[1.7.10][LISTED] InfiTech 2 Modpack v3.2.21 [HQM][GregTech balanced hard-mode modpack]
- Thread starter Jason McRay
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I've been playing in peaceful mode. I have a few peaceful tables, but not enough for zombie flesh. The centrifuging solution works for me though.
I thought as v3 is coming up, I'd share my experience of dipping into v2, if anyone is interested. Short summary of my experience: GT is fascinating, but there are some things that depend so much on luck that they can become frustrating.
1. The Stone Age
I find myself in a scene of breathtaking multicolored beauty: giant blue-barked eucalyptus trees, yellow-and-green vines hanging from sheer cliffs, dense brush everywhere, such a profusion of life I don't think I've seen in any other modded MC biome - that's ExtraBiomeXL's Extreme Jungle (when v3 comes around, I won't rest until I can make my home in a similar place. I love it).
Regardless, survival is the first order of business. Priority 1: make some wooden and stone tools. Wood is everpresent - so much for GT's wood nerf, which I still find noticeable but not critical in this kind of environment. Next priority: find some sheep. Eleven if you can, but three will do if neccessary. Since I can't see much, I climb one the vines to the top of the cliff - hey, a tetrahedrite vein - and look around. There is (normal) light forest beyond this hill, and I see white dots indicating some sheep. Nice, I'm in luck, I climb down and manage to kill 13 sheep. Not only do I now have enough wool for a bed and a sleeping bag, I also have enough meat to last me a while. I go back to my dead-end valley and carve a puny 2x3 shack out of the cliff, with my crafting table doubling as part of the wall. Just in time, it is getting dark. I hate monsters. Really.
Food, at this point, is a pleasantly minor consideration. For now the meat from killed sheep and the occasional apple dropped from "my" oaks will last me quite a while. However, believe it or not, finding the 8 (!) iron ingots I need for a basic set of tools is an achievement. I made myself a set of flint tools as I went to carve my first mining tunnels - I never paid much attention to gravel before - but while iron ore is plentiful, most of if you can't mine with a flint pick. So unless you're lucky and find just the right kind of metal ore, you need to rely on small ores for your first iron, and finding enough of that can take a while. I actually made my first hammer from certus quartz because I had more of that than of any metal, but the file and the saw need metal. It is a relief when I finally have them, since now I can mine most other common ores. I can also make an AE2 grindstone, which is a bit less tedious to handle for grinding up your first ores than GT's mortars. That's another tool I never used in a modded MC game before.
OK, next high-priority target: a water source. Since standard infinite water sources don't work, and EnderIO's reservoirs are gated beyond the ability to travel the Nether and to make steel (which you need for EnderIO's alloy furnace, which makes the fused quartz), my only option is the Railcraft water tank. For that, I need - slimeballs. I should admit that I almost stopped playing at this point, for in my experience, slimeballs are a mid-game resource. I never have them early, and having to hunt for them is a major, major frustration. In most packs I can fly before I find slimeballs, which means that my usual sources are TiC slime trees which of course are absent from this pack. Since exploring underground is depressing I go on several exploration tours of the surface, hoping to find some swamp-like biome. What I find: two villages with some nice loot - no steel ingots unfortunately, but thaumium ingots, some gold, 12 dark steel ingots (which I still have days later because I can't use them for tools, grrr....) and two steel swords (away with you to the swamp, flint sword). I also found a stargate ring component...WTF? No slimes so far but across a lake there appears to be some swamp-like terrain. After spending my night in the village, I explore that part, it looks promising. Another village with more interesting loot - more thaumium, still no steel, and lots of rails - and an aluminium vein. I spend the evening sitting in a tree until the monsters come out. Yay, slimes! Unfortunately, lots of other stuff, too, but I manage to kill enough slimes for 33 slimeballs before I have to run away from the mob of mobs.
Next order of business: a tin vein. Those prove considerably elusive but I manage to find one eventually by looking at the side of hills. This takes almost as much time as the hunt for the slime. At this point, I am considerably frustrated. Having to spend so much time hunting for resources is giant PITA. Forget GT's complexity, I can deal with that very easily. Forget early technological processes that take forever to complete, I have a lot of patience if I know there will be a nice outcome eventually. Things that depend on luck like prospecting are, and will most likely remain, a major point of frustration for me. This is compounded by yet another expedition, this time for just two diamonds I want to have for my first machine... Another real-time day goes by as I find a dozen more iron veins and some other interesting stuff I have no use for at the moment. My first small diamond ore block doesn't drop a diamond but only dust. At this point I almost give up yet again. Once you find a vein, actual mining is much less of a pain than in vanilla MC - the veins are usually big and last a considerable time, and they're convenient to mine manually since if you stand on the lowest level, you can usually reach the highest with your mining picks. Using a "core-sampling" strategy for prospecting - mining 2x2 shafts down to bedrock in a 50-block grid - will let you find something interesting almost everywhere, but if you're looking for something specific that might not alleviate your frustration. I am going about this very systematically, including building walls in shallow water so that I can dig down there. I find silver and lead, cobalt and nickel, lots and lots of redstone and enough iron to build my base from iron blocks should I ever want to do that, but no more diamond ore except a random small ore that dropped a diamond and a flawless diamond (which equals two regular ones). I have what I want, and some time later I find an actual vein, but that was....thoroughly unpleasant.
