Adventures in Gregtech (am i doin it rite)

[Larmonade]

So I recently installed Gregtech into Unleashed (which means this is a 1.5.2 thread), and have been fooling around with it quite a bit. It's a lot of fun, adds a lot of sciencey stuff, and I'm generally pleased. However, I'm also lost, like that part in Crocodile Dundee where he sees a city for the first time and just walks around looking at everything. I'm just in shock at how *alien* some of this tech is compared to what I'm used to.

Anyway, I've been building a sort of "test-it-all-out-in-creative" base, and I think I've got a lot of the basics down, but I've got some questions.

1) I have seen via NEI that several machines have been "replaced" by Greg's "Automatic" versions. Assuming both are available, is there a prevailing opinion on which is better? Is Greg's just a "hard-mode" version, or are there actual benefits over the IC2 originals?

2) I'm a big fan of set-and-forget automation, but I've found that with certain things, this is tough. An example would be the centrifuges. With a furnace, I just set my AE export bus on it with the list of things that I always want to get smelted, but with the centrifuge, because it usually requires small stacks of things (ie, 16 of something instead of just one), that means that if I have like one too many, then the last singleton just sits in the slot until I have 15 more (or however many) to complete the smelting. When you've got a whole bunch of stuff that you just want *always* being centriguted or electrolized, is there an easier way than the brute-force 1-machine-per-item?

3) What is a "typical" high-end ore processing lineup look like? Industrial grinder and induction furnace things?

4) So. Many. Tiny. Dusts. WTF.

5) With the Industrial grinder, I see that I can concoct some cells of chemicals to amplify certain gains - are there any "recommended" ores that I always/never do this for? I don't wanna waste resources just for line 1 tiny dust I won't need, but the list is long and perhaps a gregtech veteran can point out a few notable candidates for these special chemicals.

6) The explosion compressor machine is hilarious, but uses so much industrial TNT. is it worth it to try to compress all my gem dusts, or only the rare ones (and then centrifuge or electrolysize the rest)

7) - Fusion - worth it? Or is this more just for bragging rights? I never got much into nuclear reactors in regular Unleashed, so I'm a bit unschooled on how useful/awesome these are vs. Boilers and solars.

 

[Wagon153]

1. The regular IC2 machines have the advantage of not needing a higher tier of power to keep up with each overclocker, but the automatic machines can transfer power through each other.
2. Logistics pipes, if set up right, will only put items in if it can fill the whole request(like if you want 16 redstone exactly in the centrifuge at a time)
3. That sounds right.
4. Gotta love greg
5. Bauxite is something you always wanna put through a industrial grinder. Always.
6. Do it for the gems you'll actually need, which isn't many really.
7. Fusion can produce roughly 17000 EU/t if you have two plasma generators set up on it. And if you plan on doing heavy automation with gregtech(especially if you use overclockers), you will need the power. It is a bit of a pain in the arse setting up the automation for the reactor though.

 

[LoGaL]

fusion reactor can mantain 33 plasma generators so it's output is far greater( at least in 1.5 it's that way)
Anyways, you want it
chains you'll want to setup
redstone-> industrial centrifuge-> ruby dust -> industrial eloctrolyzer-> chrome dust
lava->industrial centrifuge->4 copper ingot, 2 tin ingot . 1 electrum ingot, 1 tiny pile of tungsten
bauxite->bauxite dust-> industrial electrolyzer->tiny piles of titanium, alluminium dusts + other useless things
some of those operations require you to supply your machines with tin cells, and also some of the byproducts are tin cells, that you can empty in an extractor, if you don't need what they contain
as someone else said, the best option to keep a fixed amount of materials in your machines is using the supplier logistic pipe, maybe you can connect your logistic pipes network to your AE network to make it supply the materials
Your best friends for lategame automation are routers of factorization, love them, build them, use them

You'll need the explosion compressor to get those iridium plates for some advanced parts
You need UU-matter for iridium, otherwise you can't progress
Once you get to fusion you can set up an iridium producer reactor, but it eats much energy, so you'll probably need an other fusion reactor to make it run
In my greg + unleashed world i had about 6-7 blast furnaces running to get all the materials i needed ( remember that 1 blast furnace chasing mantains 4 blast furnaces)

 

[namiasdf]

1. Automatic versions don't require an autarchic gate or redstone engine to take stuff out of them. i.e. MFR blocks.

2. No real way around it, unless you use a router.

3. Multiblocks. Grinder -> induction smelter or GT furnace.

4. Yeah. They are a pain, but take the probability of things away, as opposed to slag + TE.

5. Hmm. Mercury can be used to increase the output of something from ferrous ore... Totally forgot what it was. If you have a surplus of mercury, or have some good way of producing sodium cells, then do it for all. Since I was limited by mercury, I only used it for things like ferrous ore (iirc, this is a while back). All other usages just increase the bonus from a tiny dust to a regular dust. Quicksilver, there we go.

