Posts by Gus_Smedstad

Quote from willis936

For mining landmarks why not follow the right hand rule? Place torches on the roght hand side as you're exploring away from the base. When trying to get back to a junction or your base always look for the torches on the left.

I don't think you understand the nature of the problem I was posting.

It's not about exploration. It's about clearing a large ore vein, not missing any ore, while keeping the mining site comprehensible. It's about clearing an area, not trying to find my way back to base. I don't have any problems with the latter.

If I mine out part of a vein, and then return later, there's always a question of which parts of the vein are exhausted, and which still need work. Even during a single run, it's easy to overlook some obscure corner.

As mining progresses, the worked vein doesn't retain any kind of order, no matter what pattern you use. Branch mining is simple in structure, but once you knock a bunch of big holes in the walls between the branches from removing ore, it can quickly become a random mess.

Part of my problem, historically, is that I tended to do what we call a "greedy algorithm" in programming. Basically, I'd dig out any piece of ore I saw, even if it was above or below my current level. This often ended up with a 3 dimensional maze that was hazardous to navigate because of long drops. The solution to that is simple - don't dig out any ore below my current working level, no matter how tempting it is.

The simple solution to all those problems is to remove everything. If there's a block left on the current working level, it's not done. Seeing which parts are incomplete is trivial, and navigation's not a problem because the final result is a big open space with no obstacles.

The problem is that this is far more work than necessary. I dig out a lot of stone that I don't really need to in order to expose ore. More efficient methods, however, leave lots of stone to block line of sight, so I can't just glance around the site to see what area still needs work.

Quote from Blood Asp

Doing the oreprocessing with GT machines only will get big. http://imgur.com/a/SXbus

That setup is far, far larger than what I was even envisioning.

I guess you're saying the answer is "yes, you end up using a lot of item filters" if you use GT item transport to route ores to the proper machines. Though you can cut that in half if you shut down default processing if any of the specialist processing buffers get full. At the cost of parallelism, since you're shutting down part of the system.

I don't think alternate mods address the stack-size issue of the tiny dust -> dust conversion, or if you're automating it, the centrifuge recipes that require a multiple of 3 or 12 or 39 or other combinations I don't recall. I've looked at a few, if not in depth, and while some have features like requesting X items, I've missed any mention of "request exactly 9 items, no more and no less."

I'm reluctant to use non-GT item transport, mostly because it feels like violating the spirit of playing Gregtech. Gregtech stuff tends to be much more expensive than the replacement, both for added demand (why else would you care about brass?) and challenge. Though maybe the cost argument doesn't apply to AE; I gather a basic glass cable costs about 1/2 Certus Quartz and 1/2 Nether Quartz, and while that's less than the 3 Brass required for a GT item pipe, it's a lot easier to get brass than the Quartz items.

I'm surprised you went entirely low voltage. Whenever I put together something with low voltage I'm constantly worrying about cable length and voltage drop from the nearest battery buffer.

I didn't know that item / type filters worked without power, provided you pull from them. Presumably you can do that even with GT, if you attach a conveyor to the item pipe.

I'm in the process of automating my ore processing, and it seems like some steps are very expensive and bulky. Am I missing something?

For example, at the Purified Crushed Ore stage, I'd like to route some ores to a Sifter. Since there's some 26 ores that can benefit from the sifter, eventually this means a total of 6 item filters. 3 to specified all the ores that should go to the sifter, and 3 to prohibit those ores from moving into the auto hammer. Overall it's just cheaper and more compact to build a second, sifter-specific assembly line, macerator -> ore washer -> sifter, and take care to only put the correct ores into that macerator.

The Item Type filters don't really help, because the categories are too broad, and not processing-specific. For example, a type filter can specify "purified crushed ore," but not "purified crushed ores that can be used in the sifter."

Mercury baths are almost as bad, since there are 13 ores that benefit, which means 4 item filters (2 to transfer to the bath, 2 to ensure the ores don't go to the ore washer).

