A couple of things…
Cactus
I tried the cactus route for hydration, and cacti grow so slowly it's not worth it. By the time you have multiplied enough cactus plants (either by harvesting and re-planting or sieving for seeds) to generate enough water to keep you hydrated, you have much better options for hydration.
Watering Cans
As with so many XU things, the watering can is totally OP. I personally try to avoid XU whenever I can because it feels too much like cheating. I refuse to use its cobble generator too.
Survivalist Generator
These are OP in the early stages of this pack and should be dependent on PneumatiCraft too. The initial wreck could contain one (it makes sense to have a survivalist generator as standard equipment on an escape shuttle), and there should be a "go to location" quest about 1000 blocks out (1.5 days walk there and back), where there is some more wreckage containing some machines including another survivalist generator. All additional generators should be gated behind PneumatiCraft.
Fluid Tranposers
I would also give the player only one Fluid Transposer at the start. One extra Fluid Transposer could be in the additional "survivalist generator" wreck.
Pneumaticraft
I ground through PneumatiCraft, and it is indeed a royal PITA. And in Crash Landing, all the good stuff is gated behind PneumatiCraft, so we are pushed into PC quite early in the game when resources are still scarce and this makes it extra frustrating. But some tips:
- Seed harvesting cannot be automated with the tech you have at this stage of the game, but there are some simple constructions you can build with blocks, droppers, buttons, conveyer belts etc which help make this a little less tedious - Google these devices up.
- Set up a dedicated area for each seed, in total this area will need to be about 3 chunks in size.
- The pressure chamber requires constant baby sitting, but a simple comparator on a pressure gauge and line of redstone back to the compressors will stop it blowing up.
- You can use an air canister on a charging station like an energy cell. This will give you instant pressure on a PC network because the pressure equalises throughout the network.
- The interfaces use heaps air to operate (3 charcoal per stack of items going in, and about the same coming back out), so it's much faster and uses MUCH less fuel just to break two blocks of the pressure chamber, throw in stacks of items and then rebuild the chamber.
- I cooked up 4 stacks each of green, black and blue plastic, and a stack each of a couple of other colours. This was enough to kick start some automation.
- I lost heaps of resources to items despawning, this whole process requires CONSTANT ATTENTION which is something I totally fail at. On advice from MineMaarten I set a real-life egg timer to 2 minutes, and whenever it went off I raced back to my PC setup. This helped a lot but I still lost a few stacks of iron and some PCBs when I got side tracked while running back
- Getting a PC system up and running requires an obscene amount of iron. Build a High Oven first to triple ores. (As an aside, High Ovens are far superior to Smelteries for automation because they triple ores and don't create alloys. I smelt ores in the High Oven then melt down blocks of metal in the Smeltery to create alloys.)
- Don't etch your PCBs one at a time. Save up a batch of 16 and throw them all in the acid at once. And remember to start your egg timer
- Use your first batch of PCBs to set up all the assembly line machines and then the PCB grind is over!! Celebrate!!
Hope that helps, and
KeepOnDigging!
