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

I re-examined what I was doing, and I did get the Machine Controller cover to work on the Large Steel Boiler. I could have sworn I tried this before, but I think perhaps I'd only tried it on the input bus, not on the controller block. User error, basically.

I'm not thrilled with steam, largely because the piping expense of moving the steam to the turbines is getting high. Steam's energy density is very low compared to the liquid fuels, so it needs big pipes.

The main reason I'm focused on steam is that the trees are a continuing, renewable resource. I've been meaning to put together an Oilsand -> Nitro Diesel line for a while now, but that means periodic mining expeditions just for fuel. Probably a lot of energy per mining run, I'm still a little wary.

I've got a biomass -> ethanol setup, but it stalls because the source of biomass is fermented saplings from the tree multi-farm, and the output chest fills up with wood which halts sapling collection. I guess I could go wheat multifarm -> plantball -> biomass -> ethanol. Most foods don't return enough energy to break even, but plantballs give a decent surplus.

I've done some experimentation in the creative testbed world, and my impression is that methane isn't worth it. LPG is a decent gas turbine fuel, but I won't have any good sources for that until I start oil drilling and getting Natural Gas or Light Oil results. Right now Oilsand's my only petroleum source, and Oil -> Nitro Diesel produces 4x as much EU as Oil -> LPG.

I use pumpkins to IC2 biogas. High-stats IC2-crop pumpkins now, so a single field can produce almost 4 stacks per manual harvest. If you're willing to spend enough time breeding crops, oilberries might work as a renewable petroleum source for processing to diesel or nitro diesel.

I don't really know much about IC2 crops. I've dabbled, but I quit pretty early because I didn't know what I was doing and didn't have any goals. A crop-based source of oil would be good - but that seems like a longer-term solution, with an unknown time horizon. I'd like to stop the periodic upkeep on the HP boilers now.

I've yet to encounter any pumpkins in this game. I've got melons with a piston-based mass harvest setup, mainly for the seeds which I was using for seed oil for bee stuff before the bee stuff bored me.

So, maybe the automated Large Steel Boiler to keep my current setup running, then an oilsand -> nitro diesel line, and then all new MV machinery gets fueled by nitro diesel instead of steam, and look into oilberries for the long term. Maybe that wheat -> ethanol multifarm after the nitro diesel's set up, if oilsand harvesting starts to be a chore.

I've got a dual-power system for my primitive LV-based electric blast furnace, it can run off either steam or ethanol. The ethanol was my original plan, but when it became clear the ethanol supply was too erratic under my current setup, I put in the steam supply as an alternate source. When the ethanol isn't flowing (most of the time), I'll run the blast furnace until the steam reserves and batteries run out, and then hold off until everything's recharged before starting another run. Mostly the aluminum production has stayed ahead of my consumption.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

Is there a graceful way to split the empty cell output between these two machines?

Chest buffer, set to output by one item. Item pipe with two shutter modules (one for each receiver) and activity detector cover on both receiver. If machine "Has Work" - then close Shutter module near it. And another cell will go to other direction. Or Item Detector Covers and "Is Not Empty" condition.

del

So, I looked into Oil Berries, and I remembered why I bounced off IC2 crops the first time. Not enough information, and progress is slow and labor intensive.

While the basics of crop-breeding are there, there's nothing like a roadmap of how to get to a specific crop from vanilla crops. Unlike, say, the chart showing the bee tech tree. I have no idea how you'd get the keywords you need, since most are not present in vanilla crops. At best it looks like a long, long exercise in random breeding until the crops I want happened to show up.

Plus, there's a lot of vague stuff about opaque mechanics, like plants that require special conditions to grow, air condition, hydration, and fertilization. At least one "guide" (and I use the word "guide" extremely generously here) claims you should only try crop development in a Swamp biome at level 240+.

Then there's weeding. I have zero interest in having to check over my crops on a regular basis to do weeding. The Crop-Matron doesn't do weeding, it uses Weed-Ex, which I gather is bad.

I've made complete guide about crops breeding. But it's on Russian.
You still can watch it and/ore use some instruments for crop stats planning and "a roadmap of how to get to a specific crop from".
Part one, Part two and all tools.

