Stupid questions regarding machines.(Pulv, etc)

[unspunreality]

Quick backstory. Im new to FTB, well not new but I never used machines or anything outside of vanilla before. Decided to try it. Finally built a pulverizer and after managing to power it up(Woohoo moment here), I decided I wanted to be lazy. Wherein came a small problem.

1) Is there a way to place a chest under a pulverizer or any machine? They dont open with a block ontop of them, but maybe Im missing something.

2) Is there a way to have a chest feed into a machine. I like exploring myself and mining out caves but I dont have time to wait for 1 stack of ore to pulverize and then manually replace it. Ive been fiddling with pipes and chests and what not. Hopper didnt work cause it just chunked everything in at once and clogged the machine.

And I guess thats it for questions. Now that Im not as intimidatied by machines by before, minecraft became more fun(Turning off gregtech recipes helped).

I guess a third question. How/where do I get rubber? Im making a tree house(Go away =() and I figured I could use solar panels for energy rather then burn coal and what not. But Ive never seen rubber, hell I dont even know what to look for.

Thanks for any help.

Edit: A fourth question. Is there a reason why there is 2-3 different coppers, silvers, etc? Its mildly annoying to think Im grabbing iron and instad grab silver.. then silver again.. and again.

 

[lavarthan]

1) Not that I'm aware of that is a vanilla mechanic.

2) I have not used Thermal Expansion that much, so I cannot remember if they pull items out automatically. I do know that if you connect a wooden pipe to the chest and TE machine you can have a redstone engine working on the wooden pipe to make it feed items into the machine. Be sure to watch the spotlight at the end of my post for more info.

3) You want IC2 or RP2 rubber trees.
http://ftbwiki.org/Rubber_Tree#IndustrialCraft2_Trees
http://ftbwiki.org/Rubber_Tree_(RedPower_2)

4) By different ores are you talking about the ores, unprocessed, or the ingots? For ores it is caused by more than one mod adding it to worldgen. If it is ingots that depends on how you process it. If you use a regular furnace you might get one type and if you use a pulverizer and then a furnace you may get another. I thought that FTB had fixed this from happening unless you mean a server or have added a few more mods. Either way they should work in the recipes together.

For help with what the machines do and info on the mods I suggest watching Direwolf20's Mod Spotlights and most recent LP.
Thermal Expansion Mod Spotlight: youtube.com/watch?v=q_NXhYQuOhg

Edit: Sorry. Welcome to FTB and the modding community.

 

[unspunreality]

1) Not that I'm aware of that is a vanilla mechanic.

2) I have not used Thermal Expansion that much, so I cannot remember if they pull items out automatically. I do know that if you connect a wooden pipe to the chest and TE machine you can have a redstone engine working on the wooden pipe to make it feed items into the machine. Be sure to watch the spotlight at the end of my post for more info.

3) You want IC2 or RP2 rubber trees.
http://ftbwiki.org/Rubber_Tree#IndustrialCraft2_Trees
http://ftbwiki.org/Rubber_Tree_(RedPower_2)

4) By different ores are you talking about the ores, unprocessed, or the ingots? For ores it is caused by more than one mod adding it to worldgen. If it is ingots that depends on how you process it. If you use a regular furnace you might get one type and if you use a pulverizer and then a furnace you may get another. I thought that FTB had fixed this from happening unless you mean a server or have added a few more mods. Either way they should work in the recipes together.

For help with what the machines do and info on the mods I suggest watching Direwolf20's Mod Spotlights and most recent LP.
Thermal Expansion Mod Spotlight: youtube.com/watch?v=q_NXhYQuOhg

Edit: Sorry. Welcome to FTB and the modding community.

Well Im using FTB Ultimate. I should have started that. But darn. No mechanic for the first one? grr. I want a chest under my damn machine. Anyway.

As to 3. Since Im using Ultimate, should I just find one eventually then?

And for 4. I mean both. Finding two different copper ores. And have 2 different silver ingot stacks.

 

[Adonis0]

An alternative to the answer you got for question two

You could use buildcraft hoppers as your input, these feed directly into any machine or even themselves. So you can stack four hoppers ontop of a machine, and the items will eventually reach the machine at the bottom. I'm sure vanilla hoppers are similar, but I haven't ever used them.

As long as your machine is automatically having the output cleared/ejected then these will work quite nicely without too much fluff.

EDIT: For question three, since you're using ultimate, there's also minefactory reloaded rubber trees which are equivalent. I personally like the IC2 rubber trees, since to get the rubber you just use a tree-tap, but with MFR you have to chop down the tree (To my knowledge)

 

[Silent_007]

But darn. No mechanic for the first one? grr. I want a chest under my damn machine. Anyway.

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think chests from the Iron Chests mod can be opened even with blocks above them. Which chest would be cheapest depends on what materials you have the most of (copper chest, iron, silver, etc.).

If that doesn't work, I'm quite confident that ender chests can be opened with blocks above them. Whether that's worth the hassle or not is obviously your call.

