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

    I experimented with the modular armor today. It looks like it’s mostly not implemented, even to the degree laid out in the GTExtras thread.


    Oh, plates work, but nothing else does. Motors don’t reduce weight, batteries (at least Large Lithium batteries) aren’t recognized, and only the IC2 circuits work. You can’t, for example, insert a Processing Assembly into a Modular Exoskeleton at all. I didn’t really look too closely at how a full suit of the stuff at max weight w/o motors compares to, say, regular steel armor.

    Quote from Gus_Smedstad

    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].

    Sweet!


    Thank you for a detailed response

    Help!

    Normally I love books - but now I need help to avoid them. When I try to scan/print/assemble an item to get a recipe book for the Assembly Line, the net result is a totally useless Written Book. No recipe at all, just one blank page.

    The scanner returns a data stick and according to the description it contains the correct recipe. I take it to a printer, which produces written pages, again seemingly containing the correct recipe. But those written pages, when put in an assembling machine together with glue and leather, does not produce anything useful at all... just an empty Written Book.

    EDIT: I opened up a test World with no mods except Gregtech 5.09.31, IC and Buildcraft. Same result: an empty Written Book.


    I would dearly appreciate any help here, since now I have no idea on how to proceed on the tech tree. Without recipes the assembly line is just a very expensive pile of junk.

    I’ve never gotten as far as the assembly line in the tech tree.


    I’ve watched a couple of videos on the subject. The only obvious things are (1) you need to scan an item a voltage tier below the target item, and (2) there’s a minimum voltage requirement for the assembler that makes the book.


    If it’s neither of those things, there’s a possibility that it’s a bug with the specific item you’re trying to scan. You might try creating a test setup in a creative world and scan various items to see if they work.


    Also, it might be that the assembly line doesn’t have recipes for items below Ludicrous voltage. You don’t give any specifics on the thing you’re scanning.

    Finally I've finished my oil refinery fully dedicated to the production of high-octane gasoline. It was a pain to gather all the materials, but at least I don't have to build everything attached to a large boiler anymore. It was fun to figure out where to get the ingredients from and how to lay out the machines (even though I build everything too close). I found a bit annoying that I could get everything I needed from oil except from ethanol, so I had to build another distillation tower for fermented biomass, but looking at the bright side I also get other useful byproducts.

    I’ve had ethanol production from early LV. Mainly because I was doing tree farm -> charcoal -> large boiler for electricity, and I built and ethanol processing line just to get rid of all the saplings and apples that would otherwise clog the conveyor bringing wood to the boiler.


    Ethanol’s proved to be surprisingly useful this time around. Among other things, you can make ethylene from it, which is the base for all 3 plastics I’m making (polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, PTFE (aka Teflon)). I also burn it to supplement energy production, though it’s mediocre as a direct fuel.


    I don’t have an oil rig yet. I’m slowly working my way toward seismic prospecting to tell me where the oil is. I just finished a pyrolyse oven for wood tar -> toluene -> TNT. Next I need to set up a blast furnace for glowstone-doped wafers, which are a precursor for data sticks.


    Really, the support stuff for the prospector is much, much higher tech than the prospector itself.


    The intent is to get back to where I was last year when I rage quit, with an oil rig providing me with all the energy I need.


    High-octane gasoline is the goal, though it has a ton of intermediate steps. I don’t really need it right now, because I’m barely touching my reserves of cetane diesel as it is. The steam boiler is still provided most of the power most of the time.


    I expect that will change if I ever make much more progress into HV. I’ve got a couple of Nuclear Control Advanced Information Panels monitoring vital stats, and fairly often I’m down around 200 EU/tick even though I’m set up for 1024.


    A big problem is oxygen. I’ve got a HV blast furnace, but is sits idle a lot because so many things require oxygen to smelt, and my cobble -> sand -> glass -> silicon dioxide -> silicon + oxygen setup doesn’t remotely keep pace. Electrolyzing water (which I’m also doing) is even slower.


