Magic World - where to start?

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PixieNinja

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Jul 29, 2019
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My previous tech-based game of Minecraft relied heavily on IC2 to provide me with ore processing and power generation, along with a good dose of EE for converting waste into what I needed.

Now that I've started a new Magic World game though, I obviously don't have these two crutches to get me through those initial stages. I've already set up home, and started gathering some resources from the environment around me, but I'm not really sure what direction to head in when it comes to getting some stuff automated and some efficient power generation.

I have no experience of TE or Railcraft, and have only had limited interactions with Forestry, hence me sounding like a noob :)

Any suggestions?
 

Bibble

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If you are looking at getting a firm infrastructure behind you before looking towards the magical research, I'd advise looking towards the steam stages first.

I will typically start out with a hobbyist engine (manually fueled with water and charcoal), which has the added advantage of leaving me with a golden nugget or two spare for wands. Pipe the power into a pulveriser and powered furnace setup (technically a little bit wasteful of energy, compared to an induction smelter, but also doesn't require constant sand fueling, and fill up your inventory with slag).

Once you get your bearings, make a coke oven, and start churning that out at a reasonable rate. It'll produce far faster than the engines use it, so no worry there.

After you manage to get to the nether, hit up a fortress for some blaze powder (or comb the deserts, thank you ThaumCraft), for the fire charges needed for the boilers. Make a simple low pressure 2x2 or 2x3 boiler. That'll give you more than enough steam to run your rapidly growing array of BC-energy consuming machines for processing and production.

Then get a quarry, processing and sorting system up and running you should have more than enough stuff to be playing around with the consuming task of research and development for thaumcraft.
 

PixieNinja

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Jul 29, 2019
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Do I have to worry about engines overheating? Seen a few videos, never used them before.

I've seen that the boiler consumes a good deal of fuel initially, and is best to keep running at it's full output for best efficiency - how do you keep up with the supply of fuel that it needs, and does the steam always need to go somewhere?

My previous quarrying has allowed me to have a very portable system by using teleport pipes to transfer both power and items quarried, but now I have to find an alternative approach due to this not being present - any suggestions regarding this?
 

FlukeSDS

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Jul 29, 2019
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Do I have to worry about engines overheating? Seen a few videos, never used them before.

I believe that you don't have to worry about the steam engines overheating. However, you do have to make sure that they have a constant supply of water. If you add water to a hot and dry steam engine they are likely to explode. I haven't messed around much with anything steam related so maybe someone else that has can confirm what I said.

I've seen that the boiler consumes a good deal of fuel initially, and is best to keep running at it's full output for best efficiency - how do you keep up with the supply of fuel that it needs, and does the steam always need to go somewhere?

I'd assume that with enough coal you can use coal coke to keep you going for a good while. I'm not sure about steam always needing to go somewhere, but I don't think so.

My previous quarrying has allowed me to have a very portable system by using teleport pipes to transfer both power and items quarried, but now I have to find an alternative approach due to this not being present - any suggestions regarding this?


You can always add AdditionalPipes to the magic pack. After all, teleporting items is rather magical lol :).

You can find it here https://github.com/tcooc/AdditionalPipesBC/downloads.
 

Zelfana

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Jul 29, 2019
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Do I have to worry about engines overheating? Seen a few videos, never used them before.

I've seen that the boiler consumes a good deal of fuel initially, and is best to keep running at it's full output for best efficiency - how do you keep up with the supply of fuel that it needs, and does the steam always need to go somewhere?

My previous quarrying has allowed me to have a very portable system by using teleport pipes to transfer both power and items quarried, but now I have to find an alternative approach due to this not being present - any suggestions regarding this?
All engines can overheat but TE steam engine and magmatic engine are the only ones that can't explode in any circumstances. Forestry engines have forced cooldowns I guess, so they might be fine also.

Boilers are not really something you'd want to start with, only when you require more than 50MJ/t of power and have a good supply of something to burn in them.

Ender chests can work the same as teleport pipes. Bonus ability with them is interdimensional transport.

