What's the best way to mine on the Ultimate pack?

[Mash]

It checks each wall of the hole it mines, so if you look carefully, you'll notice, that it would check every single block in the area, so it won't miss any ore.

And it is slower unless you combine this pattern with multi-turtle mining concept what is I want to do eventually.

Well, for every turtle you make, you can just as easily make another Quarry.

After you get to the point where you can make a quarry, it's no longer about how efficiently you can mine. It's about how fast you can take in resources.

Once you make your first quarry, it's just a matter of time to make the rest of them. I could easily have 5-10 quarries working for me at any given time if I expanded my boiler room. The reason I don't is that I simply don't have any need for that many materials. At the end of the day, quarries will always be faster than turtles. And when you have everything in terms of resources, the only thing that matters is time.

 

[bigtwisty]

I just built a 2 turtle system that will smoke a quarry for speed and energy any day of the week, for a fraction of the materials and energy usage.

Thing1: Gate Reader Mining Turtle (used gems, not diamonds)
Thing2: Engineering Turtle

Thing1 gets a mining well and an ender chest linked back to my base. Thing2 gets an energy cell, some torches and a bunch of cobble to cover the massive hole it leaves behind.

Operation:
Thing2 is placed behind Thing1, facing the same direction. They place the cell and the well below them. As soon as Thing1 reads a "Work Done" gate signal, it picks up the well and digs forward, moves forward and digs down. As soon as Thing2 loses the redstone signal from Thing1, it picks up its redstone cell, replaces it with a cobble, moves forward and places the cell down again. Ad Infinitum.

It also places torches every 10 blocks when mining in a straight line.

Results:
I clocked this setup at about 32 minutes to clear out a full chunk from level 75 to bedrock. A fully powered quarry would take several hours, go through several energy cells and cost a fortune to build.

My turtles used only a fraction of a redstone cell for the entire operation.

Conclusion:
Turtles + ingenuity: 1
Quarries: 0

 

[Mash]

Okay, so a turtle+a mining well will beat a quarry.

No single turtle will ever do the same. Just to clarify, I never claimed that quarries were the best. I believe that DW20's interesting frame quarry thingamajig holds that title. I just have never seen a single turtle come close to beating a quarry, simply because it has a maximum speed that pales in comparison to the quarry's. Combine it with something that mines faster, and you have an impressive contraption.

That's still a really impressive set up nonetheless, however. Turtles certainly provide an interesting metagame. Kudos.

 

[PonyKuu]

Well, for every turtle you make, you can just as easily make another Quarry.

Do turtles cost 11 diamonds in Ultimate? Do they need that much energy? NO! It's stupid to compare quarry to only one turtle. For the same price you can run multiple turtles. 64 turtles can mine 64x64 area for about an hour, if I remember correctly

I'm not saying that turtles are the best way, but they are not THAT bad. And using just turtles has its advantages, even though it might be a bit more expensive.

Turtles also can mine tunnels, or do branch mining, and that might be even more efficient and fast, if you are looking for diamonds/gold/redstone/etc.

 

[slay_mithos]

Mining turtles can also be made out of RP gems instead of diamonds, the only downside being that it will destroy obsidian instead of collecting it.

But even with diamonds, you can make 3 turtles for the cost of 1 quarry, and still have resources left.
Will use a bit more redstone, stone, wood, as well as 1 more iron ingot, and save on gold and diamonds (2 left).

The best thing about turtles is that you can make them act specific ways regarding specific blocks (leave diamonds for you to fortune them), as well as run programs that can do very efficient branch mining, and all that.


The only downside of turtles are that they move (so they need to go back to starting point to deposit, or bring an ender chest with them), and they need to have some specific infrastructure to prevent a chunck unload or other world unloads to completely shut them down.

They do require more work than a quarry though, and many people find them way too cheap for what they can do (mostly because most people won't bother actually making their own programs).

