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

It took me a while to summon the energy to look into this.

I loaded a pre-collision backup and tested the locking track logic with a minecart placed in various locations. The signal logic worked as expected in each case. In hindsight, I really should have done this before starting the trains.

I have a backup that clearly happens within moments after the crash. The debris is still at the intersection and hasn’t despawned yet. It’s clear the electric lithium ore train was in the intersection, and somehow smashed into the steam tungsten ore train that was waiting to enter the intersection.

It’s possible it was just a timing error caused by chunk loading on game start. The crash definitely occurred within seconds of when I started that session, because it’s a start-of-session backup. If so, it’s just spectacularly bad luck that they were there exactly then.

It’s also possible the tungsten locomotive was too close to the crossing track. The locking track was immediately adjacent to the X intersection track, and I suppose the hit boxes of the two locomotives might have collided even though they weren’t in the same block. I’ve noticed the collision testing of carts in general is erratic.

I moved that locking track 1 block back, so there’s a full block separating it from the intersection. The other 2 locking tracks aren’t anywhere near crossing track.

I also added an additional test that looks at the tungsten-return track. If there’s a train within 12 blocks, an outbound train can’t enter the intersection. A race condition should no longer be possible, by the time the inbound tungsten train reaches the locking track, either the outbound train has left the intersection, or the outbound train is locked down because it detected the inbound tungsten train early.

The Lithium deposit played out, so I went about disassembling the ore drilling rig. Incidentally, if there’s some way to automate detection of when this happens, I’d be interested in hearing it. The drill will continue to move up and down while consuming lubricant and power and producing nothing. My train kept running back and forth doing not much.

I tried to send the Lithium train to a siding, but screwed it up and sent both the Tungsten and Lithium trains off to the siding. I discovered the hard way that rear-end collisions between trains don’t seem to have any negative consequences. Unlike the earlier, unseen collision that produced an explosion.

Processing the tungsten is taking a long time, so I thought I’d take a stab at upgrading my electronics assembly line to use epoxy circuit boards. Partly just to have a goal, but partly because 2kV stuff requires Exteme circuits, which are slow to make with plastic circuit boards. The Epoxy board process should be much faster and less expensive in materials, since the plastic board process involves 6 good -> 2 advanced -> 1 extreme, and the epoxy process is 3 advanced -> 1 extreme.

Epoxy turned out to be more involved than I expected. Prior plastics (polyethylene, polychloride, PTFE ) were pretty simple. This one required benzene and Propene, neither of which I was producing, and a 3 liquid chemical reaction, which meant 2 liquids in cells rather than piped in.

For benzene, I added a distillation tower to my pyrolyse oven, giving me toluene, creosote, and benzene. There are a couple of ways to get benzene from heavy fuel or refinery gas, but they produce a host of byproducts I don’t know how to use yet. For Propene I’m converting ethylene, which I’m producing from ethanol. Ethanol is a byproduct of my tree farm, and “free” if the demand isn’t too high.

To deal with the 3 liquid problem, I made a large chemical reactor, which can deal with 3 liquid inputs directly instead of needing fluid cells. First time I’ve seen the point in making one.

Drill will stop when it will use up all mining pipes. You can check vein's height manually so you can put exact quantity of pipes in rig. There is activity detector cover that emits RS and with use of wireless redstone you can do whatever you want.

Large chemical reactor is great thing because it does not lose efficiency when overclocked. That will be great when you will make radon or titanium or indium. Most LV recipes will go instant on EV.

For other machines you will need to make processing arrays (which is quite heavy on materials and technology, compared to cheap PTFE for LCR)

I’m not clear on how the activity detector cover would help with checking whether the rig has finished, since the rig continues to run after it’s exhausted all the ore.

I don’t particularly want to stop when the main vein is done. What I really want to know is when the site is completely exhausted, including small ores and ores from nearby veins that happen to fall inside the drill’s operating radius. The work involved in setting up a mining site is considerable, so I really want everything I can get out of it. Even if some of the return is low-value stuff like small iron ores.

One thing I noticed was that if you include an input bus and mining pipe, the drill will maintain a stack of 64 mining pipe in the main block. When it finishes and starts back up, pipe that would exceed 64 in the main block goes into the output bus. I could divert any mining pipe returned into a separate chest, detect whether there’s anything in the chest with a comparator, and broadcast that information with a wireless redstone cover.

