First post.
Ultimate pack, recommended version. (1.4.7 I think?)
I know 1.6 is coming out Soon(tm) and I'm taking a break from my first FTB world and doing a retrospective on what I learned. I'm also seeking advice/tips from the FTB community.
Things I learned...
1) Start with a quartz grinder or slag furnace. I discovered both of these after it was too late.
2) Spread out your machines
I had an initial starter base, then built my primary base. I made an octogon 15 blocks per side. I had 3 floors. I placed energy generation on the bottom basement floor, production on the second (main) floor, and magical stuff on the third floor - such as Thaumcraft, Enchanting room, etc.
That's 3711 internal blocks of space. It should have been enough, at least for a while. But I placed my machines too close to each other and eventually the areas became clogged with pipes and wires in between. Things became messy fast and I will try to plan better in my next world. I'm even considering a "baseless" world where I just build outside with no base and expand organically. It might be fun to figure out defenses against mobs that don't rely on traditional walls. To avoid rain, I'd go up to 200ish height and make a floating ceiling. I was thinking glass, or glass viewers eventually, but maybe I could make a cool floating mural in the sky? All that slag->rockwool could be used.
3) Ender tanks
I discovered these yesterday. Previously, my setup for transferring lava from the nether was very clunky. I never got to the point of making tesseracts in my world. So instead I had a pump going into a liquid transposer. It would fill buckets and put them into an ender chest. Then I would pump them out of an ender chest in the overworld into another liquid transposer to fill a BC tank. Also since I haven't figured out gates yet, I used to just endlessly pump the buckets, full or not, out of both chests and use diamond pipe loopbacks to put the wrong type of buckets back into the chests. So occassionally because of the tick timings I'd have one side repeatedly "grabbing" the buckets and looping them before the other side could grab them.
Also I never figured out a hands-free MJ solution in the nether and didn't want to setup an EU->MJ conversion setup there. So I tried pumping the lava into a magmatic engine. I knew it would overheat and I'd need to whack it to restart, but I had no idea how quickly and frequently it would do this. It's a pain.
This setup was already fragile and clunky. Ender tanks renders it stupidly obsolete.
4) Learn gates
I really need to figure these out. Right now I have dozens of redstone engines everywhere endlessly pumping items through silly loopback systems because I haven't learned gates. The first thing I need to learn is how to route items to an alternate location once the first location is "full". This is killing me all over my base. My harvester runs out of seeds or dumps them on the ground. I can't automate the placement of my saplings from my Steve Cart farm into my Compressor or Fermenter because I don't know how to stop the flow and it'll just dump them everywhere.
I've been reading up on gates and think I'll do much better in my next world.
5) Emergency recovery kit
I died several times in places that made recovery impractical because I didn't have an emergency recovery kit. Dying near a blaze spawner 400 blocks, over laval oceans, from the nether portal. Trying to take on a skeleton spawner only to be chain-knocked back by skeleton arrows...off a cliff...onto a zombie spawner (yes).
Both times I lost all my caving loot and my mining drill, jetpack, batpack, enchanted armor. If I had a good emergency kit, with a JETPACK, I could have recovered most of my loot quickly before it despawned.
6) Twilight Forest earlier
I spent a long time being bottlenecked on redstone. Once I eventually got around to checking out the Twilight Forest and found a large hollow hill....holy Redstone Nodes Batman! I need to hit this place earlier in my next world. I spent about 30 minutes chasing down 4-5 redstone ores in caving. In one run in the Twilight Forest I came back with 2 stacks, with tons left behind for future trips.
7) More MJ before rushing to quarry
I work best when I set goals and I decided to aim towards building a quarry. I took frequent side quests as needs arose, such as enchanting room, Thaumcraft, mob farm, automating my farming. But generally my goal was on building a quarry. With Gregtech installed this took some time.
Once I did have one built, I learned that my MJ production was pitiful. I had 3 redstone energy cells that I would swap between powering the quarry and charging at my base. I had 1 peat engine, 3 combustion engines, 3 hobbyist steam engines, and 1 electrical engine. That's 26.8 MJ/t I think. But this also had to power by automated farm, fermenter, 3 stills, and various other machines. What was left over was a pitiful amount to charge my redstone cells and thus my quarry either ran super slow or sat largely idle while waiting on my cells to charge.
Next time I think I'm going to work towards a more robust MJ setup earlier on. Hopefully getting a boiler online around the same time as I achieve my quarry
8) Use Factorization for ores
I realized after a while that my play pace is slow and I branch off on tangents frequently. Exploring places, cleaning stuff up, testing out mods. I know time is the most valuable (and only "real") resource in Minecraft, but I play slowly. Because of this, I could constantly have some ores "baking" in the Factorization system and trippling my ores. I know it's slow, but why not? I'd still use a normal TE setup for when I need stuff quickly, and probably eventually use an IC2 setup when I have energy to spare and I'm in a rush. (because it's the fastest, right?) But for the pace I play, the trippling efficiency of Factorization would be great for me.
Anyhow, those are some of the things I learned. Maybe another new player will learn from this, or an experienced player could provide more tips/suggestions to help me get the most of out FTB.
