Thermal Expansion 1.12.2 Production Chains

[Ldog]

I haven't seen any guides that account for all the changes from 1.10 to 1.12 CoFH mods, also I'm getting into Thermal Logistics as well. I've setup a couple flowcharts with full production chains which I'd like to share. I'll be showing them as built in game as well as adding probably another chart or two for the missing things (mob encapsulator + enstabulation farm, etc).

ToC:
Flow-charts (this post)
Phyto-works
Fish and loaves plus Grassoline
Mob farming
Dynamo setup
Automatic scalable ore-processing
Specialized ore-processing & on-demand crafting
On-demand Crafting II
On-demand Crafting III
Advanced Fluid Handling & Crafting
Advanced Fluid Handling & Crafting II
Advanced Fluid Handling & Crafting III
Survival screenshots

I hope the charts are easy enough to understand, but I guess I should provide some key.
Blue are machines/devices, red are primary outputs, yellow secondary (TE colors), orange for liquids. Cyan is an outside activity (mining, gathering). I went with the Periodic Table of Elements for metal names to save space. Don't feel bad if you have to refer to it, I couldn't for the life of me remember Tin (it's Sn).

So the first chart is anchored around automated production of fluxed phyto-gro, everything else flows from there. This gives us a surplus of self-sustaining power, building materials, sand for smelting and food. Once it is up and running it is completely automated. It can be scaled out of course for more power and other materials. Wheat, wart and oak were chosen because they are necessary inputs but other crops and woods could be added (Enderlily & Cinderpearls especially if you're running ExU2 & Thaumcraft6 as well). You'll also need an Aqueous Accumulator or other water source not shown. 2 Spruce with FPg Arbors produces the exact amount of tree oil for a resonant compression boiler with 1 fuel catalyzer. Unless space is an issue it is always best to put 1 arboreal extractor per tree (trust me I've crunched the numbers).

Our second chart is materials processing. Mostly from mining. Since this exercise is CoFH-centric I show the best methods using TE here. Depending on your other mods there may be better alternatives available to you. Although I don't include it in the flowchart, do not forget about the Redstone Furnace with a Flux Anodizer. In some modpacks that can be your best option for certain ores (in Infinity Evolved it was for a few things, but this was 1.7). While I try to at least mention alternative processes, I do not cover them exhaustively, not to mention your modpack may have it's own overrides so always check your options and do what works for you.

I'm going to assume everyone is pumping lava out of the nether (myself included) but I include the TE way making it out of netherrack (magma is more efficient but less available, and stone is very inefficient). Using redstone relays we also only run the crucible for this if we run out of lava (like when you forget to move your nether pump). I didn't go into detail on alloying and making Signalum, Lumium, Enderium, etc or even basic things like glass (we've got plenty of sand) here due to space, but I will include setups for this as well.

I've not done much with tectonic and pyrotheum pulverizer/smelter options, and not shown them in the chart. I'm not real comfortable automating something that uses redstone dust, and it's overkill for the most part. However I am going to do a tectonic pulverizer setup for emerald/diamond (gives 3, which is better than fortune III avg of 2.5, and less manual labor) and a pyro-infuser smelter (with sieves) that takes nickel & cinnabar to provide 4 nickel and 2 platinum. That is ore-sextupling, very sexy! In your face Mekanism/EIO!

Smelting nether quartz also gives us rich slag, and we will have surplus cinnabar; nickel being small spawns. So that also gives options for other ores you find yourself in short supply of, which will vary depending what other mods you use. Myself I seem to go through a lot of gold (Thaumcraft uses a lot). TF does use quite a bit of electrum these days for upgrades, and then if you use Redstone Arsenal you'll want a couple stacks of electrum for that(although it is a 1 time investment). Considering the bulk of your cinnabar is going to come from redstone once you have silk touch, smelting gold & silver with rich slag or cinnabar is a very viable option (I'd go with cinnabar + gold, gives more rich slag to use for silver and other ores). Thaumcraft cinnabar ore can also be converted into TF cinnabar so one could probably cinnabar all the ores if they wanted. Also while I have opted to send destabilized redstone directly to crucible for a full bucket, you can pulverize for 3 clathrates (750mB worth) and a high chance of getting cinnabar. (this paragraph brought to you by cinnabar and the number 42).

Sand and most power is provided by the 1st chain. Idle everything pretty much runs off the tree oil, occassional surges use the grassoline. All other dynamos are for large surge, ore processing, recharging your equipment, running another mods quarry, etc. Redstone relay in comparator mode on your main Energy Cell and relays on most (all but the tree oil & grassoline) dynamos to only turn them on when needed (I like threshold >14, which is like 90% full)

Also add more pulverizers/smelters as needed. I would avoid aux coils like the plague that they are and just build more machines. You've got the surplus power either way (until you start building RF Tools dimensions) The only time to really use coils is for your manual use devices where you are just impatient (and aren't we all).

 

[Ldog]

Old crap, saved for historical purposes. Skip down.

Spoiler

So it's a bit messy and the screenshots suck, but I think it's a good start (about the 4th iteration now). So 2 spruce trees with 1 fluxed arbor each will produce exactly enough for a resonant compression steam boiler with 1 fuel cat, a reinforced still will keep up with it.

2 Dark Oaks (again single arbors with fluxed phyto) plus resin funnel in sawmill produces a good surplus of rich phytogro, which we turn into fluxed with a dedicated basic Fluid Transposer and reinforced Energetic Infuser. If you went crazy with insolators for everything then you'd probably need more trees. I've got just oak, wheat, wart, ender lily, cinderpearl growing right now and there's a small surplus. Ender and Cinder are very slow though, even at resonant.

Grassoline is a bit more of a pain in the ass making it with fluxed bioblend (because seed oil) and even still it eats all the wheat. I tried adding a grower of beets as well, but then instead of balancing it seemed to prefer the beets (set filter for both). At any rate eventually it will top the tank off and stabilize. I need a better distribution system. Thermal Logistics is a nice addon to Thermal Dynamics, but it is still weak compared to Logistics Pipes or even Ender IO conduits (we won't even talk about Refined Storage/AE2). The double still setup to the left is for refined fuel, although I need to either add a 2nd crucible/3rd still to work with bitumen and coal at the same time, or at least have some better feeder system.

I don't want to use all the rosin up (nice to have for torches and what not) but there might be enough to run another set of steam boilers off it (since they don't run all the time). This doesn't show the details so great I guess, but there is plenty of space to add more dynamos as needed.

Here's a wall of pulverizers and smelters. There are filters on the bulk banks so that ore and dusts get sorted to them. The rightmost are "special" with resonant crafters (6 recipes) a smelter does all the basic alloys from ingots and hardened glass on demand. 1 Pulverizer will smash obsidian and lead for the smelter to make the glass as well as the less often needed items like bone meal and glowstone dust. I've also got a pyro with sieves for the nickel ore + cinabar, it gets you 2 platinum. Also tectonic on a pulverizer for diamond/emerald ups it to 3. I haven't automated the fluids but since they aren't heavily run without a quarry, you can just dump in a bucket here and there.

And here's a sampling of the storage. You could put covers over the pipes of course to make it look nice, but it's important to see here the lines with and without servos. This is what I call the front net and the back net. A weakness of TD that TL doesn't correct is that you can't have input and output on same connection. Additionaly the only modules TL terminal will interact with properly are crafters, everything else blocks it from requests so it has to go on the back net as well. It's an awful mess of a storage system, although this base is 1 level in 1 chunk and there's over 80 caches and still space. I would of course lean more heavily on storage drawers in actual play (if not just go right for Refined Storage net) but I wanted to show what can be done with TE/TD/TL alone.
View attachment 37404
Here's the magma/obsidian gen. Yes, I cheated and put in an Ender Tank. So the crucible is just the backup system I talked about earlier. You can see the redstone relays on the pipe, the crucible will only run if the small tank is empty. I know this looks like shit cause I just slapped it in there quick.

Here's that smelter with the resonant crafter from TL. The inputs are on top, output bottom, each row is a recipe. If you have recipes with larger inputs you can't use 6 (so 3 recipes with up to 4 or 2 recipes with 9) it's weak, but it's better than nothing. I hope to see this mod get some more work and/or TD get better fetures integrated.

Pulverizer recipes

These are just plain TD filters, this is ore for the pulverizers.

And blood for the blood god...I mean pulverized metals for the smelter. And nether quartz (gives 4 vs 3 and sulfer in pulverizer, if you need sulfer more then pulverize it).

I still need to do some other bits, especially the liquid XP. I'd also like to get auto-handling fluids in and crafting at least signalum/enderium/lumium automagicly. I don't know if subcomps are really worth it, since at this point you've built it all. Can add compactors for plates and gears at least.

 

[Ldog]

More crap, although the fluid routing system here works well enough for manual input, for on-demand crafting it'll go to hell in a handcart PDQ.

Spoiler

So the Creature Encapsulator range is 11x11x11, centered on itself. That means 5 up, 5 down, 5 each side. You can build a small multi-platform mob spawner with it in the center or do the usual mob grindy things and use this as the grinder part. I tried using it for farming livestock, put a few nametags on cows, unfortunately that does not count as taming them. One would need to have your breeding stock outside range of the device and then drop the excess into range. It will also pickup babys, which interestingly enough are processed just like adults. So it's doable, just a pain in the ass.

Tried slapping redstone relays on caches to use to trigger excess food/seeds to go to a dump chest for grassoline processing. The problem is threshold 1 is any items, so it will empty it still. Threshold 2 is 1424 items, which means we have to wait a long time, but it is doable. It also means 2 more sides used since we need structural ducts with the relays connected to another item duct with a servo. We also need our normal front & back net ducts as well. The other hassle is on the distributor chest for the sawmill...different quantities of veggies are needed to produce biomass depending what they are. If we aren't putting the exact amount and only the exact amount into the sawmill we're going to get jams. Granted we could skip the seed oil enrichment for the bioblend which would simplify it. Could get more seeds using plain phyto-gro instead of fluxed too (and yes, I know about the IE Garden Cloche ) All in all Grassoline production isn't worthwhile from a pure power perspective (it's hard to beat wood planks into a steam boiler, if you can stand the noise of sawmills running constantly) the main reason I like it is because it's an excess item sink.

Working on cleaning things up since I am still not happy with the layout. I thought if I went to a standardized layout for ducts in clusters where you could just drop in whatever in banks of 5 it would be neater and easier (I had tighter layouts that unfortunately were too much hassle if something got connected wrong or you needed to upgrade a servo/etc) so I think it's back to banks of task related machines and then hooking them into the main buses.

Urghhhhh....so I just realized the redstone relay signals propagate all over the network...this makes them a lot less useful. If servos/extractors and TE machines were integrated with the relays (so you could set a color channel on the thing itself). Ender IO conduits these are not.

I at least got the fluid-routing thing down. The allocators are a bit of a disappointment, they are not IE or MFR item/fluid routers, they are more like enhanced hoppers (and CoFH docs says as much). They are also flaky (like all the TE devices) as far as respecting filters and their auto-input/output. Anywho...I got this working properly now. Magma crucible takes inputs for: Redstone, Glowstone, Ender and the 4 elemental dusts. The 2 allocators along with filters on every output along with the internal buffers ensures no jams (unless you're just outputting mass quantities or your tanks are full of course) The first allocator has a blacklist filter for the basic 3, so only the elementals make it to the 2nd. Zeph has no use outside reactant dynamo that I know of, but it's there for completeness. This is for making limited batches of the fluids, if you are using them en masse then they should probably have their own crucible. This system could be automated with the crafters to produce on demand. Each tank would need a crafter on it's output that is linked to a crafter on the crucible input. I would also make this crucible the default destination for the clathrate ores since you get a full bucket per ore this way. Everything else should be on demand or manual feed. A hopper or some kind of buffer chest on top of the crucible would be a good idea. Lava and the fuels get their own dedicated infrastructure, I see no reason to link them. If you had other mods adding fluids you wanted to process here you could add additional fluid allocators to the setup.

 

[Ldog]

Trying a fresh approach here because it was just getting to be an insane mess. I started automating all the crafting but it started misbehaving with the fluids. Note to self: Do not destroy in use crafting modules, it will corrupt your save. Anyway. Took the opportunity to do a cleaner start without other content altering mods (Pam's HC alone adds 3 more steps to make bread and another 17 kinds of fish to sort).
Going to do this more along the way the youtubers do; just show a system out in the open and leave it up to you how to condense, optimize and make it your own.
I'll start again with what I am going to call phase 1. That is the tree oil and phyto-gro production minus the grassoline and aqua chow options along with the extra steam dynamos.

