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

Quote from CrazyIvan44

...(you can just set an Project Red logics to turn reactor on/off depend on base main power storage)....

In fact i'm doing this with RS latch and some street magic.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

I’ve got thousands of thorium crushed ore stored as a byproduct of drilling for other things.

I thought that way too before realised that depleted thorium made from regular thorium fuel rods in reactor in 50000 seconds. I got 2 reactors now stuffed only with 26 singlecell thorium each and heat vents and in two weeks did not got an 1/3 of lutetium amount needed (actually don't need it now, just want to get it and forget for later)

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

The turbine is still “enabled,” so it will re-start if you give if steam again, but does it spin down and require spin up when you feed it steam again?

Turbine Enabled means it will start spinning (generate EU and grow speed) when new steam (whatever amount) will be added into input hatch. It also had 10 sec spindown effect, in which i think it can spin up again when steam applied. After full stop there will be full spin up again. Spinup is just 5 times longer than spindown.

I’m still pretty short of titanium, so I probably won’t be making any throwaway thorium reactors soon. Though obviously if you’re running the reactor solely to get depleted thorium, you can just make a regular EU reactor and forget about turbines and the other complications of fluid cooled reactors.

I’ll bear in mind the need to collect depleted thorium in the future. Assuming I don’t burn out before then.

I’m doing my first real forays into large steam turbines. The steam source is still my large titanium boilers, rather than the nuclear reactors that have been the subject of our discussion.

My motivation is primarily water recycling. My water collection tanks really can’t keep up with the boilers if they’re running full blast. Since large turbines return distilled water, I can run the boilers on a closed loop and greatly reduce my water consumption. I’ve got lots of molybdenum for ultimet rotors (though chrome is still a persistent problem).

Secondary benefits are a 50% increase in efficiency, boosting my steam output to 1500 EU/tick, and some real experience with large turbines in case I do build a fluid reactor later.

In passing, I discovered that my existing power setup wasn’t working correctly. I was underneath the steam tank and noticed the existing HV turbines were only running sporadically, and were starved of steam, despite a full tank.

The turbines were directly connected to the tank. It turns out that Railcraft tanks will only output 1000 L/tick of fluid per valve, which is 20,000 L/sec. HV turbines consume 31,000 L/sec. Pumps can’t affect this (I tried), it’s a strict limit of the valve. Once I added an additional valve and pipe for each turbine, they started running at full output.

The large turbines I’m adding will consume only 18,000 L/sec and produce a tad more power (518 EU/tick) with a ultimet rotor. I’d go with large ultimet rotors for 945 EU/tick, but I still haven’t found tungsten. I figure I can always make large rotors later and drop them in as replacements.

On an unrelated note, I finally got around to making a mining laser. Primarily as a weapon, since I’m not really all that interested in mining with it. I wanted a ranged weapon with a flat trajectory that did fair damage.

It’s a little dopey, because the shots travel quite slowly. Much slower than an arrow, which is silly. I guess it’s not really a laser, or the speed of light is absurdly low in Industrialcraft.

It’s not really all that damaging, even in long-range high-damage mode. The slow speed of the shots mean that targets frequently move before the shots arrive.

That said, it was quite effective when I took on the local bandit camp (placed by Ancient Warfare). The fire rate is quite rapid, with a dozen bandits attacking me, I was almost certain to hit some target with each shot. It also had the amusing effect of destroying a fair bit of the camp, with from direct hits and setting the tents on fire.

The flat trajectory is really helpful, even if the shots are slow. This is particularly true because I’m playing with Vivecraft, which has the “feature” that your aim with the bow depends on the relative position of your right and left hands. This means that fairly often I end up shooting to the left of where I think I’m aiming, because when I draw the bow, my right hand is usually a bit to the right rather than perfectly aligned.

Still, I‘d like a mod with a more reasonable high tech weapon. One where the shots travel at a reasonable speed, if not instantly (which is how a laser should work).

