Posts by Gus_Smedstad

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

    I think it's fairly important to use .28pre or later. My recent experience applies, since the Seismic Prospector reported 0L of oil for all sources prior to 0.27. In 0.27 chlorine is missing from important recipes like titanium refining, that's only fixed in 0.28pre at present.


    I think 0.26 is probably safe enough to use for a short time - but sooner or later you're going to want to update because of them.


    I suspect Blood Asp views paper-wrapped tin cables as a bug, and the change is fixing the bug, not a design change.


    --
    I understand the mechanical reasons why you have to die the wool, I just think it's a little odd that gray carpets can't insulate wire. I guess electrons are afraid of the color black.


    --


    The Gregtech flax isn't available at the start of the game, when string is actually a problem for basic things like a bow. Hell, I still haven't gotten Gregtech crops to work yet. From what little I understand, it'd take some time and a bit of luck to get Gregtech flax early enough to matter.

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

    Back to oil - it appears that there's no actual use in Gregtech for Heavy Fuel except as an intermediate product for things like toluene. Is that correct? It doesn't appear to burn either in diesel generators or boilers. It has an entry for the semifluid generator, but that's an IC2 machine and not useful for a Gregtech power network.


    I ask because I'm working on drilling that Heavy Oil source, and Heavy Fuel is the obvious product. Or I could just convert it to regular oil cheaply and feed it into my existing nitro diesel line. Which I'd do anyway to start, but I was sort of expecting that Heavy Fuel was supposed to be a better use for Heavy Oil.

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

    I think farming sheep is nearly unavoidable in Minecraft. I have a corrals with cows, chickens and sheep, though these days mostly I only pay attention to the cows for leather. They're all gray though, I'd have to dye the wool. Though why the wool color matters...?


    I didn't realize there was a macerator recipe for wool -> string. Because I've always found the shortage of string in Minecraft to be artificial, I installed a Flax mod before I even started GT5U. So mostly for me it would be the wool.

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

    Quote from MauveCloud

    afaik, that's not built into the mod, so perhaps you could share the Minetweaker script you're using for that?


    I don't have minetweaker installed, though I'm thinking about it now.


    It turns out he's right. I was using paper to insulate tin up until I installed .28pre. The wool+string recipe was in there, but I never used it. Both wool and string were significantly harder to get than paper, and you need a lot of low-voltage insulation before you graduate to copper. Hell, wool+string are harder to get than sticky resin, though of course resin -> rubber requires machinery and wool doesn't.


    In the .27 changelog is this line:

    Quote from .27 changelog

    Fix ULV&LV cable recipes


    I'm guessing that this is the removal of the 32 volt paper recipes.

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

    Yeah, I did. Sorry, I didn't know that was a branch. Pre2 crashes as well, but .28pre works. I did get a warning about a missing block, crated tin ingots, but since I hadn't actually crated any tin that didn't seem like an issue.


    EDIT: Prospected 9 sites with .28pre installed, and got decent results. A couple of zeros, a handful of 10-20's, and one site yielding 212 L of heavy oil. I don't know how long that lasts yet, but that's obviously the place to start.

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

    I'm running 5.09.25. It looks like it was fixed in 5.09.27. I've been holding off updating because of the chlorine issue which is only fixed in .28pre, but I guess I'll bite the bullet on grabbing a pre-release build.


    EDIT: .28pre crashes on load.


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

    I'm having problems prospecting for oil with a Seismic Prospector, and I'm wondering if I don't understand something, or oil is just much, much rarer than the wiki says.


    I've prospected 36 sites, each 96 squares from each other, since I understand oil depends on the local 6x6 chunk.


    All of them are returning 0. They'll say "light oil," "heavy oil, or "natural gas," but it's always 0L. I thought that was only supposed to happen 28% of the time? The FTB wiki claims I should see 25 usable sites, and roughly 4 of them should be returning 300+ L. Is it the prospector? Or is there really no oil in the world?


    I haven't built an oil rig yet to test whether the prospector is lying to me.

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

    I notice that I've accumulated some arsenic from processing cobaltite, and that it has no use at present. Perhaps it could be used in recipes that call for Grin Powder (weed-EX, potion of harming) or to make battery alloy (since that's an actual use in the real world.


    There's also gallium arsenide, which is a semiconductor. I'm not sure where it would fit in the chain of electronics. NAND chips are the obvious one, but gallium arsenide would be a lot harder to obtain than the usual red alloy / plastic source.

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

    There seems to be something wrong with the 128 volt Regulator.


    I've got a couple of them, one feeding a chest buffer connected to a centrifuge, one connected directly to an 128 volt electrolizer.


    Both of them have multiple stacks that are over the set stack requirements, and won't move them. They just sit there, doing nothing. Both are enabled and are properly connected to power. The destinations in both cases are empty. No item pipes are involved.


    For example, the centrifuge regulator has a stack of 64 redstone (minimum set to 10) and 64 cinnibar (minimum set to 2) and nothing's moving.


    They have sometimes worked in the past, but neither one has moved anything for at least 10 minutes.


