[GregTech-5][1.7.10-FORGE-1355+][Unofficial but approved Port][Stable] Even GT5 Experimental is slowly getting stable.

  • I do use a lot of of sodium, but mostly for ore-washing and large batteries. Yeah, lithium's a lot better, but 512 volt batteries require so much material (32 each!) that I can't really afford anything but sodium. I'm not really making the large batteries for raw energy storage anyway, I'm usually doing it to put a clamp on how much current a given power line can supply. I can be sure that a 4-battery buffer is never going to supply more than 4 amps, so I can safely use 4 amp cable downstream of the buffer.


    FWIW, lithium batteries are not the highest capacity batteries you can make at MV and HV: an advanced batpack (from IC2) stores 600k EU (compared to 400k for a medium lithium battery), an energypack stores 2M EU (compared to 1.6M for a large lithium battery), and a charging energy crystal stores 4M EU. I don't remember if I've tried putting a charging energy crystal in a battery buffer, but I have used energypacks that way.


    For a 4 amp cable at HV or lower, you've also got the option of using the next-higher tier IC2 energy storage block with a GT transformer to step it down.


  • FWIW, lithium batteries are not the highest capacity batteries you can make at MV and HV: an advanced batpack (from IC2) stores 600k EU (compared to 400k for a medium lithium battery), an energypack stores 2M EU (compared to 1.6M for a large lithium battery), and a charging energy crystal stores 4M EU.


    I was using the Feed the Beast page on the Battery Buffer as a reference, which is why I thought lithium was the highest-storage option available for HV and below.


    The advanced batpack isn't supposed to be a battery. Using it that way feels like cheating. The material costs are considerable, I guess, at 18 bronze, 6 x sulfur, 6 x lead, 6.5 x copper, and a basic electronic circuit, versus 4 x battery alloy, 1 x copper, 8 x lithium, and some plastic. Though it's easier to come by 18 bronze than 8 lithium, and sulfur's so plentiful I'd be grateful for a real use for it.


    I wasn't aware of the IC2 "charging" items at all. If they work with Gregtech power tools, that could be pretty handy. I've graduated to a MV drill now that I'm making Titanium, but it would be nice to have extra power along instead of lugging around a set of pickaxe heads.


    While I'm never sure how much IC2 stuff it supposed to be there in Gregtech, the Energy Crystal is clearly part of mainstream Gregtech 5U, since it's part of the construction path for the Distillation Tower.

  • Charging batteries were added in IC2 build 680 (2015 Feb 19), originally from a separate addon, more recent than the creation of the Battery Buffer wiki page (2014 Sep 17), so it's not too surprising those didn't get included. I'm a little surprised the batpacks didn't get covered by that page, though.

  • I don't remember having problem with lithium once I reach MV.
    But usually I have a Mesa biome near, lots of hardened clay to macerate and electrolyze.

  • Hardened clay is kinda soft, you get a few stacks very quick.
    I think I even used mortars to make dust, because I didn't wanted to wait the macerator. I did a LOT of batteries...

  • hello,
    very sorry if this post is inapropriate or so, but could someone please tell me in which state is this port to mc 1.10.2? Is it worth it to switch server version from 1.7.10 or is there some reason to prefer the stable version? And I guess this port doesn't exist for the mc 1.8.9? Thanks for answers in advance and again, sorry for the newfagism (it just took me really long time to find this thread and I can't read through all the pages until this one)

  • hello,
    very sorry if this post is inapropriate or so, but could someone please tell me in which state is this port to mc 1.10.2? Is it worth it to switch server version from 1.7.10 or is there some reason to prefer the stable version? And I guess this port doesn't exist for the mc 1.8.9? Thanks for answers in advance and again, sorry for the newfagism (it just took me really long time to find this thread and I can't read through all the pages until this one)


    The 1.10.2 hasn't come up much in this thread recently, and I haven't tried it in a while, but I've been following on GitHub, and I have my doubts about it really being ready to play (as opposed to just testing it). Also, the planned config option to make things more like 5.08 hasn't been implemented in 5.09 yet, let alone 5.10, and GTTweaker hasn't released a build to work with 5.10.


    Also, you are correct that GT5 hasn't been ported to 1.8.9. TechReborn (based on older versions of GregTech) exists for 1.8.9, but only a beta version before the devs moved on to 1.9, and now they seem to be focusing on 1.11.2.