I’m aware that the large chemical reactor overclocks faster than the small reactors, but I haven’t seen a case yet where I cared enough about that to make a 3x3 block instead of one or maybe two single block reactors. I’ve made some 800 ingots of titanium, and haven’t felt the need. Time to smelt the titanium is slower than making the titanium tetrachloride in the chemical reactor.

I’ve noticed some chemical reactions are slow, but generally it hasn’t mattered because they effectively run in the background, and with buffering they don’t hold anything up. For example, making circuit boards at LV is slow, but if I keep a stockpile of a couple hundred, I’ve always got enough on hand when I want them.

There are some LV blocks in my ore processing that feel like they’re holding things up, but they aren’t chemical reactors. I should really replace them with HV blocks, I built most of the line when power was in much shorter supply.

That's strange, my rig just retracts all pipes when reach bedrock and turning off for good, it does not start over and over again. Restarting seems only possible to me if machine controller is used, forcing "enabled" state repeatedly.

Everything gets clear in comparsion. I had one or two simple reactors for each power tier up to EV, but when started using LCR I forgot about them completely. It's even more comfortable, you don't need to calculate liquid amount in recipes for exact matching solidifier's molds later or plunge excess reagents while losing them, output hatches can even fill fluid cells by themselves so you can load a bunch of materials and large cells and go doing your business elsewhere. Excess reagents can be retrieved by universal fluid cells and be used again later.

I’m using machine controllers. I habitually use machine controllers on all multiblock machines, at a minimum to turn them off if the output bus or hatch gets full. I wasn’t aware that I was glitching an auto-shutoff feature if I did this.

For the drill I just disassembled, a machine controller was also necessary because it regularly ran out of drilling fluid. It needed to be forced on regularly.

Calculate exact fluids for chemical reactors? Plunge the inputs? I don’t do that. For any machine with a liquid input tank, I build dedicated setups for that task, or tasks if their are multiple things I can do with that fluid.

For example, I have a chemical reactor taking oxygen that does nothing but make sodium persulfide for ore washing. It’s a common, repetitive task that’s never going away. I have a chemical reactor that does nothing but make titanium tetrachloride from chlorine. I have one filled with water that makes crystals from dusts and sodium, such as nether quartz dust -> nether quartz.

Similarly, my fluid solidifiers are all dedicated machines. They’re LV, cheap to make and cheap to run. I’ve got plastic, PTFE, polychloride, and epoxy solidifiers. Heck, I’ve even got one that makes snowballs for Pam’s cooking.

I even do this with assemblers. The ones filled with polyethylene and soldering alloy are the ones I use almost constantly, but I’ve got a couple for more unusual tasks like molten redstone and concrete (for plascrete).

I do have a metalworking room with some general purpose machines. A metal bender, a wire mill, a lathe, and a cutting machine, each with input and output buffers. None of those are dedicated to specific tasks. Even so, I’ve built dedicated wire mills and metal bender chains for my electronics room, since those demand fine wire and films constantly, and running regular wires and plates through a second time was getting too tedious. It’s so much easier to just put redstone and copper in one end and get fine redstone alloy wire out the other.

My base is all about automation and assembly lines. I do as little hand-carrying as I can manage, and I still do a lot more than I want.

Speaking of calculating things, I’m finding large turbine math kind of irritating, and I haven’t even built a fluid cooled reactor yet.

Large turbines and large boilers both have start-up costs, so it’s important to match steam production to steam consumption as closely as possible. You can throttle large boiler output, which I’m doing, and that helps considerably, but I’m vaguely irritated that I’m forcing my 64,000 L/sec boilers to perform at less than maximum.

I’ve got tungsten now, so I’m contemplating upgrading to large rotors. I’d kind of like to bring the total steam consumption up to closer to 64,000 L/sec, and the numbers aren’t friendly. It’s basically the knapsack problem, taking a variety of different-sized rotors and trying to make them add to 64,000.