In a related note, dealing with tiny dust byproducts is a headache. I've got a large chest that's nothing but the various small accumulations of tiny dusts. While the packager is supposed to automate the consolidation of tiny and small dusts, it jams if there's anything but a multiple of 9 tiny or 4 small dusts. Regulators can address this, but regulators don't generalize, and they've only got 9 slots each. Which means 5-6 regulators just to ensure that the packager only gets the correct number of tiny dusts, and almost as many to deal with the small dusts.

Quote from Sapient

It's most efficient i ever seen. You need to mine only 32% or vein volume to see every single block of ore.

And branch mining is 33%. While 32% is a little better than 33%, it doesn't seem worth the bother to worry about a pattern instead of just mining in a line.

More to the point, I was looking for advice for mining that's reasonably efficient and not confusing. My experience with very large branch mines on Gregtech veins is that they become random swiss cheese once I've actually started removing ore, and it's remarkably easy to get disoriented, or forget which branches still needed work if I leave and return. This is particularly true if I chase ore vertically instead of confining myself to removing what's on the current dig level.

Mostly I think what I need are landmarks so I can quickly orient myself. The wider corridor Mauve Cloud is a possibility, since it's obviously and visibly different from the branches. Maybe a sign or two saying "exit that way -->" as well.

Quote from Sapient

This can help you: https://youtu.be/rqbpUke_kng?t=251

Since I don't speak Russian, I didn't understand most of that. I did get that there were some diagrams of mining patterns, but it looked like they were less efficient, in terms of work required to uncover ore, than simple branch mining.

I'm not sure what the vertical stuff was about - maybe an attempt to avoid creating deep trenches when you're done mining?

That page doesn't list any technique that precisely matches what I'm doing. It's complete removal of all materials in the target area, but there's no intent for the mine to extend to the surface, as they define "strip" and "quarry" mining.

Having a central, large corridor that's obviously different from the rest might help with disorientation. I don't know that precisely measured markers 5 or 10 squares apart will make any difference. I've done the 5/10 marker thing with Terraria, but only in cases where I wanted to know precisely how long a tunnel was, because I needed to bring back X items to line it or I was building a fluid storage tank.

I got blocked on another missing ore - silver, in this case - and decided it was time to try out the vertical shaft prospecting I've seen mentioned here and there. Or rather, in my case, spiral stair prospecting, since an actual vertical shaft is problematic for a variety of reasons if you don't have a jetpack.

I had much better results than my earlier prospecting attempts. Not perfect, since I still had some shafts turn up nothing. It's not clear to me if "centered on a 3x3 chunk" means an offset of (+24,+24), or some random offset, and it's not clear when a failure means there's just nothing in that 3x3 chunk, or if it means I got the offset wrong and the ore vein for that chunk is somewhat small.

Most of what I've read about prospecting for Gregtech veins has centered on fact it's generated per 3x3 chunk, but I belatedly realized that's not the real issue. The real reason vertical prospecting works so much better than conventional branch mining is that Gregtech veins are more-or-less flat discs, 5-8 levels deep but often 50+ blocks in diameter. It's easy to miss something like that mining horizontally, and almost impossible to miss mining vertically unless it's a particularly small diameter vein.

It took a while, but I eventually found a galena / silver vein. Once I had that, I decided to do something about my long-standing Quartzite need. Looking at the ore table I realized it would probably only generate in Extreme Hills, and sure enough, on my 3rd exploration shaft I found Quartzite. I bet there's a lot of tetrahedrite that I missed earlier because it wasn't exposed and I didn't understand the importance of vertical exploration.

Near as I can tell, Quartzite's only really used for Low Voltage emitters and sensors. Which in turn is important primarily for the seismic prospector (which I haven't reached yet) and for Nuclear Control Gregtech sensor kits. For other applications, there are Medium Voltage variants that use Nether Quartz, which shows up often enough in small ores in the Nether to meet my needs.

In another mining-related note, I'm struggling a bit with mining techniques for Gregtech ore. My original, branch mining approach that worked fine with small vanilla veins creates a maze I find very difficult to navigate if applied to large Gregtech veins. I'm currently essentially strip mining, carving out the limits of the ore at the top level, and removing all blocks, both ore and stone, level by level until I've exhausted the vein.

This works, and it's very clear exactly where the limits of the vein are, and the results is large cavern where it's always clear what's left to mine. The problem is it's slow and tedious, and involves removing a lot of plain stone and dirt. I need to find a method that involves less unneeded mining but where I don't get lost and confused when returning to a paritally-mined site.

