Hehehe, well, instead of viewing it as crossing a line, think of it as another little objective that you must overcome. And thankfully for my sanity, it's not nearly as convuluted as better than wolves. But if it really does bother you, navigate to your mindcrack install folder/minecraft/config/GregTech and open the file "Recipes.cfg" find the line "B:Compress2Storageblock=true" and change it to false. this will allow you to make blocks the vanilla way. Also, what part of the Ruby/Saphhire ore is confusing you? If you mine it, instead of it dropping the gregtech gems, it drops the RP2 gems. They both use the Forge Oredictionary, so any recipe will accept either for both mods' purposes. For example, you can use a gregtech gem (if you lexicon'd to get one) for a sapphire pick, or instead, use it for a Lapotron Crystal. i can answer any further questions, or you can read the wiki found here Or his forum at here .
GregTech's changes and Ore Gen
- Thread starter PieExplosion
- Start date
I meant that he didn't want to use it in his let's play, not that he didn't like it.
Shrug, i believe that the old ones are enabled so that you can still get the side gems, such as the garnets. As modifying RP2 is sacrilage, greg has to make due by using the ore-dictionary. Otherwise, i believe there would be no real way (other than maybe the implosion compressor) to get those gems. In all honesty, i've never needed them, so i would go ahead and disable them if they bother you. I find them to be more... Diverse, than just having one texture. Same reason i have Natural textures on, it makes the ores not look exactly the same.
How is putting them into an compressor hard? I find that having to click the crafting table 9 times is harder and more tedious than just putting a stack of gems/ores into the compressor.
Especially with the hopper 
i freakin' love those things...
i freakin' love those things...Well, I don't like this mechanics, only because I tend not to start with IC2 since I found Factorization and you need diamond block to get ore processing going. Fortunately in GT you can configure everything (except I think scaffold nerf), so it isn't a problem.
you can still use the packager on copper!
odd... but meh.
For my 2c, On single player worlds I would probably heavily edit gregtech's configs, since the world not being loaded while minecraft isn't running would be a PITA for some of the 30 minute centrifuge recipes.
In multiplayer, I find gregtech to be an awesome way to keep the game fresh and new for more than a week. Even if you have gregtech's hard mode turned on, doing vanilla until you have diamonds, getting an enchanting table, using your 30 coal levels to get fortune, and mining for a few hours will get you enough for some generators, an MFE, an electrolyzer, a centrifuge and a blast furnace. From there it's a hop skip and jump to quarry. Nether timing is up to you, but even without it - the jetpack will allow you to get to and from your quarry rather quickly, and once the quarry has finished a 64x64 mining run you should have everything you need to skyrocket to at least nuclear tech. The key is to actually use the alt gregtech recipes to your advantage - electrum in circuits saves you tons of copper and rubber, and once you get aluminium you save on your advanced alloy. Fortune should net you more coal than you can use, and petrogen + fuel is wonderful for providing you base with MJ and EU.
3rd week of casual weekday play and a few sleepless saturday nights have gotten me a nuke with nuclear control, all the TE stuff, enderchests for a quarry and a mobile oil rig, 5 sorting machines into 16 colours + barrels of awesome, 15KW bluelectric power grid with furnaces and alloy furnaces and an bluelectric engine for runoff, energy cubes out the wazzoo and TC golem tech. Working on greg's multiblock structures now and looking forward to more fun stuff in the future (soul shards, steves carts, traincraft).
With the DW20 pack, I can't help but think I would have completed all the stuff + quantum suit + dead ender dragon and nether stars for beacons everywhere by week 1.5
for an even greater comparison, I got max tech in the mod that shall not be named 1.2.5 in 2 days following EE and a cow milking machine.
odd... but meh.
For my 2c, On single player worlds I would probably heavily edit gregtech's configs, since the world not being loaded while minecraft isn't running would be a PITA for some of the 30 minute centrifuge recipes.
In multiplayer, I find gregtech to be an awesome way to keep the game fresh and new for more than a week. Even if you have gregtech's hard mode turned on, doing vanilla until you have diamonds, getting an enchanting table, using your 30 coal levels to get fortune, and mining for a few hours will get you enough for some generators, an MFE, an electrolyzer, a centrifuge and a blast furnace. From there it's a hop skip and jump to quarry. Nether timing is up to you, but even without it - the jetpack will allow you to get to and from your quarry rather quickly, and once the quarry has finished a 64x64 mining run you should have everything you need to skyrocket to at least nuclear tech. The key is to actually use the alt gregtech recipes to your advantage - electrum in circuits saves you tons of copper and rubber, and once you get aluminium you save on your advanced alloy. Fortune should net you more coal than you can use, and petrogen + fuel is wonderful for providing you base with MJ and EU.