6. Meh. If you have a good supply of sulfur/creeper grinder, it's no problem. Use MFR mob spawner to your hearts content. Otherwise, you need it to craft iridium plate.

7. Fusion grows exponential. It produces enough energy, such that you can acquire the iridium/UU-matter to replicate the process once again, and thus onto infinity. It really depends on what you are wanting to do, since FTB /w infinite energy is pretty much creative mode.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

1) I have seen via NEI that several machines have been "replaced" by Greg's "Automatic" versions. Assuming both are available, is there a prevailing opinion on which is better? Is Greg's just a "hard-mode" version, or are there actual benefits over the IC2 originals?

Identical to IC2 version (recipe configurable), but they should auto-extract to an inventory placed behind them.
​

2) I'm a big fan of set-and-forget automation, but I've found that with certain things, this is tough. An example would be the centrifuges. With a furnace, I just set my AE export bus on it with the list of things that I always want to get smelted, but with the centrifuge, because it usually requires small stacks of things (ie, 16 of something instead of just one), that means that if I have like one too many, then the last singleton just sits in the slot until I have 15 more (or however many) to complete the smelting. When you've got a whole bunch of stuff that you just want *always* being centriguted or electrolized, is there an easier way than the brute-force 1-machine-per-item?

You'll want a buffer of some kind, and rig your AE/Logistics network around it.
(I'd probably go for a chest taking the main feed, and a translocator to load stacks into the machine)
--Redpower's old sorting machine was epic for this kind of stuff--​

3) What is a "typical" high-end ore processing lineup look like? Industrial grinder and induction furnace things?

How high end?
Typically industrial grinder, also look at lava centrifuging and chemical cells to boost grinder yields.
You'll probably want a few electrolyzers and centrifuges to handle the dust products.
​

4) So. Many. Tiny. Dusts. WTF.

Added automatically via Greg's dynamic config. All 'dust' items get a small and tiny version. Any ore dictionary metal automatically gains a corresponding dust/plate/nugget/block. (thaumium and manyllium plates work as machine covers)
--this is a very powerful piece of code, it does a lot more than just dusts.--
​

5) With the Industrial grinder, I see that I can concoct some cells of chemicals to amplify certain gains - are there any "recommended" ores that I always/never do this for? I don't wanna waste resources just for line 1 tiny dust I won't need, but the list is long and perhaps a gregtech veteran can point out a few notable candidates for these special chemicals.

Platinum is very valuable metal, anything that boosts your plat yield is usually worth it. (nickel/ferrous ore, iridium and sheldonite also).
The chemical cells are filled using byproducts- the mercury for extra plat is a byproduct of processing redstone ect
​

6) The explosion compressor machine is hilarious, but uses so much industrial TNT. is it worth it to try to compress all my gem dusts, or only the rare ones (and then centrifuge or electrolysize the rest)

Check the uses for your gem dusts. Normally the dust works as well in most recipes (except tools??).
I think the compression recipe is lossy, so only compress what's actually needed.
Electrolyse the ruby- good source of chrome.
​

7) - Fusion - worth it? Or is this more just for bragging rights? I never got much into nuclear reactors in regular Unleashed, so I'm a bit unschooled on how useful/awesome these are vs. Boilers and solars.

Probably not worth it for the power output- by the time you actually fire it up, you have enough power. It can be used to manufacture different elements though. Old school fission reactors are pretty neat though.​

Few interesting side notes
Reactor heat vents can be attached to machines- increases machine efficiency (3% less Eu/t per upgrade)
Those spare heating coils from your IBF?- individual ones can upgrade the electric furnace and alloy smelter (2x then 3x speed)

 

[namiasdf]

Few interesting side notes
Reactor heat vents can be attached to machines- increases machine efficiency (3% less Eu/t per upgrade)
Those spare heating coils from your IBF?- individual ones can upgrade the electric furnace and alloy smelter (2x then 3x speed)

This is 1.6.x (reactor vents), I presume?

 

[Celestialphoenix]

1.5 or 1.6- whenever Greg added cover based upgrades.

 

[GreaseMonkeY]

5) With the Industrial grinder, I see that I can concoct some cells of chemicals to amplify certain gains - are there any "recommended" ores that I always/never do this for? I don't wanna waste resources just for line 1 tiny dust I won't need, but the list is long and perhaps a gregtech veteran can point out a few notable candidates for these special chemicals.

For the industrial grinder there are 3 liquids it will accept: water, mercury, and sodium persulfate. These change the yield for certain ores, as an example ferrous ore: always grind it with mercury, this will yield a full platinum dust each time. I've found I use mostly Mercury in the grinder since Sodium Persulfate only bonuses copper. Mercury also requires much less processing to create, if you have Thaumcraft installed quicksilver can be canned into mercury cells. Something to note about putting the liquid in, you can't pipe mercury or sodium persulfate in, however water can be.

