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.
Posts by willis936
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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.
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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.
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Factorio is fun. I'm just left wanting to have to consider things that you don't. There is no electricity cost over distance. You can power a mine 2 km away and there is no loss. In minecraft you'd have to step up to IV or higher to even be able to accomplish it. In factorio you just plant poles and substations when you need power. In IC2/gregtech (and in real life) you must avoid loops at all costs. There's just an entire aspect of the game that poofs out of existence: energy distribution. I find it to be one of the most interesting parts of the game. It can be done without fires and explosions. You need concepts of voltage, current, and resistance though.
And as you point out the exponential increase in energy demand is what makes GT one long energy crisis. I wouldn't mind factorio going that way instead of becoming a mine maintainer in the late game.
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I guess maybe it's that the stakes are lower.
Energy distribution is too simple. There is no simulation of current through wires. You don't have to be mindful of what gets placed where. You cannot burn wire or blow up machines.
Energy production is too powerful. You only feel motivated to make more energy twice in the game. Once when you hit solar and another when you hit fission. There is never an energy crisis. Gregtech is one constant energy crisis and it's fun. You have to invest a serious amount of materials into higher power systems. You have to really sit down and make sure your rates are right.
Other differences like more raw resources and processing steps are just tedium that you can add back in for mods. Most of my issues stem from how little the player has to think about energy compared to raw materials.
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I actually got factorio recently and have played a hundred hours of it. I was considering making a fusion reactor mod that nerfed other energy production.
Overall it scratched the itch but I was sad at how simple it was. It's more accessible (ie you don't need an engineering degree to progress to late game) but it's not as satisfying when all of your problems are solved simply by clicking on stuff. I'm low on energy? Place more engines. I'm low on circuits? Place more assemblers. I'm low on copper? Place more mines. The emphasis is all on physical item plumbing rather than actual control systems.
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Lots of actual steam engines let the steam escape. Steam locomotives, for example, were a large scale industrial use of steam power, and they had to refill regularly with water because they didn’t recover the cooled steam.
The IC2 kinetic steam generator and Gregtech’s large turbines both return the water, allowing for closed loops - but both have a mechanic of destroying turbines over time, which kills any interest I have in them. I don’t mind the material cost so much, I mind having to effectively “hand stoke” them with new turbines. I left that behind when I moved from the small coal-fired boilers to the large bronze boiler, and I’m not going back to that.
It doesn’t help that Gregtech’s turbines are finicky about flow rate, and hostile toward on/off operation where you only run them when you need power. Energy storage and some red stone logic can help with the latter, of course, the same way I currently run my large boiler in bursts between near-zero and near-full steam reserves.
Instead you need to hand stoke your water supply.
I usually do what you say in your last paragraph. EU storage is ridiculously cheap compared to irl electric energy storage and the large turbines are so efficient and put out so fast that I usually don't pass them up. I'm not up to speed on GT5U materials but it used to be that steel blades would last an acceptable amount of time until tungstensteel blades were available (and those lasted a Long time).
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I haven't gone through the effort of fully figuring out how the oil production code works but I did notice something strange in 0.31:
The oil production rate doesn't really decrease the way the wiki says it should. In fact I noticed a very slow decline in oil production but then at some point saw the production increase again. Is this a bug or is there something about oil production I don't know about?
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That MV bootstrapping issue is what I wanted to address. It's been a while so my memory may be fuzzy but I believe you need enough to make at least a whole gallium dust (maybe more than that) before hitting MV. Also I know some players play with small ores disabled which I think should be a valid choice to be able to make.
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The two changes necessary to rebalance gallium the way I did are in that post.
- Add those zenscript lines to a minetweaker script that gets run on server launch (GTTweaker is necessary).
- Change the line in config/Gregtech/Recipes.cfg
That's it. It's relatively painless to implement. It would be nice to have some more active play testing, feedback, and development work done to smooth out GT5U but idk if this project will ever get love again. If it did then these kinds needing these kinds of hacks could be avoided in the future.
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I handled pre assembler wires with lots of sheep and macerators (and waiting). Sheep are easy to contain and breed. They are annoying to hear though.