Sorry, couldn't make heads or tails of what you were trying to tell me in that video. It sounded informative.

I got the Large Steel Boiler up, running, and automated. A RS latch shuts the boiler off when the steam tank is 90% full, and turns it back on again when it drops to 10%. Or, more precisely, 14/15ths and 2/15ths, since Comparators return contents on a 0-15 scale. I've got a long-ish item pipe from the tree multi-farm feeding it charcoal automatically.

It's day 1228, which is what, 400 hours? This is the first time that worrying about feeding the boilers, or conversely unloading them because my steam buffers are full, hasn't been a concern since I started making steam in the first place. It's also the first time that I've had a consistent steam surplus since I built the electric blast furnace.

It was expensive. Not complicated, not even the Advanced Circuits, since I already had a plastic processing line and a laser engraver / forming press / soldering station setup. But expensive, since the sheer volume of steel it required was very large. Both for the boiler and for the short lengths of Huge Steel Pipe moving the steam into the central tank for distribution. Fortunately I had huge iron reserves since I hit a Limonite vein a while back, and the steel cost was manageable because the basic Electric Blast Furnace produces it at a pretty good rate.

The boiler outputs 24,000 L/sec, and Huge Steel Pipes only handle 19,600, but fortunately it's possible to use mutiple output hatches and multiple pipes. It's worth noting that the boiler only uses one hatch at a time - until hatch #1 fills up with a backlog of steam, hatch #2 produces nothing.

It was definitely worth it. I've got enough surplus power generation now that I'm tempted to continue with steam for new machinery instead of building that nitro-diesel line. That's probably a trap, since steam distribution will continue to be a problem, and my power demands are going to skyrocket as I move further into Medium Voltage. By way of example, I had to upgrade my steam pipeline to the electric blast furnace from Large Steel to Huge, because the large pipe wasn't consistently supplying enough. It should, since power draw is normally at most 128 EU/t, which is about 7200 L/sec of steam, but Gregtech pipes can't provide consistent flow. You often have to build in a bit of overcapacity to ensure things work correctly.

Its much better, to store and distribute power in eU form, instead of Steam. 10 (or 15) LV Steam Tubines could be placed near Bronze (or Steel) boiler in same volume (3x3x5). 128V cables could be made from Copper or Annealed copper. Transformers LV <-> MV does not need aluminum, so they are very cheap.

The steam storage isn't so much for energy storage as a buffer for large swings in steam production, and as a distribution hub. Primary energy storage is in a network of (mostly LV) 4-cell battery buffers.

Prior to the Large Steam Boiler, the steam tank gave me time to unload the High Pressure Coal Boilers if they started to outpace demand - usually if a process finished and energy demand dropped. It also made steam generation more efficient, since the HP Boilers work best if they're run for long periods at maximum temperature.

The Large Steam Boiler also has a spin-up time, so running it for a long burst, storing the steam, and then shutting down until the storage is nearly empty is more efficient than cycling it rapidly or burning fuel when there's no demand.

The mechanics are a bit odd and opaque, they're not really visible unless you're using Nuclear Control to display the boiler stats. Rather than a boiler temperature like the HP boilers, it has an "efficiency" stat that ramps up to 100% in the first 20 seconds of production, and which rapidly declines when it's not running. In general it's a much faster cycle than the temperature stats on the single-block boilers, but it's still there.

You do have a point about power distribution, though. When I was slowly building out my LV network, I went through a variety of models, from basic production to distributed steam production to a central steam collection area and distribution point with local power generation and a network of battery buffers to allow nodes to share power with adjacent nodes (which is where it stands now). The steam distribution is fairly expensive to build, roughly 1 steel to distribute 26 EU/t 1 meter, or 1 bronze to distribute 13 EU/t 1 meter. Copper cables are 1 ingot to distribute 256 EU/t 1 meter.