    The issue is that back in 0.29, it used to be that a lot of compounds could only be electrolyzed, and oxygen was a frequent byproduct. Now all of those things can be smelted in the blast furnace with oxygen for a much higher yield. So instead of electrolyzing tetrahedrite for copper, antimony, and oxygen, I’m smelting it with oxygen to get 1.5 copper + some antimony per dust.

    Thank you for your input. Unfortunately, it is neither of those things. I did indeed fire up a test setup and scanned a total of five items (the four quantum suit parts, plus the Fusion Reactor Mk I) and got negative results on all of them.

    It turned out, however, that whatever the problem is it may be limited to the latest version. When I tried the same setup with 5.09.30 everything scanned as it should. This solves the problem as far as I am concerned, since I no longer use oil as basis for my energy production, but it may be bad news for many other players: 5.09.31 did include several changes in the refinery process, after all.

    If I were you I would test the prospector in creative. If the latest version have problems generating recipe books, it may also have problems generating prospecting data books.

    Also a warning. During testing I found another problem: Advanced Rocketry does not play well with Gregtech once you approach endgame. With AR installed, your Deuterium production will not work. The Hydrogen -> Deuterium recipe is visible in the centrifuge, but it will not execute.

    Probably best to report those things on Github. While it’s not clear whether Blood Asp is really active anymore, there are other people occasionally making corrections. I know the issue with oil production got addressed by a 3rd party so that the increase of the oil rig to MV no longer hoses oil-based energy.

    I just read a bunch of my old posts from 18 months ago. Mainly because I could not, for the life of me, remember how Forestry multifarms work with IC2 crops. I know I experimented with it in Creative the last time, and discovered that the multifarms have decent support for IC2 crops.


    I did eventually find the relevant post. I mentioned that you use the Manual Orchard setting for IC2 crops. Thanks, earlier me! Good to know.


    I've ventured a short distance into IC2 crops, which I didn't last time. I've bred a few non-vanilla crops. Nothing too interesting, mostly I got into it because I desperately needed blue dye for crowbars, and hadn't found a lapis vein. It's minor stuff, but kind of convenient for dyes and ink. I just want it automated now.


    It's funny, looking back on my old stuff, how much I didn't know, and the things I found difficult. I should really post a screenshot of my all-inclusive automated ore processing line, which takes ore in and one end and does everything but smelt it. All 3 washing methods, sifting, magnetic separator, acid wash for platinum sludge, thermal centrifuge, regular centrifuge, re-grinding centrifuged ore, electrolysis of anything that should always be electrolyzed. It's far, far cleaner and more compact than the thing Blood Asp posted back then. This despite using Magneticraft's conveyor belts, which are intentionally bulky compared to item pipes.


    Handling tiny dust -> dust and nugget -> ingot conversions is still pretty bulky, since each possible item requires an entry in an item regulator. Feeding stuff willy-nilly into a packager will just get a jam as an unusual dust sits in the input, waiting for 8 more that will never come. So it's 1 regulator per 9 types. I'm up to 8 of them feeding a pair of packagers (one for dusts and one for nuggets). Any newly created dusts get fed back into the system for possible centrifuging or electrolysis.


    A side benefit I've mentioned before of the conveyor belts - when something goes wrong, it's far, far clearer than Gregtech's item pipes what's wrong and how it happened. The belts are slow, but I can actually see a dust go by an inserter because the inserter was too busy to catch it, and when there's a jam, I can see where it's happening.

    What lives in a cavern under the sea?
    Manganese cube pants!


    I decided to take a stab at an alternate prospecting technique. Generally, vertical shafts are the things to dig, since Gregtech veins are thin horizontal disks. However, Manganese only spawns from 20-30, if you’re digging at around 25, a horizontal shaft will encounter the vein.


    Since I’d dug vertical shafts in my nearby land and I had a lot of ocean nearby, I dug to 25 and explored under the ocean. I found Manganese in about the 15th 3x3 chunk I explored.


    Manganese is a huge bottleneck at HV. I’ve been limping along with some I found in chests and a few paltry dusts I’d extracted from ruby ore byproducts. Once I’ve mined it out I can afford things like HV combustion generators, HV battery buffers, and electric drills.