We'll start with the factory in a box. The signalum and resonant upgrades are optional to start out. They are eventually for the pair of dynamos, the sandstone producing extruder and the sand/niter pulverizer. Reinforced should produce just enough power. The auxilliary sieves boost the chance of getting niter to 100%. Upgrading the extruder to resonant helps keep up. About a half stack each duct type should do it. Leadstone flux duct is fine for now, and even endgame for most of this system. I prefer hardened for home-runs and leadstone for most drops when able. Since caches don't go into strongboxes (or stack) I used chests to represent how many caches are needed. Although one could use chests I suppose...

I might have miscounted on the upgrades, there's probably more than needed (and I might have included hardened/reinforced for e-cell, but not signalum/resonant). You don't need most of the upgrades to get started. They are only required when an augment is required, which is for specializations. Sieves are recommended but optional. Some upgrades help the fully built system to run more smoothly, or produce more product to keep up with increased demands as we support other systems. We also avoid upgrading any of these machines just because we can since even though we have a healthy power surplus, it's still not unlimited. You'll also need to upgrade the dynamos that much sooner if you over upgrade the machines, so don't do it.

We'll pretend we built underground and this is a cutaway of the surface; 4 trees is the start of your industrial empire! You'll probably want to build this closer to save on ductwork early on. You'll probably want to use opaque item ducts to avoid making hardened glass at this stage too.

How many dark oak trees (and double the # of trees if you have to use something less efficient; my current survival game I had to take an overnight boat ride to the nearest roofed forest) you need really depends on how many arbors and insolators you are going to run. The basic system could get by with 1 along with the sawmill producing sap when it makes planks (even though that really slows down when the cache fills, inventory stocks should be pretty good by then). 2 trees will keep up with phase 2 along with adding several more insolators for other crops but I have not scienced it.

The infuser will likely need an upgrade or 2, the transposer possibly 1...if you've got a backlog of rich phyto-gro in the infuser upgrade it, if the transposer is getting full of sap (more than half-full I'd say, because when the sawmill is running constantly you will have more sap than when the system stabilizes itself) then upgrade it.

If you want to be the phyto-king and plant a bunch of dark oaks then you'll probably need more machines even, and at some point you'd need to provide more of the other inputs as well. I would start with 1-2 trees and only add more if the fluxed phyto-gro stocks are declining steadily (but remember if you add a new arbor or insolator, it will drop 64 immediately).

Basics: Water supply, still, dynamos, energy cell (again, doesn't need to be resonant, upgrade as you can). The still only needs to be upgraded to reinforced when you've got your arbors steadily using fluxed phyto-gro and your dynamos are upgraded to resonant. If you started this early, even using the steam dynamo at t1 directly before you are able to produce the upgrades to go to boiler/turbine, you'll know what you need to upgrade when. Generally you will see a small surplus of tree oil buildup until you get to resonant dynamos, a single cat in the compression boiler will be the point of equilibrium, no cat and you will start to bleed off fuel, 2-3 cats and you will start building a surplus again.

Everything else. I'd never make a room this tall but I was trying to use the minimum ducts/servos/filters/retrievers (especially retrievers) to make this work, since the sooner you get this thing built the sooner you can go on to bigger and better things. You'll probably need to make a stack or 3 of basic phyto-gro by hand to help get up and running, but the system will stabilize and fill the arbos, insolator and produce a healthy surplus. The bonus products so far at this stage mean you never need to collect sand or wood again. Torches can be made with rosin, saving your coal & charcoal for fuel. You'll have enough stone bricks and oak planks to build the castle of your dreams. At an early stage you probably don't have enough spare machines for a dedicated furnace to make glass, but the sand output makes it an option. It will also provide for many induction smelters for your ore processing lines since the only thing we are producing it here for is niter. Which we also produce in abundance so you can make lots of gunpowder too. I thought niter used to be used for a lot more items, maybe it was other mods, maybe it was just 1.7...we may want to skip the sieves on the pulverizer, the base chance is 50%, which will still provide plenty.

I'm not going to go into the configuration of every device here, but I feel the Fab merits it. Don't forget pattern validation. Otherwise you need to put filters on your inputs and it will still make a mess.

A little trick I use to see if I really need to upgrade a production chain machine to the next tier or not (provided it is at least hardened) is to drop an aux coil in temporarily (this is 1 of the few times I use them, like I said elsewhere: generally avoid them and just build another machine instead) until the machine burns through whatever surplus input it has, take it out, and observe it for a bit. Sometimes (especially with fluids) you'll get a bit of a backlog from a temporary or intermittent condition but you wouldn't gain any real benefit in going to the next tier. This might be over-engineering it, and if you don't care about efficiency then in the long run it probably isn't going to hurt anything to just slap resonant upgrades on everything and be done with it, which is why I try to discuss options that suit different play-styles. When in doubt, it's likely better to over-produce than under-produce.

 

[Ldog]

And without further ado we'll move on to phase 2. Grassoline, Aqua Chow and more dynamos oh my!

All the things for this upgrade phase.

Here it all is, just to the right of our original setup (we did reroute a few power pipes). Since I let the bread maker run for a while first, the still is just making our first Grassoline now. Eventually it will stabilize enough, but we needed to get some bread production out of the way (for aqua chow). Since it ties up a lot of wheat that we don't have right now (because we need it for grassoline, not to mention we should be raising some cows too), we keep the bread in the fab where it is made plus the fishfood maker. In survival of course you've probably got a good surplus of wheat and seeds from your manual farm (you did plant a manual farm right?) so feel free to dump them into the system.

Here's those extra steam boilers What's that alien looking thing on top of the left one? It's the Factorizer (new for 1.12?) we send charcoal into it, it turns it into charcoal blocks (no power needed) and we burn those. Why blocks you say? Because it has the burn time of 10 pieces of charcoal instead of the 9 it takes to make it). The right boiler burns wood planks. The filters are important or they will burn all the things! Wood planks interestingly produce slightly more power than charcoal (with the sawmill of course) but these gens shouldn't run too often anyway, and the 1 insolator growing oak can supply 1 of each, plus surplus wood, it probably wouldn't supply enough to supply planks to 2 dynamos and produce charcoal (and we need the charcoal for phyto-gro) and surplus wood. We could add a rosin setup too but I don't want to chance using it all up right now (could add sieves to the still I suppose though). I will look more into this later, especially since then you could use the surplus charcoal to feed Botania endoflame mana production or use for some other mod. Get that E-Cell upgraded to Resonant ASAP.

The grassoline generator in all it's green glory. You can also see 1 of the new steam turbines. You can just see the redstone relay on the duct next to the Energy Cell.

And this is how we configure it. And that is inverted threshold, sorry can't show 2 tooltips at once. Comparator, inverted threshold, and drag the slider 1 back from the right.

This is how it gets configured on the 2 new steam boilers (the grassoline has a field limiter so no need on it). You can kinda see the 4 turbines here.

Here is our overly large fish pond (max efficiency at 30 blocks of water around it) and for once I'm glad it is raining (extra fish). It's best to put it in the ocean or a river if possible for more output. You can pretend to be Jesus and feed the masses bread and fish by the truckload now...
Yes, this is all we added this phase, food & moar powah! Oh and warts to brew all kinds of potions you'll probably never use. This concludes the first flowchart put into practice.

 

[Ldog]

So instead of going into the ore processing setup (we're assuming you've got a basic one for now) since the advanced stuff requires more infrastructure anyway, I thought we'd build some of this in preparation.

The mob encapsulator & enstabulator are stupidly cheap to setup and run, so we'll make a mobfarm with them as well as a Thermal Logistics storage system. This also gives us a good supply of liquid XP for making blaze/blizz/blitz/basalz powder as well as enchanting books and repairing equipment. We're also going to add some more stuff.

While I was building this I noticed the grassoline production was barely keeping up. Puzzled I looked it over and because I went with a different setup this time I learned some new things. The E-Cell is going to take closest first, but also certain inputs (not sure how it is determined) so my prior setup worked perfectly because all the dynamos were on 1 input line AND they were in the best possible order. Even more baffling is that after a reload of the game, it switched. I didn't bother making any changes.

To not live at the mercy of the RNG, we should make 1 input line to the cell that all the dynamos go on. Turbines should go closest to the cell because they have to bleed it all out anyway (what really made it clear to me was because while the grassoline gen was empty of RF, the turbine was backed up, we want the opposite). Out of these the tree oil fed one should be 1st, the others next. After that should be any other switched off gens, last should be any with excitation field limiters. So in my setup this means turbines, then refined fuel/magma, with grassoline last. On a hardened flux duct you can put about 8 resonant dynamos (with specializations) since more will over-saturate the line. I've shown an optimized way to build this in a later post.

A mysterious box. Whatever could be inside?

A mobfarm of course. So the way to do this with the Creature Encapsulator is to set it on the floor, make an 11x11 room, 3 high ceiling. Make rooms above and below it, also 3 high. This will allow you to get Endermen in your mob farm, and making it any bigger (or more floors going 2 high) isn't going to help unless you use multiple Enstabulators. Even at resonant they are just too slow (and better to have sieves than coils as always). Cursed earth isn't going to help either. Yes, I know this is a puny mobfarm for most people (and I hated building it with no builders wand) but we're more after the liquid knowledge than mobdrops here anyway. Do yourself a favor and make a batch of reuseable morbs, put half of them in here, use the other half in a mobfarm near a blaze spawner in the nether. You might even get some Wither skulls too. Really 2-3 morbs per farm is enough. Also of note, covers do not block light. This is why we've got the little box built around the pipes. It also doesn't look like mobs will spawn on top of them (I covered the in floor ducts and light-level checker doesn't register on them, could just be a mod interaction and/or display thing) so don't sweat it too much where you decide to run your ducts through. I wouldn't lose sleep over lost spawning area either, like I said, the enstabulator can only run so fast, and even though the encapsulator is near instant, its auto-ejection cycle is not. Mob-spawns aren't going to be the bottleneck here.

Yer basic caches. So this covers about every possible mob drop (screw your colored wool). In practice all the rods besides blaze should immediately be pulverized since that is their only use, and if you ever need a cache for wither skulls then you're using Draconic Evolution We should factorize gold nuggets into ingots as well. So you can't really see them, but you can guess that the back is a wall of item ducts, this is the...wait for it....back net. The servo on the leather would be on the front net (we're making books now so it has to have a servo). Back net can never have anything besides filters and crafters on it or it won't work with the TL Terminal.

This is the TL Terminal. Looks a lot like the LP/AE2/RS terminal, EIO panel. No surprise here. If it ain't broke don't fix it right? Do take note of the module slot, you need to stick a Requester in there, the best you can make. It's the TL version of the retriever (in fact it uses 1 in the recipe). Besides being a retriever it also can request from TL crafters. So you'll notice (or not, and there is the scroll down, but take my word for it) some of the things you know we are producing aren't visible, or are machine inventories but not cache (for example we've got over 2k netherwart but the cache is behind a servo, the 2 stacks are in a sequential fab, we should also never touch this). This is because their only connection has a servo on it, that front/back net thing, which we violated doing the initial setup. So there are some weak points compared to LP, some we can work around with careful planning, some we can't. The lack of a polymorphic item sink sucks. We can't lock chests like we can a cache so it's pretty much caches for everything (although with some higher tier filters and care in making connections we can achieve the same effect). Some of these are not the fault of TL either, but limitations of TD itself. Still this is nice to have, you can do the usual request/craft/dump back to network/dump to your inventory. It's also cheaper and quicker to get up and running than other logistics systems and doesn't require power. Really this is stuff that could and should be part of TD. Oh the terminal doesn't handle liquids either, so you'd have to setup fluid transposers to request filled buckets.

Some more machines. This is an awful mess, but this is what happens when we slap stuff down without planning. An energetic infuser with the flux reconstruction specialization, a fluid transposer setup to craft your TF powders on request and an Arcane Ensorcelator that is fed books by a crafter fed leather and paper from another crafter. I was all ready to plop down a sugarcane insolator when I realized we have all that sawdust (that we don't need for plastic sheets, need to get Infinity expert mode purged from my soul) and aqua chow isn't something we go through very quickly so we're going to make paper that way (until we load Thaumcraft and use paper like it's going out of style). The fluid transposer tank is empty because we're filling a Tome of Knowledge by the way, a very handy item you should make ASAP. You'll still need to use an anvil to combine books (or use Open Blocks auto-anvil)

Here's the paper fab. I'm just feeding it into the book maker for now instead of into a cache.

