FTB Monster | Thermal Expansion/BuildCraft vs Industrialcraft

[Snowboardpvp]

So, I've been seeing a lot of things from modpacks so I decided to try it out, and I believe I am going to play monster. I've never played a modpack before, or really any mods in general. So, I decided to look some things up and I saw BC/TE, and IC are used for a lot of things.

What's the difference between the two for ore processing and power generation? Then, which one do you think would be easier for a beginner, and why? Also, I would love to know which you believe is better and why? Oh, and later game would it be possible for me to use a combination of both, or like is it ever required to use both?

I'm sorry if these are stupid questions, I'm completely new. If you have any other tips say for starting off they would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[Wagon153]

Honestly, I can't really say which is better. Thermal Expansion is best for beginners since it is relatively simple and cheap. Buildcraft has no ore processing, although it has item transportation and the quarry. IC2 is better for later game things because of it's new tedium to its recipes. That and its power system is more complex(but not much.) Rotary craft is an awesome mod that is in Monster that I highly suggest using. It is quite complex at first, but it comes with a handbook that explains all the machines, power production, and how the power works.

 

[midi_sec]

TE and BC kind of go together, but TE is the easier mod by far, just because it's more user friendly.

completely new? i would check out the various wiki's for the mods you're interested in learning, and be ready to blow things up. being new can cause explosions.

 

[Wekmor]

TE's ore processing is easier then IC2's ore processing, but once you got some stuff together you can get more then 2x the ingots from your ores.

 

[Snowboardpvp]

Thanks for the tips, I will most likely start out with TE from what you guys have said. I will also check out rotarycraft, sounds interesting.

Can you guys suggest any other fun or essential mods in monster I should check out?

 

[Wekmor]

Tinker's construct for tools, thaumcraft if you like magic stuff ..

idk what other mods are in monster xD

 

[James_Grimm]

Given that it's Monster, that would be a pretty long list. I'm also a bit of newb to mods, so I haven't tried everything yet either.

I like Tinker's Construct a lot, just because you can personalize your tools so completely. It also is a pretty nice early game ore processing system, although in monster you could probably move onto TE just as quickly (which is a little better in terms of what you can do with it, in my opinion, but doesn't let you make your own personalized tools).

If you want to try magic, Thaumcraft is pretty fun and the 4.1 version is much friendlier for early game play compared to 4.0. Blood Magic also seem to be pretty popular (I haven't gotten to try it yet, but it looks cool).
Lots of people say Twilight Forest, (an adventure based dimension) is a lot of fun to explore.

That's just a few, there is a lot of good mods, so it could take a while to try them all.

 

[rhn]

So, I've been seeing a lot of things from modpacks so I decided to try it out, and I believe I am going to play monster. I've never played a modpack before, or really any mods in general. So, I decided to look some things up and I saw BC/TE, and IC are used for a lot of things.

What's the difference between the two for ore processing and power generation? Then, which one do you think would be easier for a beginner, and why? Also, I would love to know which you believe is better and why? Oh, and later game would it be possible for me to use a combination of both, or like is it ever required to use both?

I'm sorry if these are stupid questions, I'm completely new. If you have any other tips say for starting off they would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

As it is mentioned the initial learning curve of TE is definitely lower than IC2. It is hard to do anything wrong with TE, at worst it just wont work. So for a new player yes TE is probably the best way to start out after the vanilla furnace.

But for the more experienced player, who maybe have used IC2 before, it might be a more complex matter. Tried starting out several times from scratch now in monster, and I must admit that I am starting to prefer going back to IC2 for the initial ore processing setup. It might be a slight bigger investment(not sure it actually is), but once you got a few renewable powersources set up(solar panels or windwills(great with ATG worldgen)), you are going to save a bit on resources and infrastructure to keep it running.

As you progress I usually find that I mine ores too fast for a single default setup to keep up. Sadly the TE machinery do not yet have any means of speeding them up, so if you go that route you are forced to have multiple machines running to keep up. But if you go the IC2 route you can upgrade your machines with overclockers to run faster(but use more power) which simplifies automation for them a bit.

