Come on now, guys... There is absolutely no reliable way to get a basic vanilla item until you're a couple of machines into the tech tree. We core players are fine with it, a lot of other people aren't. A config option is in order.
Unless there already is one. I did a cursory search through the configs and didn't find a way to revert it.
I don't play with thaumcraft along with my tech mods. Most of the time my mods are ic2+GT+railcraft+NEI/convenient inv. +bibliocraft/chisel/carpenter's. I started a new world recently and also added forestry, which I won't really get into until I start breeding trees for the intent of a biomass factory. There is no map mod either.
My main complaint isn't so much the scarcity of a single material as the linearity of the mod's progression, though i made my suggestion hoping to increase accessibility while maintaining the challenge. My suggestion is putting those materials that were added to prepare us for the birth of the TFC+GT master race to use right now. Maybe add some form of a tin bottleneck to the early electric age if Greg is hellbent on introducing people to the joys of mountaineering.
I see a lot of "just use X mod" suggestions and I don't like them, however well intentioned they might be. The whole metal transmutation thing really fits thaumcraft's theme and people using the mod are probably planning to put it into use and it's great that this kind of compatibility exists. However, GT is a mod that building up to GT5 did a lot of things to attain independence from other mods, adding its own item transportation, tools, oregen and energy system. Adding bottlenecks isn't foreign to the spirit of GT, but doing so while depending on X or Y other mod for a solution is a bizzare change of direction.
With harderstone true, anything is preferable to mining a block of cobble at that point of the game.
Tin only has a chance of spawning in mountains. Get an unlucky enough seed and you'll be a nomad for a long while before finding a cassiterite vein, which can be extremely frustrating. Along with the visibility issues you mentioned, plus the possibility of having the vein spawn in a location that's 1/3 of a chunk mountain while the rest of the 3x3 is air, which I've had happen more often than I'd like. In one case it was only two levels of ore bellow dirt. Talk about adding insult to injury.
And that's my point, there is way too much luck involved. Giving alternatives to plain bronze for the steam machines is a good way to hedge without shifting the oregen yet again with an underground tin vein, while giving more uses to other metals early on (or in general in some cases) and making enough sense (the Bronze Age was marked by the use of copper alloys, not the magical properties of copper mixed with tin specifically). More casual players won't complain about having to go on a pilgrimage to find tin, and more "hardcore" ones will have a choice between caving, systematically mining prospecting shafts through harderstone, or looking around in mountains.
Tin has been a pet peeve of mine from the start of GT5, and now that more people are being exposed to GT, a lot of them through the beyond reality pack that enables tin from y=60 instead of the vanilla y=80 iirc, there are more and more complaints that tin is too hit-or-miss for the massive amounts you need early game. With this suggestion you get alternatives to getting started with the GT tech-tree, but you'll still need tin for the LV machines of the early electric age and can certainly go about getting started the same way you have up to now.
Multiple types of bronze, including brass, being usable for bronze age machine crafting could solve the complaints about the rarity of tin and the linearity of the game, at least early on, regardless of TFC. Or it might make things too easy. Maybe have it on by default but add a config to disable it?
Display Moreyou know where you are? it's GregTech, first mod that actually was grindy, first mod that made the game good cause you didn't get everything in 2 days.
you shouldn't be there if you think that balancing mods is stupid. (or you just say that cause you want gregtech dead)
and now you say that rather coding automatic system that changes all recipes to require plates instead of ingots, it's better to change it with minetweaker. would be the same if you said "yeah, fuck them, fuck them all, I don't care, I don't need it so just fuck those people, let them do it MANUALLY, every recipe in the game! :)"
maybe we should code machines and the mechanic of the mod ourselves too, cause there will be someone that will not like every machine so that way everyone will be happy. yeah we should do that cause it's more reasonable that way.
UNG is one of the main let's players for GT as it is. Not just in 1.6, but right now in 1.7. He's also a guy that really tries to do as much as possible just with gregtech and that's probably what motivated his complaint about balancing based on other mods. There are some processes that, using something as minimalist as the kirara 2.0 modpack, become much easier than using just gregtech.
His intention was probably to ask Greg if some of the changes he's implemented are really core parts of his vision, or whimsical additions without considering their impact. Does this work with just GT, or are you counting too much on some other mod to make things more straightforward? Frankly, that's a question I've wanted to ask myself at times. Still, at the end of the day you can count on us to tough it out and get used to it. No reason to get confrontational over a rant or two from one of our own.
If there's one mod you'd expect to make workshops dangerous places where you have to follow safety procedures in order to avoid accidents, it's GregTech. A while back people were asking for higher voltage lines to mess with lower voltage ones if they were too near :D.
From what I understood from Greg's explanation some time ago, if it fails to find stone in order to generate a vein, it will look at a different height and try again.