2. The Steam Age, part 1
Now at last I can start doing what I started this pack to do: build machines. I spend some time mining copper and tin, and I move out of my little shack and build an actual house. Nearby there's an expanse of desert so I'll never want for sand to make into glass. None of my houses ever lacks windows - someone should ask dw20, btw, if he knows about the concept. I need to fell one of the giant eucalyptus trees for space. That takes quite a bit of work but provides me with lots of saplings and the wood for my roof. A roof made from blue wooden stair blocks. Nice. On top of it goes the water tank, and an adjacent area of the house retains a flat roof where I put some sand to plant cacti. I'll need those for some BC fluid pipes. I have also spend some time manually farming trees, and make charcoal to cook up a lot of stone, and bring some spruce saplings to plant in groups of four in another cleared area beyond my house. They will give me several stacks of wood in a minute. The drawback: each time that costs me an iron axe - at this point, 5 ingots.
Grinding up tin and copper in the grindstone is quite a bit of work, but as I said, I have patience if I know the outcome. No matter. The work is almost meditative at times, and at last I have enough bronze for a small coal boiler and a steam macerator. I make a water pipe down from the water tank on the roof, and a steam pipe to my machine. Ugh. Early BC pipes are primitive, but then I am just out of the stone age. The steam macerator takes 40 seconds to process a block of ore, and at this point I have to macerate any crushed mixed ore again to get at the dust which can be smelted to the metal. I could use the hammer for that, btw....but I have better things to do. I manage to automate the macerating using BC pipes, a redstone engine, a hopper (10 iron ingots apiece) and some chests, and cheat a dimensional anchor in. As I said elsewhere, I think that technical game issues like chunkloading should have no effect on world simulation, and for that reason I find nothing in cheating that item in and setting the config to not using fuel. Now I can go prospecting while my single machine is doing its stuff. That's quite a bit less frustrating than before since I know something useful is happening while I trudge along in those depressing rock corridors. I actually manage to find a diamond and graphite vein. Just my luck, though: it's intersected by a giant ravine and most of it is air. Still, I get a stack of diamond ore out of it. To my disappointment my Fortune III-pick made of Thaumcraft water shards has no effect, I just get the ore, but still, this will last me a while.
At this point I should mention that diamond, obsidian and some other stuff needs a level three mining pick. The easiest way to get that is by using Thaumcraft shards at pickaxe material, which are omnipresent, but elemental picks need a thaumium rod as a handle and you might not have that. Elemental picks also have low durability. The next best way is to find a cobalt vein. Cobalt ore can be mined with a level 2 pick, can be macerated and smelted directly to cobalt, and tools made of cobalt have a mining level of 3.
(to be continued)
1. The Stone Age
I find myself in a scene of breathtaking multicolored beauty: giant blue-barked eucalyptus trees, yellow-and-green vines hanging from sheer cliffs, dense brush everywhere, such a profusion of life I don't think I've seen in any other modded MC biome - that's ExtraBiomeXL's Extreme Jungle (when v3 comes around, I won't rest until I can make my home in a similar place. I love it).
Regardless, survival is the first order of business. Priority 1: make some wooden and stone tools. Wood is everpresent - so much for GT's wood nerf, which I still find noticeable but not critical in this kind of environment. Next priority: find some sheep. Eleven if you can, but three will do if neccessary. Since I can't see much, I climb one the vines to the top of the cliff - hey, a tetrahedrite vein - and look around. There is (normal) light forest beyond this hill, and I see white dots indicating some sheep. Nice, I'm in luck, I climb down and manage to kill 13 sheep. Not only do I now have enough wool for a bed and a sleeping bag, I also have enough meat to last me a while. I go back to my dead-end valley and carve a puny 2x3 shack out of the cliff, with my crafting table doubling as part of the wall. Just in time, it is getting dark. I hate monsters. Really.
Food, at this point, is a pleasantly minor consideration. For now the meat from killed sheep and the occasional apple dropped from "my" oaks will last me quite a while. However, believe it or not, finding the 8 (!) iron ingots I need for a basic set of tools is an achievement. I made myself a set of flint tools as I went to carve my first mining tunnels - I never paid much attention to gravel before - but while iron ore is plentiful, most of if you can't mine with a flint pick. So unless you're lucky and find just the right kind of metal ore, you need to rely on small ores for your first iron, and finding enough of that can take a while. I actually made my first hammer from certus quartz because I had more of that than of any metal, but the file and the saw need metal. It is a relief when I finally have them, since now I can mine most other common ores. I can also make an AE2 grindstone, which is a bit less tedious to handle for grinding up your first ores than GT's mortars. That's another tool I never used in a modded MC game before.
