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

Larger input hatches definitely do not help. Large input hatches actually hurt the large steam turbines for the reasons I outlined, and a large water input hatch for the boiler doesn’t really change how it behaves at all. About the only thing you get from a larger input hatch on the boiler is a larger water reserve.

My distilled water reserve is a small external tank. Even so, as long as the reserve is large enough to hold all the water generated by the turbines when the steam tank bottoms out, and thus all the stored steam is converted to water, the reserve tank size doesn’t matter.

I’ve taken a couple of steps to address it, because the water destruction was actually getting kind of serious if I put the system under significant load. The destruction is per boiler startup, and if the system runs continuously for a while, the repeated boiler starts (every 12 minutes or so) were outpacing my MV distillery’s ability to keep up.

I’ve added a 2nd MV distillery, which increases the amount of water converted, but the main thing I did was throttle one of the boilers by 5000 L/sec, so they boilers only outpace the turbines by 5,000 L/sec instead of 10,000 L/sec. This means that if the turbines are running continuously, a cycle takes twice as long.

Maybe it was larger output hatches that helped. One issue I saw was that more steam was generated per tick than the smaller output hatches could handle and some would get voided.

Yeah, that can happen with boilers. Boilers generate steam on a per-second cycle, not per-tick, and your output hatches must have enough space to contain a full second's steam output.

This isn't as much of a constraint as it might seem, since you can have any number of output hatches in the top layer. If a hatch is full, excess goes to the next hatch, so it's only the total space that matters. I typically go with 2-3 output hatches depending on what pipes I can make and afford when I build the boiler.

Since a LV output hatch holds 16,000 L, if you have 2 hatches this only becomes a problem when you hit Tungsten Steel boilers. Usually it's the pipes that are the limit, not the hatches themselves. If you only build a single hatch, it's a potential problem as soon as you upgrade to steel (24,000 L/sec).

I finally got my first distillation tower up and running, converting crude oil to heavy fuel, light fuel, naphtha, and refinery gas, and converting the heavy fuel and naphtha to light fuel for eventual conversion to cetane diesel.

The refinery gas I’m converting to LPG. It’s currently set up to only burn LPG if demand outstrips what the boiler / turbine setup can provide. I probably have to set up something to force it to burn LPG earlier if the LPG tank gets full. Otherwise the other lines can potentially stall.

That’s a problem that’s only going to get worse if I delve further into petroleum refining. Cracking light fuel or refinery gas ends up producing a couple of other flammable gasses like ethane and methane, each of which will need its own management system to ensure they’re used and the distillation doesn’t stall.

I guess the alternative is to set up the distillation towers so they don’t care about overflow for some output hatches. Right now the crude oil distillation tower is set up to stop if any output hatch fills with 75% fluid. I could change it so, for example, it doesn’t care if refinery gas gets thrown away.

I’m also aware that I should probably set up high octane gasoline synthesis, which means the emphasis goes from producing light fuel (as it works at present) to producing naphtha, with some cracking required for the trace additives like butene. Light fuel then becomes an intermediate product that gets converted to naphtha in a distillation tower.

The number of steps involved make my head hurt, though. There’s 6 additional compounds - butane, butene, tert-butyl ether, acetic acid, and methanol - that I’m not currently making, plus the mixing.

Not to mention there’s some logistics issues in changing over. I’ve got a storage tank for cetane diesel I’d want to use up, plus trains that are currently set up transport fuel to the fuel and ore rigs.

Which brings me to the other thing that’s on my mind - I’m feeling burned out.

I’m doing a lot of work to upgrade my power generation. Which for the moment feels unnecessary since the upgraded steam setup is providing 95% of my energy needs. It’s only the remote sites that absolutely need fuel to run, and they only really sip at my fuel production.

I’m aware, though, that the next steps involve upping my power usage to 8K, maybe 10K eu / tick. Tungsten processing requires 2kV electrolysis, and the epoxy board electronics are all 2kV assembly recipes. The steam plant is simply not up to providing that kind of energy.

Which brings me to wonder “why am I doing this?”

Getting seriously into 2kV and 8kV tech feels like a repetition of what I’ve done before, only with bigger numbers. A lot of the qualitative changes in play are behind me. Now it’s more about graduating to better materials without changing much.

Most of the real changes feels like they’re on the energy side, actually. The completely new tasks like distillation towers, fuel crackers, more complicated fuel synthesis, and maybe even a liquid-cooled reactor are all about power production.

Apparently multiblocks don't like to have pipes or cables around when you are building them. I had already laid out the pipes and cables for three turbines before building them; the first two worked correctly, the third one just wouldn't form. I tried moving it several times, and when I removed all the pipes around it worked first try. It's not even the first time it happens.

I’ve never had that problem. Every time I’ve had a multiblock fail to form, it was because I’d forgotten one of the casings. Usually on the bottom layer, where I couldn’t see it.

I generally only place cables and pipes below a multiblock before building it. Anything that’s going to connect above that, I do after I’ve placed the multiblock. I usually find pipes pipes placed before to blocks get in the way of building it. Items below the multiblock I place first for the same reason - the multiblock is going to obstruct my view of the pipes or cables below it.

