Rotarycraft - where to begin...

[Shevron]

I really got an internal dilemma on this one.

I flip through the Rotarycraft manual, and watched a mod spotlight here and there, and I had my eyes glaze over with the possibilities that this mod gives, and the coolness of how it works and looks. I literally can't wait to get my grubby hands on it and start with it ...

... but old habits die hard, and while I do want to try it, the lazy part of me says "but your setup of quarry, Thermal Expansion and AE works fine! Why hassle?"

I know I know .. i digress.

Point is, I have done some YouTube searching, and while I can find mod spotlights showing off the cool engines, and gearboxes and how awesome they look, I haven't yet found one that like, starts at it from scratch for practical use - you know, Direwolf20 style. I know Dire is irreplaceable (love the guy's "teaching" methods") but does anyone have something similar for it?

I want it bad, but I'm at such a loss where to begin

Edits: I suck at spelling this morning.

 

[Varogh]

Well, that kinda depends on how much iron storage you have in your world.
You first have to build a blast furnace and start smelting HSLA steel with it (it requires a lava block besides it to build up heat), and then look at the engines you could build.
If you just started I'd suggest you to follow all the tiers up to the best engines, starting from steam engines (DC engines has such a low output that I don't even bother building them) and producing lubricant and ethanol to fuel gearboxes and combustion/performance engines.
Your main early goal is to get enough energy to run an extractor, either switching through various power ratios to run each stage or run everything simultaneously, because its resource processing is one of the best in modded minecraft (x5).
Then you'll have plenty of particular machines and end game tools to have fun with.

 

[Shevron]

I do have truckloads of iron since I have a quarry doing its thing, and have the blast furnace going, so I can make HSLA steel on demand (although struggling for gunpowder I admit).

Thanks, I'll start poking around from there.

 

[Tankh]

Yeah, at a glance the first thing I felt would be really worth going for is the extractor but I haven't gotten that project started yet. This is partly because for every rotarycraft block i have nearby, my fps gets more and more jumpy and I get lots of small lagspikes. Just having one steam engine and a bucket filler for my factorization mixer really lags a significant amount more than without it.
Checked with Opis and the bucket filler is by far the highest entity on the whole server in computation time, even when inactive.
Placing down an AC engine with a clock makes it almost unplayable

 

[Yusunoha]

it'd have been nice if Rotarycraft would have chapters in the handbook, that unlocks step by step.
I never really like it if a mod adds a guide ingame, but just drowns you in information as soon as you open it.
I really like how Thaumcraft does it, you slowly unlock things step by step and learn about the items/blocks along the way

 

[Varogh]

That would require player tracking and enforced progression. Another good thing of rotarycraft is that you can choose your own entry point, based on what materials you already have

 

[Democretes]

Yeah, at a glance the first thing I felt would be really worth going for is the extractor but I haven't gotten that project started yet. This is partly because for every rotarycraft block i have nearby, my fps gets more and more jumpy and I get lots of small lagspikes. Just having one steam engine and a bucket filler for my factorization mixer really lags a significant amount more than without it.
Checked with Opis and the bucket filler is by far the highest entity on the whole server in computation time, even when inactive.
Placing down an AC engine with a clock makes it almost unplayable

The bucket filler is rather derpy, but if you want to save your fps, build your machines in another dimension or near bedrock. There's a block called an air compressor(?) that turns Rotarycraft power into MJ. From there you can tesseract it and use the power with another engine (can't remember the name) that turns MJ back into RoC power. It'lls save your fps by leaps and bounds.

 

[Pyrocantaes]

I suggest you go look up Surgonan's Horizons Lets play on you-tube...

 

[twisto51]

Here's what I'd do:

#1 Blast Furnace

#2 Screwdriver and Angular Transducer

#3 Steam engine, pump, and fluid pipe(good starter power, make your pump source 3x3 or 4x4, not 2x2. Can use aqueous accumulator too/instead. It has less throughput but is less complex and less susceptible to "oops".)

#4 Industrial Coil (giant battery with variable output)

#4.5 Bedrock breaker. Nice armor, stronger shafts/gearboxes. Easy to power this with a coil. Bedrock pick will silktouch mob spawners so you can pick them up.

#5 Fans, Vacuums, and Sprinklers (Crop Farming)\

#6 Bevel Gears and Shaft Junctions (can do this earlier, whenever you find a need)

#7 Grinder, Lube, and Lube pipe (all that canola you started growing in step #5)

#8 Gearboxes, clutches and CVT (Start a cow farm or something before this, you need quite a bit of leather for the CVT belts).

#8.5 Fermenters and Ethanol Crystal Production (8.5 if you're on Monster, may not be worth the trouble on Horizons. DC engines will drive the fermenters)

#9 Boring Machine (doesn't really need that much power, just lots of torque, torque is per block being mined in the face so this can go quite high if you run into a wall of obsidian or a flat cluster of something else really hard. The 512 in the handbook is just for one block.)

#10 Hydrokinetics (lots of power, you only need canola oil. Canola oil output increased recently, hydrokinetic lube cost halved).

#11 Extractor and Lava Smelter (two DC engines will drive the lava smelter)

#12 Everything else

The most important thing to grasp about rotarycraft is the relationship between speed, torque, and power. Once you have the required torque/power/speed of a rotarycraft machine you can usually make it work/go/process faster by giving it more speed. You'll notice that most of the torque/power requirements are multiples of what the engines output.

You can enchant some of the machines by right-clicking them with an enchanted book. Boring Machine, Woodcutter, and Mob Harvester are the big 3. I have one boring machine with Eff4/Silktouch and another with Eff4/Fortune 3, looting 3 on the mob harvesters for more drops, infinity on the woodcutter so it always replants. If you're on monster I think you have a lot better tree farm options but if you're on horizons you might want to check the woodcutter and fertilizer out soon as you're comfortable with steam engines.

 

[Physicist]

So I'm having a problem with this.

I made a grinder and a steam engine. I found that the steam engine was not enough torque to power the grinder, so I made an 8:1 gearbox. The problem is that I cannot even produce 1 bucket of lubricant for my gearbox before it is damaged.

How is this supposed to be done? I can only think that I'm missing something in the tech tree.

Edit: Just figured it out. Lubricant hose allows smaller amounts to transfer from the grinder back to the gearbox.

 

[jokermatt999]

So I'm having a problem with this.

I made a grinder and a steam engine. I found that the steam engine was not enough torque to power the grinder, so I made an 8:1 gearbox. The problem is that I cannot even produce 1 bucket of lubricant for my gearbox before it is damaged.

How is this supposed to be done? I can only think that I'm missing something in the tech tree.

Edit: Just figured it out. Lubricant hose allows smaller amounts to transfer from the grinder back to the gearbox.

Personally, I prefer to start with a DC Engine and a Fermenter, then use the Ethanol from that to run Gasoline Engines for most things, including the Grinder without any gearing needed.

 

[twisto51]

Industrial coil solves almost every early power problem. In this particular case use your engine(s) to charge the coil, then use the coil to run the grinder to get the lubricant. I don't even use gearboxes until I can make diamond or bedrock gears, to be honest. I'd rather just use two alternating coils, an omnidirectional clutch, and a bit of redstone logic.