    While I've tried to stick with Magneticraft's conveyors and inserters whenever possible, forgoing item pipes, I ran into a situation where I wanted automated limited stocking. I.e. only 1 stack of an item in a chest (or other inventory, specifically Thermal Expansion's cyclic assembler). That's not something Magneticraft can do.


    I ended up adding Project Red's Mechanics module for its item transport, which is a lot like Logistics Pipes. Among other things, it supports limited stocking and "pull" type item movement, rather than "push" which is the standard for almost all Minecraft item transport.


    I didn't much care for the cheesy recipes, though. Circuits made smarter because you use diamonds, distinguishing circuit boards by the color of dyed glowstone used, that sort of thing. So I put together a minetweaker script to revamp the recipes to fit with GT5U.


    The base item pipes are arguably cheaper than Gregtech's, as I've written them. However, some of the costs are higher in other ways - specifically, I've required LV Conveyor Belts to build them, which are either cheap (once you have the tech to build LV motors cheaply, and infinite rubber), or expensive (early on), compared to regular item pipes. I've always felt that item pipes were a bit magical since they didn't require any moving parts.


    Similarly, I dumped almost all of the configuration chip requirements in favor of GT5U circuits. Project Red "null circuits" are clearly empty expansion boards, so those require GT5U Circuit Boards to build. I've replaced iron / diamond / glowstone requirements from the original recipes with corresponding tiers of chips, from Basic to Advanced. Which means that some items are effectively gated behind MV technology and expensive until you have your first cleanroom.

    I do wish this thread were a little more active. I’ve got various stories to share, and sometimes I wonder if, given some of the problems I encounter, I’m “doing it wrong.”


    I’ve got a 5 level underground base. Surface is all agriculture or water collection (which is extensive, and an ongoing issue.) Level B1 is the workshop level, where I put anything I actively use. Stuff that’s completely automated goes on B2-B4. B5 is currently just plumbing and wiring.


    Speaking of that, I feel like B2-B4 are all tangled messes of plumbing and wiring. B2 is primarily for wires servicing the workshop level, though I do have some machinery there. B3 is largely large tanks for fluids (steam, oxygen, hydrogen, etc.), my two titanium boilers, and most of my automated production. B4 is service for B3 plus a few significant things like the pyrolyse oven (which is huge) and the oil railroad station.


    I suspect part of what drives my plumbing nightmare is placing things on B1, where I can access them easily, rather than adjacent to the source of the fluid. So the pyrolyse oven on B4 stores creosote in a minimal Railcraft tank, which then gets pumped up to B1 and and 2 chunks away to a chemical bath for making railroad ties. Excess creosote gets pumped up to B3 and 2 chunks in a different direction as a secondary fuel source for titanium boiler #2 - mainly so the pyrolyse oven doesn’t stall and stop producing charcoal for the boilers. A lot of things use oxygen or water, and there’s a central system providing each.


    It’s gotten to the point where I’ve made the ceilings on levels B4 and B5 five meters high, just so I’ve got 3 different levels for pipes above my head. Plus of course there’s always the floor, but I usually reserve that for power cables directly connected to machinery.


    I’ve long since run out of colors to identify pipes, and I’ve resorted to banding. That is, fluorine is alternating cyan and white, creosote is brown-and-white, and lubricant is green-and-white. Because solid cyan is chlorine, solid brown is nitric acid or dilute sulfuric acid, and green is oxygen.

    On a different topic, though also related to logistics -


    I decided to set up a Ore Drilling Rig (the multi block formerly known as the “Advanced Miner II”) to mine rarer resources, since it produces 3x as much as mining by hand. My first target was a Molybdenum vein. I’d love to use it for Tungsten, but I’ve yet to find any.


    I started by supplying it by hand, and gave up that quickly. Now it’s run by a train that mostly ships drilling fluid out to the site. It also brings a little bit of fuel out and brings back a half-chest of ore each run, but mostly it’s about the drilling fluid. 100 L/sec of drilling fluid doesn’t sound like much, but when it’s constant it adds up fast. I could make it on site, but that would mean setting up water collection to reliably supply 100 L/sec of water, which is a fair bit if you’re not using infinite sources.