Late midgame/endgame I found myself earlier using IC2 as the bulk ore processing(due to the speed) and TE for more specialized jobs. I always found a need for both lines of all the machines and their corresponding power productions. So doing one does not exclude the other.

 

[ThatOneSlowking]

TE and BC kind of go together, but TE is the easier mod by far, just because it's more user friendly.

completely new? i would check out the various wiki's for the mods you're interested in learning, and be ready to blow things up. being new can cause explosions.

False
In 1.6 TE does not need builcraft for anything other than the filler and quarry
Currently TE has ore processing, item fluid and energy transport, and a ton of other stuff

Anyways if you are new i reccoemend checking out Thermal Expansion and Thaumcraft. They are simple mods for beginners and are very useful later on

 

[GreenZombie]

In terms of Tech mods:

Tinkers Construct makes useful tools that can be repaired, and has a smeltery that requires nothing but clay, sand, gravel and lava to double ores. Probably a good place to start as, with access to nothing but some iron, you can make easy to repair stone tools that will chop down entire trees at once, or smash/dig 3x3 holes in the terrain with ease.

Buildcraft has pipes that can sort items into chests, a Quarry that can strip a 64x64 area to bedrock, a Filler for automatic building, and a power system it shares with Railcraft and Forestry. But NOT (in Monster) Thermal Expansion any more.
Railcraft gives you ore doubling, but gated on access to the nether and quite a lot of diamonds. And a bunch of stuff for making automated rail systems, and more MJ power options.
Forestry gives you MJ powered tree farms, the only (real/renewable) way to operate a Railcraft boiler.

Thermal Expansion offers its own Power system (RF) and provides machines for ore doubling. The machines can all be configured to output into each other automatically and it also provides an alternative piping system so there is no need to use this with buildcraft at all - except Thermal Expansion does NOT (yet) have a quarry for automatic mining.

IC2 has machines for ore doubling, and its own power system (EU). It does NOT have any kind of item piping / transport so needs to be coupled with some other system to automate. IC2 has automatic mining thats a lot cleaner than a quarry. But it really needs to be paired with buildcraft as its own water and lava pumps are useless.

Rotary Craft provides yet another power system, and has a first tier "Ore doubling" machine witha 3x yield, and a later tier machine that has a 5x yield. It uses a lot of (its own) steel. It provides the Tunnel Bore, a device that when powered sufficiently can make a hole through anything including bedrock, 11 wide, by 5 high, infinite length.

Factorization I can't figure out. I thought it had yet-another ore doubling pipeline and its own power system. But really I know how to make barrels.

Thaumcraft is magical, and provides "end game" tools and a fuel free furnace that can ore double, but only after significant investment and visits to the nether. It is the 4th mod with a Quarry like option - the Arcane Bore that can bore a ~60 meter long tunnel 11m in diameter when fully upgraded.

MinefactoryReloaded, Steves Cards and the Applied Energistics mods I havn't touched but seem to provide some of the features of the above. again with new power systems and *cough* ore doubling options.

 

[kleshas]

My style usually ends up with TE to deal with auto-pulverizing and auto-smelting the quarry-outputted ores, and maxed out IC2 machines for on-demand items (via App. Energ.).
TE is easier for beginners, IC2 is faster eventually but at the non-overclocked (default) speeds, slower than TE.

 

[Golrith]

Factorization I can't figure out. I thought it had yet-another ore doubling pipeline and its own power system. But really I know how to make barrels.

Factorization does have a ore tripling system, up to the 3rd stage it can be automated with any transport system. By itself it's crazily cheap (cobble, iron, string, etc) when you compare it to other blocks within Factorization and other mods. Personally I feel it needs a bit of an overhaul, as the rest of the mod is more advanced and technomagical, while it's ore system is more "vanilla".

