Posts by Gus_Smedstad

I finally found a tetrahedrite vein, after exploring roughly double the area you can see above. In trying to express how much area I've covered, I realized you could describe the white-and-gray areas that are obvious extreme hills as "mountain ranges," in which case I'd only explored 3 before, and I found Cassiterite in range 5 and Tetrahedrite in range 6. Of course that understates how much time went into it, since each "range" covers a large map area when you're exploring it on foot.

It's been an interesting, if exhausting experience. The difference between this and vanilla reminds me of the difference between vanilla Factorio and Factorio with the Resource Spawner Overhaul. In vanilla minecraft, I never had to venture far from home. Dig down far enough and I'd find everything I could use. Here, I had to actively search for a considerable time, and it's going to be a long haul back and forth to my base. If I had the resources, and the vein is large, I'd be seriously tempted to build a railway to and from to simplify haulage use chest carts and to speed it up in general.

I'm not really set up to do that, though. The main issue is that making railway ties with Railcraft is extremely tedious by hand. For a track of this length (1700 meters from home, according the Xaero's Minimap waypoints), there's no point in doing it unless it was automatic. It's 1700 * 4 / 32 = 212 ties plus 240 steel rods.

I'm not playing with any biome mods at present. I wonder if I'm doing the search wrong somehow. I've searched about 250 chunks worth of Extreme Hills from the exterior, and found 9 veins, but they were all coal, magnetite, and bauxite.

I've wandered over 2500 chunks or more (hard to estimate easily), but most of that was too low. I've got a broad, broad expanse of Mesa, but I'm assuming that ore doesn't generate inside colored clays, and that's all the high material. Certainly I haven't seen any other veins.

I should really just go branch mining in the Nether, I guess, but part of me is wondering about how easy it is to find tetrahedrite if you're looking for copper for bronze. I've got lots, but most of it is blocks generated by IndustryCraft, Forestry, or Railcraft. Which I've since turned off because it feels excessive. I'm still finding lots of it in chunks generated prior to adjusting the config, of course.

EDIT: This is what my map looks like at present. Just to be clear.

Man, that Antimony requirement for battery hulls is a killer. It's only available in Tetrahedrite veins, either as a byproduct of tetrahedrite itself or from Stibnite which also only occurs in those veins. Which only spawns above level 70, so pretty much Extreme Hills, I guess. I've gone wander a very long way, looking for exposed deposits on the surface, and have yet to see any.

I'm in the Low Voltage electrical age, struggling to get the infrastructure together to construct my first battery. I've got one Basic Steam Turbine and 5 machines at this point, of which I can only really run one at a time.

What I'm not really understanding is where I should be advancing in terms of fuel sources. I'm constantly running out of charcoal. I'll be mid-project and I have to put the parts aside so I can collect charcoal from my burner pit and go out and chop more wood to refill it. I've installed 7 solar boilers, which has helped, but it's clearly not a long term solution.

I'm barely putting out 32 watts. I could build more turbines, but I'm not producing enough steam to run a second turbine. I could build a Large Boiler, but how am I going to keep it fueled? Running a couple of medium-voltage machines would be 8x my present fuel consumption, and high voltage is of course 4x that. It'd take an entire charcoal pit full to run a single high voltage machine for a few minutes.

I found some dungeon chests, but instead of obsidian, I found Iridium shards. I used those to make an Iridium Pick (which also required a steel handle, good job there were 2 steel ingots in the chest), and with that I mined out some obsidian. From there I made a couple of Industrial Diamonds, and I was off to the races.

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, it's hard to credit making gem-quality diamonds, or even diamond dust, using steam-era technology. The pressures involved in actual diamond synthesis are enormous. On the other, it's ridiculous the macerator requires gem-quality diamonds - if the macerator really needs diamonds, diamond grit (diamond dust in GT 5U) ought to be sufficient, and I have a good bit of that from the 10+ small diamond ores I found. I only found one proper "diamond" among all those, the rest were all dust, diamond chips, or flawed diamonds, none of which qualify for the macerator.

Yeah, yeah, diamonds are pretty silly in Minecraft already, like you could really make an entire sword out of diamonds by glueing them together at a workbench, or diamond armor. I'm just rationalizing away how kinda cheaty industrial diamonds feel.

Bear, I just have to say I've watched several of your Gregtech 6 videos and enjoyed them. They're really helpful, and much more calm and collected than the typical Minecraft video.

