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

Found 5.0.9.32pre4 via the “dev versions and old versions” link in the first message. I should probably grab that one to see what changes. While my knee-jerk response is to wait for “official” builds, I ran .28pre for a while because it fixed some stuff in .28 that was important to me at the time.

OK, I fired up 5.09.32pre4. The lathe requires 1 diamond. Compressed coal balls can only be made in the assembler. I’m not running scripts that change either one, and I’m not running a mod pack.

I don’t know how you’re seeing different results.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

I’m not sure why you’re suprised the macerator requires diamonds. GT5U macerators (all flavors) have required diamonds for as long as I can recall. That the lathe now requires them was an unpleasant surprise.

Sorry, I thought you were saying it specifically needed industrial diamonds (even for the LV-tier versions of those two machines), and that normal diamonds wouldn't work. It looks to me like either kind will work for the LV macerator and lathe. Looking at the FTB Wiki page history, I don't think it's new for the lathe to require a diamond - the page from 2 September 2014 shows a diamond in the recipe, and that predates Blood Asp's fork.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

Compressed coal balls can only be made in the assembler.

In a test instance with only the following mods (and I even deleted the files in the config folder to force them to refresh):

1.7.10\CodeChickenLib-1.7.10-1.1.3.138-universal.jar
ic2\EJML-core-0.26.jar
CodeChickenCore-1.7.10-1.0.7.47-universal.jar
NotEnoughItems-1.7.10-1.0.5.120-universal.jar
gregtech-5.09.32pre4.jar
industrialcraft-2-2.2.828-experimental.jar

I can see the compressor recipe for the compressed coal ball in NEI. Perhaps you've unintentionally done something to the config files to disable it, or one of your other mods is interfering, but based on my results, I'd say you're unfair in blaming GT5u for that change.

I fired up my minimal install, which I created primarily to re-balance the food values of Harvestcraft meals, and sure enough, I can create compressed coal balls in a compressor.

I can't imagine what is suppressing it in my main directory. Of the mods I have installed, only IC2 and Gregtech are aware of the coalball. I deleted my Gregtech config directory to force default values, and the problem persists.

While I'm past that bottleneck now, since I used the Forestry Carpenter to create wood pulp and eventually completed an assembler to make compressed coal balls, it would have been nice to have industrial diamonds (and thus the macerator) earlier. Getting the assembler required a few prerequisite machines, since it has conveyors as components, and the only method for creating rubber is now the chemical reactor -> fluid solidifier route.

An early macerator also would have addressed my string shortage, since it converts wool to string, and sheep farming for wool is something you absolutely have to do for the black carpet portion of the LV cable insulation anyway.

Wool's not a problem, since other primary mod I'm using is Ancient Warfare, which allows for automated wool-shearing via hired NPCs. I got it primarily as a more-plausible way of automating wood production for fuel. Unlike Forestry's multifarms, which just sort of magically work, in Ancient Warfare you hire lumberjacks who cut down trees in your designated tree farm areas.

I still have Forestry installed, and I'll probably use it anyway eventually because the multifarms do some things that Ancient Warfare's farms won't, like auto-harvest resin from trees.

I noticed one new feature in .32pre4 which, while not vital, is worth grabbing the update by itself.

Pipes no longer auto-connect to everything adjacent. They’ll auto-connect to the block to which you are pointing, so if you are making a line of pipe you just point to the previous pipe segment and they’ll connect, but the don’t connect to the stuff to the sides. To make those connections, you have to use a wrench. The interface for connecting / disconnecting pipes is the same as it is for placing covers or rotating output sides.

This is a big, big improvement. It used to be a pain, placing pipes carrying different fluids or gasses adjacent. You had to place a cover to prevent connection, place the pipe, paint it, and then remove the cover. Or just leave the cover in place. Now it’s much more difficult to connect pipes by accident.

Getting water in my steam pipes or steam in my water pipes used to be very annoying.

EDIT: Cables still auto-connect, accidental LV to HV cable connections are still a hazard.

Paint to force pipe separation is now optional, though still useful for color-coding what a particular pipe is carrying.

