Posts by Gus_Smedstad

Quote from DreamMasterXXL

The recipes in the main folder are mixed collect recipes long times not updated. Only my pack recipes I Update recently(Gt new horizons)

The recipes for the Railcraft circuits in your modpack (signal, controller, receiver) use gregtech meta-id's as well. I think what Mauve Cloud said is spot-on, the scripts could use more vals for clarity. I notice there are a handful of gregtech vals defined for items like copper wire, which would also otherwise be meta-id formulations.

It turns out the meta id's are already visible via WAILA. I did not know that was what I was seeing. The format is <name> <id>:<meta id>. The second number never meant anything to me before.

The items in question turn out to be Gregtech parts - the appropriate vals would be

val BasicCircuitBoard = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:32710>;
val MachineControllerCover = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:32730>;
val SensorLV = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:32690>;

Now that I've actually looked at the recipes from your mod pack in-game, only the Receiver Circuit recipe makes sense. "Controller Circuits" aren't actually controllers in the lever sense, they're wireless transmitters. A Gregtech LV emitter <gregtech.gt.metaitem.01:32680> would match the receiver recipe. Signal Circuits aren't lamps; a signal block already requires a signal lamp, and the current recipe effectively makes you build two sets of lamps into every signal block. The signal circuit's supposed to be the electronics controlling the lamp. Which would be.. what? A RS latch from Project Red? I'm not sure of the proper scripting name of that item.

EDIT: Thinking further, those signal circuits aren't latches, they're receiver/transmitter pairs. Those are the links to the other signals, which is why the original relay box included 2. An expensive, if logical solution would be to create signal circuits by combining 1 controller and 1 receiver circuit. It's a wonder that in the original recipe, substituting yellow wool for red made such a difference.

OK, a better question - I was looking over the recipe replacements for the Railcraft circuits, which normally feel off because of things like colored wool. The recipes on github require some items I find indecipherable because they're gregtech metaitem id's. Where would I find a list of these id's, if I'm trying to decipher recipes like this, or gods forbid write my own?

I'm dipping my toe in Minetweaker, and I ran into a wall almost immediately.

I was trying to re-add the Railcraft Shunting Wire to my game of Gregtech 5 Unofficial, using just the relevant section of the Railcraft.zs script from Github. It didn't work. Minetweaker says "gregtech is not a member." Naturally, attempts to call Assembler() failed. This happens whether I use "import mods.gregtech.Asssembler" or I replace Assembler() calls with mods.gregtech.Assembler.addRecipe().

I'm using Minetweaker 3.0.10B for 1.7.10.

EDIT: Oh, never mind. Turns out that I missed the other thread. Once I downloaded and installed GTTweaker my errors went away, and the shunting wire recipe showed up in the assembler.

It appears that the Electric Shunting Wire from Railcraft is suppressed by Gregtech. It exists in NEI, but has no recipe. Is there an intended way to bridge gaps in electric track if Gregtech 5U is installed? Obviously it's highly aware of Railcraft, since it has all those assembler recipes for Railcraft tracks and items.

Quote from Requia

For BloodAsp: I suggest putting that there's an amp limit of 2 in the tooltip. This is very counterintuitive.

My assumption was the opposite of yours, I thought energy hatches had a limit of 1 amp, like most machines.

Fortunately, the Feed The Beast page on the Electric Blast Furnace talks about the 2 amp demand, and warns about the dangers of only using 2 LV hatches.

[

Quote from willis936

Pumps do increase the flow rate when the pipe internal tanks aren't full.

Shutters every segment will have the same effect as pumps every segment, or pumps every other segment. Pumps are never faster than shutters every segment. A pipe with one-way shutters every segment will move fluid at the pipe's rated capacity, or the supply rate, whichever is less. Pumps don't change that.

Not that you really need either one, except perhaps at the start of the pipe to avoid the overflow-via-slosh case you mentioned. As the amount of fluid you're moving approaches the pipe capacity, the actual flow rate will approach the pipe's maximum rating, even without shutters or pumps.

The value of pumps as covers is not to improve fluid flow, but to extract fluid that can't otherwise be extracted. For example, if a machine produces both items and fluid, and only has one output side, you must use either a conveyor or a pump to remove the other output. Pumps can also extract fluid from a generator, if you want to move the generator and don't want to lose the contents.

Quote from Requia

Checklist: power provided by LV battery bufffer x16, so more than enough, recipe doesn't have a required voltage.

It does 120 EU / tick even if it works at 32 volts, though. You have at least 3 LV energy hatches? Each LV hatch accepts 64 EU/tick (32 volts x 2 amps). Technically 2 is enough, but since any mechanical fault increases energy cost by 10%, it'll stop working if you deveop a fault and only have 2.

