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

    Well looks like my lead wrench was a waste. Found the lead in a village anyway so not a huge loss. Also, finally found a tin vein. I dug at least 50 holes down to bedrock, not finding any, then walked into the next biome and there was the tin just sitting out in the open.

    I have a setup for processing ores with a steam macerator and steam furnace, but I couldn't get the gregtech pipes to put fluid into the boilers. I switched them out for buildcraft pipes and they worked fine. With the gt pipes, the water only went into the closest boiler. How do i get the pipes to evenly distribute water?

    Quote from tebruuls

    I have a setup for processing ores with a steam macerator and steam furnace, but I couldn't get the gregtech pipes to put fluid into the boilers. I switched them out for buildcraft pipes and they worked fine. With the gt pipes, the water only went into the closest boiler. How do i get the pipes to evenly distribute water?

    Why do you need them to evenly distribute the water? Once the closest boiler is full of water, others should start filling. Just keep in mind that it's safest to connect the water pipes at the bottom (whether they're GT pipes, buildcraft pipes, or any other pipes), since that's the only direction boilers won't output steam to.

    Which pipes you used?
    I am using Large Wooden Fluid Pipes, and they keep 2 High pressure coal Boilers and one Small bronze boiler full, never had a problem.

    On another topic, I was looking for feathers to craft arrows today, and just found myself thinking: I have a factory full with lots of machines and technology, why can't fabricate an artificial substitute to feathers?
    Could we have something like a plastic substitute to feathers, please?

    Quote from Gus_Smedstad

    Oh, heck, as long as we're talking arrows, why is it that glass and flint are the only options for arrowheads? We started using steel for arrowheads long before plastic fletching.


    In 5.08, it is possible to make arrow heads out of various materials, including steel. In 5.09.28pre, damascus steel and sterling silver arrows are shown in NEI (at least with "show_all_metaitems_in_creative_and_NEI" true and "HideUnusedOres" false), but no corresponding arrowheads. However, once I set "EnableAllComponents" and "EnableAllMaterials" to true, the arrowheads and arrows of other materials show up. I see the "MaterialComponents.cfg" file has an "enablePerItemSettings" option if you only want a few extra types of arrowheads.

    However, with all this technology, why stop at bows and arrows for weapons? GT already has "rounds" that could be used as ammunition for guns powered by compressed air, nitrogen, gunpowder, or even electromagnetism (at least for ferrous metals). Maybe content packs for Flan's Mod already cover that, though.

    It does seem odd that we're potentially running around in powered armor wielding a sword and a bow and arrow.

    Personally, my plans include a mining laser set to "long range" mode. I'm not fond of it as a mining tool, but as a flat-trajectory, fast-reloading, reasonable-damage weapon, it looks like it will be worthwhile.

    Well, I like bows and arrows;
    I would prefer some tech bows, like a composite, and one that shoots energy arrows.

    But I'm already asking too much, just want really, to be able to use my bow without going in a chicken killing spree.
    (I have no lucky with infinity...)

    Yeah, an extractor's fairly important, and a steam autohammer means you're not replacing hammers all the time. I think those were all the steam machines I ever built before moving on to electricity.

    Once you've got a steam turbine for a power source, you'll want to concentrate on the machines which cut your current material costs in half. Metal Bender reduces the cost of plates from 2 ingots to 1, wire mill reduces the cost of wire from 1 plate to 0.5 ingot, lathe cuts the costs of rods from 1 ingot to 0.5 (or rather, 1 ingot -> 1 rod + 1/2 dust), polarizer magnetizes things for free instead of several redstone dusts, etc.

    Anyone know if worths producing nitro diesel to burn into a diesel generator using only oil sand and lv machines?
    I'm going to MV age, but I'm tired of charcoal and steam, anyone knows a good, renovable source of energy?
    I'm thinking about making an oil berry farm, any thoughts?

    Quote from Drawfox

    Anyone know if worths producing nitro diesel to burn into a diesel generator using only oil sand and lv machines?
    I'm going to MV age, but I'm tired of charcoal and steam, anyone knows a good, renovable source of energy?
    I'm thinking about making an oil berry farm, any thoughts?


    I think several pages back, somebody determined that oilsands ore isn't plentiful enough for a nitro diesel power system. It takes a while to breed oil berries, and you'll need several full fields of them to make a decent supply of (nitro) diesel. Also, you might need some other crops to cover the "nitro" part of nitro diesel. Personally, I like using pumpkins to make biogas.

    It absolutely is worth making nitro diesel if your only oil source is oil sand. Nitro diesel is about 500 EU/L after deducting processing costs, one oilsand block centrifuges to 500 L, so one oilsand = 250,000 EU. That's about 10x the energy density of wood converted to charcoal via the charcoal pile (1 wood = 1.5 charcoal = 24,000 EU). Much less work, and you don't have to deal with the error-prone process of setting up the charcoal pile every 10 minutes.

    Oilsand to Nitro Diesel still requires lots of mining. Personally, I prefer my power production to be completely automatic. My personal progression went like this:

    Central steam plant fired by high-pressure coal furnaces. This required wood chopping, hand charcoal production, and hand loading of the furnaces, since they can't be automated.

    Forestry tree farm. Apple Oaks at first. This got rid of the tree-chopping stage, and gave me a steady supply of wood.

    Electric blast furnace. This gave me much better access to steel, which was important for the next stage.

