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

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PonyKuu

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Jul 29, 2019
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I can understand you... Sometimes I'm just getting tired of coding, and i don't like to use other people's scripts. And it's always good to try different things. Actually, I've never used a quarry since... I don't know, was that 1.2.5? Or probably even earlier. I was playing with EE2 at that point... Maybe I should try one in my new world...
 

Mash

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Jul 29, 2019
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Yeah. My entire experience with turtles was with the excavate program, as well as using a couple of them for an experience grinder.

Needless to say, I got tired of waiting 3 days for diamonds. Also, not being able to shut off my computer for that entire time because having to restart my turtle program is a giant pain in the ass.
 

PonyKuu

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Jul 29, 2019
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Yeah, that's a main issue with such scripts. There are some scripts that save the state of the turtle, but as I said earlier, I'm too lazy to implement it for now...
BTW, I don't use excavate at all. It's pretty nice done, but I count it as "script made by other person". And I agree with you that one turtle mine pretty slow. Strength in numbers ^_^
 

Mash

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Jul 29, 2019
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Yeah. Overall, given my inexperience with the turtle language, and my apathy towards collecting/wasting materials, I figured that I'd be fine with quarries.

Besides, the thing hauls in materials way faster than I can use them, which satisfies me for now.

Although, I would like to see different kinds of quarries based on what type of drill you use in the recipe. Like, the standard drill mines everything except obsidian, which it just destroys, like a gem turtle. It would also go slower, but use less resources per operation. Then you have your standard quarry. And finally, you have your advanced quarry made from an advanced drill. It uses double the resources per operation, but goes twice~ as fast.
 

PonyKuu

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Jul 29, 2019
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That might be interesting... Standard quarry that's more like "slow-like-hell" version from earlier versions of Buildcraft, and advanced - that's the one we have now.

Speaking of any non-turtle mining things I prefer RP2 TBM that fixes the tunnel walls. But it goes away pretty fast, sou you have to use MystCraft to get to the TBM >_<
 

Mash

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Jul 29, 2019
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Ah, yeah. I actually haven't done a whole lot of experimenting outside of BC quarries. There are some pretty neat contraptions out there, though.
 

Ako_the_Builder

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Jul 29, 2019
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I can understand you... Sometimes I'm just getting tired of coding, and i don't like to use other people's scripts. And it's always good to try different things. Actually, I've never used a quarry since... I don't know, was that 1.2.5? Or probably even earlier. I was playing with EE2 at that point... Maybe I should try one in my new world...

2 big things in quarries favor since then; upping of speed due to max input going from (I think) 10mj/t to 46mj/t and the addition of tesseracts.
 

PonyKuu

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Jul 29, 2019
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well, tesseracts was there in form of teleport pipes (Which I didn't use ever because I didn't really like that they are instant-transfer at any distance for no cost)

Ah, yeah. I actually haven't done a whole lot of experimenting outside of BC quarries. There are some pretty neat contraptions out there, though.
Yeah... I want to use a TBM from railcraft at some point... It's slow and expensive, but I've never used it and it looks pretty neat. And... It lays tracks ^_^
 

bigtwisty

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Jul 29, 2019
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Hmmm...​
Turtle Swarm
Output: 64 blocks in 9 seconds ~= 427 blocks per minute​
Fuel: 1 turtle fuel per block​
Mining Well Turtle
Output: 16 block row, lvl 75 to bedrock in 2 minutes ~= 600 blocks per minute​
Fuel: 1 turtle fuel and 1825 mj per 75 blocks​
Turtle swarm doesn't require mj, but uses a crap ton of fuel and costs a lot of gems for the turtles. Mining Well Turtle is cheap to build, but uses MJ. Both are far cooler than a quarry!​
 

brujon

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Jul 29, 2019
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Well, post away, i'm sure everyone thinking and bashing heads together could make sense of whatever you have to say, and something good could come out of it. Nothing good has ever come by withhelding ideas.

