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

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Indalor1

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Jul 29, 2019
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Ok, making a quarry is just ridiculous with gregtech so other than a IC2 miner or just by hand with either a standard drill or a pickaxe, what would be the most efficient way to mine that doesn't take 10+ hours in game to set up?
 

Whovian

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Jul 29, 2019
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Miner with some sort of scanner, though I have a Quarry after less than 10 hours. Granted, Poppycocks helped me by lending me 2 Titanium Ingots and someone else let me borrow their Industrial Blast Furnace.

You can also cheat and use Turtles. Or just strip/cave mine by hand, it seems most people do that.

EDIT: D'oh. Pokefenn has it right, frame miners are awesome. I suppose you could also use a Frame Quarry, though the block breaker nerf might make that a little more difficult.
 

Peppe

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Jul 29, 2019
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What is best to you?

Cheapest? Turtle

Fastest? RP2 + Mining Well, RP2 tunnel bore/quarry

Easy to setup? BC Quarry, Turtle, IC2 Miner

Efficient Mining? IC2 Miner, Turtle (w/ custom program)

Can use enchantments? Arcane Bore, Think MFR block breaker uses the tool?

Cool looking? Arcane Bore

Most expensive? Steves Carts 2 Mining Cart, Railcraft tunnel bore
 

Raitor

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Jul 29, 2019
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A single turtle with the right program to mine only ores will beat (barely) a buildcraft quarry in time and fuel consumption and they are much cheaper in starting material and blocks needed to make the quarry run. so get 4 turtles for roughly the price of a quarry. They are also much easier to move around and place somewhere else. However if they run out of fuel it can be annoying to go find them.
 

Fuzzlewhumper

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Jul 29, 2019
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I am really partial to Turtles myself. But if that were out of the picture, I'd go with the Miner + Standard Drill (not Diamond Drill) + the Scanner that does 9 blocks instead of just 5.
 
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brujon

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Jul 29, 2019
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A single turtle with the right program to mine only ores will beat (barely) a buildcraft quarry in time and fuel consumption and they are much cheaper in starting material and blocks needed to make the quarry run. so get 4 turtles for roughly the price of a quarry. They are also much easier to move around and place somewhere else. However if they run out of fuel it can be annoying to go find them.

They barely beat a BC3 quarry in terms of time, but they beat it handily in terms of fuel consumption. Using AustinKK's Ore quarry program as a basis of comparison (he's the one that did the comparison video and optimized to beat the BC3 quarry), an 8x8 hole to bedrock consumes 30 Coal. The BC3 quarry uses 25 MJ/t to function at top speed, and that would require stacks upon stacks of coal, even using the most fuel efficient way to burn it. Turtles also cost, in diamonds, a little less than 1/4 of what a BC3 quarry costs, not including engines to run it, so if you have 12 diamonds to spare, you can easily build 4 turtles and mine at 4x the speed of a BC3 quarry using roughly the same amount of resources in construction.

As for speed, Mining Well Frame Quarry is, at the moment, the fastest way i know of. 1 block per tick, you can't get much faster than that. Block Breaker quarry comes second, and then comes turtles, and then BC3 quarry. IC2 quarry comes last place.
 
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Chocorate

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Jul 29, 2019
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I don't like mining. I chop trees and light the buggy floating blocks on fire.

When i need to get stuff for forestry and sorting systems, I use TNT. :3
 

Indalor1

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Jul 29, 2019
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Ok Mining Turtle it is. No diamonds or GregTech required.

Seriously though... 250k EU to make half of a single bar of titanium is just nuts. So just to make 1 Quarry you need 1,000,000 EU, an industrial electrolyzer, and an industrial blast furnace. And that doesn't include the diamonds and other resources.
 

Mash

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Jul 29, 2019
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Anything less than 100 million EU is inconsequential endgame.

A quarry only took me a few days to get to. It's not meant to be something that you start with. It's easily acquirable by mid-game, however.

I prefer quarries simply because I don't have to fuck around with programs, or worry about it reverting back to a normal turtle when the server crashes. All I have to do is take a bit more time out of my day to set it up, and then forget about it for 11 hours.
 

brujon

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Jul 29, 2019
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If you label your turtles, they store their programs. If your program includes a way to store the state it's in, then it can have a resume functionality. It's a pretty complex thing to code if you don't use GPS functionality to do so, but it does allow for the turtle to recover itself from a server crash and continue from where it left off. It's then, basically, always better than a quarry. Less resources to make, less resources to maintain, less resources to operate.