Here's that transposer crafter module configuration Has to be Signalum for 4 recipes. We also don't show the liquid knowledge that is required since we are just piping it in directly. If you were supplying it on request then you would have to link another crafter to the fluid pipe input, and request 200mb of fluid on each recipe.Very important things to note about the TL crafting, again TL is LP younger retarded brother. There is no notification that you don't have the materials to craft the stack of widgets you asked for. There is also no oversending protection. If you ask for a stack of hardened glass, it will try to send 2 full stacks of pulverized obsidian to the smelter at once. If you're using the same machine for say smelting bronze/invar/electrum/steel and you try to request all of them at the same time, it will send all the materials at once and if you're very lucky they will get in and out in the right order but more likely it'll just jam. Then you get to go clear clogged servos. Fun. Another reason to keep your frontnet out front. So you can clear those servos.

Speaking of cows...So for some things sometimes the vanilla solution is best (or other mods). The newer crowding mechanics are actually a godsend since all we have to do is feed the cows once in a while (or make use of other mods, I like Farming for Blockheads feeding trough here, you just need to set the config to breed more than 24, which is the threshold for crowding, I thought 36 was a good number). Make sure to put a filter with empty whitelist on the end of the hopper or the ducts will try to push crap into it and jam it. You could also use a Vacuumulator (which is another newer TF device) instead of a hopper, it's a little more expensive but is more server friendly (it also has a built-in filter at least). We should have a vanilla chicken farm as well. The usual dispenser egg-layer drowning type is my preference, we can also siphon off some of the eggs with a round-robin delivery system. The cow design can be used for pigs & sheep as well. These are both pretty standard designs that many youtubers have shown so I am not going to cover how to build them. Or use your own favorites but since a Redstone Furnace with a Trivection Chamber augment produces double food, we want to avoid the lava blade types that produce cooked meat.

For the sake of completeness (because I usually have better uses for rotten flesh, not least of which is vanilla...trade for emeralds) 4 rotten flesh into a redstone furnace gives 1 leather. So it's an option if you can't be arsed with cows.

So I didn't do the phase in a box, also didn't finish the phase. Obsidian extruder & glacial precipitator need to be added so we can actually make some of those powders. Maybe some auto-crafting of the dusts they are used to make as well. Obviously in survival you'd need more storage than I have shown, as well as some ore processing setup since the machines already built are single-purpose. My survival game (that I'd love to get back to) I am around phase 1 going into phase 2 which is why I started doing this anyway, to come up with a better setup.

It's late but I'll wrapup Phase 3 tomorrow.

 

[Ldog]

So I didn't get around to finishing up phase 3 in the lab. I just really needed some survival play time. Of course moving my mess of a setup (to an only slightly-less messy setup, but at least there is space to clean it up) was nerve-wracking, but I got it done. Then I upgraded my silk-touch fluxbore to resonant (along with my fluxomagnet) and strip mined a chunk. Not going to show off Thermal Innovation here but if you don't have it, get it. If you're coming from 1.7.10 like some of us, you might not have heard of it. It's a newer CoFH mod that has a drill, saw, magnet and a couple other goodies. The fluxsaw is no lumber axe unfortunately (although it's still pretty cool) but the fluxbore is the best drill ever, the magnet is even better than Botania's and the hypoinfuser and alchemical quiver are pretty neat toys too. KL's latest kick is trying to make less used vanilla items more useful and fun and those last 2 make potions fun again.

After some of my machine automation disasters, I've got a plan to automate all the things now. Just have to make more use of input buffers. Also having been in touch with Astavie (author of TL) he is already working on resolving some of the issues I ran into, so this will only get better.

Just to re-iterate (and to remind myself when I get back to playing) some rules for TL storage.
Backnet - TL terminal, dump chest (an Ender chest with a distributor for example), storage inputs (Cache/strongbox/even a storage drawer controller), most TE machine (where the machine just auto-ejects product) outputs - we can have a filter or a crafter on any of these connections but nothing else.
Frontnet - Storage outputs - cache/etc with a servo/distributor (storage drawer controller would also get one), most TE machine inputs

I say most TE machines above because if we are using a Crafter attachment then most of the time we connect to the backnet and do in/out on 1 duct. There are some cases where the crafter might go on the front-net, but most of the time not.
We've also got a lot of edge cases where we're going to feed 1 machine directly from another, so those might be connected differently.
Fluids get handled a little differently, we'll revisit that as well.

TD rules:
Because it is easy to forget this when you start making changes to a system that worked perfectly until you added or removed something and you are banging your head trying to figure out why.

Default routing is Nearest-First! Default routing is Nearest-First! Default routing is Nearest-First!

Higher tier attachments can change this but machine & device auto-outputs always follow this rule.

We can make a route shorter or longer with vacuum or dense itemducts. They exist for a reason. Make use of them where needed. They don't impact items flowing through them but they let you change routing.

Filters default to blacklist, which is empty, which means they will let anything through. Don't forget to configure them before you hook them up to an existing network that is pushing items around.

Servo & retriever default to redstone high, that means they won't work unless you provide a redstone signal or reconfigure them. I can't count how many times I have gone and set them up, configured them, and forgot about the redstone config. Walked away and then came back and wondered why my thing wasn't working.

Redstone relay will propagate signal through the duct network like normal redstone, a 16 str signal will travel 16 blocks. This can have unintended consequences (because it doesn't just transmit to other relays) but can also be used to your advantage. For example you could make a kill switch for a large bank of servo's on your storage network (and save yourself having to reconfigure them all from default).

TL attachments also follow the rules of TD. The distributor changes this in that it prioritizes filters, which means it has 2 layers of nearest-first. Nearest filter to furthest filter, then nearest non-fitered to furthest non-filtered. The Terminal dump to network also works this way.

 

[Ldog]

I'm going to revisit the Dynamo setup right now, since it is easier to know what to put where and not have to move it later. Also since the shots get to be such a mess I'm going to show the finished product and then how to build it layer by layer. I think it's much easier to understand that way.

This is the finished product. 3720 RF/t when all the dynamos are running. If you need more power than this, you probably aren't reading this guide.If/when you hit the point that this isn't enough power you probably want to explore other mods power options (since other mods are probably why you need more power anyway). In a purely Thermal mod environment 3720 RF/t will power a lot of machines. Myself I'd be building an Extreme Reactor when I need more.
So we are using steam, compression and magmatic. For fuel we burn tree oil, wood planks, charcoal blocks (I might switch that to Rosin), grassoline, refined fuel and lava. I think that covers a pretty good sampling of what TF has to offer. There are 3 other dynamos but I am not going to cover them. I'd never consider using them to be honest as they are more novelty items to show your great wealth and prestige as you literaly burn riches for energy. Again by the time you are there no longer need my guidance grasshoppa.

So the whole plant has a 4x4 footprint. Bottom layer. I prefer to supply coolant (water) from the bottom and fuel from the top. So we're going to layout 8 fluid ducts in this pattern (bottom is the front). You'll need to connect this to your water main from whatever side (or underneath) is convenient. We aren't going to discuss other coolants right now, just stick to water. We'll make the little ruler thing out of rockwool since I don't have a banana handy for scale as is the custom of our people. Oh wait...this isn't Reddit...anywho...let's get on with the build.

This is the next layer. I'm going to block out the empty spaces each layer going up with black/white rockwool to hopefully make it easier to see (let me know if this is better or worse). I suck at screenshots. Starting to see where doing a video would be easier.
So we've got a few more fluid ducts, 2 steam dynamos (left is a boiler with 3 fuel cats, right is a turbine), a redstone relay (set the boiler to high input required) that is set to redstone output (whatever color you pick, keep it consistent throughout the build), and a structural duct which connects the coolant system to the power input so the redstone signal crosses, finally a hardened fluid duct which takes the steam from the boiler to the turbines (because 1 steam dynamo boiler will power 2 turbines).

We're almost done. Throw down the best energy cell you've got, or upgrade your leadstone as you go (and yes, it is outside of the 4x4) Make sure the back is set to input (blue) the rest can be used for output (orange). We've got most of our dynamos now. Center top going clockwise - Compression dynamo for grassoline, compression for refined fuel, steam turbine, steam turbine, magmatic. We continue the water pipes (sorry ducts), some more relays. Remember to set them properly, the one on the e-cell gets comparator, inverted threshold, threshold >14. The other ones get set to output mode. The item duct on the wood burning boiler - it doesn't have to go there, just has to go somewhere, remember to put a filter on it, and set it to whitelist, oak planks. It's optional to whack the ducts that don't need to be connected (turbines don't need coolant, but they won't accept it and it won't hurt them) I made sure to route the ducts so that steam/coolant/fuel doesn't get connected by accident (which happens in tighter builds with distressing frequency).

The top (well a fuel tank of tree oil goes on left, a factorizer for charcoal on the right next level, and more fuel input ducts), our tree oil burning compression dynamo, last 2 turbines, and the charcoal burning boiler. We've also got fuel tanks on top of the other dynamos, which are optional...also there is the 1 exception to ducts that you need to disconnect, make sure that hardened doesn't get connected to refined fuel input or it'll get full of steam. Don't forget your lava line needs to be hardened or better. If you are producing charcoal blocks elsewhere (or just using Rosin instead) then your factorizer doesn't need to go here, again remember to put the appropriate filter in place and set it.

We could squeeze a second Grassoline dynamo in here, which would bring us up to 4080 RF/t, the max a hardened flux duct can handle, but it is probably not worth the effort. I only mention it because I'm having trouble balancing the grassoline production vs crop production. Ideally we could produce all crops and have a small surplus for feeding livestock, cooking, etc and then just turn the rest into grassoline.

 

[Ldog]

Today we're going to show scalable ore-processing. I set down 4 pulverizers and 4 smelters, but the lines are setup so that they could be made as long as you want. This is for your basic bulk ores. I'll cover using tectonic and pyrotheum separately, as well as on-demand crafting of alloys (and even auto-pulverizing ingots when necessary since we are smelting everything and then storing it)

Front-view, or left or back...depends how you want to look at it. At any rate this is where you'd connect it to the storage backnet as well as power (well you could power it from wherever is convenient). The strongboxes are all buffers, plain are probably fine, at least for the bottom left (sand) and top left (non-pulverized smelter input; in our case nether ore) the bottom right resonant is our ores to be pulverized, bigger is probably better. You can use this as a dump chest directly, or use your terminal, or my favorite an Ender-chest and linked pouch. Vanilla Ender chests unfortunately don't have inventories so they can't connect to the ducts.

The filter input on the resonant chest, as well as the output servo. You could use any tier servo here, I mainly used Resonant so that we don't have to replace it later when we want higher speed, but being able to once again filter all the ores provides some extra protection from us pulverizing stuff we don't want pulverized. We've got our vanilla ores (less diamond, emerald, nether quartz), all of our TF ores except nickel (well technically platinum, iridium and mana-infused, but those don't spawn by default...if you know how to configure those you probably know what you want to do with them), and the oil shale/sands which we'll smash into bitumen (or not, I wound up just sending them directly to crucible for extra oil).

This is the pulverizer bank. I chose 4. You could start with 1 and add as you go. Resonant is preferable so you can put 4 aux sieves in each, gives you a 25% chance of getting a secondary metal, 50-100% on most other secondary products, but most importantly, 100% chance of cinnabar from redstone. Gold it only gets boosted to 25%, as I mentioned in an update to the op, I will likely move gold to it's own smelter that uses rich ore to triple the gold. For lack of a better term, I used private LAN, the numbers are just to show that there are actually 3 seperate lines involved. Like Ghostbusters, Never....Cross...The...Streams! Pulverizers get set to input from bottom, output on top. No filters/servos/etc necessary with this setup, the savings really start to add up as you scale.

This strongbox buffers and sorts pulverizer output. Signalum servo sends pulverized metal to smelters below, hardened servo send non-smelter inputs into backnet storage (the smelter outputs are connected here as well). Even ores we aren't processing here need to be in the filter, because they may come from secondary (nickel from iron ore for instance).

