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

    For me, it was mainly the "no guis, do everything with in-world interactions" philosophy that Greg seems to be using now that kept me away from GT6. The ranges of RU/KU/HU/whatever shown for the different machines in NEI don't exactly help in making me think it's "simpler" and something to switch to if I thought GT5 was too complex - I'm confused by ShumnayaBulka's logic in making that switch. Sort of a moot point in my case, since I've switched to MC 1.12 with other mods for now (and I might play MC 1.13 vanilla for a bit after it officially releases)

    Quote from MauveCloud

    For me, it was mainly the "no guis, do everything with in-world interactions" philosophy that Greg seems to be using now that kept me away from GT6.

    I’m not sure what else is involved, but arguably the problems with the crucible center around this exact issue. It forces you to eyeball it to gauge the temperature, so it and the heat box need extensive babysitting even if you don’t make an error. Like, for example, have enough stone contamination that it the molten metal never changes color, or not have the correct proportions. The feedback isn’t a failure to work, as it is with most mods, it’s death and destruction of your hard work.


    My main hesitation in moving on to 1.12 and current mods is that I’m not aware of any that have what I feel is sufficient progression. I play Minecraft mainly for the “conveyor belt factory” experience you get from Factorio, Infinifactory, Big Pharma, and the like. Gregtech 5U (salted with Magneticraft for conveyor belts in my case) is the best I’ve been able to approximate that. I’d move on if there were 1.12 mods that did it better.


    Ancient Warfare 2, by the way, was mildly interesting for the early low-tech aspects. It does auto-milking of cows in a pen, which most mods don’t, and the windmills I set up to power its stuff were entertaining. The main problem is that the central “hired NPC” mechanic doesn’t work well, the NPCs tend to get stuck, or get ganked when a mob manages to mysteriously show up inside the base.

    I actually got factorio recently and have played a hundred hours of it. I was considering making a fusion reactor mod that nerfed other energy production.


    Overall it scratched the itch but I was sad at how simple it was. It's more accessible (ie you don't need an engineering degree to progress to late game) but it's not as satisfying when all of your problems are solved simply by clicking on stuff. I'm low on energy? Place more engines. I'm low on circuits? Place more assemblers. I'm low on copper? Place more mines. The emphasis is all on physical item plumbing rather than actual control systems.

    I’m fine with the emphasis on physical plant in Factorio. It’s hard for me to feel it’s “too simple” given how large and complex a base that can launch the end-game rocket has to be. “Clicking on stuff” grossly oversimplifies the sort of layout headaches the game involves.


    There are, of course, mods. I’ve only dipped lightly into Factorio mods because I felt the vanilla game was more than good enough. I have, however, thought about getting into the mods which add more materials (Bob’s Mods) or make ore processing more complex.


    It’s true that, while there’s logic gate infrastructure in the game, there’s little demand for it. The ones that come to mind are demand-control logic for steam power, balancing systems for petroleum production, and fuel-priority setups.


    In fairness, mods like Gregtech don’t demand a lot of control systems either. Generally speaking it’s either simple shut offs (“shut off if water is low”) or hysteresis systems (“turn on when steam / battery levels are low, turn off when they’re full.”) Which is just as well given how fantastically bulky red stone control systems are, even if you’re using Project Red.


    I’ve heard it argued that Gregtech isn’t actually hard, it’s just a lot of extra steps and grinding. It seems like 90% of my Gregtech decisions center around plant layout, just like Factorio. I.e. “where do I put this so it’s convenient to reach and use, where do I run these pipes, can I set up a series of item pipes so I need to do less hand-carrying of materials.”


    It’s still a challenge. A major motivation for me right now is getting to a point where I don’t have to deal with all those friggin’ tiny dusts by hand anymore. I had such a setup in my prior run. What’s holding me back is mostly that it requires type filters and lots of regulators, which in turn require Advanced Circuits, and I’m currently finding those prohibitively expensive to make en masse. That, and figuring out a layout that will work with the conveyor belts, which are much clumsier than item pipes but more interesting for being limited.

    I guess maybe it's that the stakes are lower.

    Energy distribution is too simple. There is no simulation of current through wires. You don't have to be mindful of what gets placed where. You cannot burn wire or blow up machines.

    Energy production is too powerful. You only feel motivated to make more energy twice in the game. Once when you hit solar and another when you hit fission. There is never an energy crisis. Gregtech is one constant energy crisis and it's fun. You have to invest a serious amount of materials into higher power systems. You have to really sit down and make sure your rates are right.