I planted a ton of rubber trees as soon as I could and made large batches of materials. 5U's distinct flavor is in preserving sanity through large batches. The larger your batches can be the less time you will waste. The easier crafting chains in the past meant you could just do some on demand work. "Oh I need circuits for this machine, I'll just make some." No. In 5U you better have half a stack of circuits waiting and probably a few stacks of the circuit component materials at any given time. Bootstrapping LV machinery and materials is time consuming but by early MV it should be easy to make large quantities of what you need. I never progressed past MV before stopping but I see that it's possible. I might rebalance AE2 to only require LV because honestly managing automation without it gets out of hand very fast.
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Against my better judgement, I'm firing up Gregtech 5u again. I'm stuck because it seems near impossible to get out of the steam age now.
Electronic circuits require coated circuit boards. Coated circuit boards require "wood planks" which are not wood planks as we know them. These generic wood planks can only be created from wood pulp. Wood pulp is not obtainable in the steam age.
Well not entirely, you can make it with a steam macerator - but that requires 2 diamonds. It's no longer possible to make industrial diamonds in the steam age, because the compressed coal ball now requires an assembler. Natural diamonds would work, but good luck finding those.
Honestly, the whole thing is really screwed in the head, it's so unreasonable. I'm tempted to use Minetweaker to create a recipe to make these generic "wood planks" from regular wood planks and a saw.
I really felt this. The quest for diamonds is a pure mine grind of no less than 12 hours. Also oils and plastics require large, complicated setups. I don't actually mind having to figure out the processing chains and building dedicated setups for them but it doesn't require much work in the way of rate matching or elegant design. I stopped before MV when I needed to make a second type of plastic that required a new processing setup. I just sort of lost interest because I've done this all so much before and it just felt like more of a grind now that I understood how everything worked. Automation does feel really good in 5u though and making a setup that saves manual labor pays off more now than ever.
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Guys, help. I am trying to make a Fusion Reactor Mark 3, but I can't make the transformers to work.
The thing that sticks out to me is only having one HV transformer. Each transformer in that stack can take in up to 1 amp (EU packet per tick) of the higher voltage and output up to 4 amps of the lower voltage. So to get 24 amps of HV you would need 6 (24/4) HV transformers fed by no less than 2 EV transformers. There's room to be creative in transformer placement to minimize loss or material cost.
Edit: I read this setup wrong. You are charging up the reactor through steam not extracting energy. To get all of the power from those steam turbines there the same requirements are there (6 HV transformers and 2 EV transformers). The HV loss is the most extreme so do what you can to make the length an EU packet has to travel to get to a transformer. I'm a big fan of barrel style machine stacks (like four turbines feeding directly into one transformer with no wires). Also I'm sure you know but for fluid routing I suggest using shutters, plates, and pumps to keep all of the turbines fully fed (there are a few good youtube videos that explain the GT5 fluid pipe mechanics).
Note: Without turning the plasma into EU and feeding the dynamo hatches with it you'll find that the reaction is not sustainable and the reactor will quickly run out of power. Also since this is Mk III and I don't know the current fusion reactor overclocking logic it might be that D+He3 is not a sustainable reaction either. The furthest I got in a world was a sustained Be+D for a net energy gain of something like 160 kEU/t. it required a stupid big fare (like hundreds) of applied energistics matter condensers making matter balls to scrap, turn into UUM, and then Be.
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I haven't quite worked out what's going on with oil extraction rate. I got somewhere in the range of 280 L per cycle for like the first five to ten thousand cycles then it dropped to 262. After another roughly five to ten thousand cycles it's up to 314 L per cycle. This doesn't match what the wiki says. I assume it's been balanced since that page was last updated since I calculated being able to get something like trillions of EU before expecting a drop below 200 L per cycle, which seems excessive.
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I swear machine controller + shutter module functionality is busted in 5.09.31. I can’t get it to work on pipes using redstone signals. The shutter does open and close as expected when the machine controller setting is changed but the shutter doesn’t seem to ever change based on redstone signal even when a lever is put on the machine controller.
Edit: nvm in single player I was able to fix it. There must be some other redstone source nearby messing with it.