GregTech single-player and using other mods with it

Quote from Chocohead

Unless Greg is disabling those, they are all connected in that they need steel plates, that I presume isn't ore dictionaried.

Two problems with that explanation:
1. With Railcraft installed, the GT processing recipes for steel plates actually give Railcraft steel plates, not GT steel plates (I've got NEI integration's "show internal names" option active, so I can tell the difference).
2. Except for the steel tank valves and gauges, which only show recipes for dye-ing them, the devices I listed won't even show me a recipe in NEI (with fairly recent versions of NEI addons and NEI integration installed).

One other inter-mod oddity I noticed but forgot to mention:
The GT scanner machine can scan Forestry bees, but seems to require fluid honey for that, which I'm not sure is actually obtainable by default (NEI showed me the fluid canning machine recipe for removing it from a cell or adding it to one, but not how to get the fluid honey in the first place).

Quote from retep998

1. You can electrolyze 50 steel dust to 50 iron dust fairly cheaply and then turn that into wrought iron to make steel again.
2. Uh-huh.
3. Yep. Dust forms are easily interchangeable and solid forms are easily interchangeable, but dust to solid requires the blast furnace. So avoid going back to dust whenever possible.

Sorry, I fail to see how that explains the logic behind the limitations. Those are some things I can do to work within (or does it count as around?) those limitations.

Quote from retep998

2. Railcraft changed the internal names of a lot of stuff recently and GT5 never had a chance to update to them before GT6 came along. You can fix them with minetweaker.
3. Minetweaker.

I tried using some Minetweaker scripts from https://github.com/Dream-Master/Mods-Get-Gregged in a new instance in MultiMC, and that didn't seem to fix either #2 or #3 from my list of inter-mod oddities, though maybe I did something wrong when setting them up. I saw a lot of Minetweaker errors, though, so I've attached the log file.

I was kinda hoping the lines that didn't involve items from missing mods would still be applied, but I guess I was expecting too much from Minetweaker. I will edit the scripts when I have a chance (I don't want to just remove the recipes that involve items from missing mods, I want to see if I can find alternate items to use in the recipes to maintain balance; also, I didn't see anything in Buildcraft.zs for removing the Buildcraft gear recipes), but there are two things slowing me down from that:
1. I have a migraine this morning .
2. Suddenly this morning several of my existing worlds started crashing, even without changes to the mod list. The log showed something about trying to download a cape (even though afaik I haven't earned a cape, and since I only play single-player and almost always in first-person view, I wouldn't even see the cape if I had). Disabling Optifine and my resource packs allowed the worlds to load, but I'm not happy about losing either.

Edit: #2 turned out to be a conflict with authlib (that apparently got updated independently of the main minecraft version), and Optifine has released a newer build for 1.7.10 that fixes it. Fixing the scripts from that GitHub repository turned out to be less practical than I thought. I think I'd be better off starting from scratch, but first I'm going to play my almost-pure GregTech instance for a bit, and decide whether I even need other mods to go with it.

Okay, I came across a new confusion today: cobaltite ore, which can be smelted directly to cobalt ingots for a tier 3 pickaxe, can be mined with a tier 2 pickaxe. However, the garnierite ore above it in a Nickel vein, which smelts to nickel ingots, which make a tier 2 pickaxe, apparently requires a tier 3 pickaxe to mine it. Is there a Wiki page that documents the mining levels of different GT ores (especially counter-intuitive ones like those)?

Since nobody answered my question about a wiki page on mining levels needed for different ores, I did my own checking, though only of the standard small and mix ores defined in WorldGeneration.cfg, and found some surprising results, including that cobaltite ore can actually be mined with a tier 1 pickaxe (e.g. flint, stone). I'm attaching a text file with my results, in case someone wants to add them to the FTB wiki for GregTech 5.

Since nobody provided justification for the GregTech details I expressed confusion about, I plan to tweak the configs and set up some Minetweaker scripts to address them, while still hopefully maintaining balance. See below for details.

0. I have already written a MineTweaker script to rename GT machines, so that A. There are "intermediate" machines instead of jumping straight from "basic" to "advanced", and B. where practical, the title shown for the NEI recipes that can be handled by the machine are also part of the machine name (the electric furnaces, ovens, and microwaves are exceptions, because the recipes are shown as "smelting"). I'm a little disappointed at not being able to change the names shown when accessing the GUIs of the machines, though.

