Gregtech-centric progression advice?

[Archina]

When I start off in IC2/GT, I get an MFE, LV transformer and a generator. For now, I'll run it off of coal coke from TrainCraft's coke oven (quadruples the EU coal would give and also gives a little extra gift for later on.)
Also, yes. You can build an MFE right off the bat. 8 refined iron, 4 rubies, 32 redstone, 1 gold bar, and 12 rubber. Easy enough to get.

Once you've gotten that, make yourself the essentials. That being the extractor first, then electric furnace and compressor (A macerator too if you're not using the hardmode recipe.) You must build the extractor first as it will triple your rubber output. Which is used in just about every recipe. The electric furnace as it's slightly more efficient for coal than an iron furnace (that and you can stop it when you need to. unlike the normal furnace types.) The compressor will be used for later when you want to build more advanced machines and a nano suit.

Afterwards, there should be two machines you'll be wanting. The industrial centrifuge and the semifluid generator. The centrifuge is a godsend as long as you got the EU to power it. While the semifluid generator will then help you with the "little extra gift" I was mentioning earlier. Now we have all that, it's time to delve deep.

The next step is getting renewable power. Skip the normal solars, they're useless as you should have the resources to upgrade them by now. We're going straight into the advanced solars. First though, you'll need an industrial electrolyzer. It's your first big build so make it count (Note: the IE will eat 128EU/t constantly. so either remove a wire when you're done, or set up an EU-splitter cable. It's also recommended you give it a dedicated MFE too.) This baby will be with you for pretty much the entire time. It's basically the second step of a lot of things that come out of the centrifuge and everything that comes out of it has a use so store them nice and snug.

Once you've built that, it's time to build your next big machine and this thing's gonna eat your iron deposits for a while. That's right. It's the industrial blast furnace. This bad boy has a 3x3x4 structure backing it up and is fully upgradable. For building it, you want to place the machine casing (either standard or reinforced for now. Though for reinforced you'll NEED to build TrainCraft's blast furnace for the steel) in this order, from the bottom to the top:
CCC|CCC|CCC|CCC
CCC|CLC|CLC|CCC
CCC|CCC|CCC|CCC
1st--2nd--3rd--4th
C= Casing of your choice
L= Lava (Lava isn't needed, but HIGHLY recommended as it gives it more Kelvins. which is needed to smelt items.)

Now that's done, go and build yourself as many advanced solars as you can. The more, the merrier! Normally I stop at 50 though but I do that over time. Not all at once.

After that, you've got EU constantly building up and at your disposal. We can have a bit of fun with it now. The rest of the game is your own decision as to how you advance. Just remember though that at some point, you're going to have to build a matter fabricator. So make sure you are getting the resources for it.

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Tips and other things that go here (Not all IC2/GT related):