    Other differences like more raw resources and processing steps are just tedium that you can add back in for mods. Most of my issues stem from how little the player has to think about energy compared to raw materials.

    Quote from willis936

    Energy distribution is too simple. There is no simulation of current through wires. You don't have to be mindful of what gets placed where. You cannot burn wire or blow up machines.

    I don't see any of that as a drawback. Burning wires and blowing up machines is stupid, and example of a misguided attempt to make Gregtech "hard" by brutally punishing minor errors. It doesn't make for harder decisions or a more complex game, it just means your failure states suck more, and you're forced to be meticulous about certain minor tasks. No design changes are involved, since all you're doing is placing a cover or two temporarily to prevent accidental contact between wires. Covers that you can immediately remove if you use painters to color code your wires.


    Honestly, I sometimes wonder if any mod designer who has implemented any sort of "misclick and things blow up" mechanic has actually played minecraft. Because precision pointing is not something the game engine does well. All such mechanics do is force you to be super-careful on certain clicks, or implement defensive measures first like placing extra covers. Or to just rely on mods that periodically back up your world.


    I'm aware that, for some reason, things blowing up is an accepted design idiom for Minecraft mods, but I think that's largely a matter of accidental design and people copying earlier designs. Sort of like the way that adventure games prior to Monkey Island were all built around the save and reload mechanic, because "everyone knew" you had to punish the player with dead-end states where no recovery was possible. Monkey Island demonstrated the assumption was completely false, and adventure games as a genre improved as a result.


    You could remove all that without affecting anything about Gregtech's energy crisis. That's mostly in the mod because of the exponential voltage tiers, where each new advance to new tech multiplies your previous energy demands by 4.


    Energy distribution in Gregtech isn't any more interesting that Factorio's. It's relatively expensive in materials, but in terms of actual thought, it's not much different from the short / medium / long range power lines and the distribution substations in Factorio. That they don't explicitly mention transformers doesn't change the way you lay out the power network.


    Not that you really have to do power distribution in Gregtech if you're using liquid fuels. Long power line networks, like the one I'm currently using, exist mostly because distributing steam is prohibitive above LV. If you're using Nitro Diesel (now called Cetane Diesel) or something similar, the energy density of fuel pumped through tiny pipes is enormous compared to wiring, and you can do a lot of power generation locally and just distribute fuel. No transformers or different voltages required.


    Er, I did think of an exception. In EU terms it's easy to get 1 million EU / sec of fuel through a pipe, which is higher than Ludicrous Voltage, but if you go to plaid I suppose superconductors move more.


    While I agree that you worry far, far more about energy in Gregtech than in Factorio, that's not a reason to dismiss everything else. I wouldn't say energy management in Gregtech is the majority of the game, let alone everything.

    Factorio is fun. I'm just left wanting to have to consider things that you don't. There is no electricity cost over distance. You can power a mine 2 km away and there is no loss. In minecraft you'd have to step up to IV or higher to even be able to accomplish it. In factorio you just plant poles and substations when you need power. In IC2/gregtech (and in real life) you must avoid loops at all costs. There's just an entire aspect of the game that poofs out of existence: energy distribution. I find it to be one of the most interesting parts of the game. It can be done without fires and explosions. You need concepts of voltage, current, and resistance though.


    And as you point out the exponential increase in energy demand is what makes GT one long energy crisis. I wouldn't mind factorio going that way instead of becoming a mine maintainer in the late game.

    Quote from Gus_Smedstad

    I feel like I'm the only one still playing this, these days. 3 weeks and no activity?

    Not everyone playing GT5u does always post in this thread. ;)


    I am still playing 5.0.9.32_pre4 with my skyblock setup, but due to limited time my progression is very slow. In my current world i am in the bronze age and just started producing my first steel.


    I am also not sure how far i will go or get, since my plan is to get some basic materials via ExNihilo and then getting further materials via IC2-/Gregtech-Crops and Forestry-/Gregtech-Bees. Sadly the bees are currently no option since the game crashes on startup when you disable the comb nerv in the config.

    Quote from Marilsanya2

    Not everyone playing GT5u does always post in this thread. ;)

    Agreed. Noticed a lot of negativity in the recent posts, but this is an amazing mod and I really appreciate the work done by the team. I play intermittently with a buddy, and we've been struggling our way through Infitech 2u Fear the Night for the past few months; which has been incredibly difficult, but fun. We just got stable HV power and made our first two distillation towers for processing heavy oil. We hate/love the improvements made to the circuit tiers and the various crazy setups we need to produce industrial rubbers... it feels so good to produce circuits now that we can make the SMD components.


