Thermal Expansion 3 for Newbies
(A Reference Guide for the Rest Of Us!)
(A Reference Guide for the Rest Of Us!)
The latest version of Thermal Expansion has now been released, and there's been quite a few changes since the last version. Here's everything you need to know to get started!
Initial Resources
Like most tech mods, you're going to need some resources to get started. After all, you can't just build machines out of dirt and cobble! Here's a good laundry list of what you should probably have before getting started:
- Iron. About a stack really to get started, but more is always better.
- Gold. Yes, Machine Frames need gold. So do Redstone Reception Coils. And the Electrum in Conductance Coils also need gold. So I'd say at least a dozen or so, if not a half stack.
- Copper, Tin. Your first Dynamos will be copper-hogs, and tin is used in several things. I'd try for a stack of copper and at least a half stack of Tin to get yourself started.
- Silver. Not much, actually, just a few ingots should do to get started, mostly to be used for electrum and some Transmission Coils for your Dynamos.
- Glass. I mention this because if you are stuck in a plains or mountainous region, you might not have much sand available to you, and you're going to need at least a stack or so of glass to really get anywhere in this mod.
- Redstone. You're going to need some redstone for most of your machines, as well as a few pistons and such. When you get to conduits, however, your redstone consumption will go way up. Call it a stack to get started.
- Ferrous Metal. If you have some, do not process it! No, seriously, there will be a very specific way to process this ore. For Ferrous Ingots or the Pulverized version, run Iron through a Pulverizer
- Lead. You're actually going to need some to start you off. Probably a half stack or so. Lead is used in the Tier 1 power conduits, which are in turn used to make the Tier 2 conduits. And they're used in the lower-tier Energy Cells as well.
- Clay. You'll need two brick blocks from clay to make one of your early machines.
- No diamonds are going to be needed in the early tiers of this mod, however they will be necessary for higher tiers.
You got the touch. You got the POWAH
Right, so to use machines that need power, you need to start generating it. In Thermal Expansion 3, the power generation machines are called Dynamos. Look them up in NEI, and you'll see there are four of them: Steam, Magmatic, Compression, and Reactant. Since Magmatic requires Invar to make, Reactant requires materials we don't have access to yet, and Compression requires liquid fuels which are probably unobtainable at the very beginning, we'll start with the Steam Dynamo. Let's look it up in NEI.
You'll notice this eats up quite a bit of copper to make. That Transmission Coil requires a silver ingot as well. Okay, so what does this thing run on? Well, it runs on Steam. Which means, at this point, you need some form of solid fuel and water to boil. But let's put it down for a moment at look in the GUI.
You'll notice a liquid bar on either side, a slot for solid fuel, and a bar labeled 'RF' in the middle. RF stands for 'Redstone Flux' and is the unit of measurement for the energy that Thermal Expansion uses. No longer on the MJ Standard (although it readily converts TO MJ at a 10:1 ratio, converting it back into RF is currently impossible), RF is what is used to power all TE machines that require power. You'll also notice some icons on either side. Let's discuss these for a moment.
First is the 'information' tab. Clicking on it will bring up some useful information about the block. One of the most overlooked parts of this mod is mentioned in that last paragraph. "Generation rate varies according to energy demand." What this means is "If you don't need the energy, it won't waste your fuel trying to produce it." Which is kinda really amazing and awesome and one of the reasons I like this mod so much. It won't -quite- shut down, but it WILL drop to about a tenth of the production, and fuel consumption. Very handy.
Beneath that is the tutorial button. Basically, it'll generally give tips, not unlike what I'm doing here.
On the other side on the top is the RF Indicator. You'll notice it currently says 0 RF/t being generated, and a theoretical maximum of 80 RF/t and 0 RF stored. Yes, it will store a small amount of RF internally, but I wouldn't really rely on it too much. How much energy it is storing will determine how much it throttles power output.
Beneath that is the Redstone Control button. You'll see three buttons in the popout window. The redstone dust icon means it ignores nearby redstone signals and just works nonstop no matter what. The 'turned off redstone torch' symbol means it will run unless it is given a redstone signal, which will then turn it off. The lit redstone torch means that the Dynamo will require a redstone signal to turn on and run, just like most of the engines from Buildcraft and similar mods.
That last one is actually pretty important, because a compact base design can have redstone signals flying all over the place, and this lets you either ignore them, or turn on/off based on what signals are flying around. So say your energy storage emits a redstone signal when full, which can then turn off the dynamos. You can do that, no problem.