3rd week of casual weekday play and a few sleepless saturday nights have gotten me a nuke with nuclear control, all the TE stuff, enderchests for a quarry and a mobile oil rig, 5 sorting machines into 16 colours + barrels of awesome, 15KW bluelectric power grid with furnaces and alloy furnaces and an bluelectric engine for runoff, energy cubes out the wazzoo and TC golem tech. Working on greg's multiblock structures now and looking forward to more fun stuff in the future (soul shards, steves carts, traincraft).
With the DW20 pack, I can't help but think I would have completed all the stuff + quantum suit + dead ender dragon and nether stars for beacons everywhere by week 1.5
for an even greater comparison, I got max tech in the mod that shall not be named 1.2.5 in 2 days following EE and a cow milking machine.
Packager's still super valuable for all kinds of stuff (stone brick, sandstone, making XyCraft take up less space).
I've been making a Let's play for the past weeks (currently closing to episode 30, when I will switch to MC1.4.7), and I must say that there is a simple reason for not using GT in DW20's let's play: Too much things to do, in too little time (and I am not talking about mining, but about crafting!). You have to do a bunch of things in one hand, a bunch on another, and tons of stuff to do per mod. Also, the config options plays against the mod: it is hard to explain how to play with a mod for a mod when your settings might be different from somebody else's.
Personally, I found a bunch of failures on Gregtech's planning:
- Lava Generators: access the Nether (buckets, patience, lava, water, and a "cast" gets you the portal) and use a Nether chest, Mystcraft's portal (with Railcraft's liquid loader/unloader) or one of the new Thermal Expansion's "teleporting pipes" to move lava from there to your base. Storage it into a Railcraft tank. Lava generators (IC2) are cheap and more efficient than water/wind ones.
- Advanced solar panels: if you have this, the cost of making a solar panel with the default GT recipe acts as a bottleneck only, the tier 2 solars are 8 times as powerful as a single one... and cheaper.
- Other solar mods: having Redpower 2 means you have a cheap way (iron + blue doped wafers) to get solar power (or wind power!) and it now has a MJ generator. So you "need" IC2 EUs only for compressors, extractors, and few more things (more advanced, granted).
- Multiblock structures: While I love them, having to run the cables to the actual machine block rather than any part of the multiblock can be a pain, not to mention very ugly when you have to deal with differently layered machines (let's say the industrial furnace and the implossion compressor...). Being able to place the finishing block, at least, on any side of the machine would be better.
On a personal note, I tend to prefer small numbers without extra "0" rather than big thousands. I mean, I played World of Warcraft for years, and the difference between me with lv 60 and me with lv 80 was the numbers healed, not the ratio between cost and effect.
However, I find the mod more than interesting, specially since I tend to hate devoting more than half an hour or so per gaming session to mine (some mining is fine, ducting tape to my mouse's left button is... farming. I got tired of farming years ago).
Personally, I found a bunch of failures on Gregtech's planning:
- Lava Generators: access the Nether (buckets, patience, lava, water, and a "cast" gets you the portal) and use a Nether chest, Mystcraft's portal (with Railcraft's liquid loader/unloader) or one of the new Thermal Expansion's "teleporting pipes" to move lava from there to your base. Storage it into a Railcraft tank. Lava generators (IC2) are cheap and more efficient than water/wind ones.
- Advanced solar panels: if you have this, the cost of making a solar panel with the default GT recipe acts as a bottleneck only, the tier 2 solars are 8 times as powerful as a single one... and cheaper.
- Other solar mods: having Redpower 2 means you have a cheap way (iron + blue doped wafers) to get solar power (or wind power!) and it now has a MJ generator. So you "need" IC2 EUs only for compressors, extractors, and few more things (more advanced, granted).
- Multiblock structures: While I love them, having to run the cables to the actual machine block rather than any part of the multiblock can be a pain, not to mention very ugly when you have to deal with differently layered machines (let's say the industrial furnace and the implossion compressor...). Being able to place the finishing block, at least, on any side of the machine would be better.
On a personal note, I tend to prefer small numbers without extra "0" rather than big thousands. I mean, I played World of Warcraft for years, and the difference between me with lv 60 and me with lv 80 was the numbers healed, not the ratio between cost and effect.
However, I find the mod more than interesting, specially since I tend to hate devoting more than half an hour or so per gaming session to mine (some mining is fine, ducting tape to my mouse's left button is... farming. I got tired of farming years ago).
The advanced solar issue is not greg's fault. the advanced solars are from another IC2 extension mod, and is not part of gregtech. that mod's main purpose was to allow the use of solars without all the server killing lag. personally i never use them. they are cheaty imho, and on my ssp world i don't have to deal with lag from the standard ones unless i mass spam them in the hundreds. the joys of not sharing cpu power with others ya know.