Quote from Sapient

Chest buffer, set to output by one item. Item pipe with two shutter modules (one for each receiver) and activity detector cover on both receiver. If machine "Has Work" - then close Shutter module near it. And another cell will go to other direction. Or Item Detector Covers and "Is Not Empty" condition.

I'm in the process of setting up a Nitro Diesel processing line, and this has the same desulfuration issue. Sulfurated Light Fuel + Hydrogen Cell + Empty Cell -> Light Fuel + 2x Hydrogen Sulfide Cells.

The demand on the plastics line has been pretty light, so hand-walking the cells has been OK so far. The nitro-diesel line's supposed to be fully automated. So I'm revisiting this issue.

I'm pretty sure the solutions you offer won't work. I haven't gotten to the point of trying this out yet, but I can see that both are going to present simple cases that foil the detectors. For "Has Work," if the line ever goes idle, both shutters are open and the empty cells fill up the first machine in line. If "had item," the chem reactor "has an item" when it has a hydrogen cell but still needs an empty cell.

I suspect the solution is still a minimum of 65 empty cells circulating between the 3 machines, so there's always 1 surplus once the first machine fills up. 130 tin's pretty expensive, since in truth the line really only needs at most 4 cells. I have the tin, but it's not something I want to do too often.

The steam storage isn't so much for energy storage as a buffer for large swings in steam production, and as a distribution hub. Primary energy storage is in a network of (mostly LV) 4-cell battery buffers.

Prior to the Large Steam Boiler, the steam tank gave me time to unload the High Pressure Coal Boilers if they started to outpace demand - usually if a process finished and energy demand dropped. It also made steam generation more efficient, since the HP Boilers work best if they're run for long periods at maximum temperature.

The Large Steam Boiler also has a spin-up time, so running it for a long burst, storing the steam, and then shutting down until the storage is nearly empty is more efficient than cycling it rapidly or burning fuel when there's no demand.

The mechanics are a bit odd and opaque, they're not really visible unless you're using Nuclear Control to display the boiler stats. Rather than a boiler temperature like the HP boilers, it has an "efficiency" stat that ramps up to 100% in the first 20 seconds of production, and which rapidly declines when it's not running. In general it's a much faster cycle than the temperature stats on the single-block boilers, but it's still there.

You do have a point about power distribution, though. When I was slowly building out my LV network, I went through a variety of models, from basic production to distributed steam production to a central steam collection area and distribution point with local power generation and a network of battery buffers to allow nodes to share power with adjacent nodes (which is where it stands now). The steam distribution is fairly expensive to build, roughly 1 steel to distribute 26 EU/t 1 meter, or 1 bronze to distribute 13 EU/t 1 meter. Copper cables are 1 ingot to distribute 256 EU/t 1 meter.

The steam distribution has the advantage of having zero energy loss for distance. LV -> MV -> LV is a 9% loss for the transformation, plus about 1.5% loss per meter for copper cables or 0.8% for Annealed copper. That's an ongoing cost rather than an up-front cost like the steam pipes, and at a rough guess would cost me about 30% of my energy production total, based on current distances. Now that I'm overproducing wood from the multi-farm, that's not as big a deal as it would have been when I was hand-chopping everything.

Sorry, couldn't make heads or tails of what you were trying to tell me in that video. It sounded informative.

I got the Large Steel Boiler up, running, and automated. A RS latch shuts the boiler off when the steam tank is 90% full, and turns it back on again when it drops to 10%. Or, more precisely, 14/15ths and 2/15ths, since Comparators return contents on a 0-15 scale. I've got a long-ish item pipe from the tree multi-farm feeding it charcoal automatically.

It's day 1228, which is what, 400 hours? This is the first time that worrying about feeding the boilers, or conversely unloading them because my steam buffers are full, hasn't been a concern since I started making steam in the first place. It's also the first time that I've had a consistent steam surplus since I built the electric blast furnace.

