Silk Touch & pulverizing VS Fortune

[Eruantien]

Which enchantment (or Tinkers' Construct upgrade) is better to use; will you get more gems (diamond, emerald, chimerite, certus quartz) by mining them with a Fortune III pick or macerating/pulverizing the ore blocks?

For some reason, I feel that silk touch is the way to go. Especially for redstone and lapis. But I'm not sure about the others...

 

[darkeshrine]

Silk touch is best for redstone, if only for the cinnabar. If you've got fortune III, then you'll be getting quite a bit more on average than what a pulverizer would normally give. The pulverizer is really good for early game as the extra diamonds really come in handy and silk touch is far easier to obtain on Tinkers' Construct tools.

 

[DrowElf]

With everything but redstone, fortune is the best way to go. With redstone, silk touch it and put it in the induction furnace to maximize the output as it gives 9 redstone per ore.

 

[Eruantien]

Yes... but when it's pulverized it is a valuable (and possibly the easiest) source of TE cinnabar.

 

[DrowElf]

Yes... but when it's pulverized it is a valuable (and possibly the easiest) source of TE cinnabar.

IIRC you can also get it by adding liquid cryotheoum (or however it is spelled) to TC cinnabar via the fluid transposer. Haven't really bothered with cinnabar in a while as I have been playing exclusively Agrarian Skies, where you get more shiny ingots than you will ever need while trying to get enough iron.

 

[Eruantien]

Well, yes, but that requires more effort. It will be useful later on, but shiny ingots are better for me in the early game. Plus, the cinnabar is basically free as a byproduct.

It just depends on your playing style, I guess. I looked up the Fortune III enchantment description on the Minecraft wiki; apparently, there is an "average" 120% increase, which is better than processing, it turns out.

 

[KaosRitual]

An extra thing to note is that fortune 3 works with auto-smelt, so you can get more metal ores. Although with stuff like nickel it is probably better to pulverise it, unless you have nether ores or metallurgy.

 

[Vasa]

An extra thing to note is that fortune 3 works with auto-smelt, so you can get more metal ores. Although with stuff like nickel it is probably better to pulverise it, unless you have nether ores or metallurgy.

+it gives tons of xp when you mine ores with hammer!

 

[Skyqula]

+it gives tons of xp when you mine ores with hammer!

Manually taking out ingots from a furnace gives tons of XP aswell!

 

[Pandemoneus]

According to the Minecraft wiki,
Fortune III yields a 120% increase in dropped items when used on coal, diamond, emerald, nether quartz and lapis lazuli. So it's better to mine these with Fortune III, since pulverizing usually increases the yield by 100% only.

For redstone, only the maximum amount of drops is increased (up to +3), so it's definately better to silk touch it.

 

[Pyure]

If your modpack has RotaryCraft (and therefore the Extractor) there's essentially no reason to ever use fortune.

But this assumes I can take liberty with "pulverizing" to mean "breaking down into dusts" and not just using the pulverizer from TE

 

[Eruantien]

I took out Reika's mods, as well as a few others, to see if my memory usage would go down. It didn't, so I'm probably going to put them back in.

But this assumes I can take liberty with "pulverizing" to mean "breaking down into dusts" and not just using the pulverizer from TE

Sure, however you see it.

According to the Minecraft wiki,
Fortune III yields a 120% increase in dropped items when used on coal, diamond, emerald, nether quartz and lapis lazuli. So it's better to mine these with Fortune III, since pulverizing usually increases the yield by 100% only.

For redstone, only the maximum amount of drops is increased (up to +3), so it's definately better to silk touch it.

You could also, like I do, silk touch everything, then later at your base fortune mine the ores you need to. Or set up an autonomous activator to do it.

 

[Vasa]

If your modpack has RotaryCraft (and therefore the Extractor) there's essentially no reason to ever use fortune.

But this assumes I can take liberty with "pulverizing" to mean "breaking down into dusts" and not just using the pulverizer from TE

by extracting 64 certuz quartz ore in rotarycraft extractor you got nearly 1000 certuz quartz!!!!
for 16 cobalt ore you get around 120 cobalt ingots .!!!
so its better to silk touch things and extract them if you can you will be drowning in resources ...

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

There's also a use for Silk Touch if you use Nether Ores, as you can silk touch nether ores without upsetting the locals or risking explosions

 

[Revemohl]

EnderIO's SAG Mill also gives you 3 coal and a decent chance of pulverized coal per ore, and 2 nether quartz + 1 dust per nether quartz ore.
The only normal ore that doesn't benefit from silk touch and machines is lapis.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

EnderIO's SAG Mill also gives you 3 coal and a decent chance of pulverized coal per ore, and 2 nether quartz + 1 dust per nether quartz ore.
The only normal ore that doesn't benefit from silk touch and machines is lapis.

And even there, you can just bring the lapis home and use a Fortune 3 pick on it back at base

 

[epidemia78]

I think, like how 2x ore processing has become widely adopted by many mods as the standard, silk touch and pulverizing/macerating should usually be the most productive way to handle ores unless they are magical in nature. Right now that is only the case with redstone.