I’m looking at 130% and 140% efficiency rotors of 400k+ durability. I can make and afford vanadium steel (130% / 9000), titanium (130% / 21,000), tungsten (130% / 21,000), tungsten steel (140% / 24,000), ultimet (140% / 27,000) and tungsten carbide (140% / 42,000). Actually, tungsten carbide is only 384k durability, but I’m including it because it’s close, and the flow rate is dramatically higher than the others, which means fewer turbines.

There’s no combination of 140% rotors that comes that close to 64,000 without going over. 2x Ultimet is 54,000, and Tungsten Carbide + Tungsten Steel is 66,000. My best bet is either Tungsten Carbide + Titanium (63,000) or 2x Ultimet + Vanadium Steel (also 63,000).

Since I’ve already built 3 turbines, I’ll probably go with the latter. Higher durability, and less demand on tungsten, which is still in short supply.

This is also on my mind because I’m vaguely feeling that I ought to make a thorium reactor or two because of the lutetium issue. Though if I’m doing that primarily for lutetium, I could just say screw efficiency and make EU reactors, which are a lot simpler and don’t require large steam turbines.

In fact you can use any rotors, just be sure that optimal flow is more than actual flow. Turbine running at 80% of flow just make 80% of its maximal EU while turbine at 120% will make 100%. Water condensed will be in accordance with steam used. From my experience I can only say that HSS-E is good option since it requires less tungsten tan tungstensteel, tungstencarbide, HSS-G. Also it's quite durable compared to other rotors. The only issue that you have to make HSS-G coils to your EBF (which btw demand less tungsten than tungstensteel).

When you will no longer need those rotors you can just smelt them to ingots, macerate to dust and centrifuge to components.

I agree that EU reactors are best for thorium burning, for energy production it's better to use uranium since thorium reactor with approximate HU output will require neutron reflectors.

For the machinery usage it seems that I'm just another type, I don't make assembly lines for operations that will need 1 time a week for 5 minutes or so, but tastes differ, I don't have anything against your style. Although, when recalling my game it's obvious that some automation wouldn't hurt in the end.

I’m really playing this for automation. I enjoy setting up assembly lines. If I could get a decent VR version of Factorio, I’d play that instead, but this is what I’ve got.

Never the less, I think my approach saves time most of the time. Off the top of my head, the situations are:

- Lines that involve multiple machines. These always save me time, because I don’t bother doing this unless it’s clear I’m going to be doing a lot of hand carrying of materials from one machine to the next.

I’ve got some pretty extreme examples of this. Ore processing, dust consolidation, and electronics are the major ones. Ore processing is obvious, since it involves 4-5 steps for almost everything and it’s something you’re constantly doing. Dust consolidation drove me crazy with how tedious and common it was before I could afford the chest regulators that make automated consolidation possible. Electronics often involves 2-3 steps to get the target circuit once you’re up to Extreme (EV) circuits.

Ore processing and dust consolidation is a single assembly line that involves at least a couple of dozen machines fed by a single unified conveyor belt, and emptying on to an output belt that returns all products to the input belt to be examined again. The belts make no assumptions about processing; each machine filters for what it needs. Thus I can dump an ore block into the macerator and know I’ll get full centrifuged / electrolyized dusts from it. It also auto-purifies the miscellaneous impure dusts delivered by train.

There are images of it in the screenshot board.

This category includes the assembly lines for plastics, which always involve a couple of steps. Demand for evertything but PTFE is pretty constant, as polyethylene makes machine hulls, pipes, and surface mount electronic components, polychloride makes plastic circuit boards, and epoxy makes epoxy circuit boards. It would be a nightmare to have to constantly re-purpose a chemical reactor every time I wanted more of any of these.

As it is, if I want another stack of tiny plastic pipes, I just grab a stack of plastic ingots from the solidifier, configure the nearby extruder with the shape I want, and pop them in. No need to make ethanol, covert ethanol to ethylene, and then covert that to polyethylene, it’s all automatic.

- Dedicated machines that duplicate existing machines, but at most only have an input and output buffer. I do this if the machine has a required liquid / gas input, like chemical reactors, or if the existing machine is inconveniently far away and I’m going to need it often at its present location.

The only real “5 minutes, once a week” machines that fall into this category are assemblers with more unusual liquid inputs. The molten redstone one, for example, is really just for making Advanced rails. Still, it takes me less time to make these once and forget about them, than to fiddle with purging the inputs of a general purpose machine.