I fiddled a bit with pulverizer, powered furnace etc. and came up with a nice starter setup for automatic ore processing. Thermal Expansion machines are awesome, the system doesn't have any item transport pipes, only 2 pieces of redstone energy conduit are needed or if you use conductive pipes you need a few more than that of them.
 
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SilvasRuin

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Thermal Expansion Pulverizers and/or Induction Smelters will get you the double ore yields you're used to. The Pulverizer requires smelting the dust afterwards, but most ores give a 5% or 10% chance of an extra bit of dust of another type, such as Iron from Tin, Copper from Gold, or Gold from Copper. The Induction Smelter is faster, especially as it compresses two steps into one, but it requires Sand as a catalyst and it's only extra bonus is Slag which can be smelted into a non-flammable explosion resistant "Rockwool".

The Steam Engine, not the ones with the descriptive names at the front, is a very easy to handle and fairly effective engine to start with, also from Thermal Expansion. It has no risk of exploding. If it overheats from lack of work or water, it will jam up and have to be whacked with the Crescent Hammer to get started again, which actually happens to save you fuel. The Magmatic Engine is another Thermal Expansion engine that functions much the same way but specifically runs on lava, making it the very rough equivalent to a Geothermal Generator. Both of these have a setting for how they interact with Redstone signals, allowing you to set them to be always on even without a lever.

The Aqueous Accumulator generates water that it automatically can pipe elsewhere, useful for everything involving Steam. It gets faster the more water is around it, and I think works similarly to a Water Mill from IC2 in that regard. The Liquid Transposer requires a bit of power in order to "bottle" up whatever liquid you pump into it into Cans or Capsules from Forestry, or Buckets, and can also do the reverse while preserving your Cans and Capsules for reuse.

The Igneous Extruder can be turned into a free Cobblestone Generator, a Smoothstone Generator that mostly costs water, or an Obsidian Generator that costs a bucket of lava and water each. Handy way to obtain an early Enchanting Table. The Magma Crucible takes a lot of power to melt one block into lava which can then be used for a variety of purposes, but it cannot put that lava into a container for you directly. You have to use a Liquid Transposer or do it manually from a Tank for that. Netherrack is converted to lava much more cheaply than other blocks... though you can hook up an Igneous Extruder to a Magma Crucible and power that with four Redstone Engines for occasional automated "free" power as it slowly builds up energy.

And then an extra bonus, the Glacial Precipitator can be powered to freeze water piped into it into Snowballs, Snow Blocks, or Ice, the last one being good for carrying around a stack of source blocks for things such as a mob elevator for a mob trap, or making sure a man-made lake is completely source blocks and thus doesn't have a nasty downward drag.

Since MJ is the only type of power unit for machinery (not including the Infernal Furnace) in the Magic Pack, the Redstone Conduits and Energy Cell greatly enhance your system's energy efficiency and provides a means of storage and throttling to prevent waste. Again, this is a Thermal Expansion feature.

So basically... Thermal Expansion is really useful and will/should definitely be your primary processing and power management source, especially when the Magic Pack is missing its ore processing rivals, IC2 and (strangely) Factorization.



On another note, bees can be daunting to get started in, but they offer a lot of goods when you can really get into them.
 

Squigie

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Jul 29, 2019
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Unused steam is not a problem, excess MJ is. Railcraft engines will explode if their internal power buffer fills up, which can happen if their full output is not being absorbed. This is unlikely if they are hooked up to a pipe or conduit. On the engine GUI you can see current output per tick and buffered energy. As the engine warms up you will see some energy enter the buffer; this is normal and should reach an equilibrium in the green zone. Shut down your engines immediately if they are orange or red.

Hobbyist steam engines top out at 1.6 MJ/t on their own (2 MJ/t with an external boiler) and heat up quickly. They are not suited to on-demand use, but burning ~10 charcoal at a time will produce far more total power than in a TE steam engine.

The TE steam engine will produce 50% more power than a stirling engine and at twice the rate. It uses ~half a bucket of water per coal/charcoal.
 