 

[PonyKuu]

So, gemmed turtles DO destroy obsidian? That's neat! Obsidian can be made bu minium stone or magma crucible->igneos extruder, so that's not an issue. And one can make a lot of turtles and use a swarming program ^_^

 

[Lambert2191]

Nukes enough said.

retarded way of "mining" enough said.

 

[quantumllama]

Mining is not just making holes in the ground.

 

[bigtwisty]

retarded way of "mining" enough said.

You should try telling a large mining corp IRL that their automated mining techniques are too OP. That would be cool.


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A reasonable facsimile of intelligence...

 

[Lambert2191]

You should try telling a large mining corp IRL that their automated mining techniques are too OP. That would be cool.


---------------------------------------------------------
A reasonable facsimile of intelligence...

because large mining corps IRL use fucking NUKES?! Muppet.

 

[slay_mithos]

You should try telling a large mining corp IRL that their automated mining techniques are too OP. That would be cool.


---------------------------------------------------------
A reasonable facsimile of intelligence...

One of the notable difference is that IRL, the explosive won't randomly void part of what it blows up.

They also tend to use very specialised explosives so that they can easily collect what has been mined.
Nukes and explosives in general in Minecraft just make craters, and it makes it pretty difficult to gather the drops.

Add to that the fact that an explosion will destroy items on the ground, meaning that you can't just drop 5-6 nukes and then go harvest at bedrock level, usually.

(Also, depending on where and what is mined, they also use some pretty impressive bores, kind of like the railcraft ones)

 

[quantumllama]

Gotta love tunnel boring machines IRL. I should use them more often in Minecraft as well. How do they compare to other methods?

 

[PonyKuu]

Gotta love tunnel boring machines IRL. I should use them more often in Minecraft as well. How do they compare to other methods?

They are... far away. You start mining with it and it goes very far away very quickly. But in terms of resource gathering, they are good. And they don't leave holes in the ground.

I'm talking about RP2 frame TBMs BTW

 

[Mash]

I just built a 2 turtle system that will smoke a quarry for speed and energy any day of the week, for a fraction of the materials and energy usage.

Thing1: Gate Reader Mining Turtle (used gems, not diamonds)
Thing2: Engineering Turtle

Thing1 gets a mining well and an ender chest linked back to my base. Thing2 gets an energy cell, some torches and a bunch of cobble to cover the massive hole it leaves behind.

Operation:
Thing2 is placed behind Thing1, facing the same direction. They place the cell and the well below them. As soon as Thing1 reads a "Work Done" gate signal, it picks up the well and digs forward, moves forward and digs down. As soon as Thing2 loses the redstone signal from Thing1, it picks up its redstone cell, replaces it with a cobble, moves forward and places the cell down again. Ad Infinitum.

It also places torches every 10 blocks when mining in a straight line.

Results:
I clocked this setup at about 32 minutes to clear out a full chunk from level 75 to bedrock. A fully powered quarry would take several hours, go through several energy cells and cost a fortune to build.

My turtles used only a fraction of a redstone cell for the entire operation.

Conclusion:
Turtles + ingenuity: 1
Quarries: 0

I would like to add, however, that after doing some math...

My quarry mines at a rate of 64 blocks per 9 seconds. Meaning that it would clear one layer of a 16x16 area in 36 seconds.

36 x 75 = 2700 seconds to mine an entire 16x16 area from layer 75 to bedrock. 2700/60 = 45 minutes. So, while the contraption certainly goes faster than a quarry, and probably does use less resources, I'd hardly call it 'smoking' it.

Do turtles cost 11 diamonds in Ultimate? Do they need that much energy? NO! It's stupid to compare quarry to only one turtle. For the same price you can run multiple turtles. 64 turtles can mine 64x64 area for about an hour, if I remember correctly

I'm not saying that turtles are the best way, but they are not THAT bad. And using just turtles has its advantages, even though it might be a bit more expensive.

Turtles also can mine tunnels, or do branch mining, and that might be even more efficient and fast, if you are looking for diamonds/gold/redstone/etc.

I have roughly 15 stacks of diamonds.