The only drawback is that if you don’t know how it works, it’s not obvious at first why something isn’t connecting. I discovered this feature while trying to connect a steam pipe to a steam turbine, and I was initially baffled as to why the pipe hadn’t connected. It does often mean a bit of additional clicking, making the final connection from a pipe or cable to the destination block, but it’s worth it.

This was a post I made from a few pages ago but it should be read by anyone looking to progress past LV and so it seems relevant to share now:

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

I encountered another recipe problem, this one being that there was no way to make biochaff. I was exploring alternatives to steam power, and biochaff is the gregtech method of making ethanol. I figured it was another mod conflict, like the problem with the compressed coal ball, so I tried it out with my minimal installation. Sure enough, the biochaff recipes worked there.

After about an hour of slowly deleting mods in a test directory, I determined the mod conflict. It's Gregtech 5U. Specifically, Gregtech and Unidict. Unidict hasn't changed, the source of the conflict is .31 (and .32pre4). If you load Unidict 2.9.2 and Industrialcraft 2, or Unidict and Gregtech .28pre, both the biochaff recipes and the compressed coal ball work correctly. If you load .32pre4, those recipes vanish.

Quote from willis936

This was a post I made from a few pages ago but it should be read by anyone looking to progress past LV and so it seems relevant to share now:

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

Ugh. I haven't progressed enough to examine what gallium's used for in GT. Doping the new integrated circuits, I'd guess. I'm still at the vacuum tube stage, since ICs and transistors appear to require MV tech. I do notice what you mean about gallium requiring a HV macerator, though, and if it's a significant need at MV, it definitely needs a fix.

I'm not sure about how replacing GT machine recipes works. The last time I tried, I couldn't get it to work. There's no Remove() method for GT machines in Mine Tweaker, and turning off the config line also turned off my replacement recipe. Is it really enough to just ensure the processing time is different? Or do you need to add another config line?

The two changes necessary to rebalance gallium the way I did are in that post.

1. Add those zenscript lines to a minetweaker script that gets run on server launch (GTTweaker is necessary).
2. Change the line in config/Gregtech/Recipes.cfg

That's it. It's relatively painless to implement. It would be nice to have some more active play testing, feedback, and development work done to smooth out GT5U but idk if this project will ever get love again. If it did then these kinds needing these kinds of hacks could be avoided in the future.

I've looked at the Gallium problem, and decided it was better to take an approach that was closer to real life ore processing. Gallium is normally a byproduct of electrolysis of bauxite or sphalerite. So I put together a minetweaker script that added those. As you say, to get replacement recipes to show up, you have to specify a new processing time and change lines in recipe.cfg to disable the old recipes. Here's what I'm doing.

import mods.gregtech.Electrolyzer;


val aluminum = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:2019>;
val bauxite_dust = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:2822>;
val empty_cell = <ore:cellEmpty>;    
val gallium = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:2037>;
val hydrogen_gas = <liquid:hydrogen>;
val oxygen_cell = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:30013>;
val rutile_dust = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:2375>;
val sulfur = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:2022>;
val sphalerite_dust = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:2839>;
val zinc = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:2036>;




// change this line in recipe.cfg:
// I:dustBauxite=702 to dustBauxite_702=0


Electrolyzer.addRecipe( [rutile_dust * 2, aluminum * 16, oxygen_cell * 11, gallium * 2], hydrogen_gas * 10000, bauxite_dust * 39, empty_cell * 11, null, [10000, 10000, 10000, 10000],
                        707, 90 );


// change this line in recipe.cfg:
// I:dustSphalerite_92=92 to dustSphalerite_92=0


Electrolyzer.addRecipe( [zinc, sulfur, gallium], null, sphalerite_dust * 2, null, null, [10000, 10000, 2000], 97, 60 );

This adds a yield of 5% gallium from bauxite and 10% gallium from Sphalerite. Given the apparent low volume of gallium needed (typically 1 gallium for 36 "good" circuits), this should be plenty.

I've verified that this works, but haven't playtested it since I'm still struggling to get enough power delivery for my first electric blast furnace. Energy densities are very, very low before you can convert to oil.