    EDIT: Figured it out. The default "slot 0" configuration in the third grid of the UI was preventing anything from moving. When I changed them to slot 4, everything started moving.


    This actually touches on something I've noticed before, which is that many machines have input slots that start at 4, including the chest buffer it appears, and this is not at all intuitive. Nor is "0" a good default if almost everything requires 4.

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

    Quote from Blood Asp

    Pollution is more of a machine spam prevention. Spamming dozens of low tier machines to produce EV+ energy is what ends with pollution effects. Upgrading your machines while progressing and not making more of the old stuff will keep you in the save area.


    If that's the intent, it makes sense, but it still seems opaque. You could end up with pollution issues and not have any clue what was causing it. Short of running around with a tricorder.


    Even then it's problematic. I've got a tricorder, mainly for diagnosing cases where the wrong fluid is in a pipe. I don't have any feel for how much pollution I have, or what's producing it.

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

    I gather pollution is not really implemented as yet. There's infrastructure for it, but no consequences yet. Which is fine by me, since I find the mod challenging enough as it is without worrying about something that's largely invisible until you build a tricorder, and not readily accessible even then.


    Factorio has pollution, but it also has a map overlay that shows you the pollution. No tech requirement for that either. Factorio has an entirely different balance to the pollution anyway, since the consequences are largely increased alien attacks, and that's not something that fits Gregtech at all.

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

    200L heavy oil can be converted to 200L oil, which converts to 250L nitro diesel. The energy cost for doing so isn't that high compared to the EU content of the fuel. I worked it out at one point, but call it about 120,000 EU after processing costs. Net energy surplus is about 60,000 EU.


    Now that I'm actually talking about it "out loud" instead of just running it through my head, it's a bad plan. The conversion process takes 16 seconds, which means the net output, all things considered, is about 187 EU/t. I'd be better off building another large boiler, burning the wood in the boiler, converting it to electricity locally to avoid the problems with steam's low energy density, and running wire. A large steel boiler generates 24,000 L of steam per second, which converts to about 400 EU/t, for a lot lower cost overall.


    I guess the primary purpose of the pyrolyse oven is mass conversion of wood to charcoal? I enabled the vanilla wood->charcoal recipe when I first started playing, just because I couldn't otherwise figure out how to get torches in the stone age. These days I've got automated vanilla stone furnaces converting wood to charcoal faster than my boiler can use it.


    I'm mostly running off nitro diesel at this point. The energy density is ridiculous compared to steam, so distribution's a non-issue. Processing takes a while, but it works out to producing fuel worth about 2,000 EU/t.


    I've also got a massive surplus of ethanol now that I need to utilize better. That was an iffy side-product of the tree farm for a long time, but I finally got into breeding better trees. The ones I've got aren't that great ("average" saplings and "low" sappiness), but they're still producing ethanol far, far faster than the demand of the basic electric blast furnace, which is the main consumer.


    I guess I should get into oil drilling.

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

    I ran into a major difficulty bump, and I want to be sure I understand what's going on.


    The Pyrolise Oven requires Kanthal coils. A fair number of metals are gated behind needing Kanthal coils, but my primary concern right now is a ready source of renewable oil, so I don't have to keep making mining runs for Oilsand, and the oven does a wood -> oil conversion.


    Kanthal smelting produces a hot ingot. The only way to convert the hot ingot to a usable ingot as a Vacuum Freezer.


    The Vacuum Freezer requires processor boards, which in turn needs polytetrafluorethylene (aka teflon), which has a complicated refining process involving LPG, chlorine, and fluorine.


    Is that correct? I figured I was pretty close to being ready for Kanthal until I discovered that I needed teflon.

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

    Quote from Randmax

    Gus_Smedstad
    iirc capacitors were added because comunity constantly whined about it to greg, who thought about it as a useless thing, and finaly added useless thing


    Honestly, the entire ULV tier feels like a "useless thing" tier. Though I guess you can build them before you get steel, since it looks like they use wrought iron everywhere you'd use steel at 32V or aluminum at 128v.

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

    Tantalum capacitors appear to be grossly overpriced for what they do. Not the tantalum, the manganese plate. Manganese is a critical component of stainless steel, and I'm very, very short of it at present. I can't imagine an application where it wouldn't make sense to use 32V batteries instead. If lithium's in short supply, there's always sodium, which is dirt cheap. You'll still end up with 50x the capacity of the tantalum capacitor, and 32v capable to boot.


    Not that there are a lot of applications where 8v is useful. I think solar panel accumulators are the only example, really, and 32v battery buffers do the same job.


    I was messing about in my Creative testbed world, seeing how solar panels work. They're obviously impractical for serious power, but for a remote installation where power demand is low, they seem like an option. I was specifically thinking of a scanner for use with remote apiary setups, or with crop-matrons.


    Anyway, the issue with solar panels is that they're low-voltage, high current devices. Your choices are either transformers or battery buffers. Since incoming current is the limitation, all transformers are limited to 4 amps input, and battery buffers are limited to (slots x 2) input.