- General purpose single-block machines, usually with input and output buffers. The metal bender, wire mill, lathe, etc. I use these constantly, and I’m usually dumping 3-4 stacks of ingots into them at a time. They don’t feed anything. Generally they don’t need to be reconfigured because they don’t have liquid inputs. The main one I have to re-program is the metal bender, which is usually in mode 1 (plates), but sometimes needs other modes to make rebar, standard rails, or double-thickness plates.

- The ore drills. These do take considerably more time to set up than just going out and clearing the vein by hand. Partly because of the drill setup, but also because it means running a rail out to a distant site, and that’s time consuming.

The main argument for them is that they’re 3x as productive as mining by hand. It took me a long, long time to find even one tungsten deposit, so getting 3x as much from it is important. That the drill produces a lot of byproducts from small ores and nearby veins is just gravy.

That, and I find mining by hand incredibly boring, and setting up a drill isn’t a mindless task.

Quote from CrazyIvan

In fact you can use any rotors, just be sure that optimal flow is more than actual flow. Turbine running at 80% of flow just make 80% of its maximal EU while turbine at 120% will make 100%.

You know, I really intended to focus on this, but I got sidetracked by automation. Because I love automation.

Point 1 is wrong. A turbine running at 80% of optimal flow makes 64% of its maximum EU. Any time you’re running below optimum, output is (flow * flow / optimal flow). There’s a percentage efficiency penalty in addition to the reduced flow. You really, really don’t want to feed a turbine less than optimal flow.

Point 2 is true, but irrelevant, since you can also throttle the output of the boilers so it matches or comes close to the total optimal flow, using programmed circuits in the boilers. Throttling is better than overfeeding the turbines, because it doesn’t waste boiler fuel.

My issue wasn’t “how do I deal with excess steam production,” because I’m already doing that. My issue is that I want maximum EU/t given my boiler limits, and the large turbine rules are fiddly if you want to do that.

I’m aware of HSS-E turbines . I need to make two upgrades of my blast furnace coils before I can make HSS-E, from Nichrome to Tungsten Steel, and from Tungsten Steel to HSS-G. I’m still thinking of them as “unavailable,” even though I’ll have the tech once I process enough tungsten. I’ve only got about 30 Tungsten Steel right now, but more is on its way.

That said, 2x HSS-E rotors consume 60,000 L and produce 2100 EU/t. 2x Ultimet + 1x vanadium steel consumes 63,000 L and produces 2180 EU/t. The latter produces more energy because it’s a closer fit to the boiler capacity. Like I said, it’s the knapsack problem.

Man, tungsten takes forever to smelt. 10 minutes per ingot! I really had no idea it was going to be this slow. It doesn’t help that you can’t speed up the blast furnace until you’ve got higher heat capacity coils, and the tungsten steel coils aren’t good enough to allow an overclock.

My first priority, then, over improving my turbine rotors, is to upgrade my blast furnace coils. It’s going to take a while to smelt enough tungsten steel to make the 128 HSS-G required to make HSS-G coils.

I did finish upgrading my electronics line to epoxy board tech, so I can now make Extreme (tier 4) and Elite (tier 5) circuits relatively quickly. Though I hadn’t anticipated quite how much carbon fiber this requires to make the nano-CPU wafers. I’m running lots of charcoal through the macerator just to make carbon dust for this.

My clean room is now 7x7x5 (5 x 5 x 3 interior). I’ve got 4 engravers in there, with a hopper for each kind of input on the outside, and a single output. That’s 9 ports, 4 input, 4 power, and 1 output. I can’t add a 5th unless I consolidate power input. I guess I don’t really need the capacity to run all 4 at once.

I could of course just open it and re-configure lenses any time I need to a different type, but that means a delay while the room get clean again. At least testing for 100% clean level is automated, so the machines stay off until it’s safe.

Power consumption is now regularly running over 2000 EU/t, so the turbines are running continuously, and I’m burning cetane diesel for additional power. I’m not exactly clear on how much diesel I’m consuming.

I feel like I’m running out of things to do in Gregtech. Oh, there’s a lot of potential projects, but they all seem to be power-related. I’ve got enough power, at least for now.