I'm assuming you're not getting "structure incomplete," the controller block is in the center of a bottom row, and the muffler is in the center of the top layer. I'm also assuming you're using a soft hammer or a controller cover to start it.

My basic EBF has 3 LV energy hatches supplied by a single 8x tin power bus from a 9x battery buffer filled with 8 batteries (to limit possible output to 8 amps). Though 9 would still be safe since 3 LV hatches can't demand more than 6 amps.

Wait, why would pipes ever destroy fluid? I get that there are multi-block machines that destroy items if the output hatch / bus doesn't get cleared, but why would that affect pipes?

Quote from willis936

Having that kind of behavior is more important when there's a lot of fluid to move and the costs are high anyway.

That's actually the case where you don't need pumps. If you're moving a lot of fluid in large pipes, pumps will make virtually no difference in the net throughput. It's the case where you're moving 1000-4000L and the next machine won't start processing until it all arrives that's a problem.

There are days when I think a save-corrupting bug would be a net positive. I'd rage, of course, but I've got other games in my backlog (i.e. Civ 6) that I think would be more rewarding. This current search for Nether Quartz is getting really boring (interspersed with moments of terror when something goes wrong). But I feel like I can't get it go while the various projects I have planned are not finished.

I've found a lot of other ores. Some of which I would have been glad of earlier. Given my huge oversupply of sulfur, it's hard to remember there was a time when I desperately needed it for rubber production.

Quote from willis936

This is the exact use for pumps.

Pumps don't work that way. The "small amount, last bit trickles in" case definitely applies when you're using a pump to extract the fluid from a tank. Gregtech pipes don't appear to model pressure in any way. Rather, each pipe section is a mini-tank, and it will attempt to move fluid to each adjacent entity (pipe or tank). If the prior pipe is full, the entire contents to go to the next pipe, which is why the high, constant source case gives you the rated flow. When the prior pipe is half-empty, some of the contents move in that direction.

Now, it's true that you can put pumps at regular intervals into a pipe. That's the expensive, awkward solution Requia mentioned, only using pumps instead of shutters. It's actually a better solution than a shutter, since a shutter only prevents backflow from pipe 2 into pipe 1. A pump actively moves the contents of pipe 1 to pipe 2, so one pump every 2 pipe sections is as effective as a shutter every section. Shutters are a bit cheaper at 4 iron each; I'd have to work out the precise cost of a 32 volt pump for a comparison, but it involves at least 4.25 tin for the rotor, 1.5 iron, 2 copper, 1 tin, plus insulation for the motor.

Regardless, pumps increase the cost of any small pipe considerably, since those run 0.5 - 1 bronze or plastic each. The incremental cost isn't that great for Huge pipes (12 ingots each), but if you're installing a Huge pipe, you're absolutely doing it for a high-volume, constant flow case, not moving small amounts of liquid.

The upshot is that if I'm doing moving small volumes, I try to put the machines adjacent, so one is putting its output direction into the other, or at most a 1 section pipe, where backflow can't happen. Moving seed oil or molten rubber into an assembler, for example.

Man, searching the Nether for Nether-specific ores is a huge pain.

I've learned to prospect in the Overworld, and it's not so bad, if tedious. The Nether, though, has those frequent gaps, so I'll be digging a vertical shaft and it dead ends in the ceiling of a huge chamber. Which is made much, much worse by Ghasts. Playing Ceiling Cat with a Ghast got me killed, and cost me all my gear, including an Infinite bow. The blast didn't catch me, but the blast knocked out the blocks under my feet, which led to a fatal fall. By the time I could make my way back all my stuff had evaporated.

In theory all those wide spaces would make it easier to find exposed ore, but again, Ghasts. My policy these days is never to be in the open, because if I can't run for someplace with overhead cover, sooner or later one of those blasts will hit me. It's funny, since outside of Nether Fortresses, the Nether would be easier than then Overworld if it weren't for Ghast bombardment. Pigmen will leave you alone if you don't bother them, and Magma Creams are no threat.

My current reason for mucking about is Nether Quartz. I haven't found any veins so far. I've had enough from Small Ores in the past, but now I'm doing stuff with Railcraft that demands it in truckload lots. One Routing Switch is 32 Nether Quartz.

The vertical-shaft technique has been good for finding veins so far in the Nether, the few times I'm not interrupted by a huge cavern over a sea of lava.

If the supply is enough to keep the pipes full, you can get the rated throughput, because there's no backflow. Or if the length is short, and there's little room for backflow.