The steam distribution has the advantage of having zero energy loss for distance. LV -> MV -> LV is a 9% loss for the transformation, plus about 1.5% loss per meter for copper cables or 0.8% for Annealed copper. That's an ongoing cost rather than an up-front cost like the steam pipes, and at a rough guess would cost me about 30% of my energy production total, based on current distances. Now that I'm overproducing wood from the multi-farm, that's not as big a deal as it would have been when I was hand-chopping everything.

Quote from Sapient

Chest buffer, set to output by one item. Item pipe with two shutter modules (one for each receiver) and activity detector cover on both receiver. If machine "Has Work" - then close Shutter module near it. And another cell will go to other direction. Or Item Detector Covers and "Is Not Empty" condition.

I'm in the process of setting up a Nitro Diesel processing line, and this has the same desulfuration issue. Sulfurated Light Fuel + Hydrogen Cell + Empty Cell -> Light Fuel + 2x Hydrogen Sulfide Cells.

The demand on the plastics line has been pretty light, so hand-walking the cells has been OK so far. The nitro-diesel line's supposed to be fully automated. So I'm revisiting this issue.

I'm pretty sure the solutions you offer won't work. I haven't gotten to the point of trying this out yet, but I can see that both are going to present simple cases that foil the detectors. For "Has Work," if the line ever goes idle, both shutters are open and the empty cells fill up the first machine in line. If "had item," the chem reactor "has an item" when it has a hydrogen cell but still needs an empty cell.

I suspect the solution is still a minimum of 65 empty cells circulating between the 3 machines, so there's always 1 surplus once the first machine fills up. 130 tin's pretty expensive, since in truth the line really only needs at most 4 cells. I have the tin, but it's not something I want to do too often.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

I'm pretty sure the solutions you offer won't work.

Than you can add toggle latch (from Project Red) and switch output of item pipe between two receivers.

I got blocked on another missing ore - silver, in this case - and decided it was time to try out the vertical shaft prospecting I've seen mentioned here and there. Or rather, in my case, spiral stair prospecting, since an actual vertical shaft is problematic for a variety of reasons if you don't have a jetpack.

I had much better results than my earlier prospecting attempts. Not perfect, since I still had some shafts turn up nothing. It's not clear to me if "centered on a 3x3 chunk" means an offset of (+24,+24), or some random offset, and it's not clear when a failure means there's just nothing in that 3x3 chunk, or if it means I got the offset wrong and the ore vein for that chunk is somewhat small.

Most of what I've read about prospecting for Gregtech veins has centered on fact it's generated per 3x3 chunk, but I belatedly realized that's not the real issue. The real reason vertical prospecting works so much better than conventional branch mining is that Gregtech veins are more-or-less flat discs, 5-8 levels deep but often 50+ blocks in diameter. It's easy to miss something like that mining horizontally, and almost impossible to miss mining vertically unless it's a particularly small diameter vein.

It took a while, but I eventually found a galena / silver vein. Once I had that, I decided to do something about my long-standing Quartzite need. Looking at the ore table I realized it would probably only generate in Extreme Hills, and sure enough, on my 3rd exploration shaft I found Quartzite. I bet there's a lot of tetrahedrite that I missed earlier because it wasn't exposed and I didn't understand the importance of vertical exploration.

Near as I can tell, Quartzite's only really used for Low Voltage emitters and sensors. Which in turn is important primarily for the seismic prospector (which I haven't reached yet) and for Nuclear Control Gregtech sensor kits. For other applications, there are Medium Voltage variants that use Nether Quartz, which shows up often enough in small ores in the Nether to meet my needs.

In another mining-related note, I'm struggling a bit with mining techniques for Gregtech ore. My original, branch mining approach that worked fine with small vanilla veins creates a maze I find very difficult to navigate if applied to large Gregtech veins. I'm currently essentially strip mining, carving out the limits of the ore at the top level, and removing all blocks, both ore and stone, level by level until I've exhausted the vein.

This works, and it's very clear exactly where the limits of the vein are, and the results is large cavern where it's always clear what's left to mine. The problem is it's slow and tedious, and involves removing a lot of plain stone and dirt. I need to find a method that involves less unneeded mining but where I don't get lost and confused when returning to a paritally-mined site.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

I got blocked on another missing ore - silver, in this case - and decided it was time to try out the vertical shaft prospecting I've seen mentioned here and there. Or rather, in my case, spiral stair prospecting, since an actual vertical shaft is problematic for a variety of reasons if you don't have a jetpack.

