There could be some kind of industrial sluice where water flows down it, and if provided enough dirt, sand, crushed (cobble)stone (or stone dust) and gravel to the machine, there is chance to get good ores and nuggets. These can be provided by throwing them in the water flow that reaches the sluice, or by providing directly by interface. The lower the altitude the sluice has been placed, the more valuables the minerals caught by it - reaching to diamonds in veery rare ocasions!
It needs an water flow in it to work.
I got this idea from TerraFirmaCraft's now unused sluices (which are pending for rewriting) and as such I wish you could do an fully-functional, GregTech-style sluice. It surely would gonna be some very powerful tool to gather ores from remains of mining!
Industrial Sluice
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It would have to be veeeery slow though, or very end-game(which wouldn't make any sense), because it can make ores from stuff like dirt and cobble. Anything with a at least semi-decent speed would be OP as such a simple device. One could make a high-tech variant using good amounts of power and being very expensive, though. like, not as energy consuming and expensive as massfab and replicator and this whole stuff, but a good deal slower (maybe using a OD/OV scanner?).
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This would be very OP, making it like the ExNihilo sifter ( just have a cobble gen, some kind of grinder, and now, you have infnite ores at the cost of completely renewable energy, like water mills, and a cobble gen... ) NO, just NO, But I would be ok if this was a feature disabled by default / addon, could be very useful in skyblock maps
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It wouldn't make any sense to vanilla IC2, since it's not designed for skyblock maps, or for manual things at all really. It would work at most as an addon.
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Look at the crafting recipes of those. Pushing some junk down some water is free. Scrapboxes are IC2's way of randomly generating useful things.
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Even scrapboxes are OP in my opinion
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They're really not. The most likely thing you'll get is a wooden hoe. Then the rest of the wooden tools. Then dirt. Scrapboxes are not a reliable source of resources short of having 50 in a big array.
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I haven't really started playing Industrial-Craft² yet, but a sluice sounds like a good idea to me. For balance, consider these extra suggestions and counters:
Dirt, sand, and gravel are nonrenewable... wait... nevermind.* Then, how about it doesn't require any input? Real sluices work by catching the valuable metals passively.- Passive, no interface or inputs
- It must be in a river biome
- There must not be another sluice nearby (it would get laggy and rivers abused), in the adjacent chunks perhaps?
- It must span the entire width of the river, and still fit in one-two chunks (it can't be the length of the river!)
- Built with non-tile-entity blocks, and transforms to a tile entity only when requirements are met.
- It works by stealing nearby ores, for balance, so it won't work forever. Whenever the sluice produces something, it converts an ore block underground into stone.
- More lossy than manual mining. For example, for each gold ore block replaced by stone, only 5-7 nuggets are recieved.
- Only works on metals, not crystals or other
- Slooow, maybe it ticks once every ten minutes?
Anyways, if it is a sluice and not a pan or rocker box, it should be passive.
*It appears that this mod is all about making things renewable and automatic.
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there is a block called "miner", which automines for EU, so that suggestion is kind of pointless, but as an early-game alternative for it(if i recall correctly, the miner is quite cheap, so it would be an very early-game alternative).
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It just don't sound useful enough when there are miners which are far better, but aren't massive and laggy, or restricted to biome. Anything manual or as random as placing blocks in a river to catch nuggets doesn't fit with IC2's techy automated theme.
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Ah, I didn't know about miners.