Many do consider cheating to mine without writing your own programs, some even consider cheating to use the default excavate command that comes with the turtle, which is basically, mine a X/Y area straight to bedrock. Do keep in mind the default excavate program is roughly 3 and something times slower than a BC3 quarry at full speed. It does come back up and store it's items in a chest if you place it behind it, and it does get fuel from a chest placed on the left of it's starting position now, so it's way better than when it was first implemented. Definitely something to consider if you dislike writing your own programs, but also dislike downloading programs other people made. This is built in with the turtle API, so there's that option. More advanced programs can be found in the computercraft forums if you have no qualms about downloading other people's programs that they made available to download. 99,9% of the time, running the excavate program will get you enough resources to get another turtle going on, then you can just keep adding to the turtle army.
 

Mash

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Jul 29, 2019
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Yeah. If I knew the programming language, I could probably be better with turtles. They could actually probably solve many of my problems.

But, I don't. And the only thing I hate more than cheating in items on a survival server is deliberately ripping off a design without at least adding something of my own to it.
 

McMutton

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Jul 29, 2019
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I started using the Tunnel-function of the Turtle at the beginning at the levels where the ressources where I currently needed (diamond-level, tin/copper-level) and checked the sides of the tunnel. Seemed more efficient than using the excavate-function.
After doing that it didn't take too long to start my first quarry setup.... (which by now is nearly too fast for my ME-Network to import the items when a lot of different items get pumped into the ender chest)

I also got an enchanted Power Tool from the Modular Power Suits mod...... which i am not allowed to use when i want to remove a single block in the world... (especially while building my base in the sky)... it's just too fast. :D

I plan to build an RP2-Frame machine later on.... not that it would be needed, it's more for fun (and maybe for getting less dirt and cobble from the top layers). :)
 

Mash

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Jul 29, 2019
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I would like to add, however, that it took my mining turtle 57 seconds to mine 64 blocks, and it took my Quarry... 9.

That's just over 6 times faster.

Meaning that it would finish a 64x64 quarry in roughly half the time of a turtle that only mined every third layer.
 

Hydra

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Jul 29, 2019
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I personally don't like using turtles with other people's programs. IMHO turtles are 'balanced' in that although they're cheap it takes quite some time to program them. If you skip the latter part it's almost like using creative mode to get items to me.

I do think the gregtech recipies for quarries are completely rediculous though; the normal BC quarries are expensive enough early game. They're not supposed to be an late-game item.[DOUBLEPOST=1365154817][/DOUBLEPOST]
Meaning that it would finish a 64x64 quarry in roughly half the time of a turtle that only mined every third layer.

The measurements were based on the old quarries which didn't scale as much with power and topped off at about 10MJ/t. The new quarries top off at about 48MJ/t and are WAY faster than any turtle-quarry program can ever be.
 

whythisname

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Jul 29, 2019
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What is best to you?

Cheapest? Turtle

Fastest? RP2 + Mining Well, RP2 tunnel bore/quarry

Easy to setup? BC Quarry, Turtle, IC2 Miner

Efficient Mining? IC2 Miner, Turtle (w/ custom program)

Can use enchantments? Arcane Bore, Think MFR block breaker uses the tool?

Cool looking? Arcane Bore

Most expensive? Steves Carts 2 Mining Cart, Railcraft tunnel bore

As far as I know MFR's block breaker doesn't use tools, at least not in the MFR version that's in Ultimate atm. Immibis's block breaker (the transparent one) does use tools though and that does work with enchantments (I just tested it with Silk Touch and that works fine). I don't know if it's possible to create a decent bore with those though, not to mention it'll require a constant supply of enchanted tools. So even if you can make a bore with it I'm pretty sure it'll be the most expensive miner to run.

As for Steve's Carts they're not all that expensive. The rails are a constant hassle of course, but with RC you get 2 stacks of tracks for 16 iron, 4 stacks for 16 steel and both of those can be doubled if you replace your tracks with wooden tracks. Now consider all the stuff you need to make an IC2 miner or a BC quarry (nerfed by GT) and SC really isn't that much more expensive. Both of those also need vast amounts of power to run, while SC can do a lot of work on a little charcoal, which is a lot more manageable early game.

I agree in the long run SC loses out to pretty much everything, but that's not because of the cost. Unless you go with a Galgadorian drill, which is a bad idea no matter how I look at it. With 2-3 basic drills you'll have just as much area for only a fraction of the cost and trouble.