A couple of examples: at one point I had a Huge Steel Pipe (19,200 L/sec) reliably supplying 5 Basic Steam Turbines (demand 10,500 L/sec). In my current setup, a Large Steel Boiler generating 24,000 L/sec has no problems getting steam into my main tank via two very short Huge Steel Pipes.

The problems arise when you're trying to move small amounts of liquid from one point to another, and you care about how quickly it gets there. The overall rate is OK if it's a continuous supply, but if you're doing something like emptying some containers, the last bit of the supply will take forever to trickle to the end.

Quote from MauveCloud

I suppose a minimap mod that allows grouping waypoints so they can be enabled/disabled together (not just by dimension) would work too.

Xaero's just introduced waypoint sets in the last release. It's close to what you're describing - you could keep prospecting waypoints in their own set, so you're either looking at your regular waypoints or you're looking at the prospecting waypoints. If there's some regular waypoint you really must have visible when prospecting (i.e. your home base), you have to duplicate it.

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Some days I feel like I'm really slow at making progress. I found that oil deposit several days ago, and I'm still working my way toward building my first oil rig.

A good part of that is that I decided I was going to transport the oil back by rail instead of pipe. It's about 200m in orthogonal distance from my base, plus another 50m since I've decided to plant my oil rig as close to the bedrock as possible to reduce drilling time. 2x tiny pipelines (1 for fuel for the generator, 1 for oil) would run about 250 bronze, and I've got far more bronze than that... but rails are more interesting as well as being less material intensive. Plus they can haul around anchors - with a long pipeline oil transport might stall if chunks aren't loaded.

I spent a good day in a Creative world exploring how Railcraft signals work. I'm familiar with train signaling in general, and I've built big, elaborate freight networks in Factorio, but Railcraft's signals don't behave anything like rail signals in any other game I've played. They're only detectors, and you have to set up the traffic control using locking track separately. Usually signals are train detectors and traffic control, and usually they can control traffic based on direction. You can set up locks that only affect trains going in one direction, but it's a moderate amount of work and redstone logic to do so.

After quite a few train explosions in Creative, I managed to come up with a design that allow for multiple trains a single track, with a 2-rail passing zone in the center. I'm still a little concerned about race conditions, i.e. the case where two trains enter a signal block simultaneously, though that never actually arose in my experiments.

When I finally did dig the tunnel, I ran into lots of lava in the target area, and handling that was a pain. Maybe drilling from near the surface would have been smarter. I'm not clear on whether or not oil rigs can drill through lava, though.

So far I've got the tanks and machinery I want down there, but no oil rig yet. I got diverted by the fact I was out of lithium, sodium, and salt, so I need to make a mining run for the battery buffers.

Speaking as someone who used to have a lot of trouble finding ore, vertical exploration is the way to go. Veins are wide, thin squares. Vertical shafts are likely to hit a vein because horizontally, even the smallest veins are very wide. Horizontal shafts almost always miss because many veins are only 5 blocks high.

Caves don't help at all, if they're horizontal and the ceiling is low. Some of those vast chasms can be really helpful because they expose a lot vertically, but you can still miss stuff because it's out of torch range if you're going along the bottom. For example, I found a big chasm, explored it and didn't find much, and later on I found a vein that connected to it about 40 levels up from the bottom.

Every 3 chunks offset by +24 / +24 seems to work. A lot of holes are going to turn up dry because there's genuinely no vein there. I've been using Xaero's Minimap / World Map, and marking everything I find with a waypoint. If I don't find anything, I mark that too, so I don't look there again. It's a long, busy list of waypoints, but I keep most of them disabled except when I'm planning new shafts.

So far, I've found:

36 dry holes
21 Magnetite
11 Oilsands
10 Coal
8 Limonite (iron)
6 Bauxite
6 Salt (contains lithium-bearing ores as well)
5 Redstone
5 Apatite (Gregtech, not Forestry)
4 Nickel
4 Chalcopyrite (copper / iron)
3 Cassiterite (tin)
3 Beryllium
2 Soapstone
2 Graphite (supposed to have diamonds, I haven't seen any)
2 Lapis
1 Galena (Lead / Silver)
1 Quartzite
1 Tetrahedrite (Copper / Antimony)
1 Uranium (Gregtech, not IndustrialCraft)
1 Sapphire
1 Monazite
1 Manganese

... notably missing is Tungstate for tungsten.

The point to listing all that is to give you an idea how tough it is to find some things, and how often it's a complete miss. It's very disappointing when I hit bedrock without finding anything, but it's still a much better hit rate than I had before I went with spiral staircase prospecting.

