Gunpowder

[netmc]

Diamonds are worthless to me. I'd trade them 1:1 for AE quartz or 1:4 for copper if I could.

I know what you mean. After I got the required diamonds to make an enchanting table, draw plate, saw and a few other machines, I stopped needing diamonds. I have half a stack right now with nothing to use them on. I still need plenty of iron and copper however. Those always seem in short supply.

AE quartz normally gives 1/1 of quartz and dust. You can silk touch the ore and put it through the GT grinder for 10 dust, but a much better option is to use a fortune III pick on it. I received oodles of quartz and dust out of it, and could convert the crystals for way more than the 10 dusts from the GT grinder.

Back to the original question. The only method I know of getting gunpowder that hasn't been discussed yet is using thaumcraft to manufacture it. Unfortunately, I know no way to automate it, and the extra aspects released would add a lot of flux to the environment unless you have already gotten pretty far down the research path. It's not feasible for the amount of gunpowder you need for iridium plates.[DOUBLEPOST=1365484148][/DOUBLEPOST]hmm.. You might be able to use the monster spawner block from MFR. I believe you need monster essence (which can be taken from an easier to acquire mob), and a specimen in a safari net (or pok-e-ball). Haven't used MFR much, but I know it has some strange machines that might be useful for this.

 

[RavynousHunter]

Only half a stack with little use? I'm sitting pretty with nearly 20 stacks of diamonds. That's AFTER crafting a Gravity Suit, full quantum armour, and an advanced diamond drill. Then, just for good measure, fuckin enchanting -all- that with books I managed to create from all the XP I got from making ludicrous amounts of charcoal early on.

Just go to hell, dig up some nether diamond ore, burn it in a TE induction smelter, then place and break with a Fortune pick (or, in my case, drill). Bingo! Gems are now so easy to get its stupid, and I'm seriously considering grinding down a few stacks of rubies and sapphires just to get the tasty, tasty metals out of 'em.

Hell, I'm working on supplementing my bank of 8 thermal generators with a combination of charcoal power and converted steam power. I need a -lot- of steel, too...my boilers can't keep up with my insatiable thirst for power!

Also, Nether Ores makes getting gunpowder pretty trivial, too. PROTIP: Get an industrial electrolyzer soon as you can support one. Use it to process all the sphalerite dust you get outta hell to give you sulfur (for gunpowder), and zinc, which can be used as a supplement for tin in several recipes, most notably mixed metal ingots and brass.

Every stack of sphalerite dust gives you half a stack of both sulfur and zinc, and the only thing you need to worry about afterwards is saltpeter, methinks. You get a LOT of sphalerite outta hell, too. I'm talking canvas bags full of the crap off just a few veins, which are naturally gigantic, along with some fair experience.

 

[ultradolp]

Strip a waste land bare of its cracked sand with the wand of equal trade and grind the cracked sand to dust before centrifuging it to get salt peter. Now go into the nether and mine a lot of Greg techs nether ores while avoiding the ones that anger the pigmen. Process those nether resources to get a ton of suffer to combine with your salt peter to make a lot of gun powder.

Or you can go the easy route and get a creeper soul shard which you can combine with a much easier to get zombie or skelly teir 5 shard to get your creeper soul shard. Also note that combining soul shards is a unintended bug and the new versions of soul shards will nerf it as well as getting rid of rare drops from soul shard spawned mobs, aka no more wither skelly head farms.

Oh wait, now pigman agros when you mine the nether ore? I heard other player on my server saying they are assaulted while mining, I thought they just accidentally hit the pigman

 

[RavynousHunter]

Nerp, mining hell ores (aside from the GT ores) pisses off pigmen big time. But, again, mining lasers used to be a fair workaround for this, but I'm not sure if they still are ore not.

 

[PonyKuu]

OK, maybe diamonds are not an issue (if I'm going to use my turtle swarm, I'll need a lot of them, however), but other thing is steel. You can use RC blast furnace, of course but there are nice Greg Blast Furnace....

 

[danidas]

Oh wait, now pigman agros when you mine the nether ore? I heard other player on my server saying they are assaulted while mining, I thought they just accidentally hit the pigman

The nether ores mod by powercrystals which adds the nether versions of the over world ores has some interesting effects when you mine its ores. Namely they like to explode and the pigmen take offense to you stealing their pretty rocks.

 

[bigtwisty]

Also, did you know that you can meld two soulshard on the anvil? The one on the left is which monster the resulting shard will be.

