change between it and normal AE.

On topic: Mekanism is a very shiny mod who's ore processing has been getting more, and more complex, steps. Kinda an inverse to Rotarycraft, where the complexity is more in the power production and movement but the actual 5x ore processing block (cause that's all anyone uses Mek or Rotarycraft for right?) is one simple ore-in-smelty-stuff-out block