I've been digging trenches between levels 6-9, primarily looking for Small Diamond Ore, which spawns at levels 5-10. Originally I was digging at level 12, looking for Graphite veins which spawn at 5-20, but then I learned that regular diamond ore requires a diamond pick to mine. Besides, small diamonds can spawn anywhere, so they're not restricted by other veins (of which I've found plenty).

Dropping flour into a cauldron will make early bread making a little less tedious.

Speaking of which, GT6 apparently allows fluid pipes to fill cauldrons. That's a pretty rare capability - because filling the cauldron is very repetitive, I went looking for a way, and the only mod which seems to do this aside from GT6 is Tubes.

Unfortunately, Tubes is a really terrible otherwise. When I connected a tank full of water to a cauldron, it filled it, but then it continued to empty it until the tank was dry. Apparently it treats fluids as packets, and if they don't reach a destination they just bounce around inside the tube. I'm not sure if they're destroyed or just in limbo, but in either case it was behavior I didn't want to see.

I'm still struggling along in the Steam Age. I found a big vein of iron / pyrite / copper, but I'm reluctant to start on blast furnaces until I can get a macerator running, and I haven't found any diamonds. I found a few small diamond ores, but they dropped diamond dust rather than usable diamonds. In the meantime I've been hoarding lots of unprocessed copper ore.

When I shifted from GT 6 to GT 5U, I initially went with 5.10 because I wanted to play 1.10.2 again, and I loaded up a few additional mods like Railcraft. The result was unplayable due to single-player lag. I'd whack a tree and move to collect the wood, and abruptly the tree would revert to undamaged. I'm not sure if that was GT 5.10 or the very early nature of Railcraft's support for 1.10.2.

I could have spent some effort trying to isolate precisely what combination was the problem, but I was also seeing some other odd glitches with flint tools, like not displaying remaining durability, so I decided it was best to accept being forced back to 1.7.10.

Whereas I think the crucible is decidedly inferior to regular smelting or the alloy smelter in GT 5.

While I completely agree with the original poster than the crafting grid is a bad idea, the crucible sits in a spot that doesn't use the crafting grid - smelting. Furnaces only have one slot, and no grid. The alloy smelter has 2 slots, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't care about position (though I haven't actually tested that).

The crucible still requires NEI, since there are a lot of smelting recipes that aren't particularly obvious. Smelting Magnetite for example, which is important because it's the first thing that actually requires the crucible. Only, due to the nature of the crucible, you're forced to memorize NEI recipes instead of just being able to use them directly. It's user-hostile compared to the crafting grid, and that's quite the accomplishment.

It's not so much the time required by the crucible, it's that you can't just give it a stack of stuff to do and go do something else. You have to babysit it if you don't want an explosion. You have to babysit it because you have to manually pour the metal into the molds. It's so intentionally tedious that my #1 priority, before it turned me off entirely, was to advance to the point where I could replace it with a machine with a conventional interface.

It wasn't the complexity, it was the crucible in Gregtech 6 that soured me on it. It blows up, killing you and destroying the materials and itself if you make a mistake. Since it's easy to make mistakes when you're learning, it's extremely frustrating if you don't understand every aspect of how it works. Like, not knowing whether the liquid being the wrong color means you've got the wrong mix, or it's only the wrong color because it's not hot enough yet. Mistake the first case for the second and it's death.

Beyond that, it's deadly boring staring at the crucible, and slow. One of my earliest projects with most mods is to automate moving stuff into and out of furnaces, so I don't have to babysit them when I've got half a dozen small stacks of different items. The crucible, between the heating time and the danger of touching hot molds, is the polar opposite.

All of which is why I'm exploring Gregtech 5U now instead. There are things about 6 I prefer, but I'll never play with a version that involves the crucible again.

Quote from MauveCloud

I don't recall a purely-GregTech way to do that as a fixed display, but maybe with Nuclear Control.

That's it exactly. I looked at the cover tutorial video again, and at 5:09 you can see the panel is a Advanced Information Panel from Nuclear Control 2. It seems like a really handy diagnostic, but I don't know anything about that mod, or what the panel costs.

Quote from MauveCloud

I think the alloy smelter has some sort of hidden internal buffer of steam, which might be what's confusing you.

That's a possibility. IndustrialCraft machines all have energy buffers, but it's visible so it's clear that the energy is going to charge the buffer and not being thrown away. I can see how the Gregtech Steam machines might have a internal energy buffer but it's not visible. One video I watched showed some sort of display-panel cover that showed stats for the various Gregtech machines as they were operating, but I don't know what that is, and no doubt it requires electronics.

