[1.7.10][LISTED] InfiTech 2 Modpack v3.2.21 [HQM][GregTech balanced hard-mode modpack]

Pyure

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Aug 14, 2013
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Yeah, Titanium is another element you need in large quantities eventually, but where the ore is rare. And I definitely agree that babysitting a reactor can be less bothersome than mining... However, currently I have an ender quarry set to mine a 1000x1000 area. We'll see what that operation yields. Slower than I'd like since I can't run it at full power with a speed III upgrade yet, but building other stuff while I wait is way more enjoyable than mining. Since I now have a substantial AE2 autocrafting network, I can actually think about aesthetics. It never took me that long to reach this point before.
I dread to think of how long its going to take to quarry all that. Weeks? Months?

IT2 is actually pretty interesting in one way: old fashioned "BC"-style quarries are pretty rare. It used to be really common to destroy the landscape with quarries, notwithstanding EIO's dirt swap trick.

In all the time I've played IT2, I don't think I've ever built a single quarry. The closest would be a alternate-dimension quarry I set up once in IT:R, but that was a legitimate proof of concept (an entire world made out of "poor gold ore".)
 

Xavion

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Thaumic Energistics has an alchemy recipe for quartz. For nether quartz it's aqua (alchemical boiler), vitreus (cobble) and potentia (pick your poison, I'd use charcoal).
That was what I was referring to when I said you'd want a water gen (aqua), cobble gen, macerators, and furnaces (vitreus), and a charcoal farm (potentia) for a thaumcraft method. It'd definitely be a solid possibility though.
Yeah, Titanium is another element you need in large quantities eventually, but where the ore is rare. And I definitely agree that babysitting a reactor can be less bothersome than mining... However, currently I have an ender quarry set to mine a 1000x1000 area. We'll see what that operation yields. Slower than I'd like since I can't run it at full power with a speed III upgrade yet, but building other stuff while I wait is way more enjoyable than mining. Since I now have a substantial AE2 autocrafting network, I can actually think about aesthetics. It never took me that long to reach this point before.
Why the hell do you want a renewable fluorine supply? Assuming my past numbers were correct that's enough granite to run a tungsten turbine off nickel plasma for a bit over 10,000 hours or about 14 real time months. You seriously don't need a renewable source of granite, just use what you're getting and you'll have far more power then you could ever use.
 

Ieldra

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I dread to think of how long its going to take to quarry all that. Weeks? Months?

IT2 is actually pretty interesting in one way: old fashioned "BC"-style quarries are pretty rare. It used to be really common to destroy the landscape with quarries, notwithstanding EIO's dirt swap trick.

In all the time I've played IT2, I don't think I've ever built a single quarry. The closest would be a alternate-dimension quarry I set up once in IT:R, but that was a legitimate proof of concept (an entire world made out of "poor gold ore".)
I've made a calculation after a high-speed test: with a speed 3-upgrade it should take about eight real-time days - and the reactor will help with getting there.

I assure you, I'd rather use a more targeted mining method, but prospecting is so utterly tedious that - recall what I said above - I'll do *anything* else before I sink more time into it.
 
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Ieldra

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Why the hell do you want a renewable fluorine supply? Assuming my past numbers were correct that's enough granite to run a tungsten turbine off nickel plasma for a bit over 10,000 hours or about 14 real time months. You seriously don't need a renewable source of granite, just use what you're getting and you'll have far more power then you could ever use.
Errr....where did I say I wanted that? This was about titanium, not fluorine.
 

Pyure

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I assure you, I'd rather use a more targeted mining method, but prospecting is so utterly tedious that - recall what I said above - I'll do *anything* else before I sink more time into it.
I realize I should always accept at face value that this just a personal opinion, but I do wish you'd always say something along the lines of "I find the prospecting tedious.". Otherwise it implies that this is an area of the pack which could use improvement, and its not, without losing the target audience (GT players). On the other hand, I totally respect and accept that you personally dislike it (and moreover, I respect that you enjoy the pack despite this facet you don't care for)
 

Xavion

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Errr....where did I say I wanted that? This was about titanium, not fluorine.
My interpretation of your comments on nickel being renewable may have been flawed in hindsight.