Quote from sprAngles

Personally I got hydrogen earlier on by electrolysing all my methane (I had a natural gas oil rig, which has the bonus of not requiring as much hydrogen to desulfurise)

That sounded promising, but when I crunched the numbers methane -> hydrogen is actually more expensive than water -> hydrogen + oxygen, mainly because methane's a moderate source of energy.

5000L of methane + 4800 EU = 4000L hydrogen + 1 carbon. 5000L of methane = 202,500 EU if burned in a 128v gas turbine. 202,500 EU + water -> 9000L hydrogen + 4500L oxygen.

The oxygen byproduct is probably more use than the carbon, but I don't know what the balance is like late game. Right now I've got far more carbon than I need from ashes. Currently I'm using it for nitro-diesel and carbon mesh. I know it's also used for things like smelting tungsten, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

Quote from sprAngles

What I'm referring to is the Large Diesel Engine, the titanium multiblock

I had no idea that existed. It's not documented anywhere that I could find on the web. The in-game tooltip seems fairly comprehensive, though I see it lists 2 input hatches, and clearly you need 3 if you're going to supply fuel, lubricant, and oxygen. I'm guessing the 3rd input hatch is legal and has the same restrictions as the other 2.

It's clearly beyond my current tech, but it's worth remembering.

Quote from MauveCloud

Glass dust. Centrifuge, then electrolyze.

Woah. That's a lot better than what I'm currently doing if oxygen runs low, which is to electrolyze water. I'm always running a significant surplus of sand, so getting glass for that is no big deal. Right this moment I've got a significant surplus of oxygen just from electrolysis of ores, but if I can see that changing in the future.

Is there a similar, cheap way to get hydrogen? When I originally built the water electrolysis setup, I did so because I needed hydrogen to de-sulfinate oil products (light fuel, naptha), and I wasn't prepared to sacrifice limonite to get it.

Quote from Requia

Hmm, IC2 transformer, GT transformer, and straight to batbox all charge for me in creative.

Ack, it was a Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair problem. The Battery Buffer I was using as a GT power source was turned the wrong way, and I couldn't see it because I'd left a cable covering the output dot.

Quote from Requia

A transformer will (or at least did back in GT5 official) output IC2-EU from a GT-EU input, might need IC2 cables to make it switch output but there's an easy config for that.

I tried a transformer. It didn't work. Unless maybe you mean an IC2 transformer? I was trying with a GT LV transformer.

Quote from sprAngles

What you can do with Heavy Fuel is to crack it, ideally with Hydrogen.

Right, it's an intermediate product. Since it had a name like "heavy fuel," I though it could be used somewhere as fuel.

I don't understand what you mean by a "diesel engine boosted by oxygen." Diesel generators only have a single fuel slot. The wiki says nothing about this. Are you saying you can pipe fuel and oxygen into a diesel generator?

I worked out the math for the Heavy Oil -> Cracked Heavy Fuel -> LPG transformation a while back. It's about 50% better than Heavy Oil -> Oil -> Nitro Diesel. I don't have an oil cracking unit yet, since my only source of oil up until now has been oilsand.

I don't have a distillation tower because it requires an EV pump, which requires titanium, and I don't have the vacuum freezer, kanthal blast furnace, or titanium chemical processing I need to produce titanium.

Quote from Requia

Though, reconsidering paper as insulation makes a minetweaker script much easier, no need to un nerf rubber production first and its only actually 3 diferent wires that use carpet:

Seems reasonable.

On a completely different topic, I'm thinking about Railcraft automated transport, and one choice is electric locomotives. However, I have been unable to get this to work easily, mainly because Railcraft wants Industrialcraft EU, doesn't recognize Gregtech battery buffers as a power source, and I've been unable to convert Gregtech EU to IndustrialCraft EU via any of the accepted methods.

For example, an Industrialcraft BatBox next to a Railcraft Electrical Feeder is supposed to work. Gregtech cables connect to the Industrialcraft Batbox, but don't supply it with any power. Its charge sits stubbornly at zero, and the 32 volt Battery Buffer I'm using as a source shows no drain on the Mercury Battery.

Not that I'm sure I want to do it that way, since my Creative experiments seem to indicate that locomotives (steam or electric) are strictly inferior to a near-vanilla booster track system. They're slower, and require energy and some logistics machinery. If I did, it would be purely as a self-imposed "no booster track" rule, on the theory that locomotives make sense and magic track that requires no energy doesn't.

I've I did go that way, I'm looking at electric because it's less of a headache that steam locomotives. I'd just connect the electric track to my power grid, rather than trying to figure out some sort of system for auto-loading charcoal into the steam locomotives.