Yeah I stopped after the first stage of plastics in GT5U. After making it to tier 3 fusion in GT5E I don't feel like there's enough stimulating challenges to justify the work. When there are maybe twenty people on the planet who have played as much GT5 as us and it isn't holding our interest anymore then I guess it's near the end of its run.

I did see greg mention a dream of a dedicated game in his GT6 changelog. That got me excited. Since it's not something he's even working on it's not like it's something I ever expect to happen, but it did sound interesting. Minecraft really feels like the limit aspect in many areas. Survival games somewhat in vogue and there are even occasionally interesting industrial games. None of them properly capture the hardcore design challenges or the sense of scale that GT gives. Like when I put my first nuclear reactor online in factorio all I thought was "oh neat, power is no longer a concern". In GT making the first tiny bit of steam is a massive hurdle, as is supplying enough to make 32 EU/t, then 128 EU/t, then figuring out a tree farm that can sustain 512 EU/t, then figuring out all of the systems of IC2 nuclear, the mind bending LHE+ turbines fueled by nether lava, and, my absolute favorite, fusion power. Each of those things take more raw materials, processing, space, and design work. It's not just, place a block and collect reward. The player needs to learn the rules and be clever. Hopefully there will be more games in the future that consider these design themes.

Quote from willis936

Like when I put my first nuclear reactor online in factorio all I thought was "oh neat, power is no longer a concern".

When I was putting together the distillation tower and the supporting desulfination machines, hydrogen sulfide processing, and processing to create light fuel, I kept thinking about how oil refining works in Factorio.

Factorio doesn’t give you a single-block distillery like GT5U does. Basic refining in Factorio is akin to the GT5U distillation tower, you get 3 outputs (heavy oil, light oil, and natural gas). What was uppermost in my mind is that somehow, despite having 3 dimensions to work with instead of 2, plumbing for the distillation tower in GT5U is a much uglier problem than in Factorio. I’ve learned the art of clean design for moving Factorio’s petroleum products around, and yet tackling a similar problem in GT5U ended with a tangle of pipes.

Seriously, recently I’ve been thinking that GT5U is primarily a game about plumbing (and somewhat about wiring). I spend more time on that than anything else, and it’s a problem that gets steadily worse every time I add another pipe to the web.

Maybe it’s just that it’s all crammed into a much smaller space. Factorio bases are huge, sprawling affairs by mid-game, and I’m still more or less in a 64 x 64 space. With a lot of stuff stacked vertically, since the 3rd dimension is there and I try and take advantage of it by building stuff on multiple floors instead of spreading out horizontally.

Quote from isaac2526

the first two worked correctly, the third one just wouldn't form. I tried moving it several times, and when I removed all the pipes around it worked first try. It's not even the first time it happens.

Bet I know this issue, took me couple of hours to figure out: 9 blocks in front of turbine must be completely free of anything beyond air. In my case that was a torch that prevented turbine to form (in some tries it formed partly: hatches became included but multiblock did not form in the end). I think its specific to large turbines and large diesel engines only.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

I’m doing a lot of work to upgrade my power generation. Which for the moment feels unnecessary since the upgraded steam setup is providing 95% of my energy needs.

In fact you will not need to grow power generation much from this point. Once I realized that it's not necessary to have IV power income to run IV or even LuV tier machinery because they usually don't have lenghty operations. You only need it in short times but for quite big voltage, so it's best to use transformers and battery buffers when needed. Recently i had income of 3150 eu/t and it was pretty enough for me to build fusion reactor, make naquadah heating coils and get familiar with crystalprocessors family. For a big bonus you can move batteries wherever you want without losing charge and even store it in containers for some special events or emergency.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

It’s only the remote sites that absolutely need fuel to run

That is perfectly solved by using a compact thorium fueled 1-block nuclear reactor that generates ~128 eu/t, enough for MV tier ODP and auxillary machinery. You only need to provide water and do some material routing (also use hazmat suit when extracting used thorium fuel rods). You can even throttle it to 64 eu/t and it will still work with some nuances on start.

Quote from Gus_Smedstad

Seriously, recently I’ve been thinking that GT5U is primarily a game about plumbing (and somewhat about wiring). I spend more time on that than anything else, and it’s a problem that gets steadily worse every time I add another pipe to the web.

Don't know is it in accordance with your rules but there are mod pressure pipes that simplifies piping in some way, maybe you'll find it useful.

Also there are new combined pipes in GT5U as it lists on NEI, but I haven't tested if they working yet.

I’ve used the 4 and 9 pipe variants. They work.

The main drawbacks are that you really must use fluid filters with them once a specific fluid branches off to a destination, and you can’t really color code them since they’re carrying multiple fluids.

I think of fluid filters as being expensive, since they require 2 Advanced circuits each. That’s somewhat legacy thinking, since I have a MV electronics assembly line that produces Advanced circuits somewhat cheaply, though it takes time. I’m also really awash in most materials at this point below tungsten, so material expense isn’t that important unless it’s tungsten or osmium or something.