OK, next high-priority target: a water source. Since standard infinite water sources don't work, and EnderIO's reservoirs are gated beyond the ability to travel the Nether and to make steel (which you need for EnderIO's alloy furnace, which makes the fused quartz), my only option is the Railcraft water tank. For that, I need - slimeballs. I should admit that I almost stopped playing at this point, for in my experience, slimeballs are a mid-game resource. I never have them early, and having to hunt for them is a major, major frustration. In most packs I can fly before I find slimeballs, which means that my usual sources are TiC slime trees which of course are absent from this pack. Since exploring underground is depressing I go on several exploration tours of the surface, hoping to find some swamp-like biome. What I find: two villages with some nice loot - no steel ingots unfortunately, but thaumium ingots, some gold, 12 dark steel ingots (which I still have days later because I can't use them for tools, grrr....) and two steel swords (away with you to the swamp, flint sword). I also found a stargate ring component...WTF? No slimes so far but across a lake there appears to be some swamp-like terrain. After spending my night in the village, I explore that part, it looks promising. Another village with more interesting loot - more thaumium, still no steel, and lots of rails - and an aluminium vein. I spend the evening sitting in a tree until the monsters come out. Yay, slimes! Unfortunately, lots of other stuff, too, but I manage to kill enough slimes for 33 slimeballs before I have to run away from the mob of mobs.
Next order of business: a tin vein. Those prove considerably elusive but I manage to find one eventually by looking at the side of hills. This takes almost as much time as the hunt for the slime. At this point, I am considerably frustrated. Having to spend so much time hunting for resources is giant PITA. Forget GT's complexity, I can deal with that very easily. Forget early technological processes that take forever to complete, I have a lot of patience if I know there will be a nice outcome eventually. Things that depend on luck like prospecting are, and will most likely remain, a major point of frustration for me. This is compounded by yet another expedition, this time for just two diamonds I want to have for my first machine... Another real-time day goes by as I find a dozen more iron veins and some other interesting stuff I have no use for at the moment. My first small diamond ore block doesn't drop a diamond but only dust. At this point I almost give up yet again. Once you find a vein, actual mining is much less of a pain than in vanilla MC - the veins are usually big and last a considerable time, and they're convenient to mine manually since if you stand on the lowest level, you can usually reach the highest with your mining picks. Using a "core-sampling" strategy for prospecting - mining 2x2 shafts down to bedrock in a 50-block grid - will let you find something interesting almost everywhere, but if you're looking for something specific that might not alleviate your frustration. I am going about this very systematically, including building walls in shallow water so that I can dig down there. I find silver and lead, cobalt and nickel, lots and lots of redstone and enough iron to build my base from iron blocks should I ever want to do that, but no more diamond ore except a random small ore that dropped a diamond and a flawless diamond (which equals two regular ones). I have what I want, and some time later I find an actual vein, but that was....thoroughly unpleasant.
2. The Steam Age, part 1
Now at last I can start doing what I started this pack to do: build machines. I spend some time mining copper and tin, and I move out of my little shack and build an actual house. Nearby there's an expanse of desert so I'll never want for sand to make into glass. None of my houses ever lacks windows - someone should ask dw20, btw, if he knows about the concept. I need to fell one of the giant eucalyptus trees for space. That takes quite a bit of work but provides me with lots of saplings and the wood for my roof. A roof made from blue wooden stair blocks. Nice. On top of it goes the water tank, and an adjacent area of the house retains a flat roof where I put some sand to plant cacti. I'll need those for some BC fluid pipes. I have also spend some time manually farming trees, and make charcoal to cook up a lot of stone, and bring some spruce saplings to plant in groups of four in another cleared area beyond my house. They will give me several stacks of wood in a minute. The drawback: each time that costs me an iron axe - at this point, 5 ingots.
Grinding up tin and copper in the grindstone is quite a bit of work, but as I said, I have patience if I know the outcome. No matter. The work is almost meditative at times, and at last I have enough bronze for a small coal boiler and a steam macerator. I make a water pipe down from the water tank on the roof, and a steam pipe to my machine. Ugh. Early BC pipes are primitive, but then I am just out of the stone age. The steam macerator takes 40 seconds to process a block of ore, and at this point I have to macerate any crushed mixed ore again to get at the dust which can be smelted to the metal. I could use the hammer for that, btw....but I have better things to do. I manage to automate the macerating using BC pipes, a redstone engine, a hopper (10 iron ingots apiece) and some chests, and cheat a dimensional anchor in. As I said elsewhere, I think that technical game issues like chunkloading should have no effect on world simulation, and for that reason I find nothing in cheating that item in and setting the config to not using fuel. Now I can go prospecting while my single machine is doing its stuff. That's quite a bit less frustrating than before since I know something useful is happening while I trudge along in those depressing rock corridors. I actually manage to find a diamond and graphite vein. Just my luck, though: it's intersected by a giant ravine and most of it is air. Still, I get a stack of diamond ore out of it. To my disappointment my Fortune III-pick made of Thaumcraft water shards has no effect, I just get the ore, but still, this will last me a while.
At this point I should mention that diamond, obsidian and some other stuff needs a level three mining pick. The easiest way to get that is by using Thaumcraft shards at pickaxe material, which are omnipresent, but elemental picks need a thaumium rod as a handle and you might not have that. Elemental picks also have low durability. The next best way is to find a cobalt vein. Cobalt ore can be mined with a level 2 pick, can be macerated and smelted directly to cobalt, and tools made of cobalt have a mining level of 3.