  • The 1.10.2 version definitely wasn't ready for prime time when I tried it, but that was 3-4 months ago. I haven't been watching the discussion on Github.


    ---


    Going back to the subject of power supplies that Drawfox brought up, I tend to fiddle with mine even when I don't have a real need. I added an underground peat farm today.


    This is more Forestry than Gregtech, but it turns out peat farms suck. The Large Boilers (steel in my case) can burn peat, which is good, but the difference in fuel output between the tree farm and the peat farm is dramatic. My Very Large (27 x 27 diamond) tree farm produces far more than a single Large Steel Boiler can burn, and the Very Large peat farm doesn't produce enough to keep one running. If both are fully supplied, I think it's like a 3:1 difference in fuel output between the two, if I include the ethanol output as well as the wood.


    It has a benefit though - the tree farm turns dirt into sand in a 1:1 ratio as it exhausts the soil, and the peat farm turns sand into dirt in a 1:1 ratio when it harvests peat (which isn't how peat works if you do it by hand). So a pair is a closed loop, no need to clean out sand or add dirt. I now see the peat as a valuable side effect rather than the primary benefit of the peat farm.


    I'd read here and there that you needed several peat farms to service one tree farm. That's not what I'm seeing. My impression is it's more 1:4, one peat farm can service a tree farm 4x as large, because the tree farm doesn't burn out soil that quickly. I need more time with the setup to see how it works under heavy load.


    If it does stay the way I'm seeing, I need to figure out what to do with the rest of the peat farm. If it's worth the hassle of trying to run a mixed farm, I've had poor results in the past because if one function hits a storage limit, it halts the other one as well. I.e. a mixed carrot / tree farm stops if it's not using up all the carrots.


    My future plans for headache-inducing power plant revisions include distillation towers for heavy oil, cracked heavy fuel, and cracked light fuel (I've got the oil cracking operating already). "Headache inducing" because of the product-balancing problem, since the distillation tower produces everything at once, and because it's large and I'm not sure I left enough space.

  • Heh, Very nice, thanks for the info Gus!
    I'm still messing with my machines, my goal for now, Is to stabilize my aluminium production.
    I just need a fluid canning and the diesel generator to start using nitro diesel.
    After that, I'll upgrade the blast furnace and Diesel Generator to MV, and build a scanner to start messing with crops.

  • 36 sites prospected in the Nether with the Seismic Prospector. Not one Nether Quartz. Or any other Nether-specific vein, it's all stuff like tetrahedrite and nickel. Man, I hate searching for ore in Gregtech, even though I appreciate the way it forces me to venture far afield compared to conventional ore generation.


    I found several high (500+ L/cycle) petroleum sources, but don't really know how I'd automated getting it through a Nether Gate. From what I understand, Nether Gates are not train-friendly, but they'll take one cart at a time - provided it's been recently placed by a mine cart dispenser. It would have to be some sort of Rube Goldberg setup where trains load oil on to singleton carts which travel through the gate and then immediate unload, where the oil can be transferred to a regular train.


    Not that I need more oil right now.


    At least prospecting the Nether by tunneling around at level 120 has been safe. No open spaces, and trenches are protection against the occasional lava pocket.

  • Do you really need so much Nether Quartz? Why?


    Also, I was testing so things, and early steam power with lava boiler are waaaay better than coal. I traded my coal boilers for 3 lava boilers. I use a single ULV output hatch as a tank, full with lava cells, and they automatically feed the boilers through Pipes.
    Of course, I used a stack of Tin to make cells, but I find way less boring go to the Nether fill them with lava, than plant tree -> cut -> charcoal pit -> harvest charcoal. I don't need to spend more material on axes.

  • Mainly I need the Nether Quartz for routing switches. Those things are 32 Nether Quartz each. Putting together one automated railroad to haul nitro diesel to the oil rig and oil back took all the Nether Quartz I had on hand.


    Going anywhere through the Nether of course I find Small Ore deposits, but a single proper Nether Quartz vein should supply 100x what I've found from small ores.


    I wasn't expecting finding one to be so hard. They have a weight of 80, which is the same as Coal in the Overworld, and I've found plenty of that. If anything, the odds should be better, because the table says there are only 8 ores in the Nether - Magnetite, Limonite, Tetrahedrite, Nether Quartz, Sulfur, Chalcopyrite, Redstone, and Nickel. 10% of the 3x3 chunks should be Nether Quartz, and I've covered about 180 so far (I'm hitting 4 chunk centers with each test), so I should have seen 18 of them by now.