It's one of those mods that seems powerful and very useful, just no one uses it due to being quite complex and poorly documented (again, due to it hardly being used). Hence it has a nickname of being "The Barrel mod".


For the OP, I'd recommend starting out with Thermal Expansion, MFR and Buildcraft on the technology side. After that you can dabble in the other mods. You'll usually find yourself in a situation of "I need a lot of resource X, my current setup can't produce that, what else can I use?" Then either research or ask here for the options available to obtain said resource.
Eventually you'll be thinking of the words of "World Domination"....

 

[GreenZombie]

Factorization does have a ore tripling system, up to the 3rd stage it can be automated with any transport system.

How. There was a factorization pulverizer or somthing in monster, the tooltip says deprecated in favor of some something servo based. And NEI shows no recipe for it so thats been disabled too. Its servos or the highway now. Using servo's seems just bloody obscure as to "grind" an ore block it would need to be placed in front of a servo?

 

[Golrith]

How. There was a factorization pulverizer or somthing in monster, the tooltip says deprecated in favor of some something servo based. And NEI shows no recipe for it so thats been disabled too. Its servos or the highway now. Using servo's seems just bloody obscure as to "grind" an ore block it would need to be placed in front of a servo?

Make a diamond grinder, place that down facing a barrel, put ores in barrel.
Grinder will auto eject those dirty clumps into an inventory behind the grinder.
Wash those dirty clumps, I use an TE auto assembler since it can hold liquids and more friendly then the Factorization Mixer. Just means a bit of RF power.
Send those washed ones to it's slag furnace.
Output of that into a crystaliser.

Up to the crystaliser all the item movement can be done with ducts. Ducts will just fill the top slot first of a crystaliser, then overflow into the neighbouring slots. Without a router, I ended up manually taking out the stack of crystal ore and dumping it into a vanilla furnace attached to the factorization heating coils.

I built this purely because I needed maxium ore processing on silver, as I was building the factorization solar power system, which is a lot of silver. Then I was also using Silver Micro blocks as decoration...

 

[Jadedcat]

As you progress I usually find that I mine ores too fast for a single default setup to keep up. Sadly the TE machinery do not yet have any means of speeding them up, so if you go that route you are forced to have multiple machines running to keep up. But if you go the IC2 route you can upgrade your machines with overclockers to run faster(but use more power) which simplifies automation for them a bit.

More mods have cross mod support for TE3 than they do for IC2 ... and TE3 just makes more sense. Why should I make an IC2 power setup to run macerators and industrial furnaces (which seems to be what everyone wants) and then I can't use that power for any of the other mods. I have to make 2 power setups for no reason other than TE3 doesn't have speed upgrades. I can run all my machines except IC2 off TE3 power. I can't run the TE3 machines off BC or IC2 power. I can't run BC off the IC2 power. I can't run 80% of the mods off IC2 power. I can't even generate IC2 power with most other mods.

The breakdown of mods to power nets (should be fairly accurate unless I have forgotten something or someone has added something new) :

Spoiler

I chose to go with just the pipes contained in the mod that supplies the energy. Because saying "but you can use the conversion pipes from this other mod" is not the same thing.

MJ - the Buildcraft power API - mods that will use power through BC pipes without adding a converter mod.

Buildcraft - produces and uses
Railcraft - produces and uses
Forestry- produces and uses
Applied Energistics- can accept does not produce
EnderIO- RF is the default but can be swapped to MJ
Gendustry- can accept does not produce
MFFS- can accept does not produce
MFR - produces and uses
Modular Power Suits- can accept does not produce
Extra Utilities- can accept does not produce
Quarry Plus- can accept does not produce
Rotary Craft - produces and uses


RF - the TE3 power api - mods that can use power from the TE3 conduits without installing a conversion mod