Right, so that's the GUI. But we need solid fuel and water. Solid fuel isn't a big problem, coal or charcoal works just fine. Setting up a renewable source of water isn't too hard, just a couple of well-placed buckets of water will work. However, automatically getting that water into the engine will require another machine, this time the Aqueous Accumulator. Let's look it up in good ol' NEI again.
--> PROTIP:
Q: How do you know if a machine requires power, makes power, or doesn't care about power?
A: If it requires a Redstone Reception Coil, it requires power. If it requires a redstone Transmission Coil, it produces power. If it requires a Pneumatic Servo, it doesn't need power.
So, the Aqueous Accumulator requires a Machine Frame (get used to this, it's in every machine in the mod), a Pneumatic Servo, some glass (don't be thrown by the shifting around, it's just also trying to list all of the 'equivalent' items), some tin, and a bucket.
So what does it do? Well, if it has a water source block on at least two sides, it will constantly output water. More than enough to keep up with our Steam Dynamo. Go ahead and put it down (I generally dig a 1 x 3 trench, with the AA in the middle and the water on the sides), and put the Dynamo directly on top of it. Notice how the water automatically gets put in the dynamo without needing any pipes? Yea, TE3 is just cool like that. However, let's check out that GUI of the AA first, there's something important here I want to show you.
You see that green button with the cog? That's what I'm talking about. You'll notice that on each of the five sides of the AA that isn't the face, there's an orange mark. You'll also notice that on the outside of the machine, the sides are similarly marked. Now, click one of those orange sides, and the orange mark vanishes. You'll note that it does the same thing on the machine itself. An orange slot denotes automatic output, and that it is orange on all five sides denotes that it will output its inventory (water) to any of the five non-face sides. Clicking on the various faces will turn off connectivity on that side. This is oriented from the 'face' itself, rather than any absolute cardinal direction. The spot in the corner denotes the 'back' (i.e. the opposite side from the face). Right now, the only face you really need to leave orange is the top slot (the one above the face) to feed the dynamo, so you can leave the others however you want.
So, now we have everything we need to produce power. Now all we need is some way to transmit it, and then we'll want something that will use it. Having an energy storage buffer probably wouldn't hurt either.
Let's start with the energy transmission. For this, we're going to need some lead and some redstone and a bit of glass. Look up the 'Leadstone Conduit' in NEI. If you hit Shift while mousing over it, you will note that it can transmit up to 80 RF/t, and our dynamo can produce 80. So it can handle the output of our Dynamo. That's enough to get us started, anyways.
You won't need much of this stuff, hopefully we'll be building pretty compact. However, we're not going to be wasting the leadstone conduits, they're actually used as a component in the next tier of conduit, so they won't become obsolete. Now THAT is good mod design! Just four ought to do it.
The energy cube is a bit out of our league at the moment. It requires Electrum, and we have no way of producing it... yet. That's our next step, building machines that actually use this RF.
Setting up your Ore Processing manufactorum
The first machine that uses this RF that we are going to build is the Pulverizer. Let's look that up in NEI. Not too expensive, it requires a couple of flint, a couple of copper, a piston, another machine frame, and a Reception Coil.
Also, about now, you're probably going to want to rotate your Dynamo. For that, we build a Crescent Hammer! It's three iron and one piece of silver, look it up in good ol' NEI. Now you can rotate all kinds of things, and has a lot of extra utility going forward. For example, shift + Right Click on any conduit will instantly remove it. It'll do the same for an Energy Cell which will keep all RF stored in it for when you drop it back down later. Really handy tool to have around.
So, drop down two leadstone conduit (trust me on this, it's important for later on) and put the Pulverizer on the end of the line. Now it's filling up with power. In fact, check out the GUI, and we'll note on the Energy tab that it requires a maximum of 40 RF/t to process. That's... currently half of what we are producing! But don't panic... there's another really good thing about Thermal expansion machines that I want to touch on.
If you don't have enough power to fully power each machine, they will self-throttle to the amount of RF you -can- give them. So while your machines might run slower than their maximum speed, they'll still at least run some, even when underpowered. Besides, we'll solve this problem in a bit.
Now then, you'll also notice the redstone signal tab and the configuration tabs which you should be familiar with by now, but this machine has four potential colors: blue, red, yellow, and orange. Blue is Input, red is 'primary output', yellow is 'secondary output' and Orange is 'both primary and secondary output'. Wait... primary and secondary output? Buwha?