(to be continued)
@Ieldra, this is fantastic feedback and a fun read.
I'll mention that some of the issues appear to be personal or a case of stubbornness on your part. The water problems are a total non-issue for me. I don't even consider water a roadbump anymore.
Someone mentioned that you can get slimes from PneumaticCraft slime plants, which spawn natively on the ground all over the place. Did you catch that?
I've found 4 diamond veins so far in my game btw. No redstone sadly.
Fortune items are almost useless in this pack. They're good in the early game for mining other shards, and for vanilla nether quartz, a couple other minor worldgens, but that's it.
"Elemental picks also have low durability."
Except for Terra. Its a level 3 pick with 50k durability, which doesn't suck compared to anything else at that stage of the game.
Fair warning for things like macerator times: GT basically assumes you'll spam machines. You can't get anywhere with just one of everything. Its common for me to have around 10 centrifuges, 8 electrolyzers, and so forth. GT is very factory-mass-production-oriented.
I'll mention that some of the issues appear to be personal or a case of stubbornness on your part. The water problems are a total non-issue for me. I don't even consider water a roadbump anymore.
Someone mentioned that you can get slimes from PneumaticCraft slime plants, which spawn natively on the ground all over the place. Did you catch that?
I've found 4 diamond veins so far in my game btw. No redstone sadly.
Fortune items are almost useless in this pack. They're good in the early game for mining other shards, and for vanilla nether quartz, a couple other minor worldgens, but that's it.
"Elemental picks also have low durability."
Except for Terra. Its a level 3 pick with 50k durability, which doesn't suck compared to anything else at that stage of the game.
Fair warning for things like macerator times: GT basically assumes you'll spam machines. You can't get anywhere with just one of everything. Its common for me to have around 10 centrifuges, 8 electrolyzers, and so forth. GT is very factory-mass-production-oriented.
Continued from my previous post:
3. The Steam Age, part 2
I actually end up building a full complement of steam machines. In order to progress I really only need the steam alloy smelter and the steam extractor, but I want a steam forge hammer since that halves my macerator time for mixed ores. For that, however, I need an anvil, an anvil needs iron blocks and in this pack you can't just craft those, you need a machine for that: I build a steam compressor, then a steam forge hammer. The forge hammer is as fast as the macerator is slow. The only steam machine I don't build is the furnace, since it's slower than a regular one and not worth the expense if you run six standard furnaces in parallel at times. I also have a power problem. In order to run an alloy smelter, I need several coal boilers - or a tank to store my steam. I find the tank method too limiting though,so I spend the bronze to build another six small coal boilers. Now I have problems distributing the power, since it appears I can't keep enoughs team pressure up if I put more than one machine on the same line, and even if I could build shutters yet I wouldn't want to spend even more bronze on GT pipes. For now I'm using golden fluid pipes since the stone ones are limited to 10mB/t - the forge hammer and the alloy smelter need more even if they're alone on the line. Water is needed in less quantities so the stone pipes work there for now. As for the pressure problem, rather than debugging the system I decide to do batch processing and limit my machine use to one at a time (the macerator has its own boiler though). That has the further advantage that I can use the same automation setup for all machines. I am still at two ingots per plate and every ingot counts as yet.
A long time passes while the resources for my first blast furnace are cooking up. I spend that time exploring the surface, I find some more interesting stuff like five manganese ingots which will come in handy at some point I'm sure, an Ender sword and most imporantly, I find that the shallow sea where I got my slimeballs has many patches of clay which I had missed when I went there at night. Together with what I found underground - what is that dark liquid around the underground patches btw - I calculate it is enough for three coke ovens (man, those eat up clay like nothing else) and three blast furnaces. While the rest of the bronze is cooked up, I build the coke ovens, planning to supplement my coal power with a Railcraft liquid boiler. Looking the stats up, however, I decide to postpone that, the fuel usage is too high to make it feasible with only three coke ovens. The blast furnaces are next - wow, that is expensive. I read in a GT survival guide that bronze will haunt your dreams. That was completely correct. It's not so much that the recipes are excessively expensive, but more the fact that at this point, every plate equals two ingots which doubles the expense. Anyway, I still find more prospecting to do while my blast furnaces cook up my first steel. Unfortunately, I find that you can't automate the input of the blast furnace, since any charcoal that goes in will happily fill up any empty output slot until there's no space left for the dark ashes - or the steel. I would have to pump everything but one item out of the output slot. Logistics pipes could do that, but I don't have the means to build an LP system yet.
My first steel goes into an array of seven high-pressure coal boilers - enough to generate 32 EU/t in a steam turbine. Most likely I'll rarely need that much early in the industrial age but I'd rather not deal with interrupted processes.
4. The early industrial age
At this point I should mention that I've been making use of a Steve's Workshop production table for some time. Not for any automation, since some of what it can do goes against the spirit of this pack, but just for being able to use four crafting tables and some item storage in the same gui. I hear there will be some changes to the production table in v3. I hope the table itself will remain available early. I don't mind not being able to use the automation for some time, but the four crafting grids actually make it somewhat enjoyable to craft GT stuff by hand. I eventually end up having two of those tables, each with four crafting upgrades with one storage upgrade each. Also, some time back I found some rubber trees and made a farm of ten leafless trees with two patches of resin each, and I've been collecting the stuff ever since. The steam extractor is so slow that it actually taxes my patience, but then that's only because of the steam power distribution problem I refused to debug.