Awesome!! One extra big like...
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A reasonable facsimile of intelligence...

 

[b0bst3r]

Yeh to me that's an exploit, you can take an easy to make mob shard (like cow, pig etc) and merge/meld it with a difficult one (like ghast) to make a tier 5 ghast shard.

 

[Poppycocks]

Yeh to me that's an exploit, you can take an easy to make mob shard (like cow, pig etc) and merge/meld it with a difficult one (like ghast) to make a tier 5 ghast shard.

Yeah, I think that soul should have an associated price tag of sorts. The cheaper the easier to get. Overworld passive > overworld agresive with spawners > enders > nether with spawners > overworld agresive w/o spawners > nether w/o spawners.

For example a t1 firebat shard should count for a full one when used to fill up a cow shard.

I wouldn't completely remove it though.

 

[Zjarek_S]

Yeah, I think that soul should have an associated price tag of sorts. The cheaper the easier to get. Overworld passive > overworld agresive with spawners > enders > nether with spawners > overworld agresive w/o spawners > nether w/o spawners.

For example a t1 firebat shard should count for a full one when used to fill up a cow shard.

I wouldn't completely remove it though.

Grind zombie pigmen for everything?

 

[Poppycocks]

Grind zombie pigmen for everything?

I don't see why not, that would practically mean building a rather large contraption just to be able to do that.

Remove soul stealer, make souls only stealable with vile swords and the balance is perfect.

 

[danidas]

Toward the beginning of direwolf's latest SMP series he talked with the dev behind soul shards and it was clear that they are getting a serious rework in a upcoming version of the mod. For one thing the mod will be fleshed out into a magic/tech mod like thuamcraft but powered by the souls of slain foes. Also the soul shards themselves will be nerfed/reworked but unsure of the details other then that they will no longer drop rare drops including wither skeleton heads from spawned mobs.

 

[Poppycocks]

Toward the beginning of direwolf's latest SMP series he talked with the dev behind soul shards and it was clear that they are getting a serious rework in a upcoming version of the mod. For one thing the mod will be fleshed out into a magic/tech mod like thuamcraft but powered by the souls of slain foes. Also the soul shards themselves will be nerfed/reworked but unsure of the details other then that they will no longer drop rare drops including wither skeleton heads from spawned mobs.

By doing which the mod will completely lose it's usefulness.

I like the MFR way, it needs fuel. And the fuel is .. well, souls of other creatures. That's imo perfectly sensible and I'll be transfering to that system eventually.

EDIT: Okay, that's way too harsh. On the other hand and I can't be sure if I'm interested in what ever will be left. Wait and see I guess.

 

[danidas]

Looking at the latest post by Shadowdragon on the minecraft forums it appears that soul shards will be nerfed across the board for 1.5. So more than likely the minefactory system will replace it in most peoples builds. Which makes me hope that they add it to more mod packs including mindcrack but that is up to Guude.

 

[PonyKuu]

If soul shards would be nerfed, I won't use them... Cause I don't like grinding. I don't see the point of increasing the grinding time or something like that. It would make mod more annoying. If there are any other ways to make it more interesting and not so "easy" (BTW, why it's easy?) - I like it. But just simple grinding is awful

 

[Zjarek_S]

Killing n creepers -> grind. Making a mob trap with sorting system for creepers to easily fill up a soul shard -> not a grind. My main problem with soul shard is that they are just too powerful, they ignore light level, distance limit of vanilla spawners and world mob cap, adding crazy rates of mob spawning. This can also be deadly for servers, even normal spawners can cause huge amount of server lag, soul shards make it a lot easier.

 

[PonyKuu]

You can use lover tiers of soulshards. And I don't see how mobtrap with a sorter helps with SS. You still need to kill them manually. It's almost the same as sitting next to a blaze spawner and killing them, which is annoying.

 

[RetroGamer1224]

If I remember one of Shdws videos showed that using a soul shard with something one can make a mob item. Like a creeper pickaxe. Looked really cool.

 

[b0bst3r]

Yeah one swing and it blows the living crap out of everything (Inc you)

 

[RetroGamer1224]

Not the point of the thread so back on topic.

I think either having access to the mini ghasts in twilight forest is one way to go for gun powders. Of course a good old mob drop also works. Yeah a lot of different mobs can spawn but you sitll can get creepers. Have lava blade for insta kill ot use fists to nail mobs if want exp.