This is my first post, so pictures might not be shown immediately.
Long time lurker here, hello everybody! I got into Infitech few months back, and it's been a fun journey.
One of the most fascinating things in this mod is the amount of automation you are able to make. Basically everything can be (and should be) automated, like Greg said. Me and my buddies started small, traveling first 10h before finding good enough place to settle (Read: found tin. Tin is King). Then when we got enough machinery, the fun begun.
For a start, we created some part automation, basically circuits and LV electric motors. LV motor machine can be seen below:
That thing wasn't so hard to make, few enderIO buffers slapped between GT machines. Took some testing to get fully working, and getting the pipes not spit everything everywhere. This thing here must have saved me hours of tedious crafting.
Speaking of tedious things, ore processing is pure ass in this pack. It needs so much resources and time. My helpful minions weren't always available, and I didn't want to waste my precious creeper-killing time any longer. So, that's how Automaticon was born:
Made with mostly medium voltage machines, this beast could crunch it's way through ores like none other! Production line was improved with GT type filters, that allowed separation between main products and tiny pile side-products. That's what the GT brass pipes are for, when item is passing type filter it can be sorted when using GT item pipes. This made designing the line so much easier, you could be sure same things always went to same places.
There were problems in this MV-era design. The efficiency was quite low, speed wasn't the best and it really couldn't be improved without rebuilding it. So that's what we did. Build it anew, and this time we had high voltage allowing us to use finest tech and devices. We decided to make something compact, something challenging, and this is what we ended up with.
After hours of planning and hard work, it was finally finished.
5x5x10 blocks of machines, piping, cabling, wooden covers, and swears. This was our first true processing array. 2x HV macerators leads to 4x MV ores washing plants. Then the path is divided, you can go through 2x HV macerators -> 8x LV centrifuges OR 2x LV thermal centrifuge -> 2x HV macerators. This was done because of different side-products, you can only get 3rd side-product through thermal centrifuge-route. The routing of products was the most challenging part, I even re-routed some of the final products through early pipes to get them sorted through type filters. There wasn't simply enough space to make separate lines for every processing phase.
The cabling was fun. Very, very fun. You can see how much fun by just looking at this picture:
I had to make some questionable decisions when creating this, meaning LV/MV/HV cables, transformers and battery boxes right next to each other. Oh, and there's water. There's that feeling of imminent explosion when working with GT electricity, and I can tell you it's a relief when you power it up and produce no crater. I used tens of covers to separate machines from each other, and about same amount of pipe plugs. Nicely said, BC pipes are
very compatible with every mod in the pack.
It takes 63s to process iron ore, from start to finish. 100% process efficiency, combined with full automation and possibility to stop process after every step. There's still lot of work to do, I think 3.0 version will use Applied Energistics network for item tasks.
Automaticon was created on official Infitech server.