You can put damaged (or not) turbine rotor in disassembler and get rotor blades and rod separately and made bigger rotor with some additional blades and another rod later. IV disassembler is 100% efficient, EV 90% etc., meaning that every component has X% chance to appear in disassembler inventory after process. It's expensive on energy, but you don't use any material resources (especially chrome, you'll need it later much too).

Also be careful as rotor damages, my LHE and then reactor exploded once upon it reach 33% damage or so, though I don't know really was it a reason or it's just water that had depleted (2000L I mentioned before), just saw it after it happened. My memory gives me feeling I read about it somewhere on wiki, but now can't find anything about it anywhere.

In this case I think some safety logic you mentioned is necessary.

And yes, fighting enderdragon in space with set of nanoarmor and jetpack with...enchanted bow and flint arrow...that was kind of weird. There was mod ic2 combo armors back on 1.4.7 that added nanobow, but apparently it will never get to 1.7.

Also what is your water collection rate? There is another way in getting water: you can grow cactus as ic2 agricultural crop (there will be pretty high yield if you invest some time in selection) and put them in fluid extractor. While it cost some energy you don't need vast rain collection setups and actual rain. You also don't really need any fertillizer too.

Also ic2 crops is great way in resource saving: it increases outcome 4 times, purifies crashed ore + gives additional byproducts. (another way is bees but I dont know what mod they really from (it marked gregtech, but not mentioned anywhere in wiki))

The Large Heat Exchanger explodes if it ever runs out of water while operating. Just like Large Boilers. My boiler explosion last year is what prompted me to stop playing for a while. Now I won’t operate one without red stone logic to turn it off if the water drops below about 80%.

I don’t think Gregtech turbines explode when the rotor gives out. There are turbines from other mods that do that, though.

The first thing I did when I reached EV was build a disassembler, to make it possible to repair electric tools (which are otherwise pretty expensive, despite the reduced wear). I held off until EV because 10% loss rate is twice as good as 20% loss at HV. I can’t build an IV one yet.

I don’t know exactly what my water collection rate is. I’ve got 9 3x3 Agricraft collectors and 4 Railcraft collectors. The issue is that the Agricraft collectors only collect water during rain, and I don’t have an estimate for how often it rains, or for how long. They’re much, much more efficient at collecting water overall than Railcraft collectors or Gregtech drains.

I’ve got an automated cactus farm for the dye, but it uses vanilla cactus. I tinker now and then with the IC2 crops, but generally don’t put a lot of energy into them because it’s so random, time consuming, and tedious.

Extracting water from cactus is still something worth keeping in mind if I ever build an ore rig in a desert biome. That will give me local water collection for making drilling fluid even without rain.

Bees are from Forestry. I’ve got Forestry, but I haven’t put any effort into bees this time because, like IC2 crops, making progress is slow and somewhat labor intensive. I’ve also got the problem that I’m playing with Vivecraft, and the 1.7.10 version of Vivecraft has a bug that makes bees fail to render in inventory. I can select them and move them around, but there are no icons. I brought it up with the Vivecraft devs and they said they didn’t care because 1.7.10 is old and it doesn’t happen in later versions.

I’ve converted my steam power production to use 3 large turbines running Ultimet rotors for some 1,500 EU/tick (the displayed output keeps fluctuating between 1200 and 1800, presumably because the EV dynamos don’t emit a packet until they hit 2,048 EU).

Setting up the first turbine and figuring out how I’d re-configure power distribution took considerable time, but building turbines 2 and 3 went pretty quickly. Compared to most multiblocks, the large turbines are somewhat simple, with only 5 special blocks (controller, maintenance, dynamo, input and output hatches).

It helped considerably that I only had to build one set of redstone logic for control, and turn them all on or off together. The logic is as I laid out earlier - one set of comparators and a RS latch to check available energy storage, and one for available steam. The turbines turn on if the battery is nearly empty and there’s steam available, and turn off if the battery is full or steam runs out.

Running out of steam should never happen, but there could be some reason why the boilers shut down.

In practice both the turbines and the boilers run fairly steadily since the output energy buffer and steam buffer are large. If the turbines are running continuously due to load, the boilers run 13 minutes on / 2.4 minutes off since they produce 20% more steam than the turbines consume.