    I haven't bumped us to .32pre4 yet though, been waiting for the full release. Is that still planned, or should I just use .32pre4?

    Recently I had a bad, bad Idea: making GregTech available for the Crafting Guide.

    But you know, these 16 creative tabs is not what you want to spend

    your time on, if you know there is an better Way. :pinch:


    To manage that I had a other not really bright Idea: Write a Python program.


    What it should do:

    - Fetch all the recipes for every Tier

    - Fetch all the materials an their forms (Plates, Blocks etc.) (in a Matrix)

    - Register the different tier machines

    - Insert the different crafting components from every Tier

    - Combine that and make silly Files that no living human can read :pinch:


    What I need:

    I tried to look in very dictionary of your github Code, but I cant find either

    the default Crafting shapes neither the Containers for the Materials.

    It would be great if you would help me to make a solution for a

    readout.


    --RedNicStone


    Thanks for your reply






    Quote from willis936

    Factorio is fun. I'm just left wanting to have to consider things that you don't. There is no electricity cost over distance. You can power a mine 2 km away and there is no loss. In minecraft you'd have to step up to IV or higher to even be able to accomplish it.

    That part, as I said, is abstracted out in Factorio. You can think of long-distance towers as including step-up transformers, and power substations as including step-down transformers. It's true there's no energy cost over distance, and energy loss over distance is a thing in the real world, but Gregtech exaggerates it to a ridiculous degree, so I'm fine with Factorio not bothering to model it.


    "Powering a mine over 2km away" is actually pretty small change compared to the distances we actually transmit power in real life, and we don't have to make use of exotic materials to do it. In the real world, it's actually easy to ramp up voltages to 10k volts or more - flyback transformers in CRT-era TV sets routinely went up to 50kv. At the simplest level, going to high voltage is just a matter of wrapping more wire around one side of the transformer core, and a 1000:1 ratio is no more challenging technically than a 10:1 ratio. Actual long-distance power lines like the ones depicted in Factorio run 500kv+, and have a loss rate of 0.02% over 2km.


    In game terms, both games use a system where you're encourage to build long-distance power lines and convert to short-range power distribution. Gregtech's extreme power losses are there to make this worthwhile over Gregtech's relatively short distances. They're not really that important in themselves. The different tiers of power line towers in Factorio accomplish much the same thing.


    It'd actually be really bad if Factorio had heavy power losses, because power plants in Factorio are relatively bulky. A sources of power require a lot of real estate to enough energy to run your base - this would become a nightmare if power losses were high enough that you needed local power generation.

    Quote from TraceOn37

    We hate/love the improvements made to the circuit tiers


    I've advanced quite a bit since I posted last, and I can empathize with this.


    I find dealing with the various tiny dust / nugget byproducts of ore processing tedious if I have to do it by hand. The byproducts aren't much of a production boost, but they're often vital because they're the only way to get a number of materials. They're also just there one way or another, since automated washing / hammering / centrifuging are in turn much, much better than washing impure dusts in a cauldron.


    The enormous cost and slow production speed of the basic "Advanced Circuit" had me tearing my hair out, because an automated sorting facility needs a ton of regulators, costing 4 Advanced circuits each. So there's the hate part.


    On the other hand, I finally got my first cleanroom set up for CPU production, which in turn enables Processor Assemblies that are about 1/4 the cost of the earlier Advanced Circuits, and maybe 10x as fast to produce (I haven't run the exact numbers). Making the cleanroom was fun, and one of the few genuinely new things I've done with this Gregtech run. I even set up some Project Red automation to disable the Laser Engraver until the room reaches 100% efficiency.


    It was a Factorio-like experience, because the cleanroom forces a hands-off approach where you can't touch the machines directly. CPU production is easy, and only the engraver needs to be in there, though I put a cutter in as well so the result is a "put wafers in here, finished CPUs get dumped on to a conveyor belt there." I'm kinda-sorta looking forward to circuits that require assembly in a cleanroom, because that means getting 6 (!) items into a machine without touching it or being able to see the current state.


    Thank the gods for the Internet, since I'd never have understood how the cleanroom worked without forum posts, or understood that the control block emits a redstone signal indicating progress if I hadn't watched Bear's video. Beats the heck out of scanning the control block repeatedly to see if it's ready.


    I've got a similar hate / love thing going on looking at Data Sticks. You need those for oil prospecting, and I consider that vital for any sort of significant foray into HV. Data Sticks now require an electronic part that in turn needs wafers made in a 500+ EU blast furnace. Which means I've got to find room for a second EBF set up to accept nitrogen. The process required looks interesting, but it's still a major delay before I can get into oil beyond oil sand.