The lava thing IS anoying.I agree, but without severely altering the nether, and the burn value of lava buckets in a furnace there is little one can do about it,
Imagine the uproar if someone nerfed that properly.
also it's not only gregtech that allows op nether lava exploits. TE's magmatic engines does this too. except it's for MJ's instead of EU's. Making lava a valuable source of resources is a nice touch that makes using the lava just for power less appealing in the long term tho. we can thank greg for that option. it surely helps me to keep some restraint on the lava use. (I blame TE for having magma crucibles that turns lava infinite tho. I understand the logic, but i don't agree with it.)
other solar mods: Well... Redpower solars.. mkay.. but that doesn't affect IC2 much. and you need a lot of them to make any headway for MJ's. those engines gobble down prodigious amounts of it. and tbh. I think redpower has it right when it comes to wind. those windmills have to be replaced regularly. altho at the expense of only renewable resources... (string and sticks) for that maintenance cost i think it is fair that it is on the somewhat productive end of the scale.
I agree wholehartedly about some of the multiblock structures. they are a bit meh in regards to how the look and operate, but hey. the mod is still in development. I'm not expecting perfect polish from all my mods. just that they don't destroy the world every time they update.
Lastly: small numbers. well not always, but ealing with a lot of artificial 0's that are there just to make something appear more awesome IS silly. I strongly prefer my energy units au naturelle. like redpower and Universal Electricity does it...
Lava: Yeah, i agree it can be extremelly overpowered, i think that you should need to get steam from it, since that's what you are doing technically, and use the railcraft methods of dealing with steam, i think it would balance it quite alot, especially if it produced a waste product, like slag that could bottleneck your production.... hmmm.... *runs to greg to suggest this*
RP2 power... Have you done any testing on it? It's one of the WORST power generation methods. for example, solars produce a measly 200 watts each, and the massive, and annoyingly variable vert. wind turbines only produce 1 kw. thermopiles are just silly for considering as a powersource 0.5 w per thermopile at stackable efficiency. Now, let us also remember that Redpower has very very high losses, maybe 10 percent loss per 3 blocks at high voltage. so if you want to have a solar at the top of a mountain? forget it. Also, the Bluelectric furnace (and alloy equivalent) uses about 1 kw. (perhaps a little more) And if you are thinking about using it for Buildcraft power, it runs a ratio of about 1 kw = 1 mj (that's 2000 thermopiles to get one mj per tick btw) ... Not going to lie, it's a nice renewable power source if you have 30 stacks of nickolite and iron, but outside of that, forget it.
And have you tried IC2 wind in a tower formation? it actually makes a very reasonable amount of power, about 3 (1.5eu/t all day, as opposed to the avg 0.5 eu/t from solars) times better than solars per cost (if done right).
I absolutely love the multiblock machine idea, i find it rather ridiculous that you would get any semblance of efficiency in a design that compact, considering they are technically steam engines. (unless they are miraculous thermopile technology) Having to produce a machine that processes at higher efficiency is very nice. And a few hints here, replace air with lava in your Ind. blast furnace and that multiblock machines can share casings (the walls especially).
Just being devil's advocate here.
RP2 power... Have you done any testing on it? It's one of the WORST power generation methods. for example, solars produce a measly 200 watts each, and the massive, and annoyingly variable vert. wind turbines only produce 1 kw. thermopiles are just silly for considering as a powersource 0.5 w per thermopile at stackable efficiency. Now, let us also remember that Redpower has very very high losses, maybe 10 percent loss per 3 blocks at high voltage. so if you want to have a solar at the top of a mountain? forget it. Also, the Bluelectric furnace (and alloy equivalent) uses about 1 kw. (perhaps a little more) And if you are thinking about using it for Buildcraft power, it runs a ratio of about 1 kw = 1 mj (that's 2000 thermopiles to get one mj per tick btw) ... Not going to lie, it's a nice renewable power source if you have 30 stacks of nickolite and iron, but outside of that, forget it.
And have you tried IC2 wind in a tower formation? it actually makes a very reasonable amount of power, about 3 (1.5eu/t all day, as opposed to the avg 0.5 eu/t from solars) times better than solars per cost (if done right).
I absolutely love the multiblock machine idea, i find it rather ridiculous that you would get any semblance of efficiency in a design that compact, considering they are technically steam engines. (unless they are miraculous thermopile technology) Having to produce a machine that processes at higher efficiency is very nice. And a few hints here, replace air with lava in your Ind. blast furnace
and that multiblock machines can share casings (the walls especially).Just being devil's advocate here.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on rp2 wind turbines as a poor source of power.