TE3 - produces and uses
BigReactors - produces and uses
Buildcraft - can accept does not produce
Forestry- can accept does not produce
Applied Energistics- can accept does not produce
Advanced Genetics- can accept does not produce
Railcraft- can accept does not produce
EnderIO- RF is the default but can be swapped to MJ
Remote IO - can accept does not produce
Engineer's Toolbox - produces and uses
All Emasher mods - Gascraft etc. - produces and uses
Enhanced Portals- can accept does not produce
Gendustry- can accept does not produce
Mariculture - produces and uses
MFFS- can accept does not produce
MFR - produces and uses
Modular Power Suits- can accept does not produce
Extra Utilities - produces and uses
Redstone Arsenal- can accept does not produce
Rotary Craft - produces and uses




Eu - the IC2 power api - mods that can use power from IC2 cables without a converter mod installed

IC2 and addons - produces and uses
Advanced Genetics- can accept does not produce
MFFS- can accept does not produce
MFR- produces and uses
Modular Power Suits (not working for everyone)- can accept does not produce
Extra Utilities- can accept does not produce

So basically regardless of speed or performance, if you want to be able to run most of the mods off one power system and not try to balance 2-3 different networks ... use TE3 the only mod you won't be able to power is IC2. Just make a few extra pulverizers. It takes 5 to keep up with an overclocked macerator and the fuel cost is fairly equivalent. If you only make an IC2 network you will need pipes/conduits that can convert it into a different energy type. If you ignore IC2 you can run everything in Monster off TE3 conduits. IC2 will only power 5 other mods. I personally would rather spend my time setting up convuluted crafting/sorting systems than figuring out which cable goes with which machine and whether I have enough of each of 3 power types to run my machines.

IC2 used to have more addons than any other mod. Thats not the case anymore. While they aren't TE addons more mods have support for RF than MJ or EU.

 

[Golrith]

While a bit OT, I would highly recommend in future FTB packs to consider Mekanism. Not only is it much better on performance then previous versions, it does offer it's own unique things, and allows you to cross the bridge between EU and RF with it's universal cables. Plus it's no longer associated with UE, which I believe there is a bit of bad history behind FTB and the modder.

 

[Jadedcat]

While a bit OT, I would highly recommend in future FTB packs to consider Mekanism. Not only is it much better on performance then previous versions, it does offer it's own unique things, and allows you to cross the bridge between EU and RF with it's universal cables. Plus it's no longer associated with UE, which I believe there is a bit of bad history behind FTB and the modder.

We use the UE MFFS. I think its safe to say there is no bad history between FTB and UE.

We don't list the reasons we decide not to use specific mods for a reason. All it leads to is people arguing about the reasons. Everything in MC modding is subjective opinion. And we are not going to list subjective opinion for people to debate.

 

[Lathanael]

...IC2 has machines for ore doubling, and its own power system (EU). It does NOT have any kind of item piping / transport so needs to be coupled with some other system to automate. IC2 has automatic mining thats a lot cleaner than a quarry. But it really needs to be paired with buildcraft as its own water and lava pumps are useless....

What people tend to forget is that an ejector upgrade exists which makes you able to build TE like processing lines without pipes or ducts. The only thing you would need those for is to transport products from the machines into a storage solution.

 

[rhn]

More mods have cross mod support for TE3 than they do for IC2 ... and TE3 just makes more sense. Why should I make an IC2 power setup to run macerators and industrial furnaces (which seems to be what everyone wants) and then I can't use that power for any of the other mods. I have to make 2 power setups for no reason other than TE3 doesn't have speed upgrades. I can run all my machines except IC2 off TE3 power. I can't run the TE3 machines off BC or IC2 power. I can't run BC off the IC2 power. I can't run 80% of the mods off IC2 power. I can't even generate IC2 power with most other mods.

The breakdown of mods to power nets (should be fairly accurate unless I have forgotten something or someone has added something new) :

Spoiler

I chose to go with just the pipes contained in the mod that supplies the energy. Because saying "but you can use the conversion pipes from this other mod" is not the same thing.

MJ - the Buildcraft power API - mods that will use power through BC pipes without adding a converter mod.