Peak demand so far has been about 2,400 EU/tick, but I expect that will go up dramatically once I build some actual EV machinery. So far my only actual EV consumer is my disassembler. I know the Tungstate electrolysis requires 2k EU/tick, and all of the Resin Board electronics also require circuit assemblers demanding 2k EU/tick each.

That's a nice efficiency scheme but it doesn't have much about safety. The one very crucial thing is d.water amount in boiler input because if there are any loss in steam condencation process or pipe system (or some glitch happens) d.water will deplete before steam and so it will all be fiery and messy at one point. Thats also true about LHE.

Also how do you bring exact amount of steam to turbine if your production is more? Do you use fluid regulator or manage it by pipe material/size? Or does steam tank acts in way of actual buffer by itself?

In case of tungsten extraction it's more about hydrogen, be sure to have it much (I use methane+water reaction, but it's now costly on CH4)

The turbines don’t explode, as far as I know, so they don’t need redstone logic for safety.

The boilers have had automatic logic to shut down if they get below 80% water since I built them. I think I said that earlier.

There’s a MV distillery in the loop that adds distilled water if the distilled water buffer gets below a certain amount. Right now it’s set to 50%, which means a reserve of 64,000 L of water. Even though it’s supposed to be a closed loop, I added that in case there are losses in practice or I screw up somehow. Worst case is that the boilers shut down, rather than explode.

Pipes are completely unreliable as a method of fluid regulation. Each steam turbine has a fluid regulator on the input hatch.

I have a large hydrogen reserve tank. So far, hydrogen production from ore processing has far outstripped demand, so I have logic to burn off excess hydrogen in a MV gas turbine.

I’m not sure, as yet, what I’ll do if I need additional hydrogen production beyond electrolysis of things like bauxite. I’ve got a water electrolysis setup, but it’s really too slow to do much good. I put it together early on because I thought it would help with oxygen, but it didn’t, really. For a while I was doing a lot of cobblestone -> sand -> glass -> silicon dioxide -> silicon + oxygen, but not so much recently because I’m using aluminum a lot more often than steel.

The steam turbines were mostly about reducing my water consumption and getting some practical experience with large turbines, which I’d never done before. That it boosted my steam power production by 500 EU/tick was a nice bonus, but I’m aware that I’ll shortly be venturing into territory where 500 EU/tick is a trivial amount of energy.

The efficiency of the steam turbines hardly seems worth it at this stage, given that they’re 4x3x3 structures that only produce as much power as a single-block HV turbine. They should be a lot more attractive when they can produce 900+ EU/tick with better rotors.

I’m pretty fuzzy about the transition from this stuff to plasma turbines fed by fusion reactors. I know those produce an absurd amount of energy (27,000 EU/tick or more), but I don’t know that there’s a lot in between.

For the water production: I remember someone doing a setup with a snowman creating infinite snow. Then ME Annihilation Plane creates snowballs from that snow which can be turned into water in the fluid extractor.

The snowman thing is too far afield for me. If I’m going to do something that wonky, I’d just as soon use a block that creates infinite water. Both feel equally unrealistic / cheaty.

When I set up a drill over a magnesium site, I enabled an option in Agricraft which allows the water tanks to fill if there’s a water source block above them. Because the magnesium site happened to be under the ocean, and it felt reasonable that tapping the bottom of the ocean should yield infinite water.

I do have a desert bauxite site I want to drill. Not so much for aluminum, which I have far too much of right now, as for the rutile dust, since I’m running short on titanium. I just need to decide whether I’m happier shipping drilling fluid in, setting up a cactus farm to extract water, or maybe collecting water in a nearby plains biome and piping it in.

If its about realism, I think you actually can enable vanilla water respawn mechanics but restrict yourself to only use water from big natural reservoirs. Machine hull + drain cover + pump (may be multiple) will resolve water problem without breaking IRL logic. (I mean, its impossible to deplete an ocean, isn't it?)

I’ve left the vanilla water respawn mechanics alone, I’m just playing with some self-imposed rules. Mostly that I can’t draw huge amounts of water out of a puddle or a magic block, which is how most mods do water sources.