Lack of color coding bothers me, since I’ve found color coded pipes highly useful for understanding what I’m seeing at a glance, and for finding existing pipes if I need to route a fluid somewhere new.

One thing I could try, which may or may not work, would be to paint the pipes for the color of one fluid, and slap colored covers on the pipes to identify the others. So I could do a yellow pipe with periodic green covers to identify a bundle with light fuel and oxygen.

That’s somewhat pricey in terms of materials, since each cover is an ingot, but as I said I have lots of materials. I’m not sure what colors are available off the top of my head.

I’m reluctant, but not totally opposed to adding mods to solve problems. I don’t like to feel like I’m “cheating,” and most mods tend to have lower costs than Gregtech, but I can always use Minetweaker to adjust costs if it really bugs me.

So I’ll take a look at Pressure Pipes. My main reservation is the pipe identification issue - most mods don’t let you arbitrarily re-color their pipes. Some have transparent fluid pipes, like Thermal Expansion’s pipes, but that does not help if the pipe is currently empty.

I looked at Pressure Pipes, and my initial thought is that it’s too powerful for my taste. Infinite transfer speed and infinite varieties of liquid in one pipe is too far in the other direction for me.

On the positive side, it’s microblocks compatible. You can’t color code the pipes, but you can slice any block you like to make covers for it, so you can make colored wrappers easily enough.

Buildcraft may be of choice, it hasn't this unrealistic traits yet Forge Multipart compatible and has kind of it's own built-in pipe logic. Maybe its pipes can be painted too, dunno. Along it has logic gates and some other stuff that may be interesting to you. Pipes are quite cheap but you have Minetweaker so... Also its pipes are partly transparent and you can put facades from almost any block on them.

iirc BC pipes don't have nearly enough throughput. They are slightly easier to work with but functionally GT pipes are capable of getting more fluid per second through a block than BC pipes.

For the majority of the gasses and petroleum products I move around, I’m using tiny plastic pipes because they’re cheap and I don’t care too much about flow rate.

Off the top of my head, the main exceptions are steam, which requires huge volumes and which I move only short distances, water, and oxygen. For water and oxygen I use normal plastic pipes (7,200 L/sec) for the trunk and tiny pipes (1200 L/sec) for the branches.

My impression is that most mods are in the 1200-2400 L/sec range for maximum flow. Because most mods use less materials than GT, including less fluids.

Anyway, for the moment I’ve taken a break from power plant engineering and plumbing tangles and I’m prospecting for tungsten via seismic prospector. It’s been pretty tedious. I’ve found some better oil sources, but otherwise it’s mostly been ores for which I already have known sources, like iron, Oilsands, uranium, and emeralds.

Because of the ore drilling rig I’ve got a real storage problem. My main ore repository has 50,000 crushed ore in it, and I’m hand-carrying the excess to my secondary storage, which has another 65,000 crushed ore in it. Most of which I’ll probably never use.

I wish I could figure out some automated way of putting the excess into the secondary storage, but there’s no way to test for “I’ve already got a lot of that.” I guess that’s why people indulge in things like Applied Energistics or Storage Drawers. Those always felt cheaty to me, but I haven’t had such excessive storage needs before.

138 sites surveyed. Mostly by seismic prospector.

3 manganese sites found.

4 diamond veins.

No tungsten.

Quote from CrazyIvan

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.

I started a new mining site in the middle of a desert, far enough in that shipping water in from another biome didn't look much more practical than just shipping drilling fluid from my home base. So I looked into this cactus-for-water idea.

It doesn't work. IC2 crop sticks won't take cactus, it's not a valid IC2 plant. Reed is, but not cactus.

Agricraft's crop sticks, which are based on IC2's, will take cactus. But yield is the Cactus Green dye, not cactus, and it can't be extracted for water.

I tried straight vanilla cactus, harvested either with an Ancient Warfare farm, or a Forestry multifarm. The growth rate is so slow that even with a very large (16 x 16) plot devoted to cactus, the water yield is trivial. Maybe 1 L / second, about 1/1000th of the demand of a mining rig.

For the moment the site is running on imported drilling fluid, but it's slow. I need to look around to see if I have any other options (short of using an infinite water source, which is against my personal rules).

Fair point about the Eating Plant. That one generally isn’t on my radar because it’s difficult to breed (no level 5-7 crops share keywords with it) the requirements are a bit stiff and awkward (lava underneath it), and ordinarily the demand for cactus is very low (dye only). I’ve got a cactus autofarm, but I don’t care that it’s only produced 300 cactus in months of play because I don’t use much.

With yield and growth 10+, I suspect it could cross the 2 cactus / second required to keep up with a mining rig, but the effort required to do so is high enough that I probably won’t explore that. It’s mostly the lava requirement, which is a PITA and potentially dangerous.

It doesn’t help that it’s not possible to test IC2 crops in creative just by plopping stuff down. Breeding a particular high-stat plant is just as time consuming in creative as in regular play.