The above-mentioned servos. You may need higher tier if you've got more products from other mods, or just THAT much volume that you want to send full stacks out (which Signalum will do) I just realized this is a cock-up too, I forgot flint, tar and bitumen (actually pulverizing the oil ores was the cock-up...you can do either, you'll get more oil per ore but less secondary products which are tar and flint, rather have the oil). So we'll need a Reinforced or better servo instead of the Hardened. Both could be just Reinforced honestly. What's best to use depends on where you're at in your game. Early when resources are tight, you want to use the cheapest thing that does the trick. Later on it could be quicker and easier to just go right to Resonant everything. Same for ducts, there comes a point where I'm not even going to bother using the basic ones, because I just don't care about the cost after post-scarcity. Item ducts especially, I show regular where they make sense, but in practice I'd upgrade everything to impulse once I've mined a decent amount of glowstone (which could be done in 1 good trip to the Nether).

Our line of Induction Smelters. Again however many you want. I went with 4 again, but you don't need the same amount of smelters as you have pulverizers because redstone, lapis, coal and the like don't get smelted. So don't get crazy here. Especially if you go large. After some survival testing I think 4 and 2 is good to start, and then add more machines if you find your buffer chests getting full. So lower strongbox is our sand buffer, upper is ore. You might not be able to see it so well but the pulverized ore output connects to the back of this (not into the buffers).

Filter and servo for smelter buffer. Again, go higher tier if you need to. I frequently use other mods as well, but I am not going to cover them here or I will never get this done. Also this is what I went with in survival as opposed to sending the quartz to a smelter with sieves, since I set it up early and couldn't afford another resonant smelter, and then just left it that way. If you want to maximize rich slag then process it with sieves, but your main line doesn't benefit from sieves (you should have more regular slag than you'll ever need already)

And we have hit the limit of 10 photos per post (which I just learned about now). Anyway, as you can guess the sand buffer servo and filter whitelist sand and nothing else. Oh, so the smelters like the pulverizers, input on the bottom, output on the top. Make sure the flux slot is locked so that sand only goes into the left slot; otherwise your smelters will be full of sand (and that doesn't even make glass, it just sits there). You could put a cache here as well for sand (saves a filter, only needs to be basic, the resonant was something I was testing) but I prefer to just pipe it in from the network. If you had a really huge operation with multiple RF-Tools quarries pumping ore in then you might want a dedicated extruder producing sand here instead, but I'll leave that up to you.

The smelter output, along with the non-smelted pulverizer output goes along that backnet line to your storage network, make sure you've allocated the space you need before you start dumping crap in.

I also forgot blizz, blitz and basalz rods but that would require another input (and upgrade the signalum output to resonant) since we've only got 2 slots left on the resonants as it is. Unless your mob farm is in a biome where these generate, you aren't going to have an excess of these so they can go in your manual pulverizer (always good to still keep a set of machines we can use by hand) or even if you have a low traffic automatic pulverizer elsewhere in the network. The charcoal pulverizer isn't an option as I set it up, because it only outputs to fabricator when there is room. It would otherwise be a good candidate, but you'd need to configure an inventory for it that uses a requester (because nobody needs 20000 pulverized charcoal on hand) and a crafter on the pulverizer itself. It's a good idea to do this anyway if you have other mods that use it, or you make steel (TE itself doesn't really use steel, although you can make TF tools and armor with it) or a lot of gunpowder (but you've got a mob farm producing gunpowder), It's still probably a good idea to make it on demand so we'll do that at some point. I wanted to show how to get the phyto-gro setup built as cheaply as possible since it provides our first self-sustaining power as well as core basic resources, but it is not a long-term solution since it doesn't connect to the storage network properly that way either. In fact I just discovered in the lab that it had shut down completely, probably when I hastily connected it to the mob-grinder. Phyto-gro was looping endlessly from the servo to the back of it's own cache. No bueno!

 

[Ldog]

Just a taste of the more specialized processing methods. There is an issue with this in that it ties up a significant amount of resources when done this way (a stack of pyrotheum & tectonic plus 14 buckets of each) instead of having the crucible craft and send on demand, so it isn't a viable setup until you have a good supply of blaze & basalz powder (or the materials to make them) and then more of the materials to make them plus redstone dust. On the plus side, once you do, it is a rock-solid setup that also does have a large reserve capacity of fluid. It also isn't something you'll likely be setting up until you are pretty well established so the negatives may be a non-issue anyway. Would probably be good to be at this point in survival to have a better idea, but I will sleep on it.

The left smelter only takes rich slag and gold ore. Again, you can rich slag whatever you desire. This machine setup is 1 of the edge cases I mentioned earlier and their item duct connections are a little different.

The smelters take in green input (flux slot) only from the top, which is frontnet (so make sure you've got frontnet servos setup on your rich slag and cinnabar storage). They also are set for in/out on the bottom, filters for their metal & flux since it can come in this way as well (from main ore-processing). The fabricators craft pyrotheum and petroetheum on demand via hardened crafters (because they are 3 input recipes and a basic can only do 2 inputs), the magma crucibles have requesters set for 2 pyrotheum/petroetheum as appropriate. 2 because the Fab recipe makes 2 at a time and it is just easier this way, since we don't even have to store them on the network, but we can always request them for crafting upgrades & augments. The crucibles feed directly into their attached smelter/pulverizer so we don't have to do any complicated routing with their fluid outputs. They also aren't really used for much else (fuel for some dynamos that I am not going to show you how to use anyway). I am leaning towards keeping this setup more or less (would make it more compact by doublestacking/sharing ducts if anything in all likelihood). I realize I said 3, but 2 sieves is actually enough to guarantee 2 platinum per nickel ore. Even just 1 combined with the pyro-concentrator gives us an 88% chance.

I still never did get around to doing it, but for support this requires that we've setup an obsidian extruder (or are mining tons of it), which requires lava (pumping or netherrack crucible),basalz powder which requires more obsidian & liquid knowledge since you'll probably never farm enough, your mob farm needs to be in extreme hills if you want to try, a blaze farm or the ability to produce blaze powder (which we can do with liquid knowledge and sulfur, which requires processing ores/mobs with sulfur as a secondary product or making nether brick in a smelter out of soul sand and netherrack OR if you've got Thaumcraft there's cinderpearl, you can even grow it in an insolator with fluxed phyto-gro....good thing we produce lots of fluxed phyto-gro)

Remember this guy from earlier? So we're going to cut off the 2nd allocator (actually I need to change some ducting too, but I'm not in front of the game right now). It makes more sense to send the clathrate producing ores directly to a magma crucible for 1000mB instead of pulverizing them for 750mB worth. We're also already producing Pyro & Petro directly, we'll probably want a Cryoetheum setup as well at some point, Zeph...meh. The Zeph tank in this image is basicly the manual drain. So crucible input gets a filter for the ores. The allocator output gets whitelist filters for glowstone, enderium, redstone on 1 leg each, while the last 1 is a blacklist for all 3. So if something gets into the crucible by accident, or you just want to do a batch by hand of something, you can and it will go to that last output. Tanks can of course go where you want, you probably will want to spread them out somewhat since we'll want to use them to supply other crafters instead of manual handling sooner rather than later, and of course upgrade them to higher tiers and/or stack multiple tanks as needed. You might even want to store them in multiple disconnected tanks around the network for various purposes. Go ahead and get jiggy with it!

I remembered after I shut down last night that we want another smelter setup that does have aux sieves. It is used for other types of hardened metal glass (which produces rich slag) netherbrick from soul sand and netherrack (which produces sulfur) and it would be nice to get our nether quartz in (rich slag) but it produces some challenges trying to do this with 1 smelter, and these are not the kind of jobs one usually runs often enough to be worth dedicated setups, so it may stay a manual input device.

We've got 1 recipe that runs from mining (quartz) and 2 that we probably seldom if ever run (unless you really really really like building with nether brick and assorted hardened glass), they also have different input materials, only 1 recipe has flux (sand) so we can't lock the flux slot, which makes getting materials in the right slots in pairs a pain. The base rate of rich slag is 50%, so just leaving it running through the main smelter loop isn't horrible. Provided you do go and mine quartz here and there, you should still wind up with enough rich slag for gold processing (because quartz is a lot more common than gold).

Yeah, doing all 3 in 1 smelter isn't going to work. We could do brick and glass in 1 with crafters so it's on-demand only, either leave the quartz going to the automated (non-sieved) smelter line or you could just drop it in here by hand since this won't be in use most of the time. Can also setup another automated 4 sieve just for automated quartz processing.

Salvaged image from earlier setup. We also want to add another smelter, no augments, flux slot unlocked with a crafter setup like this to produce alloys on demand. We're using pulverized charcoal from our "phyto-works" for steel. A crafting pulverizer will process lead and obsidian for making hardened glass as needed. You could make alloys out of dusts, but it's simpler to just process and store all metals as ingots and then pulverize when needed. All it costs is a little extra energy, which we're mostly producing for free anyway. It is very important to use some kind of an inventory (strongk-box, etc) as an input buffer here (and route the output back out through it too I guess, that way we don't have to do linked crafters) and it also protects you from yourself, because the terminal will let you order a ton of everything at once and it will send it all at once and jam up the works. Astavie is currently working on implementing some over-sending protection as well as notification that you don't have enough materials to craft the stack of items you just requested to TL, but the buffer is still highly recommended.

This is 1 crafting pulverizer, again no augments. Again we're going to use a buffer. Most of this stuff we will hardly ever even need or need in such small amounts that it could be done manually, but we're trying to automate all the things here! We'll need at least 1 more pulverizer like this for copper, tin, silver, platinum & gold (I'd drop the lead from here as well and add it to #2, this way lead and obsidian can by processed at the same time for glass). This will allow us to setup Fabricators to craft signalum/endurium/lumium/fluxed-electrum dust (and we're already keeping stocks of the fluids needed), which will in turn feed smelters that make ingots. Having all of this done with crafters means you can just go to your terminal, request whatever ingot you want and every required step in the chain will be done as needed with no interaction from you (because crafters can request from other crafters).

We will automate making dye from flowers too, but that will require another 3 crafters. We can probably get away with 1 pulverizer (we could likely even combine all of these, it mainly depends how often you request how much, how big your buffer is and how impatient you are) by having the 5 crafter ducts on the buffer (leaving 1 to connect to the pulverizer) and...yes, I think we will do that since most of these are low volume. If you get to the point where it doesn't keep up, you'll know what to do by then. Although I think alloy production is likely high enough volume to merit its own pulverizer for all users, so that is what we are going to do 1 for ingots, and 1 for the misc and dyes.

Todo list -
Compactor:
Plates, not used very heavily by Thermal by itself so debatable if worth automating. TF metals, mostly for specializations that are not made in bulk. Fluxed-electrum for RA armor. Thaumcraft iron/alchemical brass/thaumium/void metal.
Gears, used a little more often, doing them by compactor we can automate 6 in 1 as opposed to 1 sequential fab per (especially not worth doing if the hand recipe is not made more costly). Copper & tin for sure. Probably bronze, silver, electrum and lumium to fill out a crafter since upgrades are something we tend to make a lot of. If using the more expensive hand recipe or other mods that use more gears, then another crafter for iron, nickel, invar, lead and whatever other 2 you feel might be useful.
Coins, yeah right, LMFAO, no. I'm not going to cover this. If you want to build an iron golem farm and press out coins to use in a generator and need help, look on youtube. I'm not hating on it either, it's just not worth the hassle to me. Large mob-farms, and especially iron golem farms are just not something I enjoy building or really feel the need for, but if that's your thing then knock yourself out.

Sawmill: Very basic and easy, overlooked because I have oak planks being done already. Input chest, Resonant crafter, all 6 vanilla woods.done.

Redstone Furnce: Trivection chamber, meat on demand. Change the fisher output to cache instead of auto-cooking (because cooking it will use twice as much storage) and we can cook all the meats when desired. Beef, chicken, pork, mutton, fish, salmon - 1 resonant crafter. (goddamnit forgot baked taters!)
Pyrolytic Conversion -I am not going to set this up, but it let's you make coal coke (mostly used for steel, but then charcoal is "free" it is also an enhanced fuel but I haven't crunched numbers to see if it is worth it), it also let's you make charcoal out of a few things you otherwise couldn't: wheat bales, 4 cactus, 8 sugarcane (as well as wood and compressed sawdust) and gives you creosote which has uses for other mods (namely Immersive Engineering and Railcraft, and you may prefer to make your creosote this way then) but can be burned as fuel otherwise.
Flux Anodizer - I'm also going to give this a miss. It isn't horrible, just generally not the best. Does strict ore doubling for vanilla/TF ores. Some mods ores/modpack configs it may actually be the best, do your due dilligence!