 

[Adonis0]

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think chests from the Iron Chests mod can be opened even with blocks above them. Which chest would be cheapest depends on what materials you have the most of (copper chest, iron, silver, etc.).

If that doesn't work, I'm quite confident that ender chests can be opened with blocks above them. Whether that's worth the hassle or not is obviously your call.

Just tested with an iron chest from the mod, and an ender chest from the enderchests mod

Conclusion:
The iron chests mod chests cannot be opened under a block, ender chests can.

 

[Silent_007]

Just tested with an iron chest from the mod, and an ender chest from the enderchests mod

Conclusion:
The iron chests mod chests cannot be opened under a block, ender chests can.

Ah, well there you go. I was right to give a disclaimer about the iron chest thing I guess.
Glad to know that I was right about the ender chests though. Hopefully that's helpful to the OP.

 

[Adonis0]

Ah, well there you go. I was right to give a disclaimer about the iron chest thing I guess.
Glad to know that I was right about the ender chests though. Hopefully that's helpful to the OP.

mhm ^^
They open up underneath other chests, but they don't open under "solid" blocks, which makes me think.. perhaps they open under glass...?

EDIT: They do.

 

[Silent_007]

They open up underneath other chests.

Ah, that's what I was thinking of! I knew there was something special about where iron chests would open...

 

[NosePicker5555]

I am too lazy to read all the comments I just know the reason why there are multiple ores is because, mods add them. When you add more than one that adds the same ore, they both add the ore. If i am not mistaken a mod added a thingy-bajiger that could control the generation of different ores.. I think IC2 or Thermal Expansion..

 

[unspunreality]

Thanks for the help. So in the end, there is no real way to attach a pulverizer to a chest and have it suck items from the chest and just pulverize them in order? As said, I tried hoppers but that just dumps everything into all the pulverizer slots which obviously isnt helpful.Actually using these machines is fun. I think Im weird...

 

[NosePicker5555]

-Snip-

Yes, put the chest hopper on top. Make the pulv. have the orange i believe on top into the input. Then place a chest next to it.

 

[ICountFrom0]

Thanks for the help. So in the end, there is no real way to attach a pulverizer to a chest and have it suck items from the chest and just pulverize them in order? As said, I tried hoppers but that just dumps everything into all the pulverizer slots which obviously isn't helpful.Actually using these machines is fun. I think Im weird...

That's not how things are designed.

Take a deep breath, look at the right side of the machine GUI. Notice that there's marks on the right?

The one you want is the gear. Click it open.

Now you have a display of the sides of the block. Top, left, right and bottom in one cluster. The front is shown but can't be changed. The back is the one by itself with the line through it.

So, you put the stack of hoppers on top. Good. Now you have to adjust the machine so it knows where to put the items from the hopper. So you look to see if the top has a color... and that's where it's going now. Odds are you are set to blank face or neutral face. So, click the top one a few times. It'll eventually become blue. You'll see the blue on the top of the block, on the gui spot meant to be the top of the block and AROUND the input spot in the GUI. So now anything that enters through the top will fall into the blue spot.

Next. You put a chest to the right, left, or behind the machine. I'm going to assume the right.

Now find the spot in the gui that means the right side of the machine and click. You'll see yellow, red, and orange possibilities. The yellow is only the main output. If you process iron in a pulverizer, then the main output is pulverized iron. If you where processing copper, you'd get pulverized copper. Then you'd rarely get pulveized gold in the RED box. Now you don't really care about the system separating the copper from the gold, you want them all in the same chest. So you click it until the main output AND the lower secondary output are both orange. Now orange marked inventories will output automatically out the right.... and into the chest.

(if you don't understand this with words, watch the direwolf20 video, linked in the other post a 2nd time)

...

so you've processed some ore by smelting it in a furance, some by pulverizing fist, and likely picked up others from dungon chests or mob drops.... no, they don't always agree on what they are. You can either turn them all into ore blocks, and then take the blocks apart (you'll get copper that is almost brown, and that looks okay) or you can turn the ingots into nuggets and put the nuggets back together (you get a bright and shiny copper that looks almost like gold, I like that one less).

...

Isn't one of the relays or transposers of redpower2 a transparent block, so you could open a chest under it?

 

[NosePicker5555]

-Snip-

You deserve a, "like" for that post.

 

[unspunreality]

Oh. I get the post. I understood the whole thingy with the output inputs. Ive set it up so it can go directly from my pulverizer to my smelter. My hopper was just acting funny and tossed everything into the blue and orange slots. Now that was probably an error on my side that I didnt bother to double check after seeing it mess up once. Next time Ill triple check. I more wanted confirmation that hoppers would even work.

So now my question is. If I were to do

Chest
Hopper
Smelter - Pulverizer

In that order. Provided I have all the inputs/outputs correct, it will work in the order of hopper grabs items from chest, puts them into pulverizer, the results get sent to smelter. Provided smelter has power/sand then that gets done and empties into a second chest that would be on whatever output I choose for the smelter, correct?

xCx
xHx
CSP

(X being empty space)

Like that? Im still dealing with only small engines and stuff. I figure I can figure out bee farms and other things later. Just doing this is a big task for me, but its enjoyable.