So far in my test world I've found ore veins in nearly every single 3x3 chunk area I've dug down in. The trick is actually finding the middle chunk and moving three chunks over. The vein will typically spread into all 8 surrounding chunks, however there seem to be instances where it doesn't even reach mid-way into its neighbors before ending, while in others it covers the entirety of the adjacent chunks(in the specific y levels always).
There are cases where the middle of the chunks seems to shift one over. Still, after the finding the shifted middle chunk, I kept finding the centers of veins every three chunks. There is a possibility this was caused by an update or some mod that affects worldgen being added or removed.
What happened sometimes, is that I would find a bit of ore in a mountain belonging to the outer part of a 3x3 chunk group, but at that y level the theoretical middle chunk had nothing but air. Still, 3 chunks over in all four directions around that theoretical middle I'd find the centers ore veins. If you can't find ore digging straight down in the center of the middle chunk, try digging the hills of the outer chunks. Or you could just move on to the next 3x3 cluster if it seems that too much of the potential vein was wasted trying to get generated in mid-air.
Ocean ore-gen I'm not too sure about. I was mainly looking at mountains, trying to gauge how much a P.I.T.A. getting bronze would be (let's just say that early game is as challenging as late game). After digging in the ocean for a bit and getting really inconsistent results, I have a hunch that railcraft abyssal stone geodes overwrite GT worldgen. If that's the case and worldgen still gets generated properly even under oceans otherwise, then it's very likely that you'd get higher chances for lower y-level ore veins under oceans. If only that was the case with mountains and higher y-level ores...
These observations are mainly based on test world digging. There are some parts of the oregen config that I was too lazy to interpret, so there could be mistakes or important bits missing.
Do the different tiers of muffler hatches even do anything? I'm guessing they're placeholders for the pollution that's coming soon™?
This a very cool addon and I'm in love with the water physics. They need work but there's so much potential. I've spent most of the day trying to drain various bodies of water by placing pipes with drain covers on the bottom. It's something I'd been dreaming about since the 1.5 versions of GT 
I know that this is a general ic2 addon, but would it be possible to tweak the energy capacity of the handpump with GT installed? You are using batteries with 200k-400k EU capacity to get a 30k EU tool and it doesn't really make sense. I'd love it if drain covers could be tweaked to drain water sources from flowing water like that handpump, but it might be asking too much.
Edit: Just realised energy, etc. are configurable
I wonder, Greg is intencional that cover like pump consume Eu even when not moving liquids? i placed the cover on the fluid canner, and when i placed the pipe it started eating Eu no stop.
I'm pretty sure I reported the same thing a week or two back. The only answer I got boiled down to "use covers with pipes, they don't drain energy" and it wasn't from Greg.
ProxFun : There's no problem there. GregTech got its own E-net. You can supply IC2 machines through the GT E-net, but in order to turn IC2 EU to GT EU you need to use the GregTech transformers]. As you can see, the GregTech cables connect on the sides of the IC2 machines that accept energy, but not the outputs. IC2 cables don't connect to GregTech machines at all.
Just in case, after testing with 2 MV hatches did you remove the second one?
With my setup a single MV hatch directly connected to a MV battery buffer works fine. If you left the second MV hatch on you've overclocked your MV recipies, quadrupling the cost. The same extra MV hatch along with an HV hatch would take it to EV, causing them to cost 16 times the original EU/t.
You mean "shutter module"? Could you tell me how to use that for control?
Thanks!
Place on a pipe, set mode with a screwdriver, remove with a crowbar. You can create one-way pipes, or pipes that open on redstone signal if used along a controler cover. You obviously place them between pipes by the by. Test worlds are your friend with this kind of thing.
Derping around with covers, an' hulls, an' buffers, and stuff, I found that having a pump cover (LV in my case) pointed towards a fluid pipe will drain energy from the hull, even if no fluids are moved. The mode setting didn't matter. The energy drain stopped occuring when the pipe was removed. The same behaviour occured when pointed at a railcraft tank, so I'm only guessing it affects fluid tanks in general. The same setup with conveyor covers and item pipes didn't cause energy to be drained. Is this intended behaviour?
This is the first test world in quite some time where the first thing I did wasn't advanced pumping the closest sizable body of water into a quantum tank 
For having gone biome independant, looking for extreme hills in hopes of a cassiterite and tetrahedrite veins (most often in vain...) seems unavoidable.
eventual Multibreaking Tools
Why aren't people getting hyped about this?
On another note, does anyone have a clue why one minute I can look-up meta-items in NEI and the next minute they're gone? I looked up the butchering knife and NEI wouldn't find it. I realised it didn't show any other meta-tool either. Still, I could look them up if was roundabout enough to look at plate recipes and find the tools.