When you pulverize ores, some of them give you a 10% chance of giving you a 'bonus ore'. For example, pulverizing Iron Ore gives a 10% chance of netting a bonus Pulverized Ferrous Metal. The 'primary' output, is red. That's going to be the two pulverized iron. The yellow is the 'secondary' output, which would be the pulverized ferrous metal. Orange would be both of them. We'll be utilizing some of these mechanics in a bit, but for now, let's stick to the basics.
It can automatically accept input from any blue side and it will automatically eject into any inventory, conduit, tube, or other such thing connected to a red, yellow, or orange side. So if you have, say, a Hopper attached to a blue side, and a chest on the orange side, you put your ores into the hopper, and it will automatically spit out the pulverized metals, both primary and secondary, into the chest!
Oh, but it doesn't stop there, my friend, you ain't seen nothing yet! But right now, I want to set up that energy buffer I was talking about earlier. Look up the recipe for a Leadstone Energy Cell. You will immediately notice that it is three copper, a 'leadstone cell frame', and a Conductance Coil, which requires Electrum.
Wait... electrum? What'choo talkin' bout, Willis?
Now we get to talk about alloying metals. There's two alloys we'll be working with shortly: Electrum and Invar. There's others, but they are later on down the tech tree. Clicking on the Electrum Ingot to bring up NEI recipes isn't too helpful. There's the always present 9x nugget = 1x ingot and the 1x block = 9x ingots recipes, then there's a recipe involving something called the 'Induction Smelter' which we haven't covered yet, and smelting up the electrum blend.
Wait a second... electrum 'blend'? You mean you have to blend something together to get it? BINGO! Give the man a cigar! Click on the electrum blend, and you'll see it is equal parts pulverized gold and silver. And we just so happen to have a machine that pulverizes metals, how handy!
Now, lets' go back to that recipe for the Leadstone Energy Cell. You'll notice the Leadstone Energy Cell Frame. Let's see what that requires. Well, as one might expect from the name, it requires lead, and a redstone block, and some glass. So, make yourself some of that electrum blend, smelt it up in a furnace, and make it!
Now then, you know how I told you earlier to use two leadstone conduit to connect up your pulverizer? Now I want you to shift+R.Click the one directly adjacent to the Dynamo and drop the Leadstone Cell in its place. Make sure to do so from the side, so neither the leadstone conduit nor the dynamo are touching the front face. Now click on it and bring up the GUI.
You'll notice that you can throttle input and output here if you want, which does have uses later on, and that you've got a configuration tab. Click on it, and you'll notice you can have the cell sides set to blue, orange, or yellow. Blue is for power input, orange is for power output, and yellow is the 'blank' side for 'no connection at all'. So set the side pointing to the dynamo to blue, the side pointing to the leadstone conduit to orange, and you'll notice that... not a whole lot is happening until your Pulverizer is done. You see, you have exactly 40 RF going in, and exactly 40 RF being used by the Pulverizer, so there's no energy storage in the cell yet. But once you get done with using the pulverizer, it will start filling up the energy cell. Pretty handy, and exceedingly useful for being able to be used 'in-line' like that.
The next machine we want to build is going to be the Redstone Furnace. Check it out in NEI. Yea, remember back in the first section that you were gonna need some clay? Well, here's where it goes. Two brick blocks, two copper, a reception coil, the inevitable machine frame, and a piece of redstone. Not too hard.
Now then, placement... I want you to put it directly underneath your pulverizer for the purpose of the tutorial. Trust me, I'm going somewhere with this. Hook up the leadstone in the back from the leadstone going to both the pulverizer and the energy cell.
You will notice when you click on the energy tab that it requires 20 RF/t to run, so half as much as the pulverizer did. It also only has two colors of side other than blank: blue and orange. As before, blue is input, orange is output. Now, I want you to do something for me. Go to your Pulverizer, and set the bottom to orange, then go to your furnace and set the top to blue. Notice how output is now automatically going down into your furnace? Awesome! Now, I want you to put a chest directly to the right of the furnace, and set that side of the furnace to orange. Now you have raw ores being put into the hopper, and ingots going straight into the chest!
And now for something completely different... sort of
While we are at it, let's talk about some of the other machines you can create right now. It's assumed in this tutorial that you don't build them yet, but since I figure this is a pretty dandy reference material, I should probably go ahead and tell you what most of those other machines do.
