I am progressing at breakneck speed. It's really time to slow it down and build something because the whole point of this thing is to stop and smell the roses. This weekend, like Friday after work until Sunday night, I will be packing up my PC and heading down for a Minecraft marathon weekend with two others from my server. I'm going to spend some time helping them learn how to do some stuff, but hopefully I'll get a chance to get up there and start building above ground, nice looking things instead of just digging a giant hole underground.
Not that I don't like my giant hole, mind you. In fact, there's something about it. I absolutely love it. It is a damn pleasure to be in my base. Rebecca thinks it's just a mess, but I think it's a beautiful mess and I love it. There's a method to my madness, BTW. I feel like I haven't *had* to mine this entire run because of this new method I'm running. No more strip mining for me! This is more fun, leaves behind something cool to look at and lets me fight a bunch of monsters as I go along. It's quite profitable, too.
So, last night, I decided to run a test. My game ran out of memory while I was making the camera path last night, so I'll record it tonight instead, but I did get this one on the record. The terms of the test are to see how many resources I can pick up, as well as how big of a hole I can dig, using the AA drill, 5x5 with max fortune upgrade, two quintuple batteries (16m RF each) and my ring of magnetizing, one stack of baked potatoes and one stack of torches.
I didn't quite make it the full 32 million. For one, about 6 million of that went into the ring of magnetizing. I could cut that part out and cover more ground, but that's just no fun. For another, I actually ran out of food and torches around the same time with about 4 million left. I kept going for as long as I could, maybe another half a million from there, but I had also amassed 45 levels and I am intentionally not collecting any XP passively, so I didn't want to die and waste it. Scaling health is about half way full and the monsters I run into now are no joke.
So, I picked up about 22 million RF worth in the end. Being fair, I was never going to cut out the magnet, so if we include that then it was about 28 million worth. After I completed the run, I went back to my base and jotted down the totals for diamonds, iron and gold just as a few things to count, then sent in everything I picked up all at once. Mind you, I also didn't have to stop and unload my inventory at all, though I did twice have to rearrange a few things in my bags. The final tally by the time everything was done processing (and my current personal single-trip manual mining record) :
Total dig time: about 90 minutes @ y=11, 45 Levels (between mining and kills), 206 diamonds, 227 gold, 1064 iron. By the time the Autosort 9000 finished auto-processing my loot, I had passively recharged my 32 million RF batteries on the wireless charger.
Charging from pure canola power, and not a reserve. I had to update my ExU2, which emptied my barrels, so that was all as it grew, thought that does include the time I was mining. That is one 9x9 AA autofarm with all 81 blocks under greenhouse glass, pumped through multiple canola presses, sent through an array of fermenting barrels, into an array of 10 oil generators. I haven't totally finished this system, I need to set up more power up top to run the actual farm now, so I don't know what the limits are, but this gets me about 1000 RF/t with renewable energy.
For what this is for, this is a great little power system. This is more than enough to run this base, but don't worry, this is just early to mid-game stuff to get me through to the next steps. My minecolonies town will run off windmills, water mills and a lightning rod. And I will separately have a full rainbow generator setup as well as deep resonance, possibly a nuclear reactor, and most likely a DE reactor at some point. But for right now, I'm sittin' pretty on all the fluff stuff. And out of excuses to not be building.