Confused, I look around in the configs and enable showing all meta-items. I fire up my game again and see that there are now generic meta-items. I initially wonder why we couldn't get just the generic meta-items so we don't have the rest of the clutter, thinking it was intentional on the side of Greg. I test again, hiding the meta-items in the config once more, and the generic meta-tools were there. I keep playing, checking the tools occasionaly. As I suspected, twenty minutes or so later NEI won't show me the tools. Yet again I go about my merry way, and some time later I can look up the tools again.
I remember the same thing hapenning with Factorization back in 1.5.x minecraft. Back then it happened with some irrelevant components; right now it's really annoying. Anyone know why some items are displayed by NEI sometimes and at others they disappear?
Amperes are basically packets. GT's E-net is like the old E-net, before experimental, in that many packets(amperes) don't combine into higher voltage. Instead, the number of packets you can run through a line is limited and the voltage loss is much harsher(at LEAST 1EU/block) in order to encourage using higher voltage for transfering power over longer distances. Voltage loss and packets allowed depend on the cable. There's a spreadsheet with all the cables floating around this thread if you look a few pages back and I'm pretty sure the FTB wiki has been updated with details on the GT E-net.
Isn't there a middle ground between showing all of the meta-items and showing absolutely none in order to check their properties in NEI?
Please disregard this...
Or actually don't completely. Why are there items in NEI that seem to appear and disappear at random? One moment I could see generic meta-items, the next they were gone.
Higher tier steam generation is more efficient to counterbalance higher tier steam turbines being less efficient, I guess?
Single-block steam turbines at least. We'll see how multiblocks do.
I really hope I'll have access to my gaming rig by that point...
Come on now, how would you feel if IC2 experimental development, or at least the addition of features, slowed down and people started taking for granted that this is how ic2 is going to be from now on.
...Oh, wait!
Edit, more on topic(no, no it's not, it's still off topic...):
I was using RP in the time before machines, tubes and blutricity, so to me it remained a redstone+ mod even afterwards. I found bulky, overengineered BC automation much more fun, plus there wasn't really much need for automation at the time. I found frames amazing since I mainly used the logic to help me build silly piston contraptions, but when they came around I had taken a hiatus from minecraft, and by the time I returned the mod had stopped updating.
Early blutricity seemed trite at the very least, but the demonstrations of the more developed, more "realistic" energy system were very interesting. Without higher tier generators and machines, though, there wasn't much purpose to it at the time.
If Elo wants to go back to developing RP she should just go ahead. The arguments going on right now are mainly spurred by biterness from people that felt betrayed when RP stopped updating, and those that want to see someone who at the very least was a great modder back in action. Also, the general ball of insecurity that Feed the RF, the main "faction" of FTB, is.
My own opinion is that RP should become more of a niche mod now that there are all these alternatives. When you have competition for all-in-one, something for everyone mods, the lowest common denominator wins. It has, in fact, won. We all know which mods I'm talking about.
Will we be also getting more efficient but obviously HUEG multiblocks for other machines/generators as well? Railcraft is cool, but a(n obviously more expensive/even larger/not really modular) GT alternative would be great. I also remember talk of multiblock electrolyzers/centrifuges and we already got a taste of multi-machines with the multi-smelter.
How about a brittleness effect along with the sharpness? It's not like you shave off a huge part of a blade when you sharpen it, but make it too sharp and it has a greater chance of chipping. Its effect would be a reversed unbreaking.
Another idea might be a maintenance mechanic. The result is going back to full durability, but permanently lowering the max durability. I don't know about normal tools, since it just flat out increases their max uses, but some kind of maintenance mechanic might be a good idea for electric tools. Give a durability value to the parts of the electric tools and have some break down more often than others. This could result in tools that have less than max durability when reassembled, depending on the state of the different parts, and give you an incentive to change more parts other than the main one.
If this sounds like too much hassle, give a small chance that fewer parts are retrieved when the tool is disassembled, depending on how low its physical durability was. If its durability is high enough, no parts are lost, as a reward for regular maintenance.
Seriously, though, it has been reiterated that good manual tools can last a lifetime. Electric tools should be more likely to break down. It would be rage-inducingly delicious to have your drill suddenly stop working even though the drill bit still looks fine.
I'm gonna stop suggesting things now, so that when Greg NOPEs them my fragile ego won't be hurt too much. I should find a computer capable of running minecraft and test these releases instead of pulling suggestions out of my imagination.
Placing a magic energy absorber near an end crystal and turning the appropriate mode on gives you 124 EU/4 ticks=32 EU/t(according to the wiki).
It made more sense before RTGs and with the relatively easier progression when it first came out, but now the associated cost to construct them makes them pretty obsolete. I'm curious as to how the magical generators change in the 5.x versions if they do in fact survive the transition.
In fact, after the sneak peek into energy transfer, any chance we'll get to see some interesting energy generation? Stuff like large diesel engines and small steam turbines were mentioned in the past. Should we be expecting stuff along those lines any time soon?