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

    Ah, understood.
    Well, I'm using default ore gen too, and found two veins of quartz until now.
    But I spent a lot of time exploring there, looking for Nickel.
    I think, at least on nether, you will find it fasters just running, instead prospecting. Just be careful to not get lost :D

    "Careful not to get killed" is the bigger issue. My experience with running around in the large open spaces in the Nether is that ghasts are everywhere.


    Getting lost is a problem too, even with a map mod installed. The map mod works well with the Overworld, but in the Nether what it shows rarely resembles the maze-like actual spaces. It's been a been help in keeping track of where I've tunneled and prospected, but not so great if I just explore the existing spaces.

    I spent some time today in Creative mode, learning some things about IC2 crops (and by extension, Gregtech crops).


    My motivation is a bit convoluted. I like the Project Red lighting options, particularly now that I have a very large supply of glowstone from redstone processing. It requires dye, however, and for the most part I want white or at most light gray dye for my lights. Currently I'm primarily limited by dye for replacing all my torches with overhead light fixtures on those big block lamps.


    There aren't a lot of good options for getting dye, particularly white dye, in industrial quantities. I mean 10+ stack quantities, not 20-30 bonemeal. I have not found a Skeleton Spawner, for example, and waiting for skeletons to spawn in a darkened mob-grinder seems kind of slow, and also potentially annoying - zombie gargling irritates me.


    Besides, I'm aware that there are some interesting plants available, and I didn't really understand the system.


    Anyway, some online research and testing revealed a few things I didn't know. Namely, that a Forestry multifarm in Manual Orchard mode is actually pretty good at growing Gregtech crops. It keeps the Fertilizer and Hydration levels high, and it non-destructively harvests crops when they mature. While the material cost is somewhat high, it's not nearly as difficult to make a multifarm as it is to make an IC2 Crop Harvester under Gregtech rules. It services a much larger area than the IC2 Cropmatron or Harvester. You can even build the ideal 4-deep stack of dirt under your crops, because the vertical reach of the Multifarm above the farmland brick layer is considerable.


    The tricorder can work as a limited version of the Cropnalyzer. It doesn't give growth stages like the Cropnalyzer does, but it does show you the hidden stats like nutrition and air quality.


    The precise effect of air quality is still obscure. Height's very important - a ground level farm has very poor air quality compared to one at level 80 or 100. Several pages have mentioned that "flowers require high air quality," but no there are no numbers giving minimum air quality, as there is with light levels. The Cropnalyzer doesn't tell you that either when you look at a plant or a seed bag.


    Anyway, on my "to do eventually" list is now to breed Gregtech crops like the Corpseplant and Corium. Oilberries not so much, since I've got a very steady supply of oil from drilling now.

    Well, I'm learning about crops myself, this may help: https://forum.feed-the-beast.c…guide-very-indepth.14316/
    Read the commentaries too, they correct somethings there. I believe +124 is enough for air quality, clear skies, and no block around the plants.


    I just can't make myself to like forestry machines, so I will try using the IC² harvester. I used before, and liked, may need to spam a few, but they cover a 9x9 area, I don't think I will use a lot.


    For maps, I use Rei minimap, as I can set a waypoint, which emit a beacon of light, so is very easy to use. it sets a point too, that you can see even trough walls.


    Gregtech does have White Dyes, but seems that there's not recipe for them: http://ftb.gamepedia.com/Dye_(GregTech_5)
    Another source are tulips, but I don't know if you can farm them.

    I'm not fond of most of the Forestry machines either, but I like the Multifarm well enough. I try and use Gregtech substitutes when I can.


    I did have to use Forestry's Carpenter to make Bog Earth for the Peat Farm. It turns out that the Regulator can put things into specific slots in the Carpenter, so it's guaranteed not to jam when using multiple ingredients. The slot #''s for the input spaces start at 13.


    Xaero's Minimap has waypoints, and you can see them an infinite distance away, including through walls. That's helpful, but I still find that the Nether's twisting passages of mazes all alike can confuse me.


    I knew about Gregtech's white dye. I'm a little tempted to use Minetweaker to make a reasonable White Dye recipe. I.e. Calcium -> White Dye through the Chem Reactor or something. Given that Bonemeal is considered "white dye," calcium doesn't seem inconsistent. I've got a large supply of Calcium from ore.