    Large Steel Steam Boiler, fed by the Forestry tree farm. This can be completely automated. You can feed fuel in by item pipe, and redstone logic can turn it on and off if you attach a Machine Control Cover to the bottom of the control block. Mine is set up with sensors on the main Railcraft steam holding tank, so it shuts off when the tank is full, and doesn't turn back on until it's empty. This is important because the boiler has a spin-up time during which it's inefficient, so longer runs are better.

    Note that you can't automate wood -> charcoal production at this stage unless you re-enable the stone furnace charcoal recipe in the config (which I did). The pyrolyse oven is relatively high tech, and the Railcraft coke oven is very slow, you need a prohibitive number to feed even one large boiler.

    Ethanol production from the Tree Farm using saplings and squeezed apples for mulch. 1/4 of the farm was devoted to carrots in case apples weren't enough. This proved to be very low output, and not worthwhile until later.

    Nitro diesel refinery fueled by centrifuged oilsand. I got rid of the sulfuric acid this produces in an automated acid-battery setup, but power production was minimal. It was still required because otherwise sulfuric acid storage was a problem.

    Moved the carrots into a separate farm, because the output of the combined farm tended to jam with either all wood or all carrots.

    I bred trees with Forestry until I got something with a decent sapling drop rate, low sappiness (apple oaks are much worse than "low"), and decent maturity time. A mutated Hill Cherry, to be specific. The base Hill Cherry didn't work because the sapling drop rate was too low. This boosted ethanol production to something respectable.

    A central power plant with priority-based power production - ethanol and sulfuric acid first, then steam, then nitro diesel. This cut down on my oil consumption significantly, because I wasn't always using enough power that I needed oil.

    Seismic prospector and data sticks. Note that high-voltage technology for the data sticks is available as soon as you have an electric blast furnace.

    Prospected and found a good-sized heavy oil source.

    Oil rig on oil source.

    Electric train automatically bringing heavy oil back to base. This is the main issue with oil rigs - the source is likely to be distant, and you need a way of getting the oil back to base. Your choices are hand-carrying lots of filled cells, pipes if it's not too distant, or rail. Hand-carrying enough fuel to make it worthwhile is a problem because of the cell cost - 128 tin per stack, and a stack of oil cells is only twice as energy-dense as a stack of oilsand.

    Quote from MauveCloud

    I think several pages back, somebody determined that oilsands ore isn't plentiful enough for a nitro diesel power system. It takes a while to breed oil berries, and you'll need several full fields of them to make a decent supply of (nitro) diesel. Also, you might need some other crops to cover the "nitro" part of nitro diesel.


    Oilsand is in fact quite plentiful, and the veins are dense. It's not renewable, and it requires mining, but it's much less work than chopping wood.

    You don't need anything other than oil, salt, charcoal, and enough machinery to make nitro diesel. You get nitrogen by compressing air and then centrifuging it, sodium by electrolyzing salt, and carbon by electrolyzing charcoal dust. Nitrogen, sodium, and carbon gives you tri-nitro glycerol, and tri-nitro glycerol and light fuel gives you nitro diesel. The demand for salt and charcoal is very low - it's mostly the oil for light fuel you need.

    Because of my setup, I have large supply of effort-free charcoal. Salt's a problem mainly because it produces chlorine, and nothing seems to consume that in mass quantities. Rutile dust + Magnesium + Chlorine -> Titanium does some, but then recovering the magnesium requires more sodium and produces almost as much chlorine as the titanium smelting consumed.

    I'm thinking about going to a process that produces sodium while producing different byproducts, like electrolyzing clay dust or lapsis dust. I haven't actually done that yet, so I don't have practical experience with it yet.

    Alternately, I need to find a way to destroy liquids to get rid of the excess chlorine. I'm using Void Chests to destroy excess stone dust and cobblestone, but that doesn't work for liquids. I'd have to can them first, and losing the tin for the cells would be prohibitively expensive.

    Quote from Gus_Smedstad

    Alternately, I need to find a way to destroy liquids to get rid of the excess chlorine. I'm using Void Chests to destroy excess stone dust and cobblestone, but that doesn't work for liquids. I'd have to can them first, and losing the tin for the cells would be prohibitively expensive.


    The only pure-GT way I know of to completely get rid of excess gases (won't work for liquids) is to output it into a series of wooden pipes and let the gases vent out. IDK what that will do to pollution levels in the latest builds, though. Buildcraft has a void fluid pipe, and AE2's Matter Condenser can accept liquids. Also, Extra Utilities has a trash can for liquids (which presumably returns the container, or you can pipe the fluid to it).

    Wow, thanks, lots of useful information here.
    I'm away from my PC right now, is it possible to make ethanol using GT machines?

    Last time I played, I had a tree farm using thaumcraft golems and an infernal furnace to make charcoal. It was fun, but I want to make something different now (and I am in no mood to advance in thaumcraft again).

    I want to mostly use oil sand until I find a renovable source of energy.

    About the empting cells, the extractor used to make rubber does not do that?

    Quote from MauveCloud

    Buildcraft has a void fluid pipe, and AE2's Matter Condenser can accept liquids. Also, Extra Utilities has a trash can for liquids (which presumably returns the container, or you can pipe the fluid to it).


    I have various reasons for not wanting to install those, mainly the large number of things they'd add that I don't feel right using for one reason or another. Pretty much everything in those mods but the trash disposal items.

    If I'm going to bite the bullet and add a mod that I mostly don't intend to use, I think maybe I'll get the rest of Thermal Expansion for the Nullifier, which can destroy liquids. I've got Thermal Foundation right now for pipes that handle things Gregtech pipes won't. I try and avoid using them, but they handle things like my treefarm mixed-output which isn't possible with Gregtech.