This means, again according to my personal rules, I can only collect rainwater or tap a truly large water source like the ocean. It didn’t occur to me to use a drain cover in my under-ocean tap. I’m sure that would have worked, though I’m fine with the wooden Agricraft tanks acting as collectors. They’re open on top and look like they should be able to collect water from the bottom of the ocean.

Unfortunately, the Gregtech 5U pump will empty out the ocean if used there, and gets a trivial amount of water for doing it. I have one, but it’s only for collecting lava. Which I rationalize as a more limited resource. Particularly since lava can be centrifuged for resources, including tungstate.

Very, very small amounts of tungstate. I drained one local lava deposit and got about 4 tungstate dust out of the whole thing, which isn’t enough to electrolyze. I have toyed with the idea of emptying large portions of the Nether lava lakes for this, but I haven’t given up on finding a vein near me. I’ve only prospected about 30 3x3 chunks.

I was incorrect, I meant pump cover on same machine hull connecting to pipe system, so you can pipe water wherever you want. Drain will not empty an ocean because it only takes 1 block of water in front of it periodically. It said that you can even attach it to GT pipe, although I've never tested it this way.

IMO lava centrifuging is inefficient, just postprocess to logically get rid of cooled down in LHE lava. Outcome is so miserable that it just not worth energy and time spent.

Don't give up, It took me 100 or so 3x3s to find almost all minerals that spawns in overworld (exept iridium/osmium, haven't found it till now), so good luck to you.

Iridium and osmium don’t spawn as ore veins. Yes, Gregtech has entries for ore blocks for both of them, and NEI shows ore processing for them, but they don’t spawn unless you add an entry to the config. It appears that platinum sludge is intended to be the only way to obtain them from ore.

In practice, treasure chests in villages, temples, abandoned mine shafts, and the like are a far more plentiful source of iridium.

I should check how much I’ve got of each. I know I’ve only got about 20 platinum, all obtained from processing chalcopyrite for sludge.

EDIT: I looked at the vein table again, and while there’s no entry from osmium, iridium does generate as a rare block in a platinum vein. Which is a very rare vein, about 0.25% of 3x3s should have it.

There's quite easy way to get platinum: centrifuge redstone for mercury (or electrolyze cinnabar) then use it on crushed nickel ore in chemical bath. It's only about time since redstone centrifuging is long process, and with ore drilling rig you got that in thousands (also you gain ruby dust for chrome and pyrite for iron).

Iridium spawns in end in small ores, but it's not in great demand through game. Osmium is rather valuable (currently get it through ic2 crops but its very slow process, on par with sludge centrifuging and uum replication I guess. There another quite easy way by using fusion reactor but you need that at first).

I don’t use a lot of nickel, so I’m not really on top of what it produces when washed with mercury. I do have nickel deposits, but I haven’t really mined them beyond getting some cobalt early on.

I do, of course, have a mercury bath setup. In fact, just recently I set up a separate centrifuge for bulk-centrifuging redstone, and a big tank to hold the mecury. Prior to this I only had a very small (48 bucket) tank for mercury, but I was very short of chrome, and I had large reserves (2000+) of redstone, so I wanted the redstone -> ruby dust -> chrome process, but I didn’t want to just throw away the extra mercury.

Near as I can tell, mercury has little value beyond ore washing. You can “burn” it for power in one-shot batteries, but that seems like a waste. It’s also a fuel for Magic power converters, again a bit of a waste. The extra copper, gold, and silver you get from mercury washing seems a lot more valuable.

Up until recently, the only use I had for platinum was carbon fiber. Which it produces at very low cost (1 platinum = about 70 carbon fiber). When I looked into wireless redstone transmission to control the turbines, I discovered that those covers require EV emitters / receivers, which in turn require platinum rods. You can run through a lot of platinum in a hurry in you go into wireless redstone logic in a big way.

I ended up going wired for the turbines, which you can do now that multi-block casings transmit redstone signals. Still, I’ve got the wireless stuff in mind. Wireless redstone is potentially very convenient, and I tested that it works in / out of Compact Machines. I could, for example, broadcast the state of the steam buffer wirelessly, and every control circuit that cares about that could listen to that signal.