On a different note I'm pretty sure basically skipping T1 Fusion for T2 as quickly as possible is probably the least resource intensive solution, as mentioned you can make all plasmas in relatively large quantities without too much difficulty with the exception of deuterium and tritium which require huge amounts of machines to extract from water in usable quantities and you actually need barely any europium to hit T2 fusion.

As a question @Ieldra, what form of superconducters did you use? Just wondering what you found easiest to acquire in the mass quantities that a fusion reactor demands.
 

Ieldra

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I realize I should always accept at face value that this just a personal opinion, but I do wish you'd always say something along the lines of "I find the prospecting tedious.". Otherwise it implies that this is an area of the pack which could use improvement, and its not, without losing the target audience (GT players). On the other hand, I totally respect and accept that you personally dislike it (and moreover, I respect that you enjoy the pack despite this facet you don't care for)
LOL. It is always implicit in statements like this. However, does anyone actually not think GT prospecting is tedious? I mean, I totally get the opinion "It is as it should be", but I have serious trouble seeing how anyone can find it not tedious regardless.

As for "room for improvement", if I recall things correctly, GT's main design principle was "Make things complex and difficult, but give the players the means to deal with that and get more efficient if they use GT's machines and mechanics well". Many GT mechanisms follow that principle, but prospecting does not. So, yeah, I do think there is room for improvement. RotaryCraft follows that principle better, though that comes at the price of lesser mod synergy.
 

Ieldra

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As a question @Ieldra, what form of superconducters did you use? Just wondering what you found easiest to acquire in the mass quantities that a fusion reactor demands.
Yttrium-Barium-Cuprate. You'll get Yttrium from redstone processing and barite ore is not so hard to find. The alternatives are naquadah, niobium-titanium and and vanadium-gallium. Gallium you'll get only from sphalerite (you find that on Mars) or in very small quantities from processing bauxite in an EV pulverizer. Niobium you get only from tantalite wich is very rare, and naquadah is very hard to find.
 

Blood Asp

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As for "room for improvement", if I recall things correctly, GT's main design principle was "Make things complex and difficult, but give the players the means to deal with that and get more efficient if they use GT's machines and mechanics well". Many GT mechanisms follow that principle, but prospecting does not.
Wait for GT5.09.00 there will be a lategame prospecting help. ;)
 

Pyure

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LOL. It is always implicit in statements like this. However, does anyone actually not think GT prospecting is tedious? I mean, I totally get the opinion "It is as it should be", but I have serious trouble seeing how anyone can find it not tedious regardless.

As for "room for improvement", if I recall things correctly, GT's main design principle was "Make things complex and difficult, but give the players the means to deal with that and get more efficient if they use GT's machines and mechanics well". Many GT mechanisms follow that principle, but prospecting does not. So, yeah, I do think there is room for improvement. RotaryCraft follows that principle better, though that comes at the price of lesser mod synergy.
I find it tedious in a good way. Its a challenge to overcome, and there's tons of ways, including ic2 crops, bees, thaumcraft crops (whatever they're called) and more to get an awful lot of the resources you need.

For instance, right now I'm doing tungsten the "hard" way: refining endstone dust. But I could honestly save myself a lot of trouble by centrifuging lava instead, and get other useful resources at the same time.

The whole dig a million shafts tactic is a grind in the early game, but by later on you can dig horizontal shafts as fast as you can run in a given direction, which makes searching for ores more interesting. (IC2 Mining Laser is good for this, particularly since you can wear a battery for it. High-end GT drills are also obnoxiously fast at digging).

RoC deprecates mining completely. Set up a single boring machine, point it somewhere, and you have every ore in that dimension in infinite quantities given a couple hours. You might as well use MFR mining drills or just give players chests full of all resources.

There's only one way I can think of to actually improve the situation, and its not really in our grasp unless you can convince a GT modder to do it: we need a machine that does geological sampling to "scan" for ore veins.

Plonk down an LV/HV/IV Geological Scanner into some area. Wait a few days/hours/minutes (depending on tier) and it tells you what ores were within an X chunk radius. This seems like a no-brainer addon to GT if you ask me.
 

Blood Asp

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hmmmmmmmmmm :)
It actually is allready inside the GTExtras code. Just incomplete and because of the lack of machines disabled by default.