    What I didn’t anticipate was how large an area it covers, how many veins it would hit unrelated to the target, and the sheer volume of material it would produce. It mined about 18,000 Crushed Sodalite, 10,000 Crushed Lazurite, and 10,000 crushed Lapsis Lazuli before it reached the molybdenum. That’s about 20 chests worth of materials I didn’t really want immediately. It’ll be useful eventually, and processing some of that solved my sodium shortage, but I’m not sure where to put all the ore it’s producing.


    It’s just going to get worse, because I want to move it to several other sites when it’s done. I don’t have a tungsten deposit yet, but I do have that manganese deposit, and a beryllium / emerald deposit, etc. etc.

    I finished off the molybdenum site, and moved the ore drilling rig to an emerald / beryllium site some 25 chunks from my base. I think that’s cool, that I have a real reason to run trains (absent some mod that does outright teleportation).


    It’s had a few problems. The site was far enough away that the train couldn’t supply drilling fluid fast enough. I added a second tanker car for drilling fluid, and that barely kept up. I also had some problems with trains detaching / reversing. Longer (4+ car) Railcraft trains have severe problems if they go around a turn that reverses direction quickly.


    Solutions are either making wider turns (a stretch between turns so the rear half of the train is around the first when the locomotive hits the second turn) or slowing down. Railcraft trains s-t-r-e-t-c-h out at full speed, but the carts stay together at half speed or less. At one station I just made the turn around longer; at the other I added speed-change tracks to slow the train as it enters the station, and return it to full speed when it leaves.


    If I do another distant station, I may take a stab at making drilling fluid on site, shipping lubricant instead. It’s only 20 L per 5000 L of drilling fluid, and that’s much, much less demanding on the train. Stone dust is a common byproduct of drilling so that’s not a problem.


    Water’s the problem, I’d have to set up a semi-serious water collection setup on site. I don’t really have a handle on how often in rain happens, and precisely how fast an Agricraft tank collects it. If the deposit is in a desert, it’s a non-option.


    Alternately, I can run multiple trains. Which means setting up signaling to avoid collisions, which I haven’t bothered with so far since I’m only running 1 train on the track.


    Or I could just use one of those rapid infinite water sources like the aqueous accumulator, which I consider “cheating.” Though I can justify it if the site is under the ocean or next to a river. I do wish Minecraft’s water mechanics were better.

    On an Industrialcraft note: I made a suit of nano armor. What I really want is the quantum armor, but after scanning the nano armor to get the construction sticks, it’s clear it’s well out of reach for me since I still haven’t found tungsten, and can’t really build an assembly line or the 8K volt items needed for the quantum armor.


    I did test out the night vision feature of the nano helmet. Man, that sucks. By design it sucks. I think IC2’s night vision is the only implementation that renders you blind in light 7+, which renders it completely useless since 90% of the time you’re in a lit area peering out into the darkness. If there’s a config to disable this “feature” I’d love to know about it.


    Most of my motivation for getting high-tech armor is venturing into the End for tungsten, since I haven’t found any of that. Which means defeating the Ender Dragon. Flight would be really handy for that, but just making a jet pack means severely compromising my armor protection. The quantum armor has built in flight... but it’s gated behind tungsten. If I had that I don’t really need the armor.


    I’m debating grabbing Modular Powersuits when the time comes. Or just risk going in with a diamond helmet, jet pack, diamond leggings, and maybe rubber boots (to cut fall damage if it happens).

    I've reached the time to move to nuclear. Normal nuclear reactors aren't really worth it at 60 titanium each to get less than 500 EU/t, so I went straight to liquid cooled. I made a quick layout with 3 dual uranium rods in a creative world and the difference is huge: a normal reactor makes 360 EU/t, a liquid cooled one produces enough steam to power three turbines with large ultimet rotors (27000 L/s) and makes a whopping 2850EU/t, it's around 8 times the output! And that's even without getting super-heated steam.