As for the whole turtles vs quarry thing... Using a BC3 Quarry, for me, is in no way different than going to the computercraft forums and downloading an efficient mining program for a turtle. I don't see any distinction. In both instances, you are placing a block, giving it a command, either in the form of a redstone signal or a command word, and providing it energy, either through the turtle GUI or through tesseracts/REC's, and it does the job for you, efficiently, and fast. The question, then, becomes one of efficiency. Which is the most efficient? According to AustinKK, his Advanced Ore Quarry program can compete in terms of speed with a full speed BC3 Quarry, beating it just barely. That was back when they had first upgraded the Quarry to accept up to 45 MJ/t, but at the time of the video, and according to his tests, there was no difference between giving the full 100MJ/t of a REC and giving it 25 MJ/t - I.E, it maxed out at about 25MJ/t.

Ignoring that, and accepting that a fully sped up BC3 quarry can now mine faster than his program, we have to consider the infrastructure. Even without Gregtech, you're talking about 11 diamonds per quarry. To actually feed it enough power to run at max speed, though, you have to have a pretty stable energy setup going on already. 45 MJ/t isn't something trivial. That's 5 and a half Industrial Steam Engines, which cost a lot of steel to make, or 7 and a half Combustion Engines running on Fuel. Either way, it's a hell of an infrastructure to set up before you get your first quarry going on. How to mine all those resources to get to peak efficiency?

I'd say using a turtle is, hands down, better than mining it by hand. Ok, then you get your first quarry online, and it's faster than a turtle... But to set up another Quarry at max speed, you again, need 45 MJ/t. It means even more infrastructure to setup. By the time you got to your second quarry, you used 22 diamonds. Those 22 diamonds could have made 7 Mining Turtles. My point? Mining with turtle scales better, and faster. After your first trip to Y12, you get your first turtle online, and you never have to manually mine a single block ever again. You make more turtles. And more turtles, and more turtles, until your sorting system can't keep up. A BC3 Quarry isn't as efficient as 3 turtles running advanced mining programs at once. And they cost equivalent amounts of resources, and you don't even need to use Diamonds for the turtles, either, you could easily just skip it entirely by using Green Sapphires, which are basically useless besides that and tools.

It's pretty easy to get at a point, with turtles, that you're getting such a silly amount of resources, that it's actually hard to know what to do with it all. Eventually you get to manage 20, 30 turtles at once, via Rednet or other means, and it's silly. The competitive solution, in my eyes, is only the Mining Well frame machine that DW20 came up with, which is lolwtf levels of broken and silly. 1 Block per Tick is insanity right there.
 

Saice

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Jul 29, 2019
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Hmmm...​
Turtle Swarm
Output: 64 blocks in 9 seconds ~= 427 blocks per minute​
Fuel: 1 turtle fuel per block​
Mining Well Turtle
Output: 16 block row, lvl 75 to bedrock in 2 minutes ~= 600 blocks per minute​
Fuel: 1 turtle fuel and 1825 mj per 75 blocks​
Turtle swarm doesn't require mj, but uses a crap ton of fuel and costs a lot of gems for the turtles. Mining Well Turtle is cheap to build, but uses MJ. Both are far cooler than a quarry!​

Sure but you can just load up on buckets of lava (made from MJ) and use refuel all Might not be as fuel efficient as the well. But there is something to be said about the turtle swarm in coolness.
 

Mash

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Jul 29, 2019
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Honestly, resource cost is only ever a concern when you're referring to things like... iridium, which can't be mass-mined in the overworld.

Diamonds? They're negligible. If I ran my Quarry twice, I'd get at least 4 stacks, if not more. The quarry pays for itself quite a few times over every single time you run it.

At that point, the only thing that matters is the time it takes to mine said resources. In this respect, the quarry is outclassed block-for-block only by the mining well+turtle contraption that bigtwisty demonstrated. Sure, the turtle swarm mines faster, but if you had a quarry for every single turtle in that, the quarries would be pulling in massively larger amounts of resources in the same amount of time.

Comparing a quarry to 60-80 turtles is just silly. Just like comparing one turtle to 15 quarries would be silly. It doesn't demonstrate how efficient it is by itself.
 

Indalor1

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Jul 29, 2019
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You folks are awesome. I have 4 turtles running now and finally got an actual quarry up as well. Got plenty of resources now. Thanks for all the ideas.
 

KirinDave

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Jul 29, 2019
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I have an idea for a turtle program... not sure if I have the skill to make it though XD

In the words of a good friend of mine who has helped me when I have felt the same way about many a program. "Harden the F___ up, Lambert2191. Sit down, shut up, write the code."
 
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