It was expensive. Not complicated, not even the Advanced Circuits, since I already had a plastic processing line and a laser engraver / forming press / soldering station setup. But expensive, since the sheer volume of steel it required was very large. Both for the boiler and for the short lengths of Huge Steel Pipe moving the steam into the central tank for distribution. Fortunately I had huge iron reserves since I hit a Limonite vein a while back, and the steel cost was manageable because the basic Electric Blast Furnace produces it at a pretty good rate.

The boiler outputs 24,000 L/sec, and Huge Steel Pipes only handle 19,600, but fortunately it's possible to use mutiple output hatches and multiple pipes. It's worth noting that the boiler only uses one hatch at a time - until hatch #1 fills up with a backlog of steam, hatch #2 produces nothing.

It was definitely worth it. I've got enough surplus power generation now that I'm tempted to continue with steam for new machinery instead of building that nitro-diesel line. That's probably a trap, since steam distribution will continue to be a problem, and my power demands are going to skyrocket as I move further into Medium Voltage. By way of example, I had to upgrade my steam pipeline to the electric blast furnace from Large Steel to Huge, because the large pipe wasn't consistently supplying enough. It should, since power draw is normally at most 128 EU/t, which is about 7200 L/sec of steam, but Gregtech pipes can't provide consistent flow. You often have to build in a bit of overcapacity to ensure things work correctly.

So, I looked into Oil Berries, and I remembered why I bounced off IC2 crops the first time. Not enough information, and progress is slow and labor intensive.

While the basics of crop-breeding are there, there's nothing like a roadmap of how to get to a specific crop from vanilla crops. Unlike, say, the chart showing the bee tech tree. I have no idea how you'd get the keywords you need, since most are not present in vanilla crops. At best it looks like a long, long exercise in random breeding until the crops I want happened to show up.

Plus, there's a lot of vague stuff about opaque mechanics, like plants that require special conditions to grow, air condition, hydration, and fertilization. At least one "guide" (and I use the word "guide" extremely generously here) claims you should only try crop development in a Swamp biome at level 240+.

Then there's weeding. I have zero interest in having to check over my crops on a regular basis to do weeding. The Crop-Matron doesn't do weeding, it uses Weed-Ex, which I gather is bad.

I don't really know much about IC2 crops. I've dabbled, but I quit pretty early because I didn't know what I was doing and didn't have any goals. A crop-based source of oil would be good - but that seems like a longer-term solution, with an unknown time horizon. I'd like to stop the periodic upkeep on the HP boilers now.

I've yet to encounter any pumpkins in this game. I've got melons with a piston-based mass harvest setup, mainly for the seeds which I was using for seed oil for bee stuff before the bee stuff bored me.

So, maybe the automated Large Steel Boiler to keep my current setup running, then an oilsand -> nitro diesel line, and then all new MV machinery gets fueled by nitro diesel instead of steam, and look into oilberries for the long term. Maybe that wheat -> ethanol multifarm after the nitro diesel's set up, if oilsand harvesting starts to be a chore.

I've got a dual-power system for my primitive LV-based electric blast furnace, it can run off either steam or ethanol. The ethanol was my original plan, but when it became clear the ethanol supply was too erratic under my current setup, I put in the steam supply as an alternate source. When the ethanol isn't flowing (most of the time), I'll run the blast furnace until the steam reserves and batteries run out, and then hold off until everything's recharged before starting another run. Mostly the aluminum production has stayed ahead of my consumption.

I re-examined what I was doing, and I did get the Machine Controller cover to work on the Large Steel Boiler. I could have sworn I tried this before, but I think perhaps I'd only tried it on the input bus, not on the controller block. User error, basically.

I'm not thrilled with steam, largely because the piping expense of moving the steam to the turbines is getting high. Steam's energy density is very low compared to the liquid fuels, so it needs big pipes.

The main reason I'm focused on steam is that the trees are a continuing, renewable resource. I've been meaning to put together an Oilsand -> Nitro Diesel line for a while now, but that means periodic mining expeditions just for fuel. Probably a lot of energy per mining run, I'm still a little wary.

I've got a biomass -> ethanol setup, but it stalls because the source of biomass is fermented saplings from the tree multi-farm, and the output chest fills up with wood which halts sapling collection. I guess I could go wheat multifarm -> plantball -> biomass -> ethanol. Most foods don't return enough energy to break even, but plantballs give a decent surplus.