I'm not sure what half the things in the steam GUI do, and online documentation seems to be sparse. I guess the top right box in the coal boiler is just to hold dark ashes?

The main reason I disconnected the Steam Alloy Smelter is that it would eat all the steam in the boiler, fail to finish the operation, and then throw the steam away. Secondary reason was that I believed the smelter ate steam even when it had no queued operations.

The only mod I'm currently playing that has storage is Railcraft, and that's just those multiblock iron tanks. Those cost at least 24 iron, and I've yet to find a significant source of that. I know that when I do find a real iron vein, I'll be swimming in it, but so far I've been struggling along on those Small Iron Ore blocks.

Thermal Dynamics of course has a wide range of storage solutions, but I was trying to avoid using that as being too out of sync with Gregtech's design philosophy. I don't want to make things too easy on myself.

Incidentally, I've learned the ins and outs of the charcoal burner pile. It's incredibly fast and efficient, though time consuming to set up and harvest. I started with a 3x3x1 just to learn the ropes, and I'm currently running a 5x5x5 whenever I'm feeling low on fuel.

I've got another "what's the correct way within Gregtech 5u" question.

I'm in the early stages of steam power, and I had some unexpected snags with running a Steam Alloy Smelter. A single Small Coal Boiler couldn't provide enough steam to keep it running, and when the smelter run out of steam mid-way through an operation, it halted and reset. So just running at a slower speed wasn't workable. I added a second boiler, and that wasn't quite enough either. I did hit on a solution, I disconnected the smelter, run both boilers up to a full load of steam, and then reconnected the smelter. That ran pretty much acceptably. Though I also noticed that the steam smelter consumed steam even if it didn't have any operations pending.

Breaking the steam pipe and then re-connecting it seems crude. I'd like a valve for the pipe, or a way to turn off the smelter so it doesn't eat steam. I looked into Shutter Covers and Machine Control covers, and those would do the trick handily - except that both require a very high tech device, the Assembler to make. There doesn't seem to be any way to craft one with a regular craftbench.

Is there a regular way to make them? Or to turn the smelter on and off? I can of course use pipes from another mod, such as Thermal Dynamics, but I'm wondering about the "correct" Gregtech way to solve the problem. Assuming the solution isn't "break the steam pipe regularly."

The amount of charcoal a pit can produce crossed my mind. If the pit were an extra feature, in addition to vanilla furnace production of charcoal, the pit's cost makes sense. It's just that when it's the only way to produce charcoal in-mod, I have to ask what the intended solution to those torches you need the first night is.

The alternative, I guess, is to dig a hole and hide in it until morning, doing nothing or perhaps doing everything by feel in the dark while the hungry undead moan outside.

Quote from MauveCloud

4. If being unable to burn logs into charcoal in a furnace still bothers you after reading the alternatives above, you can find "disabledrecipes" in GregTech/Recipes.cfg and change "B:wood2charcoalsmelting_true=true" to "B:wood2charcoalsmelting_true=false"

That's what I did, but I wanted to know if there was another, intended solution. When trying out a new mod I like to see how the designer imagined it working before altering it.

I know how Coke Ovens work. It's true that you don't need anything other than a furnace, wood, and clay to make a Railcraft coke oven, but shouldn't there be a solution to torches that doesn't depend on another mod? Or is Railcraft and intended requirement, like Industrial Craft 2?

I've read about the Gregtech vein generation, but haven't had extensive experience with it yet. Are you saying you can expect to see coal veins exposed and visible pretty much all the time, provided you check out biomes like Extreme Hills?

I have a question. I'm just now trying out Gregtech 5U, and the first thing I ran into was the fact the mod disables the charcoal burning recipe for the furnace, in favor of a more realistic pit approach. Which would be OK if the pit approach didn't require bronze, brick, and iron.

Charcoal's a very early game material, required for torches. You can't really dig or go caving without torches. How are you supposed to make torches without charcoal? Coal is an alternative, but coal isn't something you find on the surface unless you're lucky.

Is there a low-tech alternative I'm missing? Shouldn't the charcoal pit be something you can make with just logs and dirt? If you're arguing that it's "realistic," that's all medieval charcoal burners used. It was a profession for the extremely poor, requiring virtually no equipment.