My new world setup is virtually the same everytime:
- I mine and get a little bit of TE3 automated ore processing going.
- I make a smeltery and get some tinkerer's construct tools.
- I make a forestry tree farm, which quickly supplies me with nearly unlimited charcoal/saplings.
- I start pumping lava out of the nether, resulting in 2 methods of basically-unlimited power only a few hours into a world.
- I set up a quarry.
- I start messing with Thaumcraft, but tend to stop messing with it after getting the boots, equal trade, and some golems.
- I set up the golems to automate a basic wheat/food farm.
- By now I have basically infinite materials just from the quarry, so I setup a basic AE storage system.
- I set up a couple 36HP steam boilers for no apparent reason, resulting in very overkill power generation.
- After struggling to find anything else to do I generally start working on bee/tree breeding, but I never get very far.
- At this point I usually stop playing, come back a month later, and repeat process.
The whole process generally is done in 2-3 days, and around 20-25 hours. I have a hard time branching off and using mods I didn't "learn" the game with, mainly because it's pretty hard to learn new mods and I end up wasting materials/time. I've looked at my other options and they usually don't appeal to me for various reasons, either they are harder to automate or just more annoying to setup (Arcane bore vs Quarry, etc). I've tried building, but I lack creativity of any kind and tend to build 9x9s for most my stuff. Playing by yourself doesn't help either because making anything impressive doesn't mean much when no one else is there to see it.
How long do you guys tend to last on a new world?
You have the same complaints I had for months. Almost exactly the same. Although I would try new mods, which you should definitely try, it makes things fun again. I was frustrated with the fact that one day of automated mining would give me enough resources to build everything. As a guy said on the IC2 forums recently "I like to build things
for a reason. Building just to build is boring for me."
Survival implies 'struggle' and you aren't ahving any sort of struggle to succeed, which it sounds like is what you are looking for. My own solution meant removing a bunch of the most efficient mods and some specific items that make things too easy (IMO). The biggest solution, unfortunately, is gregtech. It gives a lot of what you are probably looking for, but also adds a ton of crafting which a lot of people dont like. If you havent tried it, try it. You wont be in the situation you are in within a couple days, thats for sure.
Forestry has difficulty levels. Try moving up to Hard. You use fertilizer faster so you cant pump out as much wood. Remove Ender Chests mod and Tesseracts, now getting lava nether is a real challenge. Gregtech makes quarries a mid game item, but if you dont use that increase the power draw of the quarry in teh config file by 10x. Now it takes 500 mj/t to get it going full speed.
A gregtech industrial grinder is slow, which means more power draw per ore. It takes more power per head, again more power draw. 4 heads takes 512 eu/t or almost two full boilers to run. Compare this to a Pulverizer which takes 4 mj/t (rf, etc.). This is the big imbalance in how mods are made. Mods offer ways to get massive power really fast... and then have each machine use a tiny tiny trickle of power. They want to ensure their items get used early in a world.
You can also set the tinkers construct smeltery to 1 ingot per ore, so you have to use other ways to double ores. Cut the fuel values for TE machines to amke them burn more fuel, and/or use the steel and diamond recipes so slow you down even more.
There are a lot of other ways to do this too. Pretending there is no infinite water is HUGE, and a lot of fun. Or use a real mod that makes water finite. Creativity for bigger builds just takes practice, many of the people who build better are older too, which helps. Youve seen more things, have more ideas, etc. If you want more ideas send me a PM.