For example, I could set up high octane gasoline synthesis. That’s a big project, involving the synthesis of several new compounds, including methanol, acetic acid, gasoline, nitrous oxide, and ethyl tert-butyl ether. Cracking one or more of my existing products would probably be helpful, but not essential.

I could make a large combustion engine.

I could make a thorium reactor. I spent some time in creative, testing that out. I’ve got a stable design that produces 295 EU/tick in EU mode, or 950 heat / tick in fluid mode, which could be converted to about 2600 EU/tick. I think, my tests were inconclusive because I didn’t build enough large turbines to consume all the steam, and I’m not 100% certain how much steam I’m producing. I think it’s 76,000 L/sec, but it’s hard to measure.

High octane gasoline would reduce my oil consumption, but I’m not really outpacing the fairly mediocre 200 L/cycle (25 L/sec) crude oil source I’m drilling. In the same vein, the 512v single-block combustion engines combined with the steam plant are keeping pace with demand. I don’t really need the large combustion engine or the reactor.

I might do any and all of them just to have something to do, but I’d rather have a project that didn’t feel power-related.

Speaking of reactors...

I think I finally have a theoretical understanding of reactor design, rather than just blindly copying internet designs. It helped to actually run a reactor and observe where the heat appeared to be going. A big problem with the simulator for me is that it tells you the result, but doesn’t single-step through the process so you can see why a design failed or succeeded.

Overclocked heat vents have the highest heat dissipation at 20 heat. The best way to get heat into the OC’d vents is to just dump it into the reactor casing, since the OC’d vents draw 36 heat / reactor tick from the casing. Using heat exchangers to move heat to the OC’d vents is always going to be less efficient.

OC’d heat vents will burn if you don’t eliminate the extra 16 heat. The simplest and best way is to surround each one with 4 component heat vents. Component heat vents are the second most efficient vents if fully surrounded, dissipating 16 heat each, better than Advanced heat vents which only dissipate 12. Thus the most efficient layout is always a checkboard of OC’d vents and component vents, averaging 18 heat dissipated per square.

This breaks down at the edges of the grid, or adjacent to fuel rods, where it’s not possible to surround OC’d vents. There, a OC vent | advanced heat exchanger | advanced heat vent | component heat vent pattern is the best you’re going to do. The advanced heat exchanger draws 8 heat from the OC vent and 8 from the reactor shell, gives 16 to the advanced heat vent, where it’s dissipated by the advanced heat vent / component heat vent combo. The component heat vent dissipates an additional 8 from adjacent OC vents, so the total is 44 heat dissipated in 4 components, or 11 average.

I don’t think anything more efficient is possible if you’re making a Mark I design that’s stable. I’m not touching unstable designs or MOX.

In my last base I had 11 fluid reactors all running Mk I with 4 quad thorium cells in the center. It put out a decent amount of power but it was also easy to automate since all that was necessary was to filter extract spent cells and to be constantly trying to dump in new quad cells. The real reason it was made was for a lutetium supply.

That’s a lot of reactors. Between the reactors themselves (5x5x5) and turbines, that must have taken up a lot of space. I’m guessing you only needed one heat exchanger even with that many reactors.

My plan is currently to build just one fluid reactor with 7 quad cells putting out 950 heat / 2600 EU/tick from the turbines. I should make a point of automating the refueling, as you say.

I may have overestimated how my power production is doing right now, because I noticed that I’m now short of wood. Usually I run a backlog from my multiple tree farms, but the conveyor belt and buffers are empty. The boilers are still running, but I don’t know for how much longer. Hopefully the diesel generators can keep pace if the boilers start stuttering.

Power consumption is now around 2500 EU/tick, with peaks of 3000-4000. I’m not sure where all the energy is going, though obviously some is running the blast furnace continuously, and some is to running tungsten electrolysis which is 2000 EU/tick. Though that’s not too often since it requires 7 tungstate to run, and it takes about 3.5 minutes for my ore processing line to accumulate that much.

I hope you have a couple of blast furnaces because, unless you're ready to wait a lot of time, I've found that one just won't cut it. Between all the other materials, the tungsten which takes 10 minutes and needs to be alloyed again with steel and, once you start needing LuV+ components, alloyed once again to HSS, the blast furnace can become easily the bottleneck. I had 4 MVs that runned constantly and a HV one for the recipes that required it and they felt slow, although i really hate waiting for processing times and someone else might find them plenty of smelting power. Then I built the GT++ advanced one with an EV hatch which is , like the other GT++ multiblocks, a bit overpowered compared to "vanilla" GT, since it processes 8 items at the same time and is really quick. It consumes a lot of pyrotheum though (the thermal expansion stuff).