    White Tulips produce gray dye, not white. They're sort-of farmable. I've seen some videos for generic flower farming in vanilla Minecraft, doing things like using pistons to push the ground back and forth to break the flowers, and a hopper minecart running continuously to collect the drops.

    Well, you are way more informed than me, seems that I can't help =).
    I just started to do crop cross breeding, hope it goes well...

    I really hadn't intended to shut you down.


    As for being better informed, I learned about white tulips being light gray and flower-farming yesterday morning, when I started griping to myself about sources of white dye.


    Last night I looked up "calcium white dye" and discovered that calcium compounds were only used as inert stabilizers in organic dyes, not as dyes themselves. Unless you count whitewash, which is not really a pigment and impermanent when used as a paint. Zinc oxide (ZnO) is a commonly used white pigment today, and something it would be entirely reasonable to make in a chemical reactor.


    Historically there's white lead (2PbCO3·Pb(OH)2), which no one uses anymore because of lead poisoning. There's also titanium white (TiO2), but there's no way I or anyone else would want to sacrifice titanium for white dye.


    My minetweaker-fu is still weak. I don't know how to discover object / resource names on my own, so I have to search other people's scripts for the proper syntax.


    EDIT: Here's the Minetweaker script I created for white dye:

    No problem, just stating a fact.
    You had gone in a long way to get white dye, I would just chosen another color :D

    It doesn't really matter what color I chose. Yeah, sure, I didn't want to put up purple overhead lights everywhere, but I really didn't have enough dye of any color to put up a significant number of lights. Heck, white used to be the color I had in large quantities, because I'd picked up a fair amount of bonemeal from skeletons during regular play.


    The only easily renewable colors are green, brown, and red. You can farm those - brown from cocoa pods, green from cactus, and red from "roses." Put any flower into an IC2 crop stick, no matter what the color, and it turns into a "rose" which can then be farmed like any other crop.


    There are the flowers and the complicated methods for farming those, but honestly, those farming methods rather suck. They're not crops the way cactus, cocoa, and roses are. You're basically at the mercy of the random number generator, and flowers don't generate all that quickly even if you've got Forestry bees running around.


    I'm aware that my motivation's a bit frivolous, since torches do the job. Sometimes you have to put the torch on the floor if the room is big, and that's ugly, but it works, and that's the stopgap I've got in quite a few places.

    Well, there is anyone who plays Gregtech, without frivolous reasons? Also, congratz on your quartz, finally.


    On my energy topic, anyone tried crop -> Methane as fuel?
    I tried Centrifuging potatoes, and had a gain of about 1000 Eu per potato, using a lv Gas Turbine. It's slow, and I would need a big farm to do it, but it is possible to automatize (The harvester can run on 3 solar panels).
    Just don't know if a bigger setup would be viable...

    Quote from MarcNemesis

    Hmm, is it normal that 3 Large Gas Turbine do not burn out a basic Platinum Cable? (2A - 8192V)


    How much power are you getting out of the turbines? If you have 3 IV dynamo hatches you aren't necessarily sending an amp from each dynamo hatch every tick. There's some randomness there and you may or may not ever have a tick where all three output an amp at the same time. I would wire it such that two of them are on a 2x cable and the third is on a separate 1x or you combine it and go to 4x.

    Here are some numbers regarding the time:
    methane production in an LV centrifuge is 4 ticks/L at the fastest (foods vary in how much methane they produce, but not how fast, except for foods that output additional items, e.g. golden carrots/apples, which are slower)
    biogas production in an LV distillery is 1.25 ticks/L
    biogas production in a distillation tower running at minimum voltage is 32 L/tick.
    I think biogas has a big advantage in terms of net EU per item - 4 pumpkins is enough to make 1000 mB biomass in an IC2 fluid/solid canning machine (after macerating to bio chaff), which eventually becomes 32000 L biogas in the distillery, or 8000 L biogas per pumpkin, compared to 72 mB methane per potato (or 96 if you use a poisonous potato)


    Edit: net EU gains, ignoring transfer losses, and using FTB wiki numbers for gas turbine actual output (which might be based on 5.08 default efficiencies):
    poisonous potato = 96 L methane = 3648 EU
    processing cost = 1920 EU
    net = 1728 EU per poisonous potato, 19 sec = 126 EU/s or 6.3 EU/t with a constant supply of the item
    A regular potato nets about 1296 EU.


