I live here now

[KingTriaxx]

EnderIO has an inventory panel. It's basically a cut-rate Applied Energistics system. Every chest/drawer system you want to access gets an EnderIO conduit in Input/Output mode and then an Inventory Awareness upgrade. You can then place down an Inventory panel on the wall and have complete access to anything with an Inventory Awareness upgrade, as well as the ability to craft with it. It does require you make Nutrient Distillation, and pipe it in via EIO Pressurized Fluid Conduits, but it can be a very good way to have complete access to your items.

That's exactly what it means.

 

[Drbretto]

EnderIO has an inventory panel. It's basically a cut-rate Applied Energistics system. Every chest/drawer system you want to access gets an EnderIO conduit in Input/Output mode and then an Inventory Awareness upgrade. You can then place down an Inventory panel on the wall and have complete access to anything with an Inventory Awareness upgrade, as well as the ability to craft with it. It does require you make Nutrient Distillation, and pipe it in via EIO Pressurized Fluid Conduits, but it can be a very good way to have complete access to your items.

That's exactly what it means.

I don't what what ANY of that means, haha! I'm still pretty noobish, ya know

Anyway, storage drawers looks like a gift from God right now! I totally had the wrong idea about that mod. This is totally, completely, utterly what I was looking for. This will end up being much easier than I thought. I can't wait to go home.

My old buildcraft sorter looks silly now, lol. I don't care, I still love that monstrosity.

 

[Drbretto]

Still no video, prompting anyone who may have been willing to keep up with this world to immediately glaze over. It's still a big disorganized shell of a foundation so nothing would make sense to anyone but me anyway. Once I have a complete inventory management system, I will record another video.

But, I did finally get to sit down and do a looot of setup work, even if it is still ugly. Right now, my base is a metaphor for my brain. Completely disorganized beautiful mess that makes sense to no one but me, but once I have the full idea of what I want to get done in place, I will go back over everything with a much more efficient and pleasing design.

But, in the background things are going. I have a new design for a mob spawner. I dug a foundation where my base is with my first quarry and built a platform 30 blocks under the main floor of my base. Sadly this was before discovering better builders wands, which are just amazing. But I built this one manually. It is a rectangle, so I have to two long sides lined with openblocks fans on redstone blocks pushing everything towards the middle, then a strip of extra utilities conveyor belts three blocks wide all pushing towards a golden spike in the center, with a vacuum hopper above that. No water, so it produces ender pearls which is my current main bottleneck. With a dynamic lighting mod, you can drop a torch and it makes it a light source in item form, so you can drop a torch anywhere in the pit and watch it get sent to the middle and get sucked up. It's neat.

Thanks for the Storage Drawers idea. This is my new favorite thing ever. It's also going to take me a damn month to design it the way I want it to go, lol. I will be lining a 25x16 room all the way around, at least two blocks high. I need to cover *everything* so it's going to take a while to get it all down the way I want it.

Another new favorite thing ever is the ender-thermic pump. It's perfect. Covers the chunk loading, powers its own generator and pumps into an ender tank connected to my series of generators back at the base. Turning the lava into stone in the nether keeps it totally safe and painless to move as needed. Having a convenient, near infinite (for my current purposes) supply of RF is a godsend and helps set everything else up.

My fourth new favorite thing ever is the Autonomous Activator. First, I needed feathers for more angel blocks, so I set up a small pen around a vacuum hopper in the middle of a 7x7 fenced in area. I put a couple of chickens and sheep in there and any feathers or eggs the chickens drop get sucked into the hopper and fed into "the machine". But I also ran a line from my generator out to that pen and set up an autonomous activator with sheers, wheat and seeds, and it automatically sheers the sheep as they walk over it, which gets sucked into the vacuum hopper automatically, and occasionally breeds both animals automatically. I just sat there for like an hour watching it happen.

But, as great as it is to have this productive base, a major lesson was learned this weekend. Always save some raw potatoes just in case. Every raw potato I had was in the auto-farm when some rogue water broke the redstone signal, which opened the gates and "farmed" the patches. I forgot to go pick them up and they disappeared, thus ending my free food forever plans. Now I need to find another village.