6) The explosion compressor machine is hilarious, but uses so much industrial TNT. is it worth it to try to compress all my gem dusts, or only the rare ones (and then centrifuge or electrolysize the rest)

Save your gem dusts, there are usually recipes that use the dust or the full gem. Unless of course you really need the full gem.

7) - Fusion - worth it? Or is this more just for bragging rights? I never got much into nuclear reactors in regular Unleashed, so I'm a bit unschooled on how useful/awesome these are vs. Boilers and solars.

Very worth it. The fusion reactor produces liquid energy called helium plasma. This liquid is able to be stored like any other despite being "plasma". Each cell of plasma contains 8192kEU. This makes a quantum tank the best energy storage device, when full it stores a whopping 16.4TEU.

EDIT: Clarification

 

[Larmonade]

Okay, after a bit of playing around with it this morning, a few updates!

First, the Electric Craftingtable has a pretty nice "dusts mode" that basically saves me the trouble of having to set up 20-ish auto-crafters of some other variety. There's also a nuggets mode, which is sweet, though (unsurprisingly) it's a bit weird with TiCo aluminum (lol, I know, right?).

for the time being, my solution to the "cetrifuge/eloctrolize this item non-stop" has simply been an individual machine devoted to each task. A bit bulky, but I imagine that when I sit down and do this for real, when I get to the point of wanting to do this, the resources won't be a major issue.

Question about upgrades!
So I noticed that Greg's machines consume nutty amounts of power when given overclockers. Do people overclock anyways? Do people prefer banks of un-upgraded machines? Do people overclock just a little bit?

Also, I'm a big fan of bees and laser drills, and prefer to only quarry when I'm specifically in need of certain otherwise un-gettable materials (like uranium, pre-bees). Gregtech adds a crapton of stuff to get. Do you stripmine? Are bees better? I'm still just trying to see how all the pieces fit together, so I'm not 100% on exactly what I'm even gonna need a lot of

 

[kleshas]

Question about upgrades!
So I noticed that Greg's machines consume nutty amounts of power when given overclockers. Do people overclock anyways? Do people prefer banks of un-upgraded machines? Do people overclock just a little bit?

My end-game wrt automation is generally maxing out the overclockers rather than banks of non-overclocked machines.

 

[Larmonade]

Okay, so I hopped into a creative world and tried out the fusion reactor - WOW! that's a lot of EU. However, it's pretty resource intensive to keep running, with all the centrifuges and whatnot processing the needed ingredients. Any word on what kind of set-up is needed to keep one of these running non-stop? And how many plasma generators would a continuously running fusion reactor support? Are we talking levels of ridiculous that are unattainable yet? Do people just not do that?

 

[YX33A]

Okay, so I hopped into a creative world and tried out the fusion reactor - WOW! that's a lot of EU. However, it's pretty resource intensive to keep running, with all the centrifuges and whatnot processing the needed ingredients. Any word on what kind of set-up is needed to keep one of these running non-stop? And how many plasma generators would a continuously running fusion reactor support? Are we talking levels of ridiculous that are unattainable yet? Do people just not do that?

IIRC you need to make... 1 tritium per second, plus 1 deuterium per second(plus the 16 IIRC needed to make tritium), and that's 4 water per deuterium per second being processed...
It's not impossible, just damn hard to set up. Before the release of RotaryCraft(and ReactorCraft) setting up a Fusion Reaction and actually using it for power was end game to the extreme, and no one thought of anything bigger.

 

[midi_sec]

IIRC you need to make... 1 tritium per second, plus 1 deuterium per second(plus the 16 IIRC needed to make tritium), and that's 4 water per deuterium per second being processed...
It's not impossible, just damn hard to set up. Before the release of RotaryCraft(and ReactorCraft) setting up a Fusion Reaction and actually using it for power was end game to the extreme, and no one thought of anything bigger.

the sheer number of machines to make the amount of fuel required to run a gt fusion is pretty silly. i've been recommending people to use the helium3/deuterium recipe as it requires about 20-30 fewer machines, and should net higher yield because of it.

but...usually after i set one fusion coil up, it gets lonely. it needs friends, and the only friends a fusion coil likes is moar fusion coils.

so then i start doing silly things. one coil powers the other two. one of the other two is making iridium, the other platinum...to clad my empire in bling.

 

[YX33A]

the sheer number of machines to make the amount of fuel required to run a gt fusion is pretty silly. i've been recommending people to use the helium3/deuterium recipe as it requires about 20-30 fewer machines, and should net higher yield because of it.

but...usually after i set one fusion coil up, it gets lonely. it needs friends, and the only friends a fusion coil likes is moar fusion coils.

so then i start doing silly things. one coil powers the other two. one of the other two is making iridium, the other platinum...to clad my empire in bling.