I've done some experimentation in the creative testbed world, and my impression is that methane isn't worth it. LPG is a decent gas turbine fuel, but I won't have any good sources for that until I start oil drilling and getting Natural Gas or Light Oil results. Right now Oilsand's my only petroleum source, and Oil -> Nitro Diesel produces 4x as much EU as Oil -> LPG.

Another automation question:

I'm thinking about building a Large Steel Boiler. It's more steam than I need right now, but my current array of 24 high pressure steam boilers isn't quite up to my steam demands most of the time. They also require significant maintenance (re-stoking and ash clearing), and I'd like to get away from that.

I've experimented with one in a Creative testbed world, and I believe I've got a handle on the mechanics. Except for the life of me, I can't find any easy way to shut it off automatically when my 7 million L steam tank is full. I can stop delivering fuel, but there's still a minimum of 4 full stacks of fuel (256 blocks) in the input bus. That's going to continue to burn even if it's not needed.

Conveyors won't remove fuel from the input bus, and the Machine Control cover doesn't appear to work.

Am I missing something? Or is the writing off the fuel currently in the input bus, or removing it by hand (which defeats the purpose) the only solution?

The main reason I'm looking at a Large Steel Boiler, by the way, is that I have a steady stream of wood (and thus charcoal) from a Forestry tree multi-farm. Steam's the only way to convert that to energy until I can build a Pyroluse Oven, and that's a long way in the future since that requires Kanthal coils, a Vaccuum Freezer to make those, and high-voltage tech in general. I'm just barely into Medium Voltage.

I've got a plastics line up and running, and as part of that I'm desulfinating Naphtha. This creates two H2S cells, which I then empty by creating sulfuric acid. I'd like to recycle those cells automatically, but one has to go to the fluid canning unit to fill up with hydrogen, and the other has to go to the chem reactor.

Is there a graceful way to split the empty cell output between these two machines? The brute-force method is to have 128 cells in the system. Once either machine has a full stack of 64, it won't accept any more, so the remainder will go to the other one.

Heh, we're back to Quartzite, which I've yet to find.

It's difficult to say what's going on with the gear recipes. I'd have to set up a temporary install that removed Thermal Dynamics to say for certain.

Quote from MauveCloud

However, disabling the crafting recipe for the thermionic fabricator is still possible so that the assembler is required as a progression gate for the electron tubes.

I'm kind of surprised that GT 5U doesn't do this. I'm just getting into creating my first Multifarm, and the Assembler recipe for tubes requires Medium Voltage. Not directly, it's just that the recipe requires molten glass, which in turn requires MV, like almost all molten materials except rubber and tin. Just building a Themionic Fabricator instead was a lot easier, since I've yet to achieve MV tech. The fact I could bypass this felt like a bit of a cheat.

The less-expensive Forestry gear recipes are disabled. The Thermal Dynamics cheaper gears, which duplicate Forestry's recipes, are not, but I assume that's because GT 5U isn't really aware of Thermal Dynamics. I'm using Thermal Dynamics for fluid pipes that are better behaved than GT's.

Quote from xxx.514

Nuclear Power works correctly for you?

I've yet to find any quartzite, but I spent some time in a Creative testbed world, experimenting with low-voltage power distribution. Nuclear Control worked just fine with Gregtech 5U battery buffers. A little slow to update, but it did display all the important information.

I'm stuck for an ore again, only this time it's Quartzite. I've got most of my low-voltage machinery set up, with several battery buffers, but I'd like to monitor the amount of energy I've got in those batteries easily. To that end I installed Nuclear Control 2, which has a bunch of information panels. Unfortunately, the recipe for the Gregtech sensor kit involves quartzite, and I haven't seen any.

This feels like it's going to be a recurring thing. At least with the tetrahedrite I could be reasonably sure it would be visible from the surface. For veins where the generation is lower, that's not an option.

I've seen lots of coal, magnetite, bauxite, salt / lepidolite veins (handy for lithium), redstone / ruby veins, and a couple of monazite veins, but there are lots of things I've never seen.

Well, d'oh. Of course that's a better solution. I've just never had any incentive to set up a long distance transport system before.