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

    Extending post with new things:

    Another ask - how many ways are to convert RF into IC2E/GT5U power? I have few things that finally producing a lot of RF power - Mostly RF dynamos from RotaryCraft powered by jet engines and few turbines from BigReactors; moreover wish to check Mekanism 8 later, but still cannot figure out other way than powercrystal's powerconverters, but they are become a bit unefficient over 8kV and barelly works at ZPM. UV is unavailable directly and i wish to have something as low laggy at it can. Any ideas?

    --EDIT--

    And one more thing - diggin for microwave transimtter usage but found another interesting thing (its at page 133 or so about large gas turbine and biogas). The ask itself is: if i put a fluid regulator at hatch and connect it to fully pressurized thermal dynamic super-laminar fluiduct (wich has infinite throughput dependend at how much pumps enter) flow of fluid/gas will be still regulated or not?

    --EDIT2--

    Is any way to greatly speed up electric blast furnace, more than adding overclockers and exchanging coils? Its taking ages to smelt all that tungsten with HSS coils, and other stuff too. Any tweaker or something? Really, i wish to finally build that fusion reactor, but with that bottleneck all assembling will took place in next half of he year.

    --EDIT3--

    A. Is a way to speed up or incrase output of fusion? Im converting neodymium to europium - 16 mB of neodymium + 48 mB hydrogen -> 16 mB europium after ~4 sec at Mark I; using only two input hatches. Why it cannot be that if you use 8 hatches for one input and 8 for second output products shall be incrased?

    B. In future relases there will be UV microwave transmitters? As for 5.09.31 it ends at ZPM. Or its intended to stack ZPM transmitters at ZPM/UV transfomers? And if yes, MAX voltage even has any sense then - converting from UV to/from MAX will need a lot of other stacking?

    I ended up using Forestry’s Carpenter to convert wood into wood pulp. I feel like that’s a completely reasonable alternative. Making wood pulp should be a relatively easy, low-tech process, unlike ore maceration.

    I powered the Carpenter with a windmill from Ancient Warfare, which felt rather thematic. A wind-powered sawmill, as it were.

    RE: RF->Greg EU conversion - GT transformers will convert IC2 EU or RF into GT power. I’ve never done it because I was wary of balance issues. Mod authors vary wildly in how efficient they think power generation should be.

    Case in point, I felt if I was going to do this again, I’d want a non-exploding steam boiler. Magneticraft has one, but the conversion rate is 1 charcoal = 8000 mb steam, which is about 16% of what you get from a GT high pressure coal boiler.

    I’m grinding my way up to making a LV assembler so I can make industrial diamonds, which are required for a macerator and a lathe (and who knows what else, now).

    I’m seriously thinking about shelving it, because I’m feeling somewhat bored. My motivation for returning is that I’m playing via a HTC Vive, and I’ve added Magneticraft purely for its conveyor system. I really want to play a VR version of Factorio, and this felt about as close it was going to get.

    I’ve experimented with the Magneticraft conveyors in Creative, and they seem pretty nice. They’re bulkier than item pipes, but it’s much clearer exactly what’s going on, and they’re pretty fancy looking. I remember the last time I played I had some inconsistent item-pipe behavior which appeared to be due to timing issues. Having the items visibly move around, and get moved on/off the belt with inserters which can do some limited filtering should give me more interesting results.

    The problem is, I’m not getting there anytime soon, and the amount of what feels like pure waiting is getting to me. Waiting for steel, and waiting for string, mostly. Diddling around waiting for a couple of bricked blast furnaces to turn out a usable amount of steel is dull. Somewhere around .28 the tin / red alloy cable recipes got changed to require string, and I underestimated just how much string I’d need. I’ve got cotton from Harvestcraft to provide string, but I now realize I proabably should have planted huge fields of the stuff.

    The string requirement rather boggles me - what do people do if they don’t have Harvestcraft or something similar? Breed IC2 crops for flax? There’s no way you can reasonably farm spiders for the truckload lots of string you need. Building a centrifuge ate something like 40 string right there.

    I’m also finding the other staple of Gregtech, searching for ore veins and tediously mining them out, to be really dull this time around.

    Given the low traffic in this thread, I wonder if anyone is playing 5U anymore.

    I'm waiting for GregTech CE to be buildable into a playable-in-survival-mode state, but as far as the string requirement for cables, I seem to recall that you can use a packager to bypass that. Or once you make your assembler, you should be able to use molten rubber.

    However, I just loaded up a test world with 5.09.32pre4, and looking in NEI, I can't reproduce your claims about compressed coal balls requiring the assembler or the LV macerator and lathe needing industrial diamonds. Are you sure those aren't limitations imposed by your modpack, rather than GT5u itself?

    I handled pre assembler wires with lots of sheep and macerators (and waiting). Sheep are easy to contain and breed. They are annoying to hear though.

    I planted a ton of rubber trees as soon as I could and made large batches of materials. 5U's distinct flavor is in preserving sanity through large batches. The larger your batches can be the less time you will waste. The easier crafting chains in the past meant you could just do some on demand work. "Oh I need circuits for this machine, I'll just make some." No. In 5U you better have half a stack of circuits waiting and probably a few stacks of the circuit component materials at any given time. Bootstrapping LV machinery and materials is time consuming but by early MV it should be easy to make large quantities of what you need. I never progressed past MV before stopping but I see that it's possible. I might rebalance AE2 to only require LV because honestly managing automation without it gets out of hand very fast.

    Quote from MauveCloud

    However, I just loaded up a test world with 5.09.32pre4, and looking in NEI, I can't reproduce your claims about compressed coal balls requiring the assembler or the LV macerator and lathe needing industrial diamonds. Are you sure those aren't limitations imposed by your modpack, rather than GT5u itself?

    I’m not playing a mod pack. I’m playing GT5U 5.09.31, plus a grab bag of mods I added for various reasons. I haven’t looked at .32pre4, maybe the recipes are changed, but in 0.31, the lathe requires 1 diamond (industrial or natural), and the compressed coal ball can only be made in the assembler. You can make IC2 coal balls via the usual method, but you can’t compress them. That recipe has been disabled.

    I was somewhat tempted to re-enable the IC2 compressed coal ball recipe via Minetweaker. I decided to tough that one out.

    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.

    I’m not sure where you get .32pre4, since you can’t download 5U from the original links anymore. My understanding was that Curse was the only host for it now. That’s where I got .31, and that’s the latest version mentioned in this thread. Maybe Blood Asp uploaded a GT New Horizons variant to Curse? Because I know that version has always had some screwy additional requirements.

    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.

    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):

    Code
    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.

    Edited once, last by Gus_Smedstad: I was wrong about cables. (May 15, 2018 at 5:19 PM).

    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.

    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.

    Edited once, last by Gus_Smedstad: Boostrapping issue (May 15, 2018 at 6:08 PM).

    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.