Anyway, with my first steam turbine and my first two electric machines, I am getting finally out of the steam age. My first machines are a metal bender (one plate from one ingot, yay!) and a wiremill (two wires from one ingot, yay!). How this feels is.....significant. It feels like a giant achievement, and as I now research the capabilities of the other machines I can now build I am finally getting to understand why people find Gregtech fascinating. Because it is. Once you're out of the steam age. One by one I retire my steam machines and replace them with electric ones. I also find there are countless possibilities to extract byproducts from ores, and I get the impression that you really can't start doing that early enough since you'll need some of those byproducts further down the line. I build a basic macerator, ore washing plant, forge hammer, centrifuge, thermal centrifuge and electrolyzer. There are also quite a few production machines the use of which reduces resource requirements when building machine components. Besides the bender and the wiremill I build a lathe, a canning machine, a polarizer, a fluid extractor and a fluid canning machine (turns out what I need the latter two for isn't needed so they remain offline for a while. I also need a battery buffer. For the batteries I need lead and antimony. I can't extract lead and silver from galena ore yet - that's an MV process - but the galena veins have a block of lead ore here and there, enough for the batteries. Antimony I have enough from the stibnite that accompanies tetrahedrite. There is some process for extracting cadmium from something I have actually found but I can't find it at the moment, so I'll have to use sodium batteries for now - sodium is easily gained by electrolyzing the reasonably plentiful salt. In the end, I build a 4A power system to run my machines because it's the simplest setup and I need more than 1A anyway for the Thermal centrifuge.
Meanwhile, I am finding that my water source isn't sufficient any more. Between the ore washing plant and the seven HP coal boilers my water tank can't keep up. I could build a second one, but I decide to go a different route: I can now build an EnderIo Alloy Furnace, and I actually went into the Nether some time ago and mined some nether quartz. Fused quartz is very expensive, and it doesn't help that the recipe for the reservoir blocks was changed. A full stack of nether quartz goes into just one reservoir. Also, I am building pressurized item conduits to supplant the BC pipes, and you get only four of them out of one recipe. Oh my, this will prove extremely inconvenient when I get to AE2, especially since the abundance of nether quartz is much lower than I'm used to from other packs. While I'm at it, after the alloy smelter has done its job I want to put it down to produce my charcoal, since it's easy to automate. Unfortunately, I find it can't be run on GT cables so I build a stirling engine to run it, which conveniently runs on charcoal. I now automate the supply of my coal boilers with charcoal using EnderIO item conduits made from some pulsating iron I found in a village. I have 9 Ender Pearls but I don't need to use any of them. Grr...only four of those per recipe as well. Where do I get to point a pointy stick at the pack author... Anyway, all I need to do now in order to keep my power system running is to put some wood into the barrel now and then. A significant improvement from shoveling coal, but still not satisfactory...
My problem now, is power. Automated power, to be precise. My trees are big and branchless and provide lots of wood, but I still need to go and fell them manually every half hour or so (it wouldn't need to be quite that often but I can build up a surplus of charcoal that way). That makes extended absences unfeasible if my machines are running at the same time, even with a full barrel of charcoal as a buffer I am hesitant to do that, and things will get even more difficult once I need to run an electric blast furnace - basically I'll need to generate MV-level power with LV resources. I need automation for my baseload power. Real, full auomation that doesn't need any kind of regular attention unless for checking that all goes well, which will leave me free to develop non-renewable power sources for things I don't need to run constantly - like the electric blast furnace. Unfortunately, most good automation appears to be gated beyond the MV tier, and Forestry tree farms need a constant supply of a non-renewable resource which is why I have studiously avoided them ever since the advent of multifarms. So my only option is a tree farm run by Thaumcraft golems. Too many moveable parts for my taste, but if that's the only 100% renewable option I will use it. However, I have....two gold ingots and two gold ore blocks. Thaumcraft needs gold for several components. An expedition to find some gold around magnetite ores is successful, but the amount is....disappointing. However, I find I can get gold as a byproduct from various copper ores. I had been running redstone through a processing sequence for quite some time since I needed lots of it, and if I electrolyze the cinnabar I get as a byproduct I get mercury, which can be used in a chemical bath to get gold dust out of crushed chalcopyrite with a 70% chance. Once the mercury is used up, I can still get tiny piles of gold - as well as cobalt - from processing chalcopyrite. Good enough to start on Thaumcraft.
And that's where I am now. I should mention that I can craft NAND chips, LV machine fulls, electronic circuits and electric motors in my dreams, with electric pumps and automatic pistons not far behind. I am finding that I can save more resources by using more machines - the fluid solidifier can make several item casings from the steel of one ingot, the assembler can halve the redstone used up for NAND chips. I'm sure there are many other processes I haven't found yet. I'll explore those in time. By random chance I also found that the mod "IHL machines and tools" has an automatic sticky resin collecting system that doesn't use any power. Unfortunately, I found it too late to be of use in my current machine setup, and I don't have the leather to make collection sack anyway. I'll need some leather anyway for Thaumcraft but the resin collector has to wait.