1) power loss is in concordance with ohms law Potential (V) = Current (I) * Resistance (R), each wire and machine is 0.02 ohms and the 10kV wires are 2 ohms. Power (P) = V * I or I^2 * R. There is no loss of energy, only an increase in resistance which leads to a loss of power (You will still produce the same amount of energy, it will just take longer to get anywhere unless you run parallel wires or increase the voltage/resistance ratio).
2) the vertical turbines seem to fluctuate between 0W production on a completely still day and over 9KW production during a storm. On an average day, a wind turbine seems to output around 2.5KW. I started my last base out on RP2 power for the challenge, and while starting with hobbyist steam engines is easier and cheaper, once you get a wind turbine going you don't need to worry about fuel requirements at all. This gives you a great deal of flexibility in the midgame and indeed I decided to go for 6 turbines supplemented by 40 or so solar panels. This runs 6 bluelectric furnaces which I use for all normal smelting recipes, 4 bluelectric alloy furnaces, and plugs into a redstone energy storage cell which helps to run a refinery, pulverizer, induction smelter, magma crucible and some liquid transposers. The system gets 12 free MJ per tick from red power on an average day (20 during a storm) and 72 MJ per tick from a bank of 12 combustion engines which I turn on in times of increased power need.
Edit: Thermopiles put out 50W in optimal setup with snow and lava. I believe with water you get somewhere around 35W. 0.5W is impossible to run red power2 machines from, and indeed a single thermopile runs my 5 sorting machines, and can probably run around 2 more. The amount of thermopiles for 1MJ is between 20 and 40, not 2000 lol. for reference, 5 solar panels is 1 MJ during the day, a cost of 5 silver 36 nikolite and around 4 sand and 4 coal.
1) power loss is in concordance with ohms law Potential (V) = Current (I) * Resistance (R), each wire and machine is 0.02 ohms and the 10kV wires are 2 ohms. Power (P) = V * I or I^2 * R. There is no loss of energy, only an increase in resistance which leads to a loss of power (You will still produce the same amount of energy, it will just take longer to get anywhere unless you run parallel wires or increase the voltage/resistance ratio).
2) the vertical turbines seem to fluctuate between 0W production on a completely still day and over 9KW production during a storm. On an average day, a wind turbine seems to output around 2.5KW. I started my last base out on RP2 power for the challenge, and while starting with hobbyist steam engines is easier and cheaper, once you get a wind turbine going you don't need to worry about fuel requirements at all. This gives you a great deal of flexibility in the midgame and indeed I decided to go for 6 turbines supplemented by 40 or so solar panels. This runs 6 bluelectric furnaces which I use for all normal smelting recipes, 4 bluelectric alloy furnaces, and plugs into a redstone energy storage cell which helps to run a refinery, pulverizer, induction smelter, magma crucible and some liquid transposers. The system gets 12 free MJ per tick from red power on an average day (20 during a storm) and 72 MJ per tick from a bank of 12 combustion engines which I turn on in times of increased power need.
Edit: Thermopiles put out 50W in optimal setup with snow and lava. I believe with water you get somewhere around 35W. 0.5W is impossible to run red power2 machines from, and indeed a single thermopile runs my 5 sorting machines, and can probably run around 2 more. The amount of thermopiles for 1MJ is between 20 and 40, not 2000 lol. for reference, 5 solar panels is 1 MJ during the day, a cost of 5 silver 36 nikolite and around 4 sand and 4 coal.
You must have misunderstood me, i did not believe that the output of the machines was affected by the resistance, but the overall output due to resistance loss ( i have taken physics before lol) i had a turbine about 20 blocks above my battery box (which is also quite lossy for the record) and it would lose about half of the 2kw of energy it made at a maximum, (no storms in the desert) the switch to high voltage made a surprisingly small difference, considering the increase in voltage, i have to wonder how exactly the loss is taken into account. and by the by, why exactly are you using 6 Blulectric engines? From what i've heard, they can scale up to about 100 mj/t each, unless your turbines are very far apart, i would consolidate. My information may be a little biased, as i have not extensively tested the wind turbines. And indeed, the thermopiles can produce a high amount of energy like that, i suppose my figure came from a tower test, with lava and water, leading to an inefficient design. As well as the fact that i was running my base in a desert.
6 turbines, 1 engine is my setup because I use bluelectricty for more than MJ (furnaces). If you just want them for MJ and not for Bluelectricty it's actually better to have as many engines as you have power sources, as MJ through conduit has no power loss over distance and a 5% flat energy loss rate. I use 10KV wiring from all of my turbines because at 50 Amps of a full tilt wind turbine, power loss starts at 8 normal wires and you lose half at 16 wires (thank you omicron - you test things so that I don't have to).
I understand when people like gregtech, but not when they can't play without it. Its a decent mod that adds a lot of high tier item to the game and adds a little more challenge. But its not like the game ends once you get a quantum suit. I think its good to get high tier stuff earlier on so then you can build really awesome stuff