EDIT: I belatedly realized there's a bootstrapping issue, since the MV electrolyzer and MV power sources require gallium. However, finding even one small zinc deposit should give you 2 tiny gallium, which is enough to make 8 diodes and 8 "good" circuits, which is more than enough to make a MV generator and electrolyzer.

Gus_Smedstad

Have you tried Infitech 2u: Fear the Night yet? Its an updated version of Infitech 2 running gt5u 5.09.31. The quest book has all the updated circuits and chemistry changes in it. The pack is still being up-kept as well.

That MV bootstrapping issue is what I wanted to address. It's been a while so my memory may be fuzzy but I believe you need enough to make at least a whole gallium dust (maybe more than that) before hitting MV. Also I know some players play with small ores disabled which I think should be a valid choice to be able to make.

Quote from willis936

That MV bootstrapping issue is what I wanted to address.

Undmodified, it’s actually a HV bootstrapping issue, since you can’t get to the gallium by-products without a HV macerator to processing thermally centrifuges ores. That was a good catch on your part. I’d just prefer to address it in a more thematic way than adding it to the Rare Earth group.

I’m tempted to add a very low yield additional byproduct for centrifuging Sphalerite or Bauxite, or both. I.e. instead of replacing the 2nd byproduct (yellow garnet for Sphalerite, Grossular for Bauxite), add a low probability of gaining a tiny gallium dust as well. 10% probability for example would yield a 1% yield overall, so it doesn’t invalidate the HV processing that normally gets you Gallium, but does give you enough to start.

I’d have to add it to several recipes, actually - every place that currently produces the 2nd byproduct, which includes centrifuging impure dusts and thermal centrifuging of pure and impure dusts.

Getting Gallium via centrifuging is “unrealistic,” but it’s a LV method of obtaining them from the actual sources of gallium.

Quote from EconBrony

Gus_Smedstad

Have you tried Infitech 2u: Fear the Night yet? Its an updated version of Infitech 2 running gt5u 5.09.31.

I generally don’t do mod packs because they tend to throw more mods than even I want into the game often, with multiple tech packs that give you multiple, somewhat conflicting methods of doing things.

I have a specific goal in mind for returning to Gregtech this time, which is to play it out with Magneticraft’s conveyors and inserters exclusively, never using item pipes. So far it’s been interesting, actually seeing ores and dusts move around. I’ve tinkered with the recipes so those are competitive in cost with item pipes - as written, I’d never touch the conveyors because they require plastic, despite being actually less functional.

Quote from GregoriusT

As far as I know from my old GT5 Days, you can create new large veins in order to make it possible to disable all small ores. And every small Ore should have a large Ore equivalent too.

Yes, I'm fairly sure custom ore veins are still possible, and I agree with the idea that there ought to be large ores to match the small ores. However, looking at the default configs, I see the following small ores that iirc don't automatically get large ores for them:

• Amber (the material was disabled by default for a few builds if Thaumcraft is not installed, but the GitHub issue says FixedInDev, so I'm not sure whether pre4 includes the fix)
• Amethyst
• Bismuth
• Blue Topaz
• Fool's Ruby
• Red Garnet
• Yellow Garnet
• Jasper
• Opal
• Saltpeter
• Tanzanite
• Topaz
• Zinc

Sphalerite isn’t the same as Zinc ore for game balance, because they have different byproducts even if the end result is still Zinc. If straight Zinc ore was getting generated in large veins, the Gallium issue wouldn’t exist, since it has Gallium as a LV byproduct.

Saltpeter isn’t generated in large veins, in the Nether or not. It’s only in small ore deposits.

Incidentally, I took a look at the Custom Ore Generation mod for this play through. The Gregtech scripts for COG are based on the Geologica Ad Astera mod, and has the same problems when trying to actually play with Gregtech. Tin is very, very sparse, and tetrahedrite doesn’t get generated at all.

Long term it’s probably unplayable even if those things were fixed, because you can’t use the every-3rd-chunk vertical prospecting technique. Sooner or later you’ll run into a bottleneck with a critical mineral and it’ll be impossible to find it, even with seismic prospectors.