Hopefully I will have something worth showing next week!

 

[Drbretto]

Keep moving if you're looking for media again. It's getting closer, but there are a few important details I need to finish up before I can show anything still. Probably best to come back and read these AFTER the next video is posted for context, but I need to type it up while it's all fresh on my mind.

Functionally, the base is completely solid. It auto-smelts and auto-builds compressed cobble. I am using the Extra utilities pipes now because of a feature they had that I'm not even using anymore, but I am having issues feeding the auto crafting tables with anything other than buildcraft pipes so I have something of a hybrid setup going on. It's ugly, but that's all in the basement.

Sadly, I could not get the Extra Utilities Mod Sorting Pipes to work the way I had envisioned with the storage drawers. It looks like it simply just doesn't work. EU Mod Sorting Pipes are supposed to only allow items into a chest if they are from the same mod as an item inside it, or if the chest is empty. This works well enough with normal chests, but I was hoping to bypass the chests and go straight to the drawer controllers. Unfortunately, it seems to treat each drawer as its own chest, not everything under the controller, so it effectively did nothing at all.

Fine, plan B. It actually turned out that the room is 25 meters long, which means it can just BARELY fit with a single drawer controller dead center. I set up some trim to make it all a single unit and will have to manually sort everything into groups. This is going to be a monumental task because I'm not just setting it up to have all my favorite things and everything else gets stuffed in a chest up there. I'm building this thing big enough to hold every single item I will ever have, minus one chest in the master bedroom with a few specific things to be kept away from the rest for safety sake. A lesson learned from the potato incident last week, where I accidentally cooked my last potato.

Speaking of which, I did finally get another potato from the juicer. This didn't happen until after I swapped out the gold spike for a diamond spike, which might confirm that I was totally wrong about gold spikes counting as player hits. Or it could be total coincidence. Either way, I have enacted a new system to prevent any future potato famines. My auto-farm 5000 has two 7x7 patches that get harvested simultaneously from dropping a line of water source blocks in the middle, pushing the plants into two different vacuum hoppers. One is connected to the Auto Sorter 9000, where it will split off, cook, then sort the baked potatoes automatically. The other vacuum hopper is not connected to anything. I have to go down, pick them up and it'll usually have enough to replant both sides fully or nearly full. On top of this, I have also separated a stack of raw potatoes and stored them manually in a seed bank in the master bedroom, which is the safest place in the world, just in case something stupid happens again.

Next update will have pretty pretty pictures or a video, I promise. I just need to finish some key parts before it's ready for public viewing. I'm not a perfectionist by any means, but it really does just look like a bomb went off. It's functional, but it's just not something any brain but my own erratic craziness can understand right now, lol.

 

[KingTriaxx]

EnderIO conduits seem to work with BC-Auto-crafting pretty well. Just remember it's got to go in on the side and out the bottom.

On the other hand, ExU has it's own autocrafting mechanic, though it's huge.

 

[Drbretto]

I'll try coming in on different angles. I learned yesterday that that totally matters with the furnaces, and apparently the first time I had done it, I just accidentally did it right. I cooked a couple stacks of coal last night before I realized it, lol.

And I'm interested in using the Ender IO pipes because the TD pipes look to be prohibitively expensive right now (I have to make a handful of new machines, maybe I'm overestimating it), but so are the ender IO pipes! They need ender pearls, it looks like, which I am slowly generating, but I don't have an Enderman meat packing factory in the End or anything yet, so they come in slow. Though, I suppose I can leave them as-is and upgrade the whole system later or something.

As it is now, I need all the pearls I can get just to make that stupid QED thing that gave me massive sticker shock (I just wanted to make a couple lava generator x8's!). Then like 17 more or something like that to make everything I need for an Ender Quarry. Pearls pearls pearls man, that's my bottleneck right now.