    In regard to our earlier conversation about power:


    I also, at long last, put up an oilsand -> cetane diesel production line.


    I'm not really at HV since I've yet to find a manganese vein (grrr!), but I found a few dusts in treasure chests. I think it was in one of those forest temples, I'm not sure, since I found it long before I was ready to use it, and I'd forgotten just how critical manganese is.


    Even so, I elected to build a Nitrogen + Hydrogen -> Ammonia HV reactor, rather than go with the ridiculously slow LV biomass route. A big part of this was realizing that I also needed ammonia for platinum sludge extraction, and the slow LV method is completely inadequate for that.


    Cetane diesel production with twin centrifuges for oilsand is quite fast and produces a lot of energy. Unfortunately it didn't take long to burn through a full mining run's worth of oilsand, which was a forceful reminder of why it's important to advance to an oil rig and stop relying on mining oilsand.


    My day-to-day power production is still Ancient Warfare tree farms (chosen for "realism" compared to Forestry tree farms) and a single Large Steel Boiler. I've got enough 128v stuff running (mostly electrolyzers and the circuit assemblers) that the 400 EU/t it produces (after conversion) is often just a bit short of my needs. Water consumption is severe enough that I'm reluctant to set up a second one.


    It's cool that you can make plastics from Ethanol now. I'm pretty sure that wasn't possible a year ago. Ethanol is now more valuable to me as polyethylene / polyvinyl chloride production than as fuel.

    Something else I meant to mention, that I’ve been thinking about while playing.


    I think the main reason Gregtech pushes my buttons the way Factorio does is there’s an endless stream of small and large tasks I find myself wanting to do. I’ll start in on one thing, and then realize I’d best to finish an unrelated project to make that easier. This sometimes gets to be such a convoluted cascade that I forget what I was doing in the first place.


    For example, I wanted to make a tiny-dust consolidation facility (which I mentioned before). I required so many advanced circuits (24+ at last count) that I felt it was worth completing a clean room for cheaper, faster advanced circuits first. Partway through that I realized I was seriously short of copper, and that I really ought to invest in the alternate ore washing lines (mecury and sodium persulfate) first. For some ores that’s about a 60% boost in copper production.


    This made me realize a big chunk of my copper ore was chalcopyrite, and that’s one of the two ores that you can process to make platinum sludge. It felt wasteful to just hammer it and centrifuge it.


    That meant nitric acid, which meant a HV chem reactor. I had enough stainless steel to make one, but was that the smart thing to do with what little I had? Was there some way to leverage a HV machine into more manganese, using the ore veins I had discovered?


    Well, yeah, there is, though it’s awfully low yield and desperate. Ruby Ore -> macerator -> washing -> Thermal Centrifuge -> HV Macerator gives Red Garnet dust as a 3rd byproduct. Red Garnet dust can by electrolyzed to get spessartine, which can be electrolyzed to get manganese. It’s about a 2% yield, but I had a couple of big veins of Redstone nearby, and I could get a couple of stacks of Ruby Ore from each. That leverages to about 20 stainless steel per stack of Ruby Ore processed.


    So I did that, and it worked. But it also precipitated an energy crisis, because suddenly my ore processing was eating 600-700 EU/tick at peak. This is what prompted me to upgrade my boiler from bronze to steel and set up the Oilsand -> cetane diesel production.


    Lost yet? Because I know I often forgot why I’d ended up so far into the weeds. I haven’t even touched on the little side projects I did along the way, like setting up conveyor belts to feed carrots to my pigs, bring my farm produce in general directly to my refrigerator for ease of cooking, and send any extras to the ethanol plant.

    Anyone know what is the config option to enable IC2 machines like the Macerator, Electric Furnace and Induction Furnace in GT5U? I looked through the config files, could not find anything. I set AddGTRecipesToIC2Machines=true but still no recipe for Macerators etc. in NEI.

    I'm pretty sure "AddGTRecipesToIC2Machines" allows you to make Gregtech items in IC2 machines, not IC2 machines in Gregtech machines.


    The IC2 machines are disabled in Recipes.cfg. The block is called "disabledRecipes," and it lists each individual IC2 machine disabled. Set the ones you want back to "=false." Ignore the fact that the variable includes "true" in the name, that's just a terrible programming idiom that Greg picked up somewhere. The name of the variable has no bearing on its actual value, despite what it implies.


    I always go in there and turn "wood2charcoalsmelting_true" off, thus re-enabling vanilla charcoal creation in furnaces. [insert rant here about why that screws up mining of ores massively].