• Copper, Tin, Iron, Rubies, clay, bauxite and iridium. All of which you will want 24/7. Copper tin and iron are your main men in your recipe arsenal. So make sure you ALWAYS collect them! Rubies are your best source of chrome. So DO NOT waste any on tools! That's what green sapphires are for! Bauxite is your only source of titanium and a really good source of aluminium. So take as much as you can get. you'll be eating through titanium like no tomorrow later on. Clay is really useful because of it's silicon and aluminium. Silicon is mainly used in making solar panels and a cheap way out of making advanced circuits.
• While old IC2 players will know the recipes for an energy crystal and lapotron crystal, did you also know that you can use rubies instead of diamonds for the energy crystals and sapphires instead of energy crystals for lapotron crystals? It blew my mind when I found out.
• Refined iron, bronze and tin. That's the recipe for mixed alloy ingots. Yet I know better ways. Why not try invar, brass and zinc? It doubles your output (4 ingots instead of 2) and saves you a ton of tin. It's also a good way to use up your ever-growing mountain of nickel ingots. If you have too much aluminium too, replace that for the zinc ingots. It'l give you an extra MAI to boot. Sorry though, no way to replace the copper!
• Speaking of nickel, ferrous ore is your best bet for platinum ingots. so make sure you get tons of that, too.
• Mercury and sodium persulfate cells are your wild cards in the industrial grinder. They are used instead of water cells and turn the tiny pieces of dust into big pieces instead. So now all that quicksilver has a use! sodium persulfate requires a chemical reactor though. It's also made from sulfur, sodium and compressed air cells.
• Want an easier time on your copper and tin supplies? Why not feed your centrifuge some lava? It can be fed directly or through cells/cans/ect. It makes no difference which way as you get the resources back from the containers. Either use a BuildCraft pump in the nether connected to a liquid tesseract, or just melt down netherrack/cobble in the magma crucible from Thermal Expansion. 16 lava will give you 2 tin (Plus the tin for making your cells or cans), 4 copper, 1 electrum and 1 tiny piece of tungsten dust. Very useful indeed.
• The geothermal generator is really good for early EU generation too. It doesn't have to be connected to a pump. Just carry around a stack or two of cans on your inventory and fill them on your hunt for diamonds. It can be easily upgraded into the thermal generator too. Which gives 30kEU per lava instead of 20k.
• You will need to make the recycler at some point. When you do make it is your own decision but I recommend you do when you're running out of space for cobble/you got a barrel full of it. It has a chance to turn anything into scrap. Which can either be useful to try your luck with the scrap boxes, or used as fuel in the matter fabricator (gives 3% completion per scrap.)
• Electrum ingots are way too useful to miss out on. While they do have normal crafting uses, they are also used as an enhancement to both types of circuits and the glass fibre cable. Just replace the redstone for electrum and watch as your supplies suddenly double! You can either use the spare electrum from your lava centrifuging or use an induction smelter from Thermal Expansion (which requires 1 silver and 1 gold to make 2 ingots.)
• Back onto the topic of centrifuging, once you've built one, use that instead of the extractor to make rubber. It gives a bit more rubber per sticky resin and also gives you a bit of biofuel assistance!
• If you see some nikolite or iridium, don't mine them unless you really need to. With a silk touch pick or a rock cutter, you can get so much more out of them (1 iridium ore can be doubled while giving platinum too, while nikolite can give you diamond dust! Which you can either compress into actual diamonds through the implosion compressor, or use it to make tons of glass fibre cables!
• While this is completely unrelated to anything IC2, use the grinder from factorisation to grind diamond and coal ores. It's a godsend for those two. Because of it, I'm always swimming in diamonds and coal.
• Speaking of coal, 64 coal, 8 flint and 1 obsidian can be used to make a diamond if you're having a hard time finding them. Just turn the coal into coal dust, combine 8 coal dust with 1 flint and compress that into coal balls, then combine 8 of them with the obsidian to make coal chunks. Which you can then compress once more to make a diamond.
• If you're fine for EU, make some electrical engines to power your quarries and TE machines! They run on 6EU/t normally to produce 2MJ/t and can be upgraded to become MJ monsters!

For those wondering, yes I have played IC2/GT to the end multiple times. This is just my normal way of getting through it.

 

[Zjarek_S]

Well you said something about 225 EU/t per bucket, which must have been a typo on your part.

I think the steel investment for the turbines seems pretty ludicrous myself.

One solar panel needs 10 iron in normal IC2, one steam turbine is 339 iron for 100 times the output + small maintenance cost (about 30 iron every 60 hours), the time that solar panel will pay of iron wise is really long, even counting that you must boil something in boiler. Also it doesn't cost redstone, which is the only resource that I'm running of, even with a few excited bees and turning UU-matter into it. Iron isn't expensive to get with GT, even if you go magma crucible -> obsidian -> rock crush to dust -> electrolyze.

 

[Omicron]

Doing that (maybe only five times, or perhaps more) whilst also switching it to steam output would be fairly interesting way to balance nuclear power a good bit.

The problem with steam-outputting reactors lies with the fact that it's hard to connect enough pipes to get all the steam out of the reactor. With waterproof pipes, it's not possible to do more than 150 EU/t or so worth of steam because you simply run out of space, and most self-respecting reactor designs output between 200 and 400 EU/t even on default configs, before manually increasing them by multiple times as many people like to do. Of course, liquiducts made this situation a whole lot easier - making steam-outputting reactors viable for the first time - but there's still a hard limit somewhere, and there are valid designs that output over 2000 EU/t on default settings. It's useful to keep that in mind when playing with the output.