 

[KingTriaxx]

One ender pearl gets you 24 Item Conduits. Judicious use of them can make them go a long way. For long distances, TD ducts are much cheaper than they look, since item ones can be crafted from just tin and lead. (It makes opaque ones you can't see items in, but if they're buried, it won't matter.

 

[Drbretto]

Oh, I didn't know they made that much. That changes the equation.

Are you saying the TD ducts don't need that hardened glass to make if I don't mind them being opaque? I mean, I can just suck it up and make the machines I need anyway because I'll need them eventually anyway and this is as good of a reason as any to get started.

The good news is, I'm starting to understand these different systems a little bit, so I can actually start following what people are saying, lol.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Yeah, the author noticed that the recipe was prohibitively expensive pre End.

Yup, that's exactly it. You'll probably want the machines anyway, but they're not absolutely necessary.

 

[Inaeo]

The investment in the TE machines is (for the most part) a one time thing, and they can be upgraded later to higher tiers as materials become available. Once the basic infrastructure is in place, you're pretty much set, although I usually add an extra set of two of certain machines for automation purposes, but I always leave a set available for small, hand crafted jobs and odd experiments. The base level machines are pretty cheap on the whole anyway, so it's not too hard to get started.

EnderIO Conduits have built in equivalents to base level TE Servos/Retrievers with the added benefit of being able to both insert and extract from the same face, bit they do eat into the ever precious Ender Pearl supply. TE Itemducts are cheap (opaque being cheapest) enough to lay a decent network relatively early, while a few Servo pumping items into the network and a series of Filters can make basic tasks simple to set up. They cannot be used to insert and extract from the same face, however.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Combining the two sets of conduit's and ducting can be a very useful thing. Going long distances with TD Ducting and then using a chest buffer when you arrive at a location containing machines for example. EnderIO conduit's also have an ME cable available, so you can jumper across ME networks, which you can't with TD ducts.

 

[Inaeo]

At this point, I have to try hard to not cross-mod everything. At least two parts of my last world had blocks/piping from no less than 8 different mods inside of a 5x5x5 area. It worked wonderfully for its purpose, but it was an absolute eyesore. So far this world has been more about making things look good first, then adding things behind the scenes to make them functional. Maybe when I get some things in place I'll finally make a thread of my own here to collect my random doings...

 

[Drbretto]

I like mixing them just to learn their quirks. You'll find that I fly by the seat of my pants, and sometimes I need a result to happen but I'm not overly concerned with elegance. There will always be some quick things I know how to whip up without thinking about it with buildcraft pipes and they'll need to connect to more intricately designed structures seemlessly.

I did a bunch more research throughout the day. Bounced around the various wikis checking out the exactitudes for a few different pipe systems. I have read a bunch on here from some of you in this very thread, but until I sat down and set up the EU pipes none of that made any damn sense to me. Now I'm starting to get the idea and I'm seeing the value of a few sets:

EU is cheap to make and was fairly cheap to upgrade to max pull-out speed. I had to MacGyver a clumsy coal feed into a stirling engine to keep up with a quarry with BC. And, it looks like there's an upgrade to send power wirelessly like a tesseract. But way cheaper.

TD gives some great, simple control. On a deeper look, it actually doesn't seem expensive at all. It just looked overwhelming because it was all unfamiliar. It looks like it would give me the most predictable, manipulable pathing that will make it the best choice for complicated systems. It's also going to get me into the mod that has those viaducts. That's going to be a fun month.

And enderIO will eventually render EU obsolete by the time I have the End industrialized. It will be the elegant solution in the end game due to its combined spaces.

And I'll still use buildcraft to visualize thought experiments, lol. They will all have roles.

 

[Drbretto]

At this point, I have to try hard to not cross-mod everything. At least two parts of my last world had blocks/piping from no less than 8 different mods inside of a 5x5x5 area. It worked wonderfully for its purpose, but it was an absolute eyesore. So far this world has been more about making things look good first, then adding things behind the scenes to make them functional. Maybe when I get some things in place I'll finally make a thread of my own here to collect my random doings...