I find a 1x2 (north-south) shaft works for me, and I bring sand to help in case I find a ravine. Spiral stair probably isn't that much less efficient.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

I had much better results than my earlier prospecting attempts. Not perfect, since I still had some shafts turn up nothing. It's not clear to me if "centered on a 3x3 chunk" means an offset of (+24,+24), or some random offset, and it's not clear when a failure means there's just nothing in that 3x3 chunk, or if it means I got the offset wrong and the ore vein for that chunk is somewhat small.

I've found that the centers tend to be pretty close to x and z of 24, 72, 120, ... so if you dig down at those coordinates, you're unlikely to miss a vein if it's there. Negative coordinates have been a bit weird due to https://github.com/Blood-Asp/GT5-Unofficial/issues/718, but even the smallest veins in the default config are large enough to still have a decent chance of finding them if you're off by one chunk in the x and z coordinates.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

In another mining-related note, I'm struggling a bit with mining techniques for Gregtech ore. My original, branch mining approach that worked fine with small vanilla veins creates a maze I find very difficult to navigate if applied to large Gregtech veins. I'm currently essentially strip mining, carving out the limits of the ore at the top level, and removing all blocks, both ore and stone, level by level until I've exhausted the vein.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

This works, and it's very clear exactly where the limits of the vein are, and the results is large cavern where it's always clear what's left to mine. The problem is it's slow and tedious, and involves removing a lot of plain stone and dirt. I need to find a method that involves less unneeded mining but where I don't get lost and confused when returning to a paritally-mined site.

Based on http://minecraft.gamepedia.com…ining#Simple_Strip_Mining I'm not sure "strip mining" is the correct term for what you describe. Lately, I've been branch mining, but with a central 3-wide hallway north-south for easier navigation, and I check coordinates (using the Batty's Coordinates Plus mod for forge) to 1. help keep from getting lost, and 2. have a pattern for torch placement - in the central hallway, I put them in ceiling alcoves at z coordinates that are multiples of 5, and in the branch tunnels, I put them on non-ore walls at x coordinates that are multiples of 10 (if necessary, I place cobblestone to put the torch on), though offset by 5 once I get to lower layers of the mine. I dig the first east-west tunnels near the predicted center of the mine to figure out the limits of the mine. Also, I often place chests in the mine for storing excess dirt/stone.

That page doesn't list any technique that precisely matches what I'm doing. It's complete removal of all materials in the target area, but there's no intent for the mine to extend to the surface, as they define "strip" and "quarry" mining.

Having a central, large corridor that's obviously different from the rest might help with disorientation. I don't know that precisely measured markers 5 or 10 squares apart will make any difference. I've done the 5/10 marker thing with Terraria, but only in cases where I wanted to know precisely how long a tunnel was, because I needed to bring back X items to line it or I was building a fluid storage tank.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

I need to find a method that involves less unneeded mining

This can help you: https://youtu.be/rqbpUke_kng?t=251

I think Greg is missing the final boss . For example the materials of the top get Greg matter , push in Fusion Reactor Mk3 . Serve energiyu and get the portal . Go to the very Ultimate Battery (this is the pass ). There boss Gregorius . After killing the boss get completely full Ultimate Battery . And cheers, Greg passed completely . That's such nonsense, I guess .

Quote from Sapient

This can help you: https://youtu.be/rqbpUke_kng?t=251

Since I don't speak Russian, I didn't understand most of that. I did get that there were some diagrams of mining patterns, but it looked like they were less efficient, in terms of work required to uncover ore, than simple branch mining.

I'm not sure what the vertical stuff was about - maybe an attempt to avoid creating deep trenches when you're done mining?

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

some diagrams of mining patterns, but it looked like they were less efficient

It's most efficient i ever seen. You need to mine only 32% or vein volume to see every single block of ore.

Hello, I'm getting a crash when using the latest version:

http://pastebin.com/turAEXKn