So that's the plan for the foreseeable future: progress in Thaumcraft until I can make a golem tree farm, then develop some non-renewable power sources - I think I saw some oil patches on one of my exploration tours - and use that to progress to the next power tier. Likely I'll be in v3 before I get to all that. I won't be able to transfer my beautiful environment but I don't feel like starting from scratch - I'll cheat in what I already built in this world. Re-finding the veins will be painful enough, I wish it could be the other way round.
3. The Steam Age, part 2
I actually end up building a full complement of steam machines. In order to progress I really only need the steam alloy smelter and the steam extractor, but I want a steam forge hammer since that halves my macerator time for mixed ores. For that, however, I need an anvil, an anvil needs iron blocks and in this pack you can't just craft those, you need a machine for that: I build a steam compressor, then a steam forge hammer. The forge hammer is as fast as the macerator is slow. The only steam machine I don't build is the furnace, since it's slower than a regular one and not worth the expense if you run six standard furnaces in parallel at times. I also have a power problem. In order to run an alloy smelter, I need several coal boilers - or a tank to store my steam. I find the tank method too limiting though,so I spend the bronze to build another six small coal boilers. Now I have problems distributing the power, since it appears I can't keep enoughs team pressure up if I put more than one machine on the same line, and even if I could build shutters yet I wouldn't want to spend even more bronze on GT pipes. For now I'm using golden fluid pipes since the stone ones are limited to 10mB/t - the forge hammer and the alloy smelter need more even if they're alone on the line. Water is needed in less quantities so the stone pipes work there for now. As for the pressure problem, rather than debugging the system I decide to do batch processing and limit my machine use to one at a time (the macerator has its own boiler though). That has the further advantage that I can use the same automation setup for all machines. I am still at two ingots per plate and every ingot counts as yet.
A long time passes while the resources for my first blast furnace are cooking up. I spend that time exploring the surface, I find some more interesting stuff like five manganese ingots which will come in handy at some point I'm sure, an Ender sword and most imporantly, I find that the shallow sea where I got my slimeballs has many patches of clay which I had missed when I went there at night. Together with what I found underground - what is that dark liquid around the underground patches btw - I calculate it is enough for three coke ovens (man, those eat up clay like nothing else) and three blast furnaces. While the rest of the bronze is cooked up, I build the coke ovens, planning to supplement my coal power with a Railcraft liquid boiler. Looking the stats up, however, I decide to postpone that, the fuel usage is too high to make it feasible with only three coke ovens. The blast furnaces are next - wow, that is expensive. I read in a GT survival guide that bronze will haunt your dreams. That was completely correct. It's not so much that the recipes are excessively expensive, but more the fact that at this point, every plate equals two ingots which doubles the expense. Anyway, I still find more prospecting to do while my blast furnaces cook up my first steel. Unfortunately, I find that you can't automate the input of the blast furnace, since any charcoal that goes in will happily fill up any empty output slot until there's no space left for the dark ashes - or the steel. I would have to pump everything but one item out of the output slot. Logistics pipes could do that, but I don't have the means to build an LP system yet.
My first steel goes into an array of seven high-pressure coal boilers - enough to generate 32 EU/t in a steam turbine. Most likely I'll rarely need that much early in the industrial age but I'd rather not deal with interrupted processes.
4. The early industrial age
At this point I should mention that I've been making use of a Steve's Workshop production table for some time. Not for any automation, since some of what it can do goes against the spirit of this pack, but just for being able to use four crafting tables and some item storage in the same gui. I hear there will be some changes to the production table in v3. I hope the table itself will remain available early. I don't mind not being able to use the automation for some time, but the four crafting grids actually make it somewhat enjoyable to craft GT stuff by hand. I eventually end up having two of those tables, each with four crafting upgrades with one storage upgrade each. Also, some time back I found some rubber trees and made a farm of ten leafless trees with two patches of resin each, and I've been collecting the stuff ever since. The steam extractor is so slow that it actually taxes my patience, but then that's only because of the steam power distribution problem I refused to debug.
Anyway, with my first steam turbine and my first two electric machines, I am getting finally out of the steam age. My first machines are a metal bender (one plate from one ingot, yay!) and a wiremill (two wires from one ingot, yay!). How this feels is.....significant. It feels like a giant achievement, and as I now research the capabilities of the other machines I can now build I am finally getting to understand why people find Gregtech fascinating. Because it is. Once you're out of the steam age. One by one I retire my steam machines and replace them with electric ones. I also find there are countless possibilities to extract byproducts from ores, and I get the impression that you really can't start doing that early enough since you'll need some of those byproducts further down the line. I build a basic macerator, ore washing plant, forge hammer, centrifuge, thermal centrifuge and electrolyzer. There are also quite a few production machines the use of which reduces resource requirements when building machine components. Besides the bender and the wiremill I build a lathe, a canning machine, a polarizer, a fluid extractor and a fluid canning machine (turns out what I need the latter two for isn't needed so they remain offline for a while. I also need a battery buffer. For the batteries I need lead and antimony. I can't extract lead and silver from galena ore yet - that's an MV process - but the galena veins have a block of lead ore here and there, enough for the batteries. Antimony I have enough from the stibnite that accompanies tetrahedrite. There is some process for extracting cadmium from something I have actually found but I can't find it at the moment, so I'll have to use sodium batteries for now - sodium is easily gained by electrolyzing the reasonably plentiful salt. In the end, I build a 4A power system to run my machines because it's the simplest setup and I need more than 1A anyway for the Thermal centrifuge.