I also see that platinum is the only -1 EU/meter cable for 8kV. Clearly it’s way too rare and expensive for that. Unfortunately there’s no cheap alternative like aluminum. I guess that most people use tungsten steel cable, which is -2 EU/meter, but much easier to obtain once you’ve got a tungsten deposit.

I checked platinum sources, and sure enough, washing crushed nickel ore with mercury is the only meaningful source of platinum as a by product, and far more productive than platinum sludge. I had around 1500 crushed nickel in storage from ore rigs, so I dumped a bunch of it into my ore processing system to get some more platinum.

I’ve got 11 Osmium and 31 Iridium at this point. 20 of the iridium is loot from treasure chests.

I’m setting up the ore rig for bauxite. Man, compared to just going out and mining, the prep time is huge. Much of the day, really.

Part of the issue was this was my first surface mine, the previous three were all underground. Of course that meant I had to build a shelter from the rain, and I ended up building a substantial little castle rather than just leave a big ugly stone cube on the site. It’s still rectangular in shape, but it has proper walls with anti-spider defenses and a few decorative touches like crenellations. Kind of silly for something that’s essentially throw away, something I’ll abandon once the site is exhausted.

The actual surface site turned out to be in the plains, not the nearby desert as I thought, so I threw in a wooden water collector tank and a minimum-size (3x3x4) Railcraft tank to store water. My plan is to have lubricant and drilling fluid cars in the train, and send the train back early if drilling fluid runs out locally. Which should only happen if there’s not enough water on site.

Even though it’s substantial work, it feels like the time investment is worth it, since drilling one site is like mining 3 sites by hand, and I don’t have to hand-carry anything back and forth or go through the tedium of branch mining.

I also think the process of setting up drills will go faster as I get more practiced. Throwing up the drill itself goes very quickly. It’s setting up the support stuff that still takes a little time, like the on-site drilling fluid production and the redstone control logic.

Plus there’s laying down track, though each new segment of track I lay is something I’ll probably be able to use to reach later sites.

I made an IV disassembler.... and it's really useless. To disassemble a LV machine it needs more than 400secs, so there isn't any reason to waste millions of EU to save a bit of copper and iron. The only thing you could use it for then is to disassemble electric tools, but considering how much tungsten it took to build, an EV one or even lower would still be better, since you could disassemble more tools than you'd ever use before the loss of materials would exceed the cost of the machine.

I tend to look at EU as being free. Mainly because I emphasize renewable fuel sources (i.e. trees converted to charcoal) or largely hands off (i.e. my oil rig). The cost for setting up the power infrastructure is significant, and a project that never really ends, but once it’s in place I don’t hesitate to use it.

90% of the reason to have any kind of dissambler is the electric tools. They’re very expensive compared to simple pickaxes if you can’t recycle them when they’re near breaking. They’re quite reasonable if you can salvage 90% of the parts.

Even with electric tools, most of them don’t get really heavy use. It’s the drills that get significant wear, not chainsaws, screwdrivers, or wrenches. Even if you’re using ore rigs for your ore mining (as I am), there’s usually significant wear digging tunnels.

I don’t see myself making an IV disassembler for the extra savings, even though I regularly use a MV drill, which means some loss of titanium every time I rebuild it. I’m glad I have the EV disassembler, though.

If past experience is any guide, eventually you get to a point where things that used to look prohibitively expensive are now cheap enough to do anyway. I don’t care about the steel cost of anything since I have so much iron and I can make more steel very rapidly. Stainless steel doesn’t look so bad since I have hundreds of manganese, though I’ll probably have to drill a redstone deposit for more chrome soon. Titanium will be plentiful as soon as I finish drilling my current bauxite deposit.

Tungsten is, of course, completely prohibitive for me since I haven’t found any at all. I imagine, though, that it starts to feel cheap and plentiful if you’ve gone to the End, killed the dragon, and flown around setting up ore drills there. I gather that tungstate is common there, though I’ve never been there.