    4 pumpkins = 32000 biogas = 841600 EU fuel value
    processing cost:
    macerate 16 pumpkin seeds to 1 bio chaff = 800 EU (2 EU/t for 400 ticks)
    fluid enrich water with 1 bio chaff = 800 EU (4 EU/t for 200 ticks)
    distill 1 L biomass to 32 L biogas 1000 times = 640000 EU
    net = 201600 EU per 4 pumpkins, or 50400 per pumpkin (49600 per pumpkin if you use a second macerator to convert the pumpkins to seeds to allow buffering the pumpkins in a chest instead of the seeds)


    Edit 2: just for the sake of comparison, here's charcoal to steam via large bronze boiler at 5.08 efficiencies (admittedly automating wood harvesting is impractical without other mods - I've heard about players pulling it off with an imprisoned Wither iirc, but that sounds absurdly dangerous to me - and automating logs to charcoal is mid-game by default in 5.09):
    1 charcoal = 16000 L steam (at full heat) / 2 * 0.66 = 5280 EU
    wood to charcoal in LV electric furnace = 512 EU (4 EU/t for 128 ticks)
    net = 4768 EU per charcoal

    Quote from willis936


    How much power are you getting out of the turbines? If you have 3 IV dynamo hatches you aren't necessarily sending an amp from each dynamo hatch every tick. There's some randomness there and you may or may not ever have a tick where all three output an amp at the same time. I would wire it such that two of them are on a 2x cable and the third is on a separate 1x or you combine it and go to 4x.

    Turns out it ended up burning the wire enventually (atleast...sporadically.) I came to edit my message but you already replyed :p

    Nice, that was extremely helpful, Mauve.
    Hmm, seems that I just need one ic2 machine to make biogas? I will check that at home, as I don't want to depend too much on Non-GT machines.
    It will be a interesting chain to automatize, pumpkins to biogas.

    Quote from Drawfox

    Nice, that was extremely helpful, Mauve.
    Hmm, seems that I just need one ic2 machine to make biogas? I will check that at home, as I don't want to depend too much on Non-GT machines.
    It will be a interesting chain to automatize, pumpkins to biogas.


    I can confirm from personal experience that the fluid/solid canning machine is the only IC2 machine needed to make biogas, and once you can make a pyrolyse oven, you can use that instead to further reduce dependency on non-GT machines (higher EU cost though - 9000 EU to make 5000 L biomass compared to 4000 EU for the IC2 fluid/solid canning machine, though it only needs 4 bio chaff to make that much, which complicates the calculations). You'd still need something like an ic2 crop harvester or a Forestry multifarm if you want to automate harvesting the pumpkins, though.


    Note that other crops can also be used in biogas production, but the reason I chose pumpkins is that it is low tier (so it grows fairly quickly even without breeding for stats), has no light level requirements, and is consistent about what it drops (potato crop will drop poisonous potato unless harvested early, and the poisonous kind isn't usable for biogas production; melon crop drops a mixture of melon blocks and melon slices)

    Yeah, I was looking at the Pyrolyse oven right now.
    I got the pumpkin part, It yields more, while using less space too, which means less logistics.
    (Water) Melons seems to yield a lot too, I would need only two to get a biochaff, but they require an extra step on the macerator when it drops a whole melon.
    For some reason, I don't have a problem with the Ic2 harvester. Maybe because there's no GT machine that does what it does, or because it stays out of my sight most of time. :D


    Edit: The Pyrolyse requires a Sh*t tons of iron, 8 stacks only on casings (assuming I make then on the assembler). I will have to use the IC2 canning machine for now (It is so cheap compared with GT machines, that I fell like cheating).


    Edit2: THe harvester thought, got expensive as hell. It's HV now, I didn't expected that.

    I've decided to give GT 5.10 more of a try, but since I currently can't use IC2 crops (the IC2 builds that include them crash with GT 5.10), I might need to re-evaluate what to use for that when the time comes. Curiously, it looks like it will allow me to craft 8 sugar cane into a plantball (as well as wheat, cactus, leaves, saplings, ferns/grass, or wheat seeds); 5.09 only allows wheat for making plantballs via the crafting table.


    Edit: I might actually try some oil drilling this time. I just noticed that refinery gas has the same fuel value as diesel, and it's much simpler to process from natural gas than diesel is from oil, so if I can find a decent source of it, it might work.