What can you realistically get out of a nuclear reactor with GregTech using the default config settings? I'd like to actually make nuclear power a viable option on my server but I need some guidance.

Quite a bit, actually, especially if you're in the business for efficiency, as GregTech's iridium neutron reflectors allow you to get maximum efficiency out of all your fuel, provided you can afford them. The rock cutter allows you to silk touch uranium ore, which not only doubles your uranium yield but also drops bonus plutonium. Thorium cells gives you an option to further increase the total EU yield of each unit of uranium without having to bother with a breeder reactor, at the cost of taking longer to produce said EU.

Plutonium allows for some incredibly high EU/t designs, but as with normal IC2, you still need to find a way to cool it all. GregTech doesn't change anything about that aspect.

 

[Guswut]

The problem with steam-outputting reactors lies with the fact that it's hard to connect enough pipes to get all the steam out of the reactor. With waterproof pipes, it's not possible to do more than 150 EU/t or so worth of steam because you simply run out of space, and most self-respecting reactor designs output between 200 and 400 EU/t even on default configs, before manually increasing them by multiple times as many people like to do. Of course, liquiducts made this situation a whole lot easier - making steam-outputting reactors viable for the first time - but there's still a hard limit somewhere, and there are valid designs that output over 2000 EU/t on default settings. It's useful to keep that in mind when playing with the output.

Perhaps liquid tesseracts could be utilized then? Mm, I am not sure how large their bandwidth is though, at least compared to liquiducts.

 

[Velotican]

Thanks for that, but I was hoping to get some ballpark EU numbers to work with so I don't accidentally make them too good.

 

[KirinDave]

Liquid tesseracts do not have a "max liquid bandwidth" as I understand them. They move buckets as fast as they conceivably can and that's way faster than the normal fluid mechanic flow rates can interact with. They have a single bucket internal buffer, but that shoudln't come into play here.

Also, Ender Buckets are a an elephant in the room.

 

[Guswut]

Liquid tesseracts do not have a "max liquid bandwidth" as I understand them. They move buckets as fast as they conceivably can and that's way faster than the normal fluid mechanic flow rates can interact with. They have a single bucket internal buffer, but that shoudln't come into play here.

Ah, a perfect solution in this case. Use as many liquid tesseracts required for the output end, and it shouldn't be an issue. Yay for teleportation!

Also, Ender Buckets are a an elephant in the room.

The standard Ultimae pack doesn't have Ender Tanks (it should have an updated Ender Storage with ender tanks in that) which means they don't have ender buckets. And in regard to ender buckets specifically, maybe get turtles to use them (if possible) to grab steam? Mm.

I wonder if ender tanks (either mod's version) have enough bandwidth for this? I believe the Ender Tanks mod has a inventory of sixteen buckets, so it'd require a similar setup to the tesseract but also require redstone power on the liquiducts to pull it out/etc.

 

[Omicron]

The problem with liquid tesseracts is that while they don't care about input speed, it's not the only metric you have to worry about. Just like it is with liquiducts and steam boilers: a single liquiduct connection transports 80 steam per tick, because that is how much the boiler outputs by itself. The liquiduct can carry a more or less infinite amount of steam, but the boiler will give it only 80. If you power the liquidict and set it to force extract mode, it will pull 160 instead, because that's the pull strength of the liquiduct. You still need five connections for a 36 HP even then.

Similarly, a nuclear reactor won't ever output all its steam out of a single face. Therefore it doesn't matter if the liquid tesseract can carry an infinite amount of steam; you are still limited by how much steam you manage to extract out of each face of the reactor. And with only a limited amount of faces, you'll only ever do a limited amount of steam.

 

[Vovk]

I am also fairly certain that you can attach buildcraft tanks in the corners of your steam nuke and get more steam out that way. Not sure on the throughput on a railcraft valve, but a railcraft tank is also an option.

 

[KirinDave]

Do reactors outputting steam "push" to valves then? If they do, then Xycraft and buildcraft tanks could be used since I've never seen a valve be a bottleneck.

Linked Xycraft tanks as efficient conduits for high speed steam transportation and output would probably be cool too. They seem to balance really fast.