So I wasted my day delving into the confusing world of .31+ fuels. I had a pretty good grasp of how combustion fuel production worked in .28, but pretty much everything has changed, and many of the new fuels have recipes that rapidly become confusing if you're just casually browsing NEI, since they have a half-dozen steps or so to complete.

Methanol is on the list just because you can burn it, but you never should. Its energy value is low, and it's primarily a precursor to gasoline. When you eventually want it, the pryolyse oven is the way to get it, since wood -> wood vinegar -> methanol is much, much faster and cheaper than biochaff -> biomass -> fermented biomass -> methanol.

Diesel makes no <bleeping> sense. It's inferior to the EU value of its ingredients - the light fuel alone has 67% more energy than the resulting diesel - and it's not an efficient precursor to anything. If you want to make cetane-boosted diesel, you use the light fuel directly, because mxing it as diesel first cuts the cetane diesel yield in half.

Ethanol is now something you can produce without using IC2 machines. It's now a precursor for high octane gasoline, which means it's always relevant. The primary bottleneck is converting various foods to biochaff via maceration. That takes a significant amount of time. You'd need banks of macerators to run any good-sized base. Still, it's one way to turn saplings into energy if you've got an automated tree farm.

Light fuel is unchanged from .28. It's a decent fuel, and one of the least-complicated things to make, but it converts 1:1 to cetane boosted diesel which has twice the EU.

Gasoline is hideously complicated to make because it requires 4 ingredients, most of which have fairly complex production requirements. It's also inferior to cetane boosted diesel, which is much easier to make, and uses less resources. It is, however, a precursor to High Octane Gasoline. It's also possible you might make it if you're getting the naphtha for free from a distillation tower when making light fuel.

Cetane Boosted Diesel is, like is prior incarnation Nitro Diesel, the sweet spot if you have oilsand or an oil rig. It's just light fuel + nitric acid. Nitric acid requires ammonia, which is slow and expensive to make before HV, but still worth doing. The other caveat is that the production line is plants -> biochaff -> biomass -> fermented biomass -> ammonia -> nitric acid prior to HV, which means plant production is a possible bottleneck, and the fermented biomass and ammonia steps are both very, very slow prior to HV. There are enough steps involved that running on simple light fuel for a while may make sense.

It does get much simpler and faster once you can convert nitrogen and hydrogen directly into ammonia at HV.

High Octane Gasoline is the end-fuel for the combustion generator. 20% of its volume (6 out of 30 cells) is cheap nitrous oxide, which you can make from air, and of course it's 50% higher EU than Cetane Boosted Diesel. It's ridiculous to make, though. It's complex enough that it's potentially a goal just for the sake of having cracked it.

It's Gasoline + Nitrous Oxide + Ethly Tert-Butyl Ether + Toluene. Gasoline is Naphtha + Toluene + Methanol + Acetic Acid. So you've got 7 production lines and about 18 steps, not including the occasional canning machine or distillation tower.

Oil -> Sulfuric Naptha -> Naptha -> Toluene.

Wood -> Wood vinegar -> Methanol -> Acetic Acid.

Naphtha + Toluene + Methanol + Acetic Acid -> Gasoline

Air -> Nitrogen + Oxygen -> Nitrous Oxide.

Plants -> Biochaff -> Biomass -> Ethanol

Oil -> Sulfuric Refinery Gas -> Refinery Gas -> Butane -> Butene + Ethanol -> Ethly Tert Butyl Ether

Gasoline + Nitrous Oxide + Ethyl Tert Butyl Ether + Toluene -> High Octane Gasoline.

A few months ago, I looked at the different fuel types, but not just at their fuel values, also at how fast I could produce them, depending on whether I had only LV single block machines for processing or multiblocks such as the distillation tower. Pre-distillation tower, light fuel wins out (I usually used oilsands ore, but I think oil berries would also work, if you're willing to take the time to breed some). After the distillation tower is craftable (and especially once the pyrolyse oven is craftable), methane is more attractive, since it looks fairly easy to make it renewable from crops (and water). Admittedly, GT5u makes the Crop Harvester recipe harder by default now, but if you have another way of automating a crop farm, such as a Forestry multifarm, you can use that.