Ensorcellator: I did do basic automation, needs to be cleaned up, properly connected to storage. I set down 1 resonant with the 6 enchants that I expect would be used most (holding, efficiency, unbreaking, protection, slash, power). Could use the buffer trick and probably automate all the enchants if desired. If nothing else I would automate Holding for sure since it can be used on many items (resonant strongbox with holding 4 ftw, so long and thanks for all the fish Iron Chests mod). The others tend to go on things you will make a few of and then never make again. Anvil automation for combining the level 1 books, but I think this has to be done with other mods since there's no way to automate a vanilla anvil that I am aware of (Open Blocks auto-anvil is pretty ideal for this, it will also run on TF liquid knowledge)

Misc:
Lava, obsidian & snowballs: These are simple setups that just need to be included because other things are dependent.

Cryo/Pyro/Petro/Aero craft on request...need dedicated fabs for each, petro/pyro already in place need only slight modification to setup, Cryo used frequently enough to justify adding as well. Aero probably not unless we were using Reactant Dynamo.

Machine/Device frames/other subcomps/vanilla items...does the convenience outweigh the cost of the fab+crafter (materials as well as space and time spent setting them up) that will sit gathering dust most of the time for these easy to make items? That is the question. This is really the question to ask oneself when deciding what is or isn't a good candidate for automation (unless one is just automating all the things), especially things that once you've setup your automation setup you probably won't make anymore. OTOH, there is no rule that says you can't repurpose a fab setup once it is in place, and it is a less painful task than trying to repurpose a lot of other things since these are simple things that we will hook a crafter duct to the backnet and set the fab to in/out, done.

Automatic repair/recharge in Energetic Infuser: Probably not worth the trouble but could be done I guess. Easier to just keep the repair unit somewhere convenient (like by the terminal you use most...you can have multiple terminals btw) with an input and output chest if you like. Not really used if all your gear is RF vs breakable. As for charging, wireless charger for flux capacitor and use that to keep all your gear charged is the hassle-free way to charge.

I do believe we have covered all the TE machines and most if not all of the devices now.

Oh, almost forgot Centrifuge (besides Enstabulator) let's see....we can double our sugar...which also produces water that we need void...and we can un-combine some things when we accidentaly used up all our redstone or what not making too much cryotheum dust or signalum blend. Something that is nice to have around but not the most useful thing to automate. Screw it, we will do sugar on demand because we can. I think we used to be able to burn sugar in a steam dynamo can we still do that (I'm living in the past again, that was an MFR thing, to make sugar charcoal)?

Cleanup and do a better job showing the automated fossil fuel production cycle.
Needs to handle automatic bitumen & pulverized coal from ore processing as a bonus be able to request more pulverized coal on demand (so it doesn't use up all our coal)...probably something like the lava generation from empty tank redstone relay signal.

Create scripts for angry zombie and possibly other Thaumcraft mobs (this is more for my current survival game than this tutorial) see https://docs.blamejared.com/1.12/en...Expansion/Centrifugal_Seperator/#mob-addition
Worth mentioning if you use other mods that add mobs, the encapsulator will grab them if there is a spawn egg (creative menu) for them, but they won't have loot drops, so they will jam up your enstabulator. So you'll need to do the same for whatever mods you use. I'll share the TC scripts when I'm happy with them.

 

[Ldog]

On-Demand Crafting II

I laid out a lot of this above in my todo list, so let's get right to it!

This is without buffers. It isn't the best way to do this, I'm going to leave it here for comparison.

This is with buffers, they serve as both input and output buffers. They are optional, but highly recommended since they make the system much more bulletproof.

We'll start with the compactors, sawmill and redstone furnace. For the most part these machines can be whatever tier. Some need specializations so they have to be hardened or better. For the most part they don't need other augments, but go Resonant when convenient. If you're the impatient type you can add aux coils in any empty spots as you like, these machines only run on demand so the extra power drawer is less of a concern. Maybe preferable since you want that stack of steak NOW! This is one of those exceptions to my general rule on aux coils.

Also since most of them connect exclusively to backnet you can pack them much tighter than shown and share ducts. Whatever sides are configured are generally in/out (blue/orange mix) I'll make sure to point out any exceptions, but consider these the general rules for on-demand.

The standard compactor makes plates out of ingots. I really just don't see the need without other mods, TE just does not use that many plates. Copper would be the most used maybe (for turbines and boiler among other things) and even that's not really enough to justify automation. Redstone Arsenal, you'll use 96 fluxed-electrum plates to make a set of armor, if you use Simply Jetpacks as well the flux-infused jetpack add another 12 to that, so I consider it worth automating. A hardened crafter can do this, but if you're going to bother go big or go home. Myself I'll be adding iron plates (TF doesn't use them either, but other mods I use do), alchemical brass/thaumium/voidmetal (these are all Thaumcraft). If you're doing IC2 as well, then you can make plates here instead of in the metal former. The IE metal-press can be automated too, and sometimes I just like to watch it work, but as long as your plates are all ore-dictionaried you can pretty much mix and match as you choose.

Compactor #2, gearworking die. This let's us make...yes, you guessed it...gears. And only gears. It will no longer make plates with this installed. I put the config here as well, make sure auto in/out are on, in this case we are gonna use 2 crafters so we've got 2 sides configured.

Gears are used a little bit more in the Thermal Universe so we're actually going to setup not 1 but 2 resonant crafters. We're doing iron, gold, lead, nickel, invar, constantan, copper, tin, bronze, silver, electrum and lumium. As you're well aware by now since you've made more than a few gears by hand now, 4 ingots makes 1 gear. If you've got the old-school recipe with an iron ingot at the center for gears made by hand (it's a config option these days) then making them in the compactor also saves you that iron. If you were only going to do 1 automated then I'd go with the tinc, copper and the 4 used for upgrades (bronze, silver, electrum, lumium) since those are your most used gears. You could also have a 3rd crafter for the remaining gears if you so desire.

Sawmill config is also a little different, because we aren't ever actually requesting the sawdust as a crafting material, we cheat a little. It gets sent out the side (yellow). In theory it could go out the bottom, but it generally won't (this is when not using a buffer). When a buffer is in place, the sawdust will wind up going there as well, so you'll need to put another output with a servo, whitelisted to sawdust, backnet connected on the buffer.

Use whatever augments you want here. If you feel you need more sap & resin then you can use the funnel, but you'll need to fit fluid ducts in and route them. You'll also need to deal with both fluids coming out. I doubt anyone needs more resin or sap really at this point, and it is probably best to just add more arbors and trees if that is the case. If you want more sawdust you can add sieves. Unless you go through tons of paper you've probably got enough sawdust too.

This is all the vanilla wood plank recipes. We could get rid of oak, or we could take our original sawmill and move it here since we've probably got a good stock of oak planks & sawdust and aren't using the wood steam boiler much by now anyway (or maybe we are, you could also set the filter on the boiler to ignore NBT and burn any planks...you'll just have to take routing into account for storage and your preferred order). If you've got woods added from other mods, you can add more crafters for them.

Since we're up to 9 screenshots and we've got 3 for the furnace we'll continue on the next post.

 

[Ldog]

On-Demand Crafting III

Redstone Furnace with a Trivection Chamber. Double your pleasure, Double your noms.

So I forgot about rabbit too (always forget wabbitseason!) These are your 8 vanilla cook-ables, Thermal doesn't add any new ones. I don't have other food adding mods installed in the pack I am working from, but I believe this works with them as well. Lately I am using Pam's (because Cooking for blockheads and Spice of Life:Carrot Edtion actually makes it fun) which I want to say it doubles whatever new cooked meats there are, but it doesn't double other recipes that one would consider cooked but aren't made in a furnace. It also works with Twilight Forest venison and what not. So you may want to go resonant, and possibly add a 3rd if you are using those. With Pam's you will still make use of both raw & cooked meat (not to mention ground which we can pulverize but is outside the scope of this guide...and as I discover newer features of Pams, ground meat is it's meat-doubling mechanic) as an ingredient so this is still a useful setup. No secondary products here, also you're generally going to get 2 and only 2. If there was a food item that had a cooked output of 2 you'd get 3, but I don't think sieves would get us extra here.

I touched on the other possible furnace specializations above. I am not going to cover automating them here right now. As far as fuels go, Dashkal and I crunched the numbers and did field tests; making refined fuel out of coal is better than making coal coke (this is taking all augments and specs into account). It should be pretty easy to figure out how from the rest of this guide where we've got solid inputs with solid & liquid outputs and do more or less the same thing here. I do use Immersive Engineering as well, so I may set this up in my survival game, in which case I'll show it here. I probably won't use the Flux Anodizer either, but that is even easier to setup. Ore goes in, ingots come out, basic furnace stuff.

Here is the terminal in action. We ordered a lead gear, a copper plate and a stack of yummy steak! (yeah, don't eat off the lead gear) So we've already got most of our steak and the rest is being cooked (look to the right). Granted it is a bit basic, all it does is tell us we've got a request out for 22 steak, but not any status or issues, the red X is if we want to cancel it, not because there is anything wrong.

 

[Ldog]

Advanced Fluid Handling & Crafting
I need to go back and finish the other section, but I felt like working on this right now so we're going to skip ahead a bit.

I'm going to do these stand-alone, and use creative power & material inputs. Later I'll show how to tie things together. So the creative inputs just represent the appropriate connection to the rest of your network. I apologize for the bad lighting, I just corrupted the other save (again) but rest assured, as fast as I am reporting crash bugs Astavie is fixing them, so make sure you check that you are updating your TL if you are following along.

We've got a fluid transposer here with a buffer, pair of linked crafters. The resonant strongbox has the items we will use, in practice this represents the link to your storage backnet. Most of these inputs we would also craft on demand, so you could go to your terminal and just request some resonant fluxducts without crafting anything.

So you'll notice we do input for fluid from the top. In/out for items on the bottom. You also might have noticed the fluid duct is full of destabilized redstone but the transposer has none. Rest assured everything is hooked up properly. I haven't figured out a way yet to keep fluid supplies from dumping into the duct network and still be available on-demand, but I am working on it.

This is the linked crafter that goes on the buffer (strongbox). It requests the materials as well as takes the outputs. Notice the linked tab that shows we have another crafter linked.

This is the 2nd linked crafter, which is on the fluid duct on top. Notice that we request different amounts of destabilized redstone depending on the recipe.
This will ensure we only request what we need. While we could just dump redstone into the transposer and keep it full at all times (like we did with the liquid knowledge things earlier) doing it this way allows us to use a hybrid system of redstone kept on hand (from destabilized ore that we feed into crucible as we mine it) but to also allow us to request redstone into a crucible on demand (to prevent using all our redstone dust up).

Here is our input materials.

We'll request some items.

And...something has gone wrong. For some reason the transposer won't eject the full buckets. This worked fine in my other lab (I have the instance I play survival in, and a lighter instance for this, but I corrupted the save there and jumped here while I wait for fix). This might be a mod interaction, might be something wrong with my setup. We won't really request filled buckets since the Fab handles fluid crafting, but it needs to be fixed nonetheless.

Yeah, I am really at a loss here as to what is going on. I did a couple quick tests with filling and unfilling and it "should" work properly. This is a fault of TE not TL. It seems like it doesn't want to work with the in/out setting, it works as expected if I output the bucket on it's own orange output, provided there is no blue/orange. Yes, this is exactly it, and with the chest it will loop the bucket around if I toggle fill/empty (because the bucket can be both input and output, filled or empty) so this will require different handling. We'll just have to fill buckets by hand if we need them unless I can figure out a solution, but it's low on my priority list.

*MYSTERY SOLVED*
So yes, the issue is the bucket will get looped around. It can be resolved by putting a blacklist filter on the input that doesn't take filled buckets. It then causes a new issue because machines can only pull from a directly connected inventory (and we need a duct to put a filter). So now we need to put a duct with a servo on the strongbox (and blacklist the filled bucket). Kind of a pain, but it's an option. The other option is skip the bucket filler (or have a seperate transposer for bucket filling operations).

We can do the same thing for any other transposer recipes we like. You'll want 1 for glowstone for impulse itemducts for sure. We can also do something similar with Sequential Fabricators and fluid upgrade for making enderium/signalum/lumium/etc blends (unfortunately we need 1 fab per recipe)

Since we're already setup for redstone here, let's go ahead and automate signalum blend. Setup the fabricator like so. Don't forget to upgrade to hardened at least and slap in a fluidic fabrication augment. Since we are controlling it with a crafter we don't need pattern validation.