 

[Omicron]

In the same way as Railcraft steam boilers do. In fact I can imagine it tapping into CovertJaguar's code, as the setting relies completely on Railcraft being installed.

I am also fairly certain that you can attach buildcraft tanks in the corners of your steam nuke and get more steam out that way. Not sure on the throughput on a railcraft valve, but a railcraft tank is also an option.

Now that is a solution I can see working.

 

[Zjarek_S]

I was testing steam nukes some time before and they outputed all steam to one connected liquiduct (1,34 B in that test) and steam boiler only outputs 0,08 B to one liquiduct. Of course this liquiducts were in normal mode, not extraction. I tested it a few TE versions before so it could change.

 

[KirinDave]

I was testing steam nukes some time before and they outputed all steam to one connected liquiduct (1,34 B in that test) and steam boiler only outputs 0,08 B to one liquiduct. Of course this liquiducts were in normal mode, not extraction. I tested it a few TE versions before so it could change.

That's exciting.

So let's say I was running a server—does that setting "fix" nukes as in, bring it back inline with what is reasonable to expect from such an expensive and dangerous system?

 

[Guswut]

That's exciting.

So let's say I was running a server—does that setting "fix" nukes as in, bring it back inline with what is reasonable to expect from such an expensive and dangerous system?

From what I've read, steam makes nuclear reactors worse (utilizing the standard output) as a simple 36HP boiler will output a great deal more steam for much lower initial and running cost. Assuming the steam output scales in the same way EU output scales, though, it could be used as much.

 

[KirinDave]

10x boost it is, I guess.

 

[Omicron]

I was testing steam nukes some time before and they outputed all steam to one connected liquiduct (1,34 B in that test) and steam boiler only outputs 0,08 B to one liquiduct. Of course this liquiducts were in normal mode, not extraction. I tested it a few TE versions before so it could change.

Interesting, then that must have changed since I last tested it. Definitely a change for the better.

And, with some disclaimer since there have apparently been changes since my last test, I don't think nuclear reactors are getting any worse by this change. They produce the same amount of EU/t as before, just in the form of steam (16 steam for every 5 EU/t increment). You could previously compare the nuke to a boiler in terms of material cost just as easily, and the boiler has always been cheaper.

 

[KirinDave]

Interesting, then that must have changed since I last tested it. Definitely a change for the better.

And, with some disclaimer since there have apparently been changes since my last test, I don't think nuclear reactors are getting any worse by this change. They produce the same amount of EU/t as before, just in the form of steam (16 steam for every 5 EU/t increment). You could previously compare the nuke to a boiler in terms of material cost just as easily, and the boiler has always been cheaper.

So getting back to the "admins-make-nuclear-competitive", would a 10x increase in EU output be apropos? Is that too much?

 

[Omicron]

Well, in that scenario a single quad uranium cell with four reflectors will give you 280 million EU at 1200 EU/t. If you are running steam-outputting reactors, you will need 12 turbines; if not, you'll need a HV-transformer. You be the judge of whether or not that's fair.

In my personal config I've nerfed windmills and solars to 50% output (both IC2 base, and advanced solars), nerfed geothermals to 75%, and buffed reactors to 200% for a test. In my last world I had the same settings except for the reactors which were at default, and while it was competitive in output with the other EU sources I had, it was significantly more expensive to maintain than said other sources. So I'll see how it'll go with this x2 setting. I'm not yet that far into my new world though.

 

[KirinDave]

Well, in that scenario a single quad uranium cell with four reflectors will give you 280 million EU at 1200 EU/t. If you are running steam-outputting reactors, you will need 12 turbines; if not, you'll need a HV-transformer. You be the judge of whether or not that's fair.

Hmm. That does seem like a lot, but of course it's not that simple. Type I reactors are usually Type I because they have little fuel and lots of cooling. Maybe 2-5x makes sense. You want it to be good, but not insane.

That said, there is Dat Fusion Reactor and at some point you say, "The risk of this power source annihilating your base is enough to offset a lot of OP-seeming behavior."

My first reactor was not type I, it was type blow-up-everything. I quit that game. High risk, high reward.

 

[Guswut]

High risk, high reward.

I'm going to make sure to offer my services to everyone on the server in regards to setting up a turtle-based battery charging/moving system. Hahahah.