One last question. Im using stirling engine so far. Well 4. 2 hooked up to each machine. Provided I leave them on forever, would they blow up? I read that they overheat if there is an oversupply of power but Im not quite sure what to make of it. If the thing theyre supplying power to(One of the machines) is full and thus they keep running without anywhere to put the excess power, then theyll blow up? So if Im planning a really long excursion from my base, it'd be safer to just turn them off?

Sorry for all the questions. Im trying to figure stuff out on my own, hand holding is boring. But I also dont wanna blow up my tree base. Already had 2 explosions because I forget to put lighting everywhere and thus.. kaboom. <.> Dying in the air to a creeper isn't fun.

 

[ICountFrom0]

No.

Because this is a buildcraft hopper, not a 1.5.1 vanilla hopper. It does not automatically pull from inventories.

You have an induction smelter, rather then a powered furnace? You don't need to run it through both.

But yes, the smelter can output into a chest, the puliverizer, or anything really.

Stirling engines won't explode. They might stop working. The gold pipes might pop, but they don't hurt anything else, but they are mostly safe.

Combustion engines are dangerous, they explode rather badly.

The engines added by thermal expansion are "smart" engines and instead of causing trouble they turn themselves down, or overload and turn off until hit with a wrench.

As for trying to figure it out yourself, most wiki's are remarkably short of random spoilers. Check the guide in my sig, pick the wiki's for the bits you want to look up, and look em up. Then you'll only get spoiled on the one bit you wanted to know.

On the subject of creepers, hit f7, dark spaces get marked.

Would you try something for me? Put a chest on top of a blue side and see if it will pull from the chest?

Oh, and most importantly, don't worry about it. That's part of why the forum exists.

Just be polite, pay attention to the answers, and maybe give likes to those who are of most use, if you want. Eventually you'll be answering these same questions for somebody else.... trust me, that's what happens here.

 

[Stratagerm]

On the subject of creepers, hit f7, dark spaces get marked.

Wow, thanks for this. I didn't know NEI had it.

 

[unspunreality]

Is there a big difference between smelter and furnace? I picked the smelter cause of slag. My set up isnt exactly perfect so Im still experimenting.

Also that F7 thing. o-o Holy crud.

 

[wolfsilver00]

1) AE works (ME Chests). Factorization barrels work too (but you can only input in them one type of item).
2) BC wooden pipe extracting from the chest, RP sorting machine extracting from the chest into pneumatic tubes, AE export bus from the Net to the machine.
3) Travel, you will find 2 kind of rubber trees. The first one is small with 2 leaves on the top. Chop it down, you can use the wood in the Sawmill to get some stycky resin then in the extractor to get rubber. You can get rubber too from it, which you can smelt into rubber bars. They do get some different wood blocks with a different texture, use a tap to get rubber from them
4) Because different mods add different ores, if you want to change them to some of them for storage purpose (because they have the same functionality in all mods) craft a forgelexicon.

 

[unspunreality]

There's worlds of difference between the smelter (tier 2 machine, only way to make hardened glass) and the powered furnace (tier 1 machine, very efficient) ...

One of them being that the smelter requires either a rare byproduct of processing iron, or a very rare ore found only down near diamonds and lava.

The powered furnace mostly is used to turn dust into ingots. Does it with lower power costs and does it without costing sand. Can also be used to make the rockwool from the regular slag, will cook your food for you at less power cost then anything else (even vs the steam oven). The furnace is not actually a source of ore multiplication. The pulverizer is.

The induction smelter makes 2 ingots per ore DIRRECTLY from the ore (+sand) and does not require it to be pulverized. It's a source of ore multiplication in a single unit. Ore and sand go in. Twice as many ingots go out. Rarely a rich slag will come out that lets you TRIPLE an ingot, instead of double it.

If you use the smelter, you use it by itself, the pulverizer instead grinding down cobblestone into sand.

If you use the pulverizer, you use it on copper to get some bonus gold and on iron to get ferrous dust, until you have all you need.

See, this is where looking up the machines on the wiki, sort of helps.

OOOH. I see, I see. Well I found some rubber trees and now my tree house is surrounded by rubber trees. Its the fake ones though, where I need to process the wood into rubber, which.. requires an extractor I think. But I get enough rubber just from chopping them down that Im fine for now, I think. Ill build some more machines today and play around with them. Maybe even make a mining turtle now that I found enough diamond for a pickaxe. =OOOOOOO Id need to look up how to use turtles though. But thats easy enough.

Id like to say thanks for everyone's help however. Even making mistakes Im learning and heck, Im still making more machines.


Edit: I guess since I have this topic open, I could also ask. Is there anything I should aim for? I was thinking of power armor next but that seems like a lot of materials. Dunno if I could take on endermen yet for pearls to upgrade it.

EditEdit: Or anything to aim for in learning? I never did enchants or played around with any of the extra mods I have stuff for (Bees, thumology, etc). Dunno what would be a good learning path. Gonna try enchants now cause I have so much exp and dunno what to do with it.