We'll setup our pair of linked crafter like so. I think you know by now which one goes where. For Sequential Fabs in general we will want to use the cheapest crafter we can, if you need another input material then you'll have to go hardened, there may be times you want to use the advanced features or higher speeds of a higher tier even, so do what you gotta. We should do the same for Lumium and Enderium crafting as well (I'm not going to show them,it's the same setup, just with appropriate materials).

We've hit the screenshot cap again so we'll continue with part II.

 

[Ldog]

Advanced Fluid Handling & Crafting II

So this mess here above produces destabilized redstone fluid in 2 ways, the crucible on the left is fed any destabilized redstone ore from mining that is fed into the system. The crucible on the right has linked crafters that request a single redstone dust to output 100mB. The structural ducts there because I had an issue where the transposer wasn't requesting from the crafting crucible and after scratching my head a few minutes I realized it was because it couldn't communicate its request. You'll also notice that the duct has redstone in it, even though the crafter only draws and requests what it needs to, the distributor on the left tank will push the fluid into the duct regardless. A servo did the same. I think it's just the way TD handles fluids and so this whole thing is kinda kludgy. So our stockpiled fluids are going to wind up in the ducts, if we've got long ducts this can be an awful lot of fluid. It shouldn't hurt anything, just is a pain, and if you need to reroute ducts then you need to shutoff supply and drain them with an extra tank. If we don't have a servo/distributor on the tank and just let it drain into the ducts it might cause an issue with the crafter and/or cause a loop, but it might be completely uneeded too.

Crucible crafter 1, itemduct.

Crucible crafter 2, fluid duct (well tank actually, we can get by w/o the tank too)

Filter for the passive crucible. We could do the fluid router thing here that I showed earlier and run ender & glowstone through here as well (and I probably will, because since they each come from a different dimension you aren't generally going to be processing all 3 at once) now that I've got a lot of the nuances of the crafters sorted (and Astavie pointed me to the wiki)

I see energized glowstone is going to be an issue, since 1 glowstone dust gives 250mB, 1 conduit uses 200 mB. 1 Glowstone block gives a bucket, 1 energized netherrack gives a bucket. Besides the conduits, which we'll want lots of there is Lumium blend, which at least uses a full bucket per craft. We'll figure something out.

Enderium at least is only used in full buckets for crafting so that is no headache (and only 2 recipes use it)

So this intimidating thing will actually do all the redstone/glowstone/ender liquid crafting and transposing from fluids made passively or requested (stuck those creative caches in for lab, as well as a box of things). Most of the time it works right. I am having some trouble with some of the linked crafters (the transposer ones) that just puzzle me, because they are intermittent.

Here you can see the terminal with all the recipes, as well as a bunch of items that were crafted on request, except some of them stopped working. The blends are working fine no matter what. So it isn't a thing of not being able to contact the crucible supply crafters. I tried with and without structural ducts connecting everything. I am beside myself with this right now.

The first setup in this post is nearly identical, except it does the destabilized redstone stuff only. It is still working flawlessly. I really don't get it.

Annnnnndddd....I went and redpatterned off the working redstone setup, dropped new ones into the big setup and everything started working (even the more complex viaduct/impulse itedmduct transposer)

I also realized dropping oil shale/sand directly into crucible is better than pulverizer. Don't know what I was thinking when I did the flowchart, except I did that off docs not ingame, maybe docs were wrong...

So this...This I am really glad I was able to make work. This goes on a strongbox attached to the fluid transposer. First recipe is a longrange linking viaduct, which uses resonant ender. The other 5 use energized glowstone. That is the 4 basic (non-dense/vac) impulse itemduct recipes plus a top-tier Simply Jetpacks 2 part. You'll notice we are linked to 2 other crafters here, because the resonant ender and glowstone need to come in from different ducts.

This goes on the resonant supply duct.

This goes on the glowstone supply duct. Critical here, notice that the 1st recipe is left empty, otherwise this will not work. Also these 2 crafters are only linked to the first, not to each other. That's also very important.

I'm out of screenshots for this post, but the tanks are the "passive" supplies. They're empty right now, otherwise the ducts would have the fluids in them since they pump out into the ducts but not the crafters until asked for. The active supply (on-demand crucible) are the lines coming from the filler with crafters on the end. They just contain the output material in whatever amount is created per pull (100 mB for redstone from dust, 250mB for the other 2). Ahh, I'l just go to next post already. A picture is worth a thousand words.

 

[Ldog]

Advanced Fluid Handling & Crafting III

Signalum blend crafter. We skip pattern validation, but install fluid crafting. Hardened upgrade. If it's not fast enough for you go higher, but crafting is PDQ.

Solids crafter. Goes to strongbox feeding in/out of the Fab. Links to:

Fluids crafter. This goes on the fluid duct input (no buffer here).
Lumium and Enderium crafted the same, just with their respective materials so I won't post screens.

This is a filter that goes on 1 of the output ducts of the passive fluid allocator. Notice it contains a bucket instead of straight fluid like the crafter. The other 2 outputs get redstone and glowstone buckets. The tanks just get plain servos.

This is a crafter, notice it shows fluid and amount in mB instead of a bucket. This goes on the outputs of the active fluid allocator. The other 2 are glowstone 250mB, redstone 100mB. This is important. If you were using glowstone and redstone blocks then you would put 1000 mB and 900 mB respectively. This crafter is linked to:

This crafter, which goes on the strongbox feeding active crucible. It requests a single ender pearl, and nothing more quoth the raven. Ahem. The other 2 input crafters have as you might have guessed, single redstone and glowstone dusts.

When coupled with our main processing and storage network, this provides automation of just about everything you want to automate in the Thermal Universe (obviously you need to setup fabs for many basic items, but I think I've covered just about every technique needed).

Yeah, I just realized I already covered Signalum in the first section, I kinda felt a sense of Deja Vu, oh well. Here's some screens of a useful vanilla chicken farm to make it up to you

I'm going to redo the storage network as well. I've always tried to do push instead of pull as much as possible with TD, because pulling requires eye of ender. Crafters are pull though, and we use a lot of them. I'm thinking of seeing if I could eliminate the frontnet pretty much entirely, especially since we can grow ender pearl and blaze powder with all the fluxed phyto-gro we make. It gets very confusing sometimes which net is which (especially with allt the private nets) and then it takes up extra space, extra ducts, and then I feel the storage can't be anywhere near as dense because of the need to see the front as well as have servo access. It's a lot of trouble. Storage drawers does alleviate a lot of the pain and I'll likely still use that in survival. The caches have thier uses though, they also hold a lot more than a SD (even upgraded). The fact that you can easily pickup and move TE storage without emptying it (or packing tape) and that you can lock and unlock caches without a key (one of the stupider parts of SD all the fucking keys) is a bonus. Even though I have Refined Storage installed I may end up not using it my current survival play through, we will see. It's certainly easier and more foolproof than this, but it was fun and challenging to design, and it does most everything I want. (once we get a wireless terminal for TL, but Astavie is working on it)

 

[Ldog]

Survival interlude:
There is still some more to do for the guide, but I start to feel the need to play survival mode (I mean that is why we do all this). Besides, if we don't survival test the solutions we don't find out if they are practical or not.
Not near the game so no screens right now, and this is from memory.

We've got the basic phase 1 phyto-works. I have skipped grassoline/aquachow for now. Food and power just aren't an issue for me right now. Possibly due to my playstyle (I get sidetracked easily) I just don't need that much power gen either. I am still running off the single tree-oil to turbine (resonant though) into a resonant e-cell. The only time I ran it dry is when I upgraded my jetpack and flux cap to resonant, and the wireless charger can use 9k RF/t. Taking a gander at the builder/quarry cards (RFTools) it looks like 900 RF/t will do it, so my designed system when implemented should be enough for me.

My other personal gear consists of a Redstone Arsenal sword (with loot 3, slash 5) & bow, an invar shield, resonant fluxsaw, fluxomagnet, and fluxbore (with silk touch, unbreaking 3 and eff 5), a reservoir and a satchel. The rest of my armor at the moment is Project Red sapphire. I swap the wireless for the repair spec and pour a bucket of xp in if I need to do repairs, then swap back.

The enchants were all done with the ensorcellator. Early on I used an open blocks xp drain/shower/tank setup to manage my xp. Moved onto the TE tome when I was able. I've also got an encapsulator mobfarm running under my base. Growing ender lily in an insolator for more endpearls. I'll add the wheat and probably wart as well as some of the Thaumcraft "crops" to insolators eventually. I'm getting enough blaze rods with looting 3 at the moment, but I'll probably go the cinderpearl route at some point vs a nether mobfarm (because I'd need to hang out in the nether for it to work, in which case I might as well do my own killing). Oh and 2 dark oak trees provide a lot of sap. I don't think I will need more anytime soon but we will see.

I have the various machines of various tiers kind of in a mess right now. There are some strongboxes and the odd duct for input/output but not true automation. I still find I need copper & tin as much as anything else, although as predicted gold is in shortest supply, especially since I've been delving into Thaumcraft as well. Considering producing tectonic isn't really that bad, I am really toying with the idea of going full on ore-tripling in the pulverizers. Storage is partial, I've got the main products and inputs in caches and hooked up to the TL Terminal. Caches and ducts eats through tin like mad.

As predicted all impulse itemducts all the time. Glowstone is not an issue, especially with the TF energized netherrack. I've also been acquiring quite a stockpile of pulverized coal just from pulverizing coal ore with 4 sieves. It is likely that alone will provide a surplus of refined fuel once I start making it. I'm not really sure what we will use all our coal for. I guess I can always make Alumentum (Thaumcraft...although I tend to do things in small batches so it's usually a waste), Red coal (ExU2), or more diamonds (IC2 process). I never did get around to automating the sawmill, I'm getting plenty enough sap as it is and not going through a ton of wood planks or sawdust atm (and like a dummy I built the house of mostly spruce instead of oak, that I had to cut and process by hand...and it was a lot more wood than I thought). WIth a phyto-works stone brick and oak really are your building materials of choice!

On the surface I've got a 3x3 chunk area fenced in and lit, built a house in the middle. We've got cow (fed by blockheads trough) and chicken farms, a single strategicly placed vacuumulator picks up both outputs. I should probably add a nestbox farm as well (Blockheads) for eggs since the eggs in the farm go to making more chickens. My original wheat/hemp/misc farm. Our trees for sap & resin. A Harvestcraft beehive and field of flowers, maple tree. There's a cooking for blockheads kitchen setup in the house, as well as my Thaumcraft stuff. I just did a few hopping bonsai pots for some fruit trees, but the drops are disappointing (actually having let it run a bit, they produce plenty, it's just that I don't need to be buried in extra wood)...you plant fruit/nut trees for fruit/nuts, not wood/stick/leaves. I'll have to look if the output is configurable (It is actually) . If it isn't I'll probably just plant a few of the needed ones (like lemon, pepper & avocado) and see if I can get golems to harvest them (I really need an excuse to do a golem farm anyway, I think that is part of why I keep HC, we will have golems tend a field for some mixed HC crops that aren't worth an insolator too). I've added another farm plot for the more useful Pams crops, but I haven't gotten around to making golems yet. Still finishing up the automated smelter setup (This https://imgur.com/r/feedthebeast/XU8sWXa works really well, I've used it in another playthrough).

It is a bit wierd that the hours I have in and some of the gear I have now will be with me until endgame but there is still a lot of stuff I want to do and I feel like it is still early game, even though I guess this is mid-game.
Poor Botania I have only gotten so far as to make a pouch and collect some flowers. I've got quite a few other mods in this pack that I haven't even gotten around to touching yet. Blood Magic, Immersive Engineering, IC2, DE (I'd uninstall DE but I'd have to cleanup the ore spawns), Extreme Reactors, RFTools & Dimensions, Mystcraft (yeah, I know I've got 2 dimensional mods and haven't even touched either), Twilight Forest - to name a few.
I only just recently even made expeditions to find a nether fortress (spawn was not kind) as well as a magical forest (to get silverwood). The jetpack does make this a lot easier.

 

[Ldog]

Still no guide progress, just my survival ramblings.

