When I watched a mod spotlight big reactors by direwolf, I found out that you can make those reactors create steam if it has coolant ports on it. So in a way, you could fairly easily make a bunch of steam through that method.
What else...
Thaumcraft is more useful then you guys think. As it turns out, there are alchemic duplication recipes for all sorts of things. For instance... you can very easily duplicate/create steel (assuming you have it first). Alloys like electrum, and soldering iron? Those can be duplicated, along with I think brass, bronze, cobalt, bismuth, lead, and silver. It gets easier if you research automated alchemy, which apparently implies that with the researched item, you can end your ways of clumsy essential balance (which almost always results in some sort of waste), and simply pump the essentia you need into a thing with a crafting GUI of sorts. Once the needed essentia is inside, you place the catalyst in it.
When I get around to making that, I'll supposedly no longer have to worry about pollution!
Food is not really that hard to get after a certain point. When I started on this world, I came across one of those Thaumcraft sinister node dungeons. And it had some food in it.
Around the point where I am now... which was just after having explored an abandoned mineshaft, and having ran (on rails) all of the treasure chest carts back to my base... well, I have a bunch of food now. A sizable portion of said comestibles are feasts, like Beef Wellingtons (at least somewhere around 2-3 stacks...), Delighted Meals (not quite as many), a bunch of burgers of various kinds, some pizzas, some sort of rice meals...
Honestly, I didn't even have any problems with food prior to getting all of these feasts anyhow. As it turns out, once you find a single apple, craft it into a core, and then plant that, the tree that sprouts will end up giving you so many apples in an automated fashion, that you could just live out your days eating apple junk.
That's not even to speak of what villages can provide. Did you know that there's a Chef Villager, who for a single emerald, could sell you a FULL STACK OF FOOD?
If there's one thing I really hate, it's going to be my unbelievably crappy/lack of storage.
The place I chose to hide out for my first night (which ended up being the place I ended up living in), was this sort of small narrow ridge, which ended up leaving me with not a lot of space to spread out, and was a small hassle for beings 'somewhat' above sea level. (I had to/chose to dig down 30 blocks to ensure that for the subsequent hollowing that followed, I wouldn't/couldn't end up opening a hole to the surface, or end up breaching a shallow pond slash lake. Thank GOD for Thaumcraft levitators. Those things made going up and down so much quicker, and much more streamlined.)
And you know what sucks? Apparently, even now, I still haven't actually done much to fix this. I've just sort of been fumbling my way through the issue of chest management. Well, now that I've gone and brought 8 chest carts full of stuff back with me, I'm apparently left with no other choice other then let the stuff sit outside in the rain...
A few remaining queries... Why are Gregtech microwaves supposedly uncraftable? I see nothing about a recipe for them on NEI.
Are Thaumium Crowbars uncraftable, by way of the fact that NEI also doesn't list a recipe for them, or is the recipe listed in the Thaumonomicon actually the recipe for them? (I ask this because while the book tells you how you can make Thaumium tools, NEI say "Nope, they're made like this.")
Lastly, for Thaumcraft, what are the prerequisites for Sanitizing Soap, and Arcane Spas? I'm pretty sure they're these two shaded icons on my Alchemy page, and I haven't the slightest clue as to how I can unlock them for my research.View attachment 13253