    Of course you need quite a bit of extra titanium for the large heat exchanger and all the other materials for the turbines, but it's worth it.

    And when I'll need more power i can add 3 more reactors and get bonus power from switching to HP turbines.

    I’ll make an effort soon to take some screenshots of my base; I think it’s interesting mainly for the Magneticraft conveyors feeding the Gregtech machines. To a lesser extent there’s also the railway for obtaining remote oil and ore from remote sites.


    I’m not sure liquid-cooled reactors are worth it either.


    On the one hand, 2850 EU/t is a lot more than the stuff I’ve read online has said I’d get from one. The number quoted was 1344 heat for 1008 EU/t; is the conversion rate from heat to EU better in the Large Heat Exchanger than in IC2? Or are you somehow generating 3500+ heat with just 6 fuel rods? If the latter, I’d like to know the layout.


    On the other hand, a single Large Combustion Generator is 2048 EU/t even without oxygen boosting, and a lot less expensive than a reactor, heat exchanger, and 3 turbines. However, it does require an oil source and a fairly robust refining infrastructure, which may turn out to be nearly as expensive as the reactor setup. My distillation setup still uses single-block distilleries rather than distillation towers, and it’s slow enough that it can’t keep up with the demand from 4 HV combustion engines.


    Boosted with oxygen, the output goes up to 6144 EU/t (!) and the efficiency up 150%. That’s a lot more power than the reactor. I’m not looking to build one yet because it requires an 8kV dynamo hatch, and I haven’t found tungsten yet.

    I'm getting ~1000HU/s; each liter of hot coolant in the LHE makes 80 liters of regular steam so I get 80000L/s of steam, just enough to support three turbines. I've also considered the diesel generator since I've already got the refinery set up, but the thing should consume a high octane gasoline cell every 9.4 seconds and I'm not sure if I can keep up with it, considering I already use it to power everything I have except the refinery itself. Plus, when I've got a single power source I tend to build everything clustered together and later regret it, while the single block generators, even if slightly inefficient, allow me to build things further apart, are more flexible and don't need any buffers with redstone to switch on/off only when they are needed.

    To address your last point first: isn't that an argument for petroleum and against nuclear?


    The fluid reactor generates steam. Steam's bulky. You can't really generate it in one place and pipe the steam to local turbines beyond LV. A single-block HV steam turbine wants 31,000 L/sec of steam, which means at least a Huge Titanium Pipe, which is utterly impractical. I've only made it work myself by connecting the HV turbines directly to the steam holding tank.


    This means that a nuclear setup, particularly one that uses large turbines, is necessarily a central power generation setup. A cetane diesel or high octane gasoline setup can pipe fuel to local generators, and cheap tiny plastic pipes are more than enough. 1200 L/sec cetane = 300,000 EU / tick of energy flowing through those tiny pipes.


    I tend to oscillate back and forth between central and distributed power. At LV I was piping steam everywhere. At MV I switched to central power and a few directly-connected turbines because steam pipes were too expensive. Once I had cetane diesel I started making local power nets again, piping fuel instead of steam. Since single-block generators stop at 512v, I feel I have to shift back to central for 2kV stuff. The 512v generators are just too awkward if the local demand is 4000+ EU/tick, which is just 2-3 2kV machines.


    You mention distance, but really, worrying about distance is a holdover from LV. You can run a wire 100 blocks at 512v for a 20% power loss. For a 2kV line it's only a 5% loss for 100 blocks.


    So why did I flirt with distributed power again at HV? Because in a central power setup, your primary power line limits the total draw of your entire base. I had wired everything for 4 amps @ 512V for distribution at MV (using step-up transformers), and I had to add stuff that could easily draw 2000 EU/tick by itself. I didn't want to rip out all that 4x cable and replace it with 8x. 8x cable is kind of pricey, too, at 4 ingots per block.


    Still, power generation at 2kV looks complicated enough that it's easier to do it in one place. I think if I find myself in the "need a 8x main cable" dilemma again, I'll go with step-up transformers and the next higher voltage instead.