1. I will set all the blast furnace requirements to false in MaterialProperties.cfg, but make most of the relevant dusts more challenging to initially obtain, e.g. only via mixer (for alloys that are normally craftable via shapeless crafting) or only via centrifuge and/or electrolyzer (for other metals). If the normal way to initially obtain the material is via the blast furnace (e.g. steel, nichrome, tungstensteel), that's already challenging enough. (Done)
2. I will remove the furnace recipes for smelting ore blocks, crushed ores, and mixed dusts (e.g. limonite, chalcopyrite) into ingots/nuggets, so that they have to be processed to dusts first (mostly restricted to plain dusts, but allowing a few impure dusts with lower output, so that it's still possible to make a cauldron). (Done) Maybe even remove things like "iron ore" and "copper ore" from the oregen, but leave the small ores of them.
3. I will adjust the machine component recipes to make all cable materials of a given tier viable options for the components of that tier (though not directly mix-and-match in a single recipe), except for ZPMV and UV (which have no matching cables), which would be handled with 4x LuV cables and 16x LuV wires respectively. (changed my mind after realizing how many machines this would affect)
4. I would like to make as many as possible of the materials that tools and/or cables can be made from be theoretically obtainable (without actually installing other mods, like Thaumcraft or Metallurgy, or using cheats/commands). However, for most of them, I have no idea what ore distributions and processing recipes would be good for them. I was thinking about using COG for this, but found that its default config file for GregTech is a lot more complicated than I anticipated, and for all I can tell, it might even partially address this already.
5. I would like to disable crafting of the following items/machines, and preferably even hide them from NEI: IC2 cables, the straight IC2 "generator" (IC2 machines that are normally crafted with the generator sometimes drop a generator instead depending on what they're hit with), and anything from IC2 that already has a GT analogue (e.g. the drill and chainsaw). I will probably need some help coming up with alternate recipes for the ones that don't have GT analogues but have crafting recipes that rely on some of the items I plan to disable. I'm also willing to consider new recipes for other items/machines (that don't rely on the to-be-disabled items).

Also, I plan to try to find a good seed this time, instead of letting the game choose the seed itself randomly. Is there anything I should try to have near spawn besides swampland (for putting a farm above, and a base below the farm so the machines can be in spawn chunks) and extreme hills (for a good chance of having stone high enough for a tetrahedrite vein to spawn in, and exposed stone for small ores)?

There are a few other confusing details I've noticed:
1. The GT chainsaw shears leaves (and I haven't found a way to turn that feature off), but it won't shear vines or sheep.
2. Each rotor usable for a pump has a second non-craftable version that is gt.metaitem.01 instead of gt.metaitem.02. Are these non-craftable versions available as chest loot or something?
3. The GT Portable Scanner doesn't show the growth stage of a crop.

Please let me know if you can help with any of the above, if you notice any problems with my ideas, or if you have any questions related to the above.

P.S. Since I haven't gotten any replies yet to GT5u storage organization tips?, I will probably go ahead and install AE2 again (and maybe ExtraCells), but disable its quartz worldgen in favor of GT ores (whether via GT's worldgen or COG's), and try to refrain from installing the other mods I did before.

Quote from Blood Asp

I added a config to disable and hide all IC2 cables. they get replaced by GT cables in all IC2 recipes. should there be other mods using IC2 cables, minetweaker is needed.

I checked my config, and I'd already set that option to true (in my "personalized" instance), but I hadn't noticed before that it also took care of replacing the cables in the recipes (and even wires, for the IC2 coil). Thanks for that.

Okay, I've come up with an initial plan for dealing with most of the tool head and cable materials that aren't available by default (and a few tool heads for which the material is already available, but the tool head recipes are missing by default):

I haven't decided yet on details like durations and voltages for the processing-recipe materials, and I could still use some help figuring out what distributions would be good for the added ores (I'm leaning toward using COG for this, but I'm not that familiar with it yet, and if someone provides reasons to stick with GT's ore generation instead, I'll re-evaluate).

Edit: I could also use some help with the materials that require fluids (HSLA steel from steel + oxygen in a blast furnace, and vinteum gem from vinteum dust + water in an autoclave), since I haven't found documentation to explain how to specify quantities for fluids in processing recipes.

Edit #2: I did some searching in COG's default config for GregTech, and discovered that it generates small copper ores, but not small iron ores or small tin ores, and also decided it's not worth my effort to edit it to make it usable with my other changes. If someone else is willing to provide a COG xml that goes well with my other changes, I'd be willing to consider it.

Quote from MauveCloud

2. I will remove the furnace recipes for smelting ore blocks, crushed ores, and mixed dusts (e.g. limonite, chalcopyrite) into ingots/nuggets, so that they have to be processed to dusts first (mostly restricted to plain dusts, but allowing a few impure dusts with lower output, so that it's still possible to make a cauldron).

I made a script for this, but even after commenting out the redundant lines for magnetite and vanadium magnetite (which would already only allow the plain dust in a furnace), I still get 14 warnings about removing furnace recipes for inputs that already lacked them, but since I was using a wildcard for the output, and it doesn't show the line numbers for the warnings, it's hard to tell which inputs are triggering them. I'd rather not have to check every item individually with the script deactivated, so os there a way to make Minetweaker show line numbers or something for these warnings? If not, could somebody please look at the attached script and tell me which items are redundant? Thanks.