Meanwhile, I am finding that my water source isn't sufficient any more. Between the ore washing plant and the seven HP coal boilers my water tank can't keep up. I could build a second one, but I decide to go a different route: I can now build an EnderIo Alloy Furnace, and I actually went into the Nether some time ago and mined some nether quartz. Fused quartz is very expensive, and it doesn't help that the recipe for the reservoir blocks was changed. A full stack of nether quartz goes into just one reservoir. Also, I am building pressurized item conduits to supplant the BC pipes, and you get only four of them out of one recipe. Oh my, this will prove extremely inconvenient when I get to AE2, especially since the abundance of nether quartz is much lower than I'm used to from other packs. While I'm at it, after the alloy smelter has done its job I want to put it down to produce my charcoal, since it's easy to automate. Unfortunately, I find it can't be run on GT cables so I build a stirling engine to run it, which conveniently runs on charcoal. I now automate the supply of my coal boilers with charcoal using EnderIO item conduits made from some pulsating iron I found in a village. I have 9 Ender Pearls but I don't need to use any of them. Grr...only four of those per recipe as well. Where do I get to point a pointy stick at the pack author... Anyway, all I need to do now in order to keep my power system running is to put some wood into the barrel now and then. A significant improvement from shoveling coal, but still not satisfactory...
My problem now, is power. Automated power, to be precise. My trees are big and branchless and provide lots of wood, but I still need to go and fell them manually every half hour or so (it wouldn't need to be quite that often but I can build up a surplus of charcoal that way). That makes extended absences unfeasible if my machines are running at the same time, even with a full barrel of charcoal as a buffer I am hesitant to do that, and things will get even more difficult once I need to run an electric blast furnace - basically I'll need to generate MV-level power with LV resources. I need automation for my baseload power. Real, full auomation that doesn't need any kind of regular attention unless for checking that all goes well, which will leave me free to develop non-renewable power sources for things I don't need to run constantly - like the electric blast furnace. Unfortunately, most good automation appears to be gated beyond the MV tier, and Forestry tree farms need a constant supply of a non-renewable resource which is why I have studiously avoided them ever since the advent of multifarms. So my only option is a tree farm run by Thaumcraft golems. Too many moveable parts for my taste, but if that's the only 100% renewable option I will use it. However, I have....two gold ingots and two gold ore blocks. Thaumcraft needs gold for several components. An expedition to find some gold around magnetite ores is successful, but the amount is....disappointing. However, I find I can get gold as a byproduct from various copper ores. I had been running redstone through a processing sequence for quite some time since I needed lots of it, and if I electrolyze the cinnabar I get as a byproduct I get mercury, which can be used in a chemical bath to get gold dust out of crushed chalcopyrite with a 70% chance. Once the mercury is used up, I can still get tiny piles of gold - as well as cobalt - from processing chalcopyrite. Good enough to start on Thaumcraft.
And that's where I am now. I should mention that I can craft NAND chips, LV machine fulls, electronic circuits and electric motors in my dreams, with electric pumps and automatic pistons not far behind. I am finding that I can save more resources by using more machines - the fluid solidifier can make several item casings from the steel of one ingot, the assembler can halve the redstone used up for NAND chips. I'm sure there are many other processes I haven't found yet. I'll explore those in time. By random chance I also found that the mod "IHL machines and tools" has an automatic sticky resin collecting system that doesn't use any power. Unfortunately, I found it too late to be of use in my current machine setup, and I don't have the leather to make collection sack anyway. I'll need some leather anyway for Thaumcraft but the resin collector has to wait.
So that's the plan for the foreseeable future: progress in Thaumcraft until I can make a golem tree farm, then develop some non-renewable power sources - I think I saw some oil patches on one of my exploration tours - and use that to progress to the next power tier. Likely I'll be in v3 before I get to all that. I won't be able to transfer my beautiful environment but I don't feel like starting from scratch - I'll cheat in what I already built in this world. Re-finding the veins will be painful enough, I wish it could be the other way round.
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I did. Too late to solve my problem without the added frustration, but nice to know for the future.
Yeah, that's what I meant with depending on luck for critical resources. Redstone is even more critical than diamonds, and you'll need it in quantities. The advantage of vanilla ore generation is that you're guaranteed to find at least *some* redstone or diamond in every chunk. GT's approach is radically different. The rewards are high, but so is the frustration potential.
Are you telling me that there are no speed upgrades? BTW, I haven't found a good source of information about GT machine upgrades. One video explains how they work in general, but gives no information about what's available. Do you have a good source?
Yes. Gregtech badly tries to combine the notions of an upgrade and an overclock. The only thing you can do is tier up your machines, which increases their speed x3 but increases their power consumption x4. As a result its nearly always more efficient to spam machines (and get x4 production for x4 energy consumption.)