The catch-22 with HE-3 is that while it needs 20-30 less machines... it needs a easily renewable source of either glowstone dust or endstone, where as a Tritium/Deuterium chain requires only water.

 

[Larmonade]

The catch-22 with HE-3 is that while it needs 20-30 less machines... it needs a easily renewable source of either glowstone dust or endstone, where as a Tritium/Deuterium chain requires only water.

I'm pretty good on glowstone ATM (witch farm as well as bees and laser drills), and I suppose that if push came to shove, I could set up an automated TiCo smeltery or two to cook up some endstone.

I guess that my usual modus operandi is to just spam a bunch of solars, and the idea of having a perpetually running fusion-coil ring running in the basement powering my base instead of a bunch of Ultimate hybrids is kind of appealing...but if this is going to require hundreds of machines and a bunch of lag, I might just set it all up in creative, watch it go for a while, and then go load up a different world and do something else.

 

[midi_sec]

do you have reliquary in your pack? if so alkahest is your bff. 1 endstone makes 16 or something.

edit: number of machines for a helium/deut loop was 50-60 including support machines (canner, cyclic assembler, etc depends on how you're supplying your fuel to the reactor). 32 or so double oc'd centrifuges, 4 single oc'd ind. electrolyzers, and yeah. half the fun is getting all of the power to these machines.

 

[Runo]

1) automatic machines auto-export, can transfer power to neighboring machines, and can handle upgrades. its a trade-off to the advanced options.

2). Automation is the mid-game GT challenge. It can be done with AE interfaces and gt logistics machines. For mass production of complex chains, look up the advanced regulator and the buffer series, I'm sure there's a video on it. Advanced regulator is absolutely wonderful for the assembling machine, functions like sneakypipes for multiple input sides, types, and sizes.

5). Sheldonite ore and ferrous ore with mercury. Platinum and iridium are your GT 'diamonds' along with chrome (from redstone and ruby). Platinum can be centrifuged to iridium, and mercury boosts gt grinder platinum output of those two ores.

6). Compressor is only really worth it/needed for iridium plates, everything else is ancillary.

7) fusion is endgame and a lot of fun trying to obtain. Early game is getting your machines and a basic power system less than 512eu/t or store/burst/gather. Mid-game is power-ramp up to thousands EU/t, automation, and heavy resource gathering. Endgame is building and powering a fusion reactor. Then you can build tungstensteel clad rail tunnels like I did or your own flavor of fun.

Automating a fusion reactor requires 32 industrial electrolyzers and 112 industrial centrifuges, half count/double power for every oc set. I did 2xOC to reduce lag. Routers are crucial for that BTW.

 

[namiasdf]

The infrastructure required to support fusion is quite intense, and requires you to understand how EU work/how you can make this infrastructure most efficient.

I would advise you to play the game first, dealing with the antics of EU, up to the 512 EU/t point, and understand how EU works to its finest detail.

Once you reach that point, designing this system, which requires arrays of transformers, etc. to convert the power properly, to power all the machines required to support the infrastructure + integration of all the power generated by your fusion core into your base...

Don't start off with fusion. That's just silly.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

Question about upgrades!
So I noticed that Greg's machines consume nutty amounts of power when given overclockers. Do people overclock anyways? Do people prefer banks of un-upgraded machines? Do people overclock just a little bit?

Usually I do 1 or 2 overclockers max, and that was rather late into the game
these things stack exponentially; each o/c upgrade requires 4x the power
2 o/c's on an 128Eu/t machine would require a dedicated plasma genny.
stick another 2 on, and its over 32000Eu/t

My personal taste involves building a second machine, and a 3rd, 4th ect...

I think my old FTB ultimate base had 5 tungstensteel ready IBFs. (it might have been 6, can't remember)​

 

[namiasdf]

Usually I do 1 or 2 overclockers max, and that was rather late into the game
these things stack exponentially; each o/c upgrade requires 4x the power
2 o/c's on an 128Eu/t machine would require a dedicated plasma genny.
stick another 2 on, and its over 32000Eu/t

My personal taste involves building a second machine, and a 3rd, 4th ect...

I think my old FTB ultimate base had 5 tungstensteel ready IBFs. (it might have been 6, can't remember)​

More so, it is relevant when you are talking about auto-crafting and AE.

For example. Say you were wanting to craft an ME processor. There are two components, which the speed which you process them via electric furnace, will effect the time your system requires to create the item. (1) smelting a quartz dust into silicon and (2) smelting the raw processor. Both of these require that you put the item into a furnace type block for processing. This requires time, such that it could really back up your AE system.

Another relevant case would be crafting diamonds from coal. Utilization of the rotary macerator (super fucking fast, super fucking expensive), along with the advanced machines compressor upgrade, etc.