Silk touch or Fortune?

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Tyler Shellberg

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Jul 29, 2019
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I have the option of decking out my Ender Quarry with either silk touch or fortune. Which should I use, and why?
(I'm aware of what both do, but I'm still relatively new to 1.7.10 and the mods within infinity, so I'm not sure what mod synergy is best)

Thanks!
 

knn03

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Jul 29, 2019
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I always use Silk Touch and process the ores. I'm not 100% on this but I think on average, Fortune 3 yields more products on lapis, redstone, and diamonds than pulverizing. But my vote's for Silk Touch.
 

GreenZombie

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Jul 29, 2019
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Silk touch is usually way cheaper to apply to a quarry.
Allows you optionally harvest the ores manually for the XP.
The yield from most mods processing is at least as good as fortune III and consistent to boot.
You can choose to not process the ores immediately and benefit from the more compact storage.

The principal disadvantage is, if quarrying near the surface, you can pick up grass blocks rather than just dirt.
 

KhrFreak

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Jul 29, 2019
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I usually go silk touch, it's easier to process with fortune later on, plus fortune 3 on an ender quarry uses a heck of a lot more power then silk touch IIRC
 

asb3pe

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Jul 29, 2019
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I always use silk touch. If you want to use fortune, it's easy to setup a few autonomous activators and apply fortune to your ores afterwords.

this. Altho quite honestly, i'm not really even sure you need to run silk touch either. All i run is the top-tier speed upgrade on my Ender Quarry. My argument is that, sure, silk touch can give me more raw materials with some ore processing... but if I really need all that extra stuff, then I'll just run my quarry some more.

During very early game (when silk touch is a luxury I usually don't have), my biggest need for silk touch is to mine the redstone ore blocks... because TE pulverzing redstone ore blocks gives TE Cinnabar, and TE Cinnabar can then be used with Ferrous Ore in a TE Induction Smelter to give a 100% guaranteed Shiny Ingot for every Ferrous Ore block processed. Shiny is essential to make Enderium ingots, so I can make Tesseracts and really up my game (i.e. get out of early game).

But once I've got an Ender Quarry going (which means I've already got my Tesseracts), and I'm no longer in early game, I find I don't really have a big need to silk touch everything. But, I haven't done the math to see which is more energy efficient - silk touching/processing, or just running the quarry for a longer time. Mainly because I really don't care which is more energy efficient, they both would give more than enough materials.
 

KingTriaxx

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Jul 27, 2013
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The only reason to silk touch are really Redstone and Diamond. Redstone for the TE Cinnabar, and Diamonds so they can be fortuned.
 
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GreenZombie

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Jul 29, 2019
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The thing about silk touch on a quarry feeding into an automated processing system is - and this can be a pro or a con - is it gives you more processing opportunities: You need to build - or at least collect - at least one extra pulverizer/macerator/SAG Mill that you otherwise would not have had a need for. And in the case of some of those machines, deal with the more interesting extra materials.
 

Zarkov

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Mar 22, 2013
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A small cursed earth spawner (e.g. 5 x 5 covered by a single grinder) for essence, combined with an MFR block smasher or two, takes care of applying Fortune III as needed.

No need to take the 80x power penalty to get Fortune III directly from the quarry.
 
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Baron_Falcon

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Jul 29, 2019
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Silk touch hands down. By this time you will be getting such an abundance of ore it's ridiculous, and by properly processing the silk touched ores you will basically get the same as or better than the effects of fortune, with the added bonus of some of the additional options/output of silk touched ores.