This is stupid game design. Its my only real gripe with GT. I definitely sympathized with a lot of the stumbling blocks you encountered, but by and large they're all decent game-design fundamentals (although naturally preferences may differ). With respect to GT tiers however, its not a relative term. Its just objectively poor design principals, period.
A tip for you then, you can turn slimeballs into rubber. This combined with the extremely plentiful slimeballs from slime plants provides a very good alternative to resin, the catch is of course it's very difficult to automate. You could probably do it with use golems + guard golems but I'm not sure how many other ways would work.
I haven't tested it but apparently PC plants are supposed to be forestry treefarm compatible now.
Ok, thx. And, is here any way to force them generate without making Greg's work of updating 5.xx.xx version instead of doing 6.xx.xx versions?
@EchoingZen, @Xavion, thanks again for the centrifuge tip. I always knew the machine was there but I never made the connection on what it might be good for (perhaps I didn't think I'd be accumulating compound aspects in reasonable quantities, but I certainly do)
As a bonus I also learned how the essentia buffer and bellows work. The buffer in particular makes my essentia infrastructure more manageable.
As a bonus I also learned how the essentia buffer and bellows work. The buffer in particular makes my essentia infrastructure more manageable.
May I ask how you're using the buffer? I've attempted to use it to route distilled essentia but that never worked well. That was in TC 4.1 though, I heard the tubing system is more stable now.
Edit: Ah, I understand you're using it with the centrifuge, right? In order to route the essentia to its correct jars? Do you really need a bellows or does it work without one?
The unique ability of the buffer is that it can store up to 8 essentia in any combination, this makes it perfect for the centrifuge as it adds a buffer of 8 essentia before it gets clogged as the centrifuge can only store one. Then the jars are connected to the buffer and they'll pull out the aspects they want allowing it to work, bellows are irrelevant as it's really just being used as a buffer/splitter. The usage as a splitter is much more interesting and basically makes it the crux of simple large essentia systems, as it's got tiny suction but can store multiple types anything really will prioritise over it, this means that if you have a jar and a buffer connected to a buffer the jar will take everything it wants and everything else will go to the next buffer in line. Using that you can make a line of like 10 buffers with three jars off each of them and you'll have a system that's capable of handling and sorting the output of an alchemical furnace with up to 30 different types of essentia without any issues. So great for manual systems and infusion altars, special setups like for producing a particular resource shouldn't need to abuse it so but it makes setting up systems a ton easier.
I'm wondering why the efficiency of GT's generators goes down with their tier. That appears counter-intuitive - and doesn't it mean it's more advantageous to spam LV generators and transform the power up, rather than using the higher-tier ones? The optimal MV power setup, for instance, appears to be "place four LV generators around an LV->MV transformer". Also, do IC2's power storage blocks work with GT? They appear to be a considerably more compact way to store power.
Yes ALL LV machines are more efficent than the higher tier machines
It is because they are designed after the original "Overclocker Upgrade" (faster + less efficent) so greg decided to remove the upgrade and just make higher tier machines
IC2EU and GTEU can be transformed into each other
GTEU directly into IC2 machine
IC2EU -> IC2 Transformer(or batbox/mfe) -> GT Transformer -> GTEU
and apparently MFSU into Ultra Low Voltage Transformer works without explosions
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Hi all
Myself and a couple of friends are playing Infitech on a private server, recently we have been having a problem.
We have a 36HP RC boiler fed by a fleet of coke ovens and a forestry tree farm. The tree farm is at least 3 chunks away from the ovens and boiler.
For the last 4 days the first person to log in that day has discovered the Boiler cold and all the charcoal gone. When checked the tree farm is fully stocked and immediately starts producing logs.
I and assuming that the server is keeping the RC boiler chunk continuously loaded overnight even when no-one is logged in as it is exhausting the charcoal reserves.
I'm not sure what is causing this problem, for about a day we did have some world anchors placed around the base but I have removed them.
Has anyone any ideas on what could be causing this?
Thanks
Myself and a couple of friends are playing Infitech on a private server, recently we have been having a problem.
We have a 36HP RC boiler fed by a fleet of coke ovens and a forestry tree farm. The tree farm is at least 3 chunks away from the ovens and boiler.
For the last 4 days the first person to log in that day has discovered the Boiler cold and all the charcoal gone. When checked the tree farm is fully stocked and immediately starts producing logs.
I and assuming that the server is keeping the RC boiler chunk continuously loaded overnight even when no-one is logged in as it is exhausting the charcoal reserves.
I'm not sure what is causing this problem, for about a day we did have some world anchors placed around the base but I have removed them.
- Server logs show no-one is logged in during this period. However there are several can't keep up messages....
- Opis does not show any forced chunks around the base.
- A server reboot does not resolve the issue.
- Upgraded from 2.2.0 to 2.2.1.1 does not resolve the issue
Has anyone any ideas on what could be causing this?
Thanks
Is your base near spawn ? Maybe the RC boiler is chunkloaded through the "Spawn" but the treefarm isnt.
edit: opis does NOT show the chunkloading around spawn BUT the map can show you that
http://imgur.com/GPLfc51
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