Buildcraft - produces and uses
Railcraft - produces and uses
Forestry- produces and uses
Applied Energistics- can accept does not produce
EnderIO- RF is the default but can be swapped to MJ
Gendustry- can accept does not produce
MFFS- can accept does not produce
MFR - produces and uses
Modular Power Suits- can accept does not produce
Extra Utilities- can accept does not produce
Quarry Plus- can accept does not produce
Rotary Craft - produces and uses


RF - the TE3 power api - mods that can use power from the TE3 conduits without installing a conversion mod

TE3 - produces and uses
BigReactors - produces and uses
Buildcraft - can accept does not produce
Forestry- can accept does not produce
Applied Energistics- can accept does not produce
Advanced Genetics- can accept does not produce
Railcraft- can accept does not produce
EnderIO- RF is the default but can be swapped to MJ
Remote IO - can accept does not produce
Engineer's Toolbox - produces and uses
All Emasher mods - Gascraft etc. - produces and uses
Enhanced Portals- can accept does not produce
Gendustry- can accept does not produce
Mariculture - produces and uses
MFFS- can accept does not produce
MFR - produces and uses
Modular Power Suits- can accept does not produce
Extra Utilities - produces and uses
Redstone Arsenal- can accept does not produce
Rotary Craft - produces and uses




Eu - the IC2 power api - mods that can use power from IC2 cables without a converter mod installed

IC2 and addons - produces and uses
Advanced Genetics- can accept does not produce
MFFS- can accept does not produce
MFR- produces and uses
Modular Power Suits (not working for everyone)- can accept does not produce
Extra Utilities- can accept does not produce

So basically regardless of speed or performance, if you want to be able to run most of the mods off one power system and not try to balance 2-3 different networks ... use TE3 the only mod you won't be able to power is IC2. Just make a few extra pulverizers. It takes 5 to keep up with an overclocked macerator and the fuel cost is fairly equivalent. If you only make an IC2 network you will need pipes/conduits that can convert it into a different energy type. If you ignore IC2 you can run everything in Monster off TE3 conduits. IC2 will only power 5 other mods. I personally would rather spend my time setting up convuluted crafting/sorting systems than figuring out which cable goes with which machine and whether I have enough of each of 3 power types to run my machines.

IC2 used to have more addons than any other mod. Thats not the case anymore. While they aren't TE addons more mods have support for RF than MJ or EU.

Yes it is true that many more mods support TE3 than IC2 now. But that doesn't meant that you cant with great benefit have a IC2 power generation. One of the biggest benefits to IC2 power generation IMO(and the reason why I make it for many things) is that it is one block(with compact/advanced solars/windmills) supplying the power. I don't need large laggy structures for everything. Don't get me wrong, I still build the large laggy structures that TE3 requires(treefarms, ethanol productions, boilers, rows of dynamos etc.) but I dont need to have 10 or 20 identical lines of them to power my base. This is because I choose to use IC2 to partly power the constant power hogs(AE, MFR and ore processing) with 512EU/t Solars. Helps make more complex projects more tolerable in terms of FPS/TPS etc.

 

[Golrith]

We use the UE MFFS. I think its safe to say there is no bad history between FTB and UE.

We don't list the reasons we decide not to use specific mods for a reason. All it leads to is people arguing about the reasons. Everything in MC modding is subjective opinion. And we are not going to list subjective opinion for people to debate.

Sorry, forgot all about MFFS. I just remember there was a bit of a uproar a bit ago, and that sort of thing sticks in your mind longer. As a wise person once said "Leave things be (especially if Jaded is around...)"

@rhn I believe that a large TE3 power setup won't be as demanding on a server as you think. It'll be those other mods that would be more of a source of server strain. I do find it odd you mention complex builds (when tend to be big sprawling affairs), and then mention just powering it by a single overpowered (to my mind) and pretty boring block.
Each to their own though, it's all Lego bricks that we get to play with.