Seismic Prospecting: Place down a Prospector block, feed it with explosives. You hear explosion and wait a few sec. After that click on it with a data-stick and it saves data about what ores or oil is stored below it.
That datastick must be analyzed in a GT Scanner. That takes some time and energy, but can be fully automated. The analyzed stick then can be printed into a readable book in the printer. That book then contains coordinates and found stuff. So the documentation where to find what is also done.
 

Pyure

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It actually is allready inside the GTExtras code. Just incomplete and because of the lack of machines disabled by default.

Seismic Prospecting: Place down a Prospector block, feed it with explosives. You hear explosion and wait a few sec. After that click on it with a data-stick and it saves data about what ores or oil is stored below it.
That datastick must be analyzed in a GT Scanner. That takes some time and energy, but can be fully automated. The analyzed stick then can be printed into a readable book in the printer. That book then contains coordinates and found stuff. So the documentation where to find what is also done.
Neat sir. Could higher-end versions scan a radius rather than checking just what's directly below it?

Scientifically the premise is that if your instruments are sensitive enough, you can find minute traces of gold near a gold vein.
 

Xavion

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I've never found Naquadah in any version of Infitech. Puts me in a bind since I also refuse to do it with bees, oh well :)
And I've seen people actually complain act like it's not rare enough, it's all a matter of luck really. Personally never found any though.
 

Pyure

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And I've seen people actually complain act like it's not rare enough, it's all a matter of luck really. Personally never found any though.
30-odd years ago I used to play an old rogue-type game called Larn. Played it obsessively actually. Anyway, it was a bit quirky in that there was a tiny, rare chance that you could find some ridiculously high-end equipment sometimes on the first level of the main dungeon. If you found it, you were set for life. Win-button. If you didn't, well, you played a normal game.

The whole naquadah thing always reminds me of that.
 

Blood Asp

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Neat sir. Could higher-end versions scan a radius rather than checking just what's directly below it?

Scientifically the premise is that if your instruments are sensitive enough, you can find minute traces of gold near a gold vein.
For GT Veins a 3x3 scan down to bedrock will allmost for sure at last hit one oreblock, so more should not ne nesseary. Maybe 5x5 max, but not more. For other mods ore another way of searching might be a fitting idea, but for GT that is enough.
 

Pyure

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For GT Veins a 3x3 scan down to bedrock will allmost for sure at last hit one oreblock, so more should not ne nesseary. Maybe 5x5 max, but not more. For other mods ore another way of searching might be a fitting idea, but for GT that is enough.
We're talking about different things. I'm not concerned about missing a vein beneath me, I'm trying to reduce the amount of prospecting required, so a giant radius means you're more likely to find a vein at all.

No biggie, its just something that's been on my wishlist since GT5 ore generation arrived.
 

Ieldra

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Apr 25, 2014
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I find it tedious in a good way. Its a challenge to overcome, and there's tons of ways, including ic2 crops, bees, thaumcraft crops (whatever they're called) and more to get an awful lot of the resources you need.
Speaking about bees, I've been browsing the new bees added by the pack, and see a "degrade chance" on the mutatron recipes. What does that mean? Does that mean the mutation has an X% of failing (annoying but acceptable) or does it mean the bee has a 30% of dying every work cycle (in that case mass production won't be feasible)?

There's only one way I can think of to actually improve the situation, and its not really in our grasp unless you can convince a GT modder to do it: we need a machine that does geological sampling to "scan" for ore veins.
Plonk down an LV/HV/IV Geological Scanner into some area. Wait a few days/hours/minutes (depending on tier) and it tells you what ores were within an X chunk radius. This seems like a no-brainer addon to GT if you ask me.
100% agree...
 
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Pyure

Not Totally Useless
Aug 14, 2013
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Speaking about bees, I've been browsing the new bees added by the pack, and see a "degrade chance" on the mutatron recipes. What does that mean? Does that mean the mutation has an X% of failing (annoying but acceptable) or does it mean the bee has a 30% of dying every work cycle (in that case mass production won't be feasible)?
Gendustry isn't his specialty, but any time a Bee question comes up I find it handy to ask the expert.

@MigukNamja ?