Having just discovered the ground traps in HC, I am starting to think they are actually better and less hassle than animal farms so I may switch over to them completely. I never realized HC does have some pretty nice mechanics. Never touched the bees before (because Forestry), they're actually handy and don't take up all your time (like Forestry). I'm curious to see how Pam will integrate with the upcoming vanilla bees. The presser, grinder & bee hive can be automated too. Bait is pretty easily produced with surplus crops (sometimes even just as a side product in the presser), and even if you have to make it with string, there are about 5 plants to "grow" string (or you could automate sheep and pulverize wool into string...wool is 1 of the few animal products the traps don't produce...although you can make wool out of string). The water traps produce some fish the entangler won't, namely shellfish which while not strictly required for any top tier dishes (because I'm using SoL so there is incentive to produce better food) do add some variety. The traps are all nice steady slow gen, and of course you can spam them if you feel the need. They work good for me where I really am not looking to be buried in thousands upon thousands of items I will never use. I suppose there is something to be said for "expert-mode" packs with their huge item sinks, they incentivize industrial scale solutions. I am starting to think it would be good to have a few mods/items that are long term end-game goals for that purpose. I also don't want to make the entire game a long boring grind like most of the packs do, there is a balance somewhere in between.

HC can be a little bit of a timesink itself. 1.12 HC doesn't let you ignore it like 1.7 did, even early game I found the need to put some effort into being able to make semi-decent food because basic & vanilla stuff doesn't really cut it. Nor does the good old stuffed eggplant (not as easy nor as nutritious as it used to be). I've spent a fair amount of time out searching for particular tree fruits I wanted. Not a jungle biome anywhere convenient for me either (even with the highspeed jetpack) so I had to buy a few seeds from the market. HC & Cooking for Blockheads can be automated to some degree, the main thing is the farming. The large variety of crops aren't suited to insolators or cloches. Thaumcraft golems are ideal really, but the trouble with golems is you really need to do almost all the golem research before it is worth using golems. Harvesting seal being an advanced one requires quite a bit done.

Speaking of TC, done a fair amount of work there. Other than the research for flux-cleanup my smeltery is done. Built infusion altar and golem press. Still have a lot of research to do. Automated compactor for plates would have saved me some running up and down the stairs. I at least ran an itemduct and terminal up to the Thaumatorium area. I need to do something for the kitchen as well.

Some enchanting here and there as I run past the Enstabulator tank and scoop up the XP. Threw a brain in a jar down by the cowfarm too (just realized we overlooked another TE device, the insightful condenser...can even make double XP with that lapis we don't use for anything, but requires more ducting). Resonant flux cap with holding IV, 75 mil RF. It's a hell of a lot of flight time. Gone through several anvils (try to remember to throw them into the smelter at very damaged) just combining books. The vanilla anvil really does leave a lot to be desired. I really should make an Open Blocks auto-anvil. The tome of knowledge takes some of the pain out of using the vanilla anvil, but TE really needs an "Arcane Enforgellator" to complement the Ensorcellator. Protection IV on the jetpack. The rest can wait for RA armor. I'll probably upgrade the shield soon. The bow already 1 shots most stuff with vanilla arrows so enchants for it low priority. Feather falling boots would be good since the high tier jetpack does have the annoying tendency of slamming you into the ground if you just hop over something with hover turned off (and hover is annoying when you don't want it...it's like the vanilla auto-jump). It doesn't cause much damage, just enough to be irritating. The first TC infusion trinket you can make does alleviate this though. With the power capacity I have I can fly around all the time really, but I can suck the base dry when I come home if I overdo it. I really should upgrade my power infrastructure.

So like I said, easily side-tracked. I did at least hit a few ravines as I was flying around scouting so got a good amount of tin and copper. So I can get some more TF infrastructure up and get to automating all the things. Caches are a big up-front investment of tin whereas Storage Drawers are cheap (hell wood is free for me) but then they need upgrades sooner (basic cache 20k, set it and forget it) which requires metal again or bulk obsidian production. If I go down the Refined Storage rabbithole then I will never do the rest of the TD/TL setup so I am going to pretend it isn't even installed for the moment.

I'm still weighing the tectonic initiator for bulk processing option. When all is said and done, it comes down to 1 redstone dust per 5 ores. It gives us 3 plus a 1/3 chance of getting a secondary (as opposed to 25%) with full sieves. Other than aluminum I'm not drowning in overstock of any metals really so it wouldn't hurt. We'd also get an extra 3 redstone dust per ore, which alone is enough to process 15 ores (and over 80% chance to get cinnabar). So as long as 1/15th of whatever ore we mine is redstone we aren't losing any. I'm still leery, redstone is 1 of those things I'll have a ton of and then I blink and it is all gone. Cinnabar and rich flux actually starting to pile up a bit though too, so I dunno...it's a tossup. I'll probably stick to the original plan and just use tectonic for diamond/emerald. I'm just not comfortable with the thought that basic ore-processing could be shut-down by a materials shortage.

 

[Ldog]

The insightful condenser and lapis works pretty good actually. I slapped one down in the breeding area with just a tank so I can see how much it is producing, and it is a fair amount, the lapis also lasts a good while. I need to duct it in with the Enstabulator and get it hooked up to the Ensorcellator & a fluid transposer. Right now I use a bucket or the tome, and the I have the anvil on the front porch still, not efficient. Since I've managed to fill the tome I've been doing some more enchants. The brain in jar was brought inside to keep the other brain company (so now they both hiss at me when I come in to do research). I went ahead and added pigs as well as a trough for beets for them in since some top-tier foods need pork. I'll add some chickens for eggs as well (they just need to be in a box near the vacuumulator is all...the meat/feathers production uses its eggs for breeding, so we don't get eggs there). I know what I said about the traps, but since we had this already setup it'll do until I get the traps automated. Farming and cooking already taking up a lot of time so I really need to automate that ASAP.

I made a diversion into modding last night. As Dashkal pointed out to me, the saner option for Bonsai would have been to just use a nullifier for the unwanted outputs, but...ehh..sanity is over-rated right? So some quick tips from skyboy and Dashkal and we boldly go...where many have paved the way already, into Forge modding. It really is painless to get up and running than it was when I last tried my hand at it (In like 1.25 probably) I went and modded all the Pam's tree outputs with some simple changes to 1 class file. Recompiled. Easy. Now we just get a slow trickle of fruit and nuts from the 3 pots that I alternate saplings in. Of course if I ever want updates to Bonsai that means I have to edit and recompile my own every time, but then it's a warm fuzzy having your own personal mods. On my todo is to make a few more for the dozen or so tree types I use and automate storage and piping into kitchen. Filled in my missing crops with the market, the shipping crate made me some money, but FFS, someone needs to give Pam a GUI that doesn't suck or Blockheads needs it's own seller.

I decided it was time to put holding IV on the e-cell too, so now it holds a whopping 150 MRF. Put the other 6 steam dynamo in as well. I went with rosin (instead of planks) along with the charcoal blocks. Running low again on electrum, out of plat so only 1 set upgraded to resonant, the other just hardened. It topped up and stabilized, used a few K rosin, didn't look at charcoal (full cache anyway) but now at least I don't have to worry about running it dry when returning from expeditions and it'll get topped up again much faster. I finally got around to automating a sawmill, since we were full on logs anyway, now we've got a full cache of planks too. Since the phyto-cache is getting full too we skipped the resin funnel. I may regret this when I add more full-time insolators, but we can always plant another dark oak tree if we need to.

Besides the oak, I've got 1 resonant insolator that I swap crops as needed (Ender/Blaze/Vishroom/Quicksilver as well as more mundane things like beets, wheat and cacti), this is far from optimal. I went ahead and fertilized the outdoor Pams field with Blockhead's green, which is supposed to give more drops but doesn't seem to be working properly. It is also wierd that I can plant a crop, break it, get back 2, rinse, repeat with many but not all Pams crops. Reminds me I should report this. I can't get golems in soon enough, although I need more ducting & storage to support it as well. Even with large inventory and a fair-sized kitchen, the storage space fills up fast. Golems and a few more automated insolators and we can free up our time for...mining. Which I really need to get back to since we're running low on materials again.

So tonights plan is a mining trip, upgrade the remaining dynamos, clean up the shop and get some more automation going there, expand storage, do Thaumcraft research, automate farming. I should probably look at automating mining too (even before farming since we're in no danger of starving). The options I have available to me given my current mods are the IE Excavator (needs a lot of steel, and we need more power still...I like these more after I've already strip-mined the immediate area, and of course the main reason to use any IE machine over anything else; they look hella cool), the RFTools builder (need a netherstar for silk touch, I should get to it, since this really is a rock-star quarry), ExU2 Ender-Quarry (is it still a huge PITA to build? I liked ExU more when it was a smaller mod, nothing Extra about it anymore, it's really a full-fledged content mod that I only use for a couple small things...although this works more like IE IIRC, and alongside it to boot) and the IC2 Miner (which is a joke, I'm better off with the fluxbore). Will most likely go for the RFTools. I should slap an IE pump down in the nether for lava too. So many tasks, so little time.

LMFAO, yeah, I'm living in the past. Just looked up ExU2, it's called the Quantum Quarry now! 20k RF/t...yeah, we won't be doing this until we go nuclear!

 

[Ldog]

Well we got a fair amount of our goals accomplished without too much distraction last night. Cleaning up the place will be an on-going thing for a while, I didn't get much TC research done, and we've still got to automate farming. That fluxbore at 3x3x3 is just so sweet, and along with the jetpack it is very easy to stripmine at whatever depth you want. I filled my resonant holding IV satchel up several times last night. The 5x5 of chunks under my base is fast becoming a large cavern. We also did run into an issue that halted some TC projects, the fact that I moved quickly to silk touch means we don't get rare earths. Fortunately I had been stockpiling the amber ore, so I made a RA pick with Fortune III.

I did however get the dynamos upgraded, automated pulverizer/smelter line built (and gold/rich slag smelter too), as well as on-demand pulverizer and alloy smelter. I also made another 9 hopping bonsai pots, there are 11 Pams trees + IC2 rubber. I've just got them on top of chests in the basement, so I can at least ignore them a good while until I get around to kitchen automation and by the time I need IC2 rubber, I will have plenty. Fluid handling my next biggest priority since making upgrades consumes a lot of time, and with the ore/ingot handling automated that is the last piece in that chain (well, aside from fabs making parts...but those are easy and can be dropped in wherever/whenever). Added some more storage as well. Oh, as predicted niter storage getting kinda full, so I swapped the resonant pulverizer and sieves over to ore-processing, replaced with a hardened (because again electrum short supply). I'm starting to think maybe silver with rich slag too. Funny I remember complaining to KL once that silver was over-abundant and under-utilized (this was like TE2, maybe 3 tops...we are at 5/6 now).

As for other mods ores, Project Red stuff (Electrotine, gems) all go in the main pulverizer array; I've not even used any electro, the gems I actually made less common (CoFH world, same rules as diamonds) and they still pile up. Other than armor and early weapons/tools not much use, so not interested in getting more of them via fortune, etc. TC quartz goes in the smelter with sand, to produce rich slag same as vanilla quartz. Cinnabar is actually one of those rare cases I mention where the Furnace with smelting spec is the best output, 2:1. We just don't use that much quicksilver (and shimmerleaf works in insolator) and even though it can be used to make TF cinnabar, we have no shortage of that either. Right now I just stockpile the ore as well. Rounding out our modded ores, we have yellorium and uranium, also stockpiled. Yellorium will likely get cinnabar ore-tripling and Uranium needs to go through the IC2 macerator/washer/centrifuge cycle to produce fuel. I haven't done any IC2 yet, even though I kinda hate most of IC2 these days, I do enjoy the reactors more than ER (which just take up so much space, although I will have both) and I'm using IE addon that still lets you convert EU to RF. Amber as mentioned by hand with Fortune III. I might need to do this with the diamond ore as well (right now I pulverize diamond as I need them) since I really need the rare earths. RFTools dimensional ore has to be done by hand as well. Oh, Draconium...I let that sit for now too, it'll either get standard handling or specialized tripling, if I don't wind up uninstalling it.