It's stupid to compare things based on the resources they use, especially when each of said things have the potential to GIVE you unlimited resources.

Also, I have enough titanium for roughly 5 quarries. And I have enough bauxite ore to give me a whole lot more.

But, you're right. Turtles aren't bad. I don't think they're bad. I think they're very good in certain aspects, and for their price, they are quite efficient at mining. I just don't measure things by price. I measure things by how quickly they can do their job.

 

[bigtwisty]

I would like to add, however, that after doing some math...

My quarry mines at a rate of 64 blocks per 9 seconds. Meaning that it would clear one layer of a 16x16 area in 36 seconds.

36 x 75 = 2700 seconds to mine an entire 16x16 area from layer 75 to bedrock. 2700/60 = 45 minutes. So, while the contraption certainly goes faster than a quarry, and probably does use less resources, I'd hardly call it 'smoking' it.

Hmm... perhaps I haven't used quarries in a while. Last I knew, they took hours to clear a chunk. I'll have to look into it...

 

[Mash]

Hmm... perhaps I haven't used quarries in a while. Last I knew, they took hours to clear a chunk. I'll have to look into it...

There is every possibility that my math is wrong, but I'm not so sure.

For the purpose of comparing the two, I measured how long it took a turtle and a quarry to mine one row of a 64x64 quarry. The turtle took roughly 57 seconds, while the quarry took about 9. I may re-measure this, or even just measure the time it takes for the quarry to mine an entire layer, for the sake of being thorough. With that short of a test, a small inaccuracy can throw the entire equation off.

Also, I always hook my quarries up with a redstone cell buffer set to maximum output, as well as a tesseract feeding into that from my base. Just to be sure that it is always going at maximum speed.

(And I'm talking about BC quarries. Just in case there was any confusion.)

 

[PonyKuu]

I would like to add, however, that after doing some math...
But, you're right. Turtles aren't bad. I don't think they're bad. I think they're very good in certain aspects, and for their price, they are quite efficient at mining. I just don't measure things by price. I measure things by how quickly they can do their job.

Well, so you can check this out. It's VERY quick. Give it 64 modules and mine 64x64 area. It is much faster that quarry. I thing it is faster that five quaries. Not sure about ten quarries, but that might be true as well...

However, you can't shutdown you world and then start it up again... That's possible to handle, I'm just too lazy to mess with it, especially because CC team is working on lua state saving.

 

[Mash]

Well, so you can check this out. It's VERY quick. Give it 64 modules and mine 64x64 area. It is much faster that quarry. I thing it is faster that five quaries. Not sure about ten quarries, but that might be true as well...

Oh, I wouldn't doubt it. It certainly looks very impressive. Is that with just one turtle? And is there by chance a video of this in action somewhere?

Even if you can get a single turtle to go faster than a quarry, I'll probably still use a quarry. Partly because I'm stubborn, and partly because I like how quarries work, and I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with turtles.

 

[PonyKuu]

I'm sorry, I didn't record any videos ever... And that's not just one turtle, that one master turtle which places up to 64 mining modules and give to each of them one Ender Chest with fuel and one linked to sorting system. Each mining module goes to the place assigned by Master and mines a 1xLengthxDepth slice. It mines three layers at one, so it's pretty efficient in terms of movement and fuel. However, they eat a good amount of fuel if there are 64 of them ^_^

 

[Mash]

I'm sorry, I didn't record any videos ever... And that's not just one turtle, that one master turtle which places up to 64 mining modules and give to each of them one Ender Chest with fuel and one linked to sorting system. Each mining module goes to the place assigned by Master and mines a 1xLengthxDepth slice. It mines three layers at one, so it's pretty efficient in terms of movement and fuel. However, they eat a good amount of fuel if there are 64 of them ^_^

Hmm. Well, that would certainly be quite efficient. Both time and resource-wise. Though you'll have to forgive me, I'm kind of fuzzy on the concept. One of my biggest motivations for getting the hell away from turtles was my overwhelming ignorance of all things ComputerCraft.