I’ve actually got 3 HV blast furnaces, but only 2 of them are set up to transfer hot ingots to a vacuum freezer. #1 is my steel / general purpose furnace (hooked to oxygen), #2 is my titanium furnace (hooked to titanium tetrachloride), and #3 is my glow stone wafer furnace (hooked to nitrogen). I’ve got 3 because, in my experience, blast furnaces only take one fluid input. You can build multiple input hatches, but the furnace only checks one of them. Maybe that’s changed.

Anyway, the idea of building additional furnaces makes sense. That 10 minute wait for tungsten’s ridiculous, and tungsten steel and HSS-G are what, 6.5 minutes? I remember looking at them but not checking the precise number.

Once I’ve made HSS-G coils, I should be able to overclock tungsten and tungsten steel, bringing the time down to 2.5 minutes for tungsten, but HSS-G requires Naquadah coils to overclock. So building an additional furnace or two might still be a good idea.

iirc a GT LHE wasn't used with the fluid reactors and it was just a large array of single block ic2 liquid heat exchangers and stirling generators. This simplified the control system. The only LHE I had was used in a lava pump setup. If you have access to chunkloading and tesseracts (there are few mods with enough fluid throughput to max out an LHE) this might be an enticing option for power and gold/tungsten generation.

I’m seeing serious water destruction in my boiler -> large turbine loop. I upgraded the rotors the 2x Large Ultimet and 1x Large Vanadium Steel, and the water just started steadily dropping. This isn’t a startup issue, it’s continuous operation. Steam production is closely matched to steam consumption (64,000 L/sec vs. 63,000), and yet the 2x Advanced distilleries could not keep up.

It was so severe that I gave in and built a distillation tower just to make distilled water. It has no trouble at all keeping up with the water destruction, since it can output 626 L/sec, more than the combined consumption of the two boilers (426 L/sec distilled water). Still, I’m profoundly irritated.

The turbines are receiving exactly as much steam as they need, I’ve got fluid regulators feeding them 27,000 L/sec for the ultimet rotors and 9,000 L/sec for the vanadium steel rotor. I’ve verified that all 3 turbines are, in fact, returning water while running. Just not enough to match boiler consumption.

With my prior rotors, the system was stable at ~60,000 L of distilled water in the buffer tank during continuous load. By the time I finished the distillation tower, it was all gone. Fortunately I have shutoff logic on the boilers testing for less than 90% water in the input hatches.

I’m 70% done with my first fluid reactor. All 3 turbines are built, as is the large heat exchanger and the reactor core. The containment vessel is 80% built. I’ve run no plumbing or control logic yet, and I don’t have a production facility for coolant yet.

Rather than run all steam through a steam tank, I’m going to connect the steam output directly and attach an expansion tank to hold any excess steam, with some control logic to turn off the reactor if it gets full. It’s not really possible to exactly match steam production and consumption, though you can get close. Unlike the boilers, you can’t really throttle a heat exchanger. That just ends up backing up hot coolant, which is bad.

I believe my production will be 76,000 L/sec and consumption will be 75,000 L/sec, but we’ll see how it goes in practice. I’ll probably tune the fluid regulators so the excess goes through the turbines, rather feeding the tank, but the tank will give me some leeway to avoid steam destruction (and thus water destruction).

That is, if the steam turbines behave as expected. I don’t think they will, given what’s happening with my boiler / large turbine setup.

Started up my thorium reactor. It’s apparent that my “steam expansion tank” was ill-conceived, it doesn’t behave at all how I imagined it would. Mainly because for it to work, the expansion tank has to empty really, really fast when the exchanger shuts off. The tank needs just as much throughput for dumping steam as a conventional buffer, so I might as well just build a steam buffer tank, the way I did for my boiler setup.

I need to re-organize my reactor room. Which probably isn’t as big a task as it seems at first, though it does mean re-doing to the redstone logic controlling the various shutoffs.