I've come to the realization my front/back net idea should just be scrapped more or less...I mean the principles are solid, those rules still need to be followed, but a better design avoids using a frontnet pretty much entirely (they become isolated LANs when needed). I think I had a pre-existing bias against pull devices because eye of ender. I probably still would if I didn't have easy automation of them (although honestly even vanilla, a blaze spawner farm and once you have killed the end-dragon these go from hard to come by to common). I've also not heavily used TD in ages, so there were some mishaps. Finally TL is really more pull than push based (crafters & requesters are what "make it", distributors are more for completeness and options)

Some of the issues that have come to light (some seen in creative but their true impact seen in survival) are how easily servos and even just unregulated machine outputs can dick up your network, and the value of on-demand crafting. Since the phyto-works is something one wants to get up and running ASAP, it gets built with less error-trapping, but being as it is the centerpiece of everything that follows it needs to be upgraded and reorganized ASAP as well. Fortunately this isn't IC2 so we can wrench and move and not lose things. Redprints of course essential for moving your filters & things, but they are cheap. This is also a place where the strongbox/cache shine since they can be easily moved without spilling their contents.

One of my big issues is the charcoal factorizer for some reason keeps trying to dump to the network, generally jamming the crafters on me (because they are on the main line). My charcoal cache is full and I just don't see a need for more than 20k so not going to upgrade it. To a lesser degree the sawmill tends to spit planks into the network as well sometimes (again got a cache full). The factorizer is next to the charcoal cache so it is always full, the oak logs cache has a servo so the sawmill is also always full even though not attached. For the most part my other things that are directly fed by adjacent machines/caches run smoothly because there is no route for things to go where they shouldn't. I have had some wierd instances of unwanted materials getting into places they don't belong as well, which can't happen if the only input is a requester/crafter.

I am going to limit servo use now as much as possible and make more liberal use of requesters & crafters. Dumpchest still needs a servo (and when I say servo, I mean servo or distributor pretty much interchangeably). The automated ore-processing still needs servos, because we are doing 1 to many, and on private lines. Otherwise each pulverizer and each smelter has to have a requester, which is a viable choice as well but can be a pain. This is for "dry goods" only of course, fluids have thier own rules as we have found. It basicly breaks down to the fluid duct itself is a viable destination for fluids, so it acts like an inventory in many ways.

There is still a choice in how to handle many things on a case by case basis. For example the charcoal factorizer issue could be fixed by allowing it to output only to the steam dynamo (but then we can't request blocks elsewhere) it could also be fixed by having a crafter on it's input/output so that it only works on demand (we have to have a requester on the dynamo). In this case we already have a requester on the dynamo and will likely go with the crafter. Of course I have also been toying with the idea of factorizers on input/output with cache for higher volume storage. Charcoal (or say ingots) would only go to the block factorizer which dumps to the cache. The cache has a duct as well as another factorizer that breaks blocks, ingots would get another pair to make/combine nuggets. The end result is the cache would store blocks, which means 9x capacity. You can request nuggets/ingots/blocks from the system. You can also dump excess nuggets/ingots/blocks back into the system and they get sorted to the 1 inventory. Easy-peasy....or not...I just remembered why I haven't done this, the circle-jerk routing. Also this would only exacerbate the current issue I'm having with them. Needs seperate networks again (not necessarily a deal-breaker, just needs to be evaluated for cost/benefit like everything else). I'll leave my idiotic ramblings here since they show the thought process, which can be helpful sometimes (besides I think most of the post views are myself, so if it's helpful to my main viewer, me, it's good enough )

So tonights big goals.
1. Fix the above-listed snarls in preparation for more automation as well as re-organize storage lines a bit for optimization (even impulse ducts are still kinda slow over long distances).
2. I need to move the Enstabulator along with it's supporting ducts since it is kinda in the way now. Also tie the XP from breeding pits in, ducting (if not full automation) to Ensorcellator, Anvil (time to go OpenBlocks auto), Transposer and possibly Repair Infuser (project red gems have no other real use, but Thaumcraft stuff is worth repairing...especially when you're a dumbass and forget to change out of your robes before you go out).
3. Get the fluid handling in for red/glow/ender. Automate signalum/lumium/enderium.
4. Another compactor with gear die (I think it's time) and crafters for the gears. Automate pyro/cryo as well. Pretty much covers making upgrades.
5. Add more insolators. All dedicated. Wheat, beets, cinderpearl, ender lily. Maybe wart. Possibly start grassoline & refined fuel production lines. May as well start pumping lava in from the nether too. Ender tanks. Ender chest and pouch for dumpchest while we're at it! Also get retrievers on the food troughs since right now I either need to be running wheat/beets or manually feed them.
6. Quarry!
7. Add egg farm (minor, and quick and easy, I just keep forgetting)
8. Redstone furnace on-demand cooking as well as a furnace for on-demand glass/brick/etc. Right now I have only 1 and I add/remove the trivection augment as well as manually operate it. We do have a good supply of cooked meat already on hand though so this is low priority.
9. Sequential fabs and crafters for some more frequently made items, especially the ones that use water like clay & paper.
10. More cowbell...I mean Thaumcraft.

This looks more like entire weekends goals. Depends how much the wife lets me play.
Once we've got all of that done we'll probably have more fodder for the guide, or at least some new screenshots.

 

[Ldog]

Productive weekend. Other than a quarry we got pretty much everything on the list knocked out, and a few other things as well.
Ended up moving the factorizer to just on-demand, can also add another 5 blocks into it as needed (right now I added redstone). Setup another one to make various nuggets, just need to be careful to keep it clear.
The fluid handler is working pretty well, I automated many crafting things, including all the parts to make more fabs and crafters.

Added all those insolators, so we have 6 total, although wood production mostly stopped right now. We run at a slight deficit of phyto-gro with all of them running. Most of them are only hardened tier. Wheat, beets and wart have topped out caches for now though so it is mostly blaze & pearl which are slow, as well as the 4 arbors so supply up again. We will see how it goes when I add Grassoline production, will probably need to add a 3rd dark oak arbor. I've added the refined fuel processing as well as compression and magmatic dynamos. IE pump, some pipe, a lever, a basic e-cell (it will power the pump a good long time before recharging), an ender-tank. Claim and load the chunk with FTB utils. That's our nether lava farming. Back at the ranch I just decided to put an ender tank on the magmatic as well as another on the obsidian extruder. A pair of redstone relays runs the extruder only if the ender-tank is full. I'll add a crucible to produce lava if the tank is empty, more because we can than because we need to. It's not like I'm relying on that magmatic dynamo to keep the lights on. Oh, refined fuel. So just from pulverized coal produced as a secondary product of coal ore was enough to make 100 and something buckets. I had to upgrade the tank. If I ever needed more of course I can pulverize coal directly, and at the moment we don't use that coal for anything (but hey Christmas is coming and I'm sure we've all been naughty!).

My mob-farm is going to shut down soon if I don't do more enchanting (and I already cranked out most of what I want/need for the foreseeable future) or add more tanks. Resonant almost full, full tome, resonant at breeders half full (never did get around to ducting down), and then 2 open blocks tanks (32 B) + anvil (45 levels...which is a hell of a lot of liquid XP) full. I should probably look at some kind of multi-block tank solution for ess.

Got around to harvest seal and golem, slapped a vacuumulator under the farm. It's a simple 9x9 farm with 1-3 of each of the 40 or so Pams crops I consider worth growing, on high-yield Blockhead fertilized soil. I was worried it would snatch crops before golem could replant (still not positive if golem is breaking/replanting or r-click harvesting) but it is working perfectly. I send that to a storage drawer system under the kitchen, and then the kitchen cabinets and fridge have ducts with retrievers to keep a stack of each as well as requesters for cooked and pulverized meats. I should setup some more for other grinder/presser recipes (most of which can be done in TE pulverizer) I suppose, as well as bait for the traps. So the kitchen is fairly well semi-automated which makes it less of a chore. Oh, the bonsai trees feed into the SD system as well. I still need to see if a golem can harvest fruit from full-size trees. Do they need climbing legs? Flight ability? The seal can be configured for height so that isn't an issue at least. It's too bad we can't automate the shipping container, also most tree products can't be sold in it. What are we overfull on? Tree products of course. As I become less of a HC noob, I'll probably pare down my crops list. There are a lot of foods just not worth making. Especially now when saturation is the only important thing. Still it is fun chomping down gourmet burgers for buffs. You pretty much need all the spices, many other things can substitute for each other. Good things to look for are presser/grinder recipes, since it means automation for sub-products and generally trap bait as well (for example this makes regular grapes superior to green grapes). Of the nut trees I would say only almond, coconut and walnut are worth growing, and even those are debatable but can at least be ground/pressed into other generally useful things.

Have had no end of fits from wierdness in the crafting system. Astavie is responsive and interested in making his mod better so I am confidant most of these issues can be resolved. The rest by better designs through the learning process here as I find the quirks in survival that are easily overlooked in creative. Since the phyto-works goes in first when we are poor and it is our only automation, it needs to be cheap and easy. Later when it is the foundation of the rest of your automation you need to add to it and move things around some to make it more bulletproof. For instance I slapped a servo on the cache because we have 10 consumers of FPG, making any retrievers early on tends to be cost prohibitive, let alone the 5 or so you'd need at startup. Later on when eye of ender is trivial there is no question about it, retriever/requester on everything that needs one. There should be very few servo/distributors in your network. Your dumpchest, any specialized closed-loops (like my ore processing) and nothing else.

Another big issue I found is when the machine output can also be an input and how that interacts with buffers (like fluid transposer bucket in the lab). So the alloy smelter, which I didn't seem to have trouble with in the lab gives me regular intermittent problems. The flux-slot has to be unlocked to make alloys. It also makes the alloys viable inputs because hardened metal glass. So the alloys often wind up back in the smelter before the crafter can grab them and we get jams. This system already has the potential for jams since it makes multiple alloys, but this makes it worse. Now add hardened glass production to the mix, and you can get stuck with metal glass that you didn't want and no alloy or hg to boot. So the buffer needs a filter to blacklist these things going back into the smelter. Because we have to have a duct to add a filter (because item-allocator filtering only affects input, they would be much more useful with output filters...I mean FFS you are almost always going to have an input duct to filter from but more often than not the output is to an inventory) now the smelter can't draw directly from the strongbox so we need a servo. Now we need another duct because the output can't go back through a servo. Hmmm...actually the much hated item-allocator might still be the better buffer here (which doesn't invalidate my gripes about it...it would be the perfect buffer if the filtering were reversed). We still need a duct, because we have to filter the stuff going into the smelter. So blacklist filter on smelter - bronze, invar, electrum, steel, constantan, glass. Allocator does push/pull (have to make sure it can do both in same side, should be...same standard throughout TE). This still won't stop you from getting say constantan + jam instead of the bronze + invar you asked for, but the only way to completely prevent that is seperate smelters and crafters for each alloy. WIth a little care and caution on what you order when you can avoid this most of the time though. It will at least prevent you getting jammed alloys and/or metal glass, which also helps reduce chance of recipe conflicts indirectly, since anything that causes a bottleneck is going to increase the chance of simultaneous demands.

Other than that, I've got some issues where things are requested to be crafted instead of pulled out of inventory, or possibly just the request sitting forever in the queue because it can't decide what to do (especially when you've got say 3 signalum but need 1 more). That part is being worked on at least. I'm also having any new crafter I setup queue up 8 batches for no reason. Still trying to determine if it's something I did or a bug. I did not notice this in creative, but maybe it's because it's more noticeable in survival, since I tend to be watching my limited resources more. It does account for the madness in the lab with the fluid transposers/seq fabs come to think of it.

I promise this will be the last post without new screenshots (well until after next post with screenshots). The place is a haphazard mess with ducts everywhere, and very little use of covers (mostly if it's in the floor) but it's a pretty tight setup. Most of it fits into 2 levels in 1 chunk, and there's room to spare so I could probably spread out and make it look nicer. That's another issue with working around your initial setup. You want to keep ducts short in the beginning and moving things is a pain. So compromises have to be made, and then they are likely to stay that way until something breaks (just like RL).

Guide update notes for myself:
Don't bother upgrading sand pulverizer. 50% w/o sieves is still going to fill up the niter storage before sand, especially once you start using sand for smelting & glass. You're probably still going to need to void excess niter at some point.

Monoculture still produces saplings and seeds, combined with sieves can still get 2 even with the reduction. Seeds can be used for oil. Saplings can be used for sawdust/biomass/other things. Either way you will need to deal with the outputs. Monoculture on products with no secondary is a no-brainer. For mod crops such as cinderpearl ender lily, better to not use monoculture (all sieves or nothing).

Slag production far outstrips demand. Turn the smelter off well before you run out of storage because ore processing will start producing a lot of slag as well. The same for charcoal, I fill a cache and then switch over to on-demand crafting. If not using TL then just turn the charcoal furnace off when storage gets full. It will last a very long time.