    I think the battery buffers are always the better choice. While an 8V->32V transformer is relatively cheap, a 4-slot 8v or 32v battery buffer with 2 batteries can handle the same 4 amps. The 32v version is slightly more expensive than the transformer, but not much. If you're doing a large solar installation, a 16-slot buffer with 16 LV batteries is significantly cheaper than 8 ULV transformers, which cost at least 64 iron for the casings.


    It's the one place I can imagine using a 16-slot, 8 volt battery buffer containing 16 tantalum capacitors, since it's largely about current handling and not EU storage, but cost of 16 ingots of manganese seems silly expensive compared to 16 small batteries, which will run at most 28 lead, 7 antimony, 8 tin, and 16 sodium or lithium. Less lead and antimony if you're using plastic, which I am. Lots more overall material of course, but lead, antimony, tin, and sodium are all very common by the time you've got the tech to make solar panels.

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

    What do you guys use for dust storage and organization, once you've got a enough dust backlog that this matters?


    I've 5 large chests full at present, and it's a bit of a mess. I experimented with setting up a linked chain of low-voltage chest buffers, and that's not working out nearly as well as I though it would. I had imagined that stuff would more-or-less sort, and that piles would move forward and combine, but it hasn't worked out that way at all. Dusts are pretty much randomly distributed through the 4 buffers I've got hooked up at present.


    I don't see using type filters as a great solution. It'd organize things, but it wouldn't adapt well to changing distributions, and I'd probably be fiddling with it all the time.


    I have managed to get the basics of my ore processing automated. Maceration -> purification options -> thermal centrifuge -> maceration anyway, with a system to automatically handle tiny dusts and nuggets (which required 7 regulators). Secondary processing of final dusts like Magnetite, Bauxite, Tetrahedrite, and the like still requires that I hand-walk the ores over to the correct processing line, but I'll get to that eventually.


    I need to do something about a better source of oil. Most of the new stuff runs off oilsand -> nitro diesel conversion, and I'm having to do mining runs for oilsand more often than I want.

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

    Quote from Blood Asp

    for your order issues, maybe allow some overflow even trough it does not go trough the most ideal path then, also restrictive pipes for the order might help.


    It's not the order of the pipes, it's the order of items in the chest. If the first item is currently blocked, that blocks everything that follows - but only if the chest buffer and the destination are linked via item pipes. If they're directly connected, it works properly. If they're connected via any other mod's item transport, it works. It's Gregtech item pipes in particular that don't handle this case well.


    Partly the issue is that I'm still haltingly implementing things, and when something comes through the system that I haven't handled yet, it locks up. I just made my first Universal Macerator, and my washing -> thermal centrifuge -> universal macerator first froze because I wasn't removing the dusts first, and then it froze because the thermal centrifuge created a tiny dust I wasn't diverting.


    Another issue is that the conveyor-as-cover has even more problems with sorting than chest buffer -> item pipe -> filter blocks. If it's block inventory -> conveyor + item pipe -> filter blocks, the items fail to move if any item does not match the first filter block. Even if there's plenty of space all around it, and later filter blocks that can accept the item, the system locks up. Near as I can tell, the only time you want to use conveyor + item pipe is if there's only one possible destination.


    Which is why I was using chest buffer -> item pipe -> filter blocks instead of, for example, doing chest buffer output -> filter block 1, chest buffer side 2 -> conveyor + item pipe -> filter blocks 2 and 3.

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

    I'm still strugglng with automating my ore processing.


    It's really a larger problem with Gregtech item pipes and sorting in general. They don't really deal well with any kind of filtering. I'm trying very hard not to resort to using another pipe system, such as Project Red's transport pipes or Thermal Dynamic's Itemducts, since I feel I ought to be using Gregtech's expensive pipes and filters to stay in line with the overall difficulty level of the mod.


    If a chest buffer sends its output into a pipe, if the destination for the first item in the chest is full, the system locks up. The item goes into the pipe and stays there, and the item in the pipe prevents the chest buffer from sending out anything more. The same thing happens if there are no valid destinations for the first item in the chest buffer.


    If the chest buffer is directly connected to another machine instead of using an item pipe, this doesn't happen. Obviously the "full" case still results in a delay, but if the first item in the chest buffer can't go, the chest buffer chooses the first valid item instead of locking up. For example, if a chest buffer for an ore washer gets dusts because the macerator created some dust, that's fine. The first crushed ore goes instead, no matter how many dusts are ahead of the crushed ore.


    If chest buffer is sending out logs, and the first item attached is a Type Filter Buffer set to logs, and that type filter is full, the system locks up, even if there are other things in the chest buffer than could move. If there's a sapling after the log stack, for example, it stays put even if there are valid destinations for the sapling. On the other hand, if I replace the Gregtech item pipe with a Thermal Dynamics itemduct, the logs wait but the sapling moves.


    So the simple solution is just to use Thermal Dynamics Itemducts. Which cost 1/6th what Gregtech Item Pipes do, because it's 2 Tin + 1 Lead -> 6 Itemducts intead of 3 Bronze -> 1 Item Pipe.