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DrCeph

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In previous games without IC I've also generally moved towards making a forestry peatbog farm early on, giving a fairly decent renewable energy source early on. The forestry peat-fired engine is only 1 MJ/t but one peat brick lasts for ages. The engine can be used to run the peatbog farm (it burns peat slower than it makes it) making it sustainable, as long as you restock using bog earth (dirt+sand+water). You can use the pulveriser to turn your cobble from mining into sand for this process. I believe you can also use the peat in the steam engines too should you need a little more bang for your buck (or peat!).
 
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Bibble

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Just on the exploding thing, one thing I discovered/remembered last night after an explosion in my base:
Power pipes now have a limit to the amount of power they can take before exploding. This means that you can't heat your engines up, leave them with nothing to do and go out mining for a few hours, or the pipes will burst.

Not too much of an issue when you get the boiler running (you can turn the engines off and on when needed), but with the initial hobbyist engine, it's worth bearing in mind.
 
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Squigie

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Peat produces 1.25 times the energy of coal or charcoal. It will cook 10 items in a normal furnace, and generate 2000 MJ in a stirling versus 1600 for coal. In a peat-fired engine it will burn 2.5 times as long, for 5000 MJ total.
 
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PixieNinja

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Jul 29, 2019
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It feels like I'm learning all over again without IC2 and EE to fall back on!

I've currently gone with a TE steam engine, which I'm manually filling with coal and water. I definitely need to set up some form of automated system for pumping the water into the engine though, as it's just not lasting long enough for me to leave it for too long. Went with the TE one so that I didn't have to worry about it overheating and taking out half of my house in the process. It's feeding a pulverizer and a powered furnace, and I've popped a hopper atop the pulverizer, and a chest next to the powered furnace, so that the ores can be pulverized, baked and stored without the need for more pipes.

Not sure where to head next when it comes to techy stuff. I have a serious shortage of redstone, and a distinct lack of decent places to mine right now.

Don't currently have any farms set up, but I wouldn't mind trying ones that are handled using Railcraft or Steve's Carts, just to see how much quicker they could be compared to the Forestry farms.

It's great to see some figures regarding the different engines out there - stuff like this will be invaluable for the forthcoming FTB wiki.
 

Zelfana

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Jul 29, 2019
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It feels like I'm learning all over again without IC2 and EE to fall back on!

I've currently gone with a TE steam engine, which I'm manually filling with coal and water. I definitely need to set up some form of automated system for pumping the water into the engine though, as it's just not lasting long enough for me to leave it for too long. Went with the TE one so that I didn't have to worry about it overheating and taking out half of my house in the process. It's feeding a pulverizer and a powered furnace, and I've popped a hopper atop the pulverizer, and a chest next to the powered furnace, so that the ores can be pulverized, baked and stored without the need for more pipes.

Not sure where to head next when it comes to techy stuff. I have a serious shortage of redstone, and a distinct lack of decent places to mine right now.

Don't currently have any farms set up, but I wouldn't mind trying ones that are handled using Railcraft or Steve's Carts, just to see how much quicker they could be compared to the Forestry farms.

It's great to see some figures regarding the different engines out there - stuff like this will be invaluable for the forthcoming FTB wiki.
TE steam engine doesn't explode and neither does magmatic. They jam up instead and you have to right click them with a wrench when they do.

Hoppers make transport pipes unnecessary when you configure your TE machines correctly. It's so nice, I made a very compact design where I can throw my ores in and they get automatically pulverized and distributed to two powered furnaces.

For power I'm using magmatic engines. You can fill up cans directly by right clicking lava and using liquid transposer you don't have to make any more than about two stacks so your engines stay filled. You can visit the Nether every now and then to fill a stack of cans. You also could use magma crucible fed with netherrack if you prefer but it's one extra machine more and it takes a bit of power.

You should try out Twilight Forest for mining, hollow hills are dangerous places but stuffed with ores.

Steve's Carts are borderline OP compared to Forestry farms. I guess they use more iron for the tracks but the speed is just too good and their fuel usage is very low. I put a normal solar panel engine and a compact solar engine on a farmer cart and it can run over half of the night after sunset without other power so it's making me wheat without me having to do anything about it. It does use 3 diamonds where the Forestry wheat farm doesn't use any.