    I've found all the other ores. I'm wondering if Nether Quartz is not generating or not being detected by the Seismic Prospector.

  • Looking at the code for the Seismic Prospector, I see no reason for Nether Quartz not to be detected (unless the prospector was below the ore vein, but you've detected Tetrahedrite veins with it, which means you're placing it plenty high to detect Nether Quartz veins).


    Looking at your WorldGeneration.cfg (especially the "dimensions" section) might answer whether it's actually being generated.

  • The Dimensions section says "Nether_true=true" for Nether Quartz mixed veins, as does the mix {} section.


    The way variables get declared in the config is weird. Why would you include the value of a variable in the name? The Nether Mix section declares "OrePrimaryLayer_522" to be 522, rather than what I'd expect, which would be declaring "OrePrimaryLayer" and the value is the ore ID. I get the impression the code is only looking for the presences of certain variables and the value is immaterial. But then, I've never done any Minecraft mod coding - my experience is all with C++ and similar languages.

  • The variable name includes the default value. If you change both, the entry will be ignored, and a new entry will be added with the default. If you change the value on the right side of the equal sign, it will override the default with the new value.

  • It still seems odd to me, since it implies the code is checking for dozens of different variables names for PrimaryOre values instead of one.


    Anyway, I digress. I'm still running the default worldgen config, which means I should expect nether quartz veins to generate. So far I've seen no evidence that they do. Up until the point I started using the seismic prospector, I assumed it was just because I was having trouble sinking exploratory shafts in the Nether.


    Does it matter what you use to activate the Prospector? I've been using 8x stick of dynamite, since that was the easiest to make. My understanding is that the search box is 5x5 chunks no matter how you activate it, that the only difference between dynamite, TNT, industrial TNT, and nitro glycerol cells was the cost. I've taken to activating at (+48, +48 ) relative to the 96x multiple, on the theory I'm hitting 4 vein chunk centers from there. My grid is in multiples of 96, since the vein grid is 3 chunks apart and the oil grid is 6 chunks apart. That means I've got a 1 chunk gap between search areas, but that shouldn't matter.

  • It still seems odd to me, since it implies the code is checking for dozens of different variables names for PrimaryOre values instead of one.


    It's not checking multiple variable names in the config (for a given PrimaryOre in a given mix). It's constructing the variable name to check in the config based on the hard-coded default material for that mix.


    Anyway, I digress. I'm still running the default worldgen config, which means I should expect nether quartz veins to generate. So far I've seen no evidence that they do. Up until the point I started using the seismic prospector, I assumed it was just because I was having trouble sinking exploratory shafts in the Nether.


    I think the dimensions section you found is evidence that it at least tried to generate a nether quartz vein somewhere in the Nether, though possibly in an area where there was no substrate for it to actually generate in.


    Does it matter what you use to activate the Prospector? I've been using 8x stick of dynamite, since that was the easiest to make. My understanding is that the search box is 5x5 chunks no matter how you activate it, that the only difference between dynamite, TNT, industrial TNT, and nitro glycerol cells was the cost. I've taken to activating at (+48, +48 ) relative to the 96x multiple, on the theory I'm hitting 4 vein chunk centers from there. My grid is in multiples of 96, since the vein grid is 3 chunks apart and the oil grid is 6 chunks apart. That means I've got a 1 chunk gap between search areas, but that shouldn't matter.


    As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter what explosive type you use. However, the search box is 5x5 blocks, not 5x5 chunks. At least with the regular seismic prospector. There's an advanced seismic prospector on GItHub (not in .28pre, possibly in one of the newer preview builds, though) with a radius specified in the constructor, but GitHub search won't show me where that's called, so I don't know what value(s) that gets.

  • Well, shoot. I thought the Wiki said 5x5 chunks, but when I double-checked, you're right, it's 5x5 blocks. It seems likely that because I was deliberately choosing spots midway between veins, I'm missing most of the veins.


    5x5 blocks is very small, but my usual spiral 3x3 spiral staircase for manual exploration exposes about that many blocks, and I've had good results with that. I need to re-do my search with (+24, +24 ) offsets searching 3 chunks apart, like my original, manual search for ore.