not dead...just lost internet for a few days. been tooling around with the map and made a few things:
cursed earth spawner for mob essence and getting pechs to catch for an autospawner
pech autospawner room with an activator loaded with a scythe with looting 3, fans to blow the pechs into the activator, and a vacuum hopper collecting the drops. from that vacuum hopper, it goes off to an ae interface for drops, and a pipe for liquid xp...which is fed to a tank with 2 xp showers, over sewage drains (liquid xp -> mob essence converter basically). using all that essence to feed 3 pech autospawners, and lots of mob essence left over for other things. might work on an enchantment library
also discovered something neat: feeding all the mob drops (rotten meat, bones, weapons, wands, picks, axes, all the normal mob drops) into a alchemical furnace yields 28 different aspects. i got a team of 4 alchemy golems on 24/7 duty emptying the furnace with 5 alembics to keep 28 void jars topped off. the mob farm also generates ethereal essence drops (wisps spawn in there) but i keep those for the infusion recipes that need it, and all mana beans go into storage for the rest of the aspects
added magic crops into the mix. my plan is to automate everything needed for infusion/table recipes, so basically my original goal: to grow all the items needed to for infusions
replacing the turtles on the pedestals with peripheral proxies...turtles were cool but hard to maintain code wise. i figure one wired network should do fine. not as quick, but should be easier on the server.
more to come as i get all the patterns and stuff loaded into the ae system