-> You can build yourself a Sawmill. It produces SIX planks per wood, so a net 50% increase. It needs that Machine Frame, an iron axe, a couple of wood planks, a couple of copper, and that Redstone Reception Coil, which means it also needs power. This doesn't throw anything at you that you haven't seen before. It'll also produce for you Sawdust, which can be compressed and smelted into charcoal.
-> The Fluid Transposer can load or unload liquids into containers. The good thing about this is that it doesn't destroy the container in the process. The bad thing is that this does require power. It'll be extremely handy in the next section, but for now it's just a bit of utility.
-> The Glacial Precipitator takes in water and can crank out snowballs, snow blocks, or ice blocks. It does require power to do this, however.
-> The Igneous Extruder is a surprisingly useful block which requires both water and lava to use properly. It can function as a cobblegen indefinitely, requiring any amount of water and lava, but not consuming either. Much less lag than conventional vanilla cobblegen tactics, and it can automaticaly output by using the orange. It can also accept piped in liquids on blue sides. It can also crank out smooth stone instead of cobblestone, and it doesn't even consume lava to do it anymore, just needs a bucket. It will consume one bucket of water per smoothstone, so hook it up to an Aqueous Accumulator. It can also produce obsidian, which can be extremely useful, but requires a full bucket of lava and a full bucket of water per obsidian. This will be an instrumental part of the next stage of our tech tree. Immediately, however, it means you can crank out tons of smoothstone to turn into grey brick or whatever you want to chisel them into to make a really dwarfy looking abode.
-> There's also a Strongbox you can craft now. It's just a chest with four tin. These guys are kinda like Iron Chests type stuff, but with an added advantage: Sneak + R.Click pops them out and into your pocket... but they keep their entire inventory with them! You can even upgrade it and it should* keep the inventory.
* Make sure you use a vanilla crafting table or the Machinist's Workbench when you do this. I make no promises that any other form of crafting will retain inventory.
-> Wait... what's a Machinst's workbench? Well, looking that up, you'll note it requires a strongbox to make, as well as a piece of paper and a couple of iron ingots and a crafting bench. It's the direct upgrade, and very close to the old-school RP2 Assembly Table, if you were around back then. Basically, it's got its own inventory you can leave stuff in, and the top half is rather interesting as well. There's three empty slots with some scroll-looking shadow in them and a couple of extra buttons. Those three slots are for Schematics, which require Lapis and paper, and will store your recipes for later use. You'll also note that clicking on the crafting square doesn't put items in the square itself, just marks that space with that item. Clicking that top button on the other side will clear the crafting square. The other button is used to write recipes to schematics. Click on it and he selected blank schematic will be written with the recipe you've got in the crafting grid. You'll also note that if you don't have a resource needed for the recipe in the workbench's inventory, it will have a subtle red background. However, it doesn't have a configuration tab, and it can't accept or spit out items. For that, we go to the next item on the agenda.
-> The Cyclic Assembler is how Thermal Expansion 3 handles auto-crafting. You will notice the Schematic slot as well as blue input and orange output slots. You'll also notice a schematic button on the side. If you put a blank schematic in the schematic slot, put in a recipe in that crafting grid that pops open, then click on the check mark, it will write that recipe to the blank schematic and start churning it out from the inventory it has! Also note that it has a liquid container it can use to craft items that require liquids.
--> The Energetic Infuser requires a Redstone Transmission Coil, but it doesn't actually produce power itself. What it does, however, is charge any items which can be charged with RF. This works out very well with tools from Redstone Arsenal, and there's also a Modifier for Tinker's Construct tools to run off of RF as well. However, because it does transmit power and charge things up, it requires a Transmission Coil.
-> The next utility machine is going to be the Autonomous Activator. This little beaut can accept items, then it will attempt to use that item. For a block like cobblestone, it will place it down. You can also customize in the GUI what sort of clicking you want to do with the item. And of course, since it has a Servo rather than a Reception Coil, it doesn't need any power. Very handy little toy, there.
-> The Terrain Smasher is a good ol' Block Breaker, which will attempt to break any block adjacent to the blue face, and spit it out the orange face. Since it has that servo, you know it won't need any power to do so. Also a pretty handy little toy.
-> The last machine we'll be talking about here is the Nullifier. In effect, it's a trash can. Anything that goes into the Nullifier is immediately and permanently destroyed. Similar in concept to the Trash Can, the Void Chest/Pipe, and anything else that is designed to keep your world from being cluttered by worthless stuff.
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