Ultimate pack, recommended version. (1.4.7 I think?)
I know 1.6 is coming out Soon(tm) and I'm taking a break from my first FTB world and doing a retrospective on what I learned. I'm also seeking advice/tips from the FTB community.
Things I learned...
1) Start with a quartz grinder or slag furnace. I discovered both of these after it was too late.
2) Spread out your machines
I had an initial starter base, then built my primary base. I made an octogon 15 blocks per side. I had 3 floors. I placed energy generation on the bottom basement floor, production on the second (main) floor, and magical stuff on the third floor - such as Thaumcraft, Enchanting room, etc.
That's 3711 internal blocks of space. It should have been enough, at least for a while. But I placed my machines too close to each other and eventually the areas became clogged with pipes and wires in between. Things became messy fast and I will try to plan better in my next world. I'm even considering a "baseless" world where I just build outside with no base and expand organically. It might be fun to figure out defenses against mobs that don't rely on traditional walls. To avoid rain, I'd go up to 200ish height and make a floating ceiling. I was thinking glass, or glass viewers eventually, but maybe I could make a cool floating mural in the sky? All that slag->rockwool could be used.
3) Ender tanks
I discovered these yesterday. Previously, my setup for transferring lava from the nether was very clunky. I never got to the point of making tesseracts in my world. So instead I had a pump going into a liquid transposer. It would fill buckets and put them into an ender chest. Then I would pump them out of an ender chest in the overworld into another liquid transposer to fill a BC tank. Also since I haven't figured out gates yet, I used to just endlessly pump the buckets, full or not, out of both chests and use diamond pipe loopbacks to put the wrong type of buckets back into the chests. So occassionally because of the tick timings I'd have one side repeatedly "grabbing" the buckets and looping them before the other side could grab them.
Also I never figured out a hands-free MJ solution in the nether and didn't want to setup an EU->MJ conversion setup there. So I tried pumping the lava into a magmatic engine. I knew it would overheat and I'd need to whack it to restart, but I had no idea how quickly and frequently it would do this. It's a pain.
This setup was already fragile and clunky. Ender tanks renders it stupidly obsolete.
4) Learn gates
I really need to figure these out. Right now I have dozens of redstone engines everywhere endlessly pumping items through silly loopback systems because I haven't learned gates. The first thing I need to learn is how to route items to an alternate location once the first location is "full". This is killing me all over my base. My harvester runs out of seeds or dumps them on the ground. I can't automate the placement of my saplings from my Steve Cart farm into my Compressor or Fermenter because I don't know how to stop the flow and it'll just dump them everywhere.
I've been reading up on gates and think I'll do much better in my next world.
5) Emergency recovery kit
I died several times in places that made recovery impractical because I didn't have an emergency recovery kit. Dying near a blaze spawner 400 blocks, over laval oceans, from the nether portal. Trying to take on a skeleton spawner only to be chain-knocked back by skeleton arrows...off a cliff...onto a zombie spawner (yes).
Both times I lost all my caving loot and my mining drill, jetpack, batpack, enchanted armor. If I had a good emergency kit, with a JETPACK, I could have recovered most of my loot quickly before it despawned.
6) Twilight Forest earlier
I spent a long time being bottlenecked on redstone. Once I eventually got around to checking out the Twilight Forest and found a large hollow hill....holy Redstone Nodes Batman! I need to hit this place earlier in my next world. I spent about 30 minutes chasing down 4-5 redstone ores in caving. In one run in the Twilight Forest I came back with 2 stacks, with tons left behind for future trips.
7) More MJ before rushing to quarry
I work best when I set goals and I decided to aim towards building a quarry. I took frequent side quests as needs arose, such as enchanting room, Thaumcraft, mob farm, automating my farming. But generally my goal was on building a quarry. With Gregtech installed this took some time.
Once I did have one built, I learned that my MJ production was pitiful. I had 3 redstone energy cells that I would swap between powering the quarry and charging at my base. I had 1 peat engine, 3 combustion engines, 3 hobbyist steam engines, and 1 electrical engine. That's 26.8 MJ/t I think. But this also had to power by automated farm, fermenter, 3 stills, and various other machines. What was left over was a pitiful amount to charge my redstone cells and thus my quarry either ran super slow or sat largely idle while waiting on my cells to charge.
Next time I think I'm going to work towards a more robust MJ setup earlier on. Hopefully getting a boiler online around the same time as I achieve my quarry
8) Use Factorization for ores
I realized after a while that my play pace is slow and I branch off on tangents frequently. Exploring places, cleaning stuff up, testing out mods. I know time is the most valuable (and only "real") resource in Minecraft, but I play slowly. Because of this, I could constantly have some ores "baking" in the Factorization system and trippling my ores. I know it's slow, but why not? I'd still use a normal TE setup for when I need stuff quickly, and probably eventually use an IC2 setup when I have energy to spare and I'm in a rush. (because it's the fastest, right?) But for the pace I play, the trippling efficiency of Factorization would be great for me.
Anyhow, those are some of the things I learned. Maybe another new player will learn from this, or an experienced player could provide more tips/suggestions to help me get the most of out FTB.