I'm working my way towards this style as well. To start, I have to work backwards. I need that foundation first. Practically everything external right now is a placeholder or a skeleton. But, once I finish setting up a fully functional base, I move on to more visual projects, with a tech twist. I use the generated environment to inspire what I build and I have some fantastic ideas for things to try. I'm not a great artist by any means, but I have some really cool ideas for later down the line. With neat effects, like a sculpted face, but using pistons to change it from happy to angry at night, and maybe bleed lava out if the eyes or something like that.

 

[KingTriaxx]

I find it far more interesting to build everything with multiple mods. For example, I've done a BC Quarry, that dumps into Buildcraft pipes, that feed Railcraft train loaders, and into an over flow chest. The chest is then emptied by EnderIO back into the loaders. The train also drags along a pair of RF Carts that empty into the quarry by Mekanism power lines. I could have done it all with BC piping, or slapped on a Tesseract and called it a day, but that's not fun.

 

[masterx244]

I find it far more interesting to build everything with multiple mods. For example, I've done a BC Quarry, that dumps into Buildcraft pipes, that feed Railcraft train loaders, and into an over flow chest. The chest is then emptied by EnderIO back into the loaders. The train also drags along a pair of RF Carts that empty into the quarry by Mekanism power lines. I could have done it all with BC piping, or slapped on a Tesseract and called it a day, but that's not fun.

Same. needed a tree farm in my base but Forestry is a little bit too "boring", rigged up something with AE2 (item routing), RFTools (multiple Builders for mining (had to avoid some tech at the first layer above trees on autoremoveing) and replacing dirt that gets stripped by the tree roots) , XU2 (block placer for the saplings) and some plain vanilla reddustery.. parts look like a messy clusterfuck (time to reroute some cabling) but it works and it was fun to rig it up

 

[Drbretto]

After a momentary diversion, I went to go check out FTB Beyond. Gotta say, I don't even totally know what mods are in it anymore, but I can sure tell you I'm gonna have a hard time ever going back to 1.7 again. It's a huge difference in everything I care about. I'm going to lose weeks to chisels and bits....

But first! We need a seed. I care about one thing, a beautiful seed. I spend hours, sometimes days, resetting for random seeds until I find one that hits me. Beyond doesn't have much for world generators. I added real terrain generation and recurrent complex because both can be used server side only, which will make running a beyond server a lot easier.

This was my first look at RTG. It generates some amazing looking forests and the biome distribution feels much more like real world terrain. This unfortunately has the side effect of not having as fantastical looking mountains and whatnot, but after 9 hours over 2 days, I just loved this seed. I live here now:

I had a mishap when trying to do this recording. Spent half an hour trekking away from my base to this recurrent complex village in the mountains. I was exploring in real-time, all new to me, ending on this village and it didn't record. I was bummed, but I just started it back up and recorded it from the village back to my base. Getting lost a couple times in the process. Sorry it's so jittery. I wasn't planning to speed it up.

I'll get another one with shaders, too. I tried to record a similar trip but the game crashed when I went to finish up and I lost that whole recording, too.

Oh, and I priced I was better than direwolf20 by taking his famous 9x9 design and improving it on every way by adding 1 to both sides. That's right. 10x10. No one has ever even attempted it.

 

[Drbretto]

Oh, and I forgot the most important part: this seed reminds me so much of my home state. I live in New Hampshire, which is covered in these forests, mountains and where I live, lakes, all pretty similar to these. This seed feels like home because it practically is. It really captures the beauty of that transition from winter to spring.

 

[KingTriaxx]

I like RTG's mountains. They feel very mountainous.

 

[Drbretto]

Gaaaaa! It works it works it works!! I'm so happy!

Forget that last video. Erase it from your memory. It's gone. It's gone forever! All of my recording woes are gone forever.

This is your teaser. Vid incoming in about 3-5 hours.

Edit: by which I mean tomorrow, lol. It's taking forever to render. Might have to run it overnight and start the upload in the morning. And to think, I cut it less than half way.