Posts by Gus_Smedstad

I’m fine with the emphasis on physical plant in Factorio. It’s hard for me to feel it’s “too simple” given how large and complex a base that can launch the end-game rocket has to be. “Clicking on stuff” grossly oversimplifies the sort of layout headaches the game involves.

There are, of course, mods. I’ve only dipped lightly into Factorio mods because I felt the vanilla game was more than good enough. I have, however, thought about getting into the mods which add more materials (Bob’s Mods) or make ore processing more complex.

It’s true that, while there’s logic gate infrastructure in the game, there’s little demand for it. The ones that come to mind are demand-control logic for steam power, balancing systems for petroleum production, and fuel-priority setups.

In fairness, mods like Gregtech don’t demand a lot of control systems either. Generally speaking it’s either simple shut offs (“shut off if water is low”) or hysteresis systems (“turn on when steam / battery levels are low, turn off when they’re full.”) Which is just as well given how fantastically bulky red stone control systems are, even if you’re using Project Red.

I’ve heard it argued that Gregtech isn’t actually hard, it’s just a lot of extra steps and grinding. It seems like 90% of my Gregtech decisions center around plant layout, just like Factorio. I.e. “where do I put this so it’s convenient to reach and use, where do I run these pipes, can I set up a series of item pipes so I need to do less hand-carrying of materials.”

It’s still a challenge. A major motivation for me right now is getting to a point where I don’t have to deal with all those friggin’ tiny dusts by hand anymore. I had such a setup in my prior run. What’s holding me back is mostly that it requires type filters and lots of regulators, which in turn require Advanced Circuits, and I’m currently finding those prohibitively expensive to make en masse. That, and figuring out a layout that will work with the conveyor belts, which are much clumsier than item pipes but more interesting for being limited.

Quote from MauveCloud

For me, it was mainly the "no guis, do everything with in-world interactions" philosophy that Greg seems to be using now that kept me away from GT6.

I’m not sure what else is involved, but arguably the problems with the crucible center around this exact issue. It forces you to eyeball it to gauge the temperature, so it and the heat box need extensive babysitting even if you don’t make an error. Like, for example, have enough stone contamination that it the molten metal never changes color, or not have the correct proportions. The feedback isn’t a failure to work, as it is with most mods, it’s death and destruction of your hard work.

My main hesitation in moving on to 1.12 and current mods is that I’m not aware of any that have what I feel is sufficient progression. I play Minecraft mainly for the “conveyor belt factory” experience you get from Factorio, Infinifactory, Big Pharma, and the like. Gregtech 5U (salted with Magneticraft for conveyor belts in my case) is the best I’ve been able to approximate that. I’d move on if there were 1.12 mods that did it better.

Ancient Warfare 2, by the way, was mildly interesting for the early low-tech aspects. It does auto-milking of cows in a pen, which most mods don’t, and the windmills I set up to power its stuff were entertaining. The main problem is that the central “hired NPC” mechanic doesn’t work well, the NPCs tend to get stuck, or get ganked when a mob manages to mysteriously show up inside the base.

Quote from GregoriusT

It doesnt actually explode unless youre dumb enough to insert Gunpowder into it.

Vaporized metal destroying everything in range, including the crucible and heat box, and killing you seems a lot like an explosion. Even if you want to say it isn’t.

The crucible and the "it explodes and you die if you make a mistake" mechanic are what keep me away from GT6.

I feel like I'm the only one still playing this, these days. 3 weeks and no activity?

I finally managed to get polyethylene production going. Willis mentioned doing that but quitting before MV; I'm not sure how that works, since the formulas I see for ethane production require MV.

This required a trip to the Nether to go Blaze hunting, since it requires two distilleries. I put together a Blaze farm while I was at it, but I suspect that the 20 Blaze Rods I collected while defending myself during construction are all I'll need for a long time. I went through a couple of Hazmat Suits doing it, but it was worth it, not having to worry about the Blazes setting me on fire.

As a bonus, I managed to luck into a large vein of Nether Quartz on the way there. I remember really hurting for that stuff last time I played.

Polyethylene is required for transistors, which in turn are required for Advanced Circuits, which was my goal. I've forgotten, now, how we used to make Advanced Circuits, but they're now fantastically expensive and time consuming to make. Mostly because they require 2 Good Circuits, which in turn require 3 Basic Circuits to make, for a total cost of 6.

I'm just lucky I managed to find an Exquisite Green Sapphire somewhere, or I'd have to make an Implosion Compressor and some sort of explosives production line as well. I know I'll have to do that eventually, but just getting polyethylene going was quite the headache, now that it requires 5 steps (oilsand -> crude oil -> sulfuric naphtha -> naphtha -> ethylene -> polyethylene ), plus 2 fluid canners to put oxygen and hydrogen into cells. And I haven't even started on the production line for processing the H2S cells you get as a waste product from desulfinating the naphtha.

One thing I noticed was that the alternate ICs, which require plastic for the circuit boards, require CPUs, which can be made with a glass lens. Except that the glass lens requires an Exquisite Glass Crystal, which appears to be impossible to make. Alternately, you can make them from glass plates in a HV lathe. Used to be that the plate -> lens recipe was LV.

I put together a tiny resource pack for the early stages of the new circuits. At present, it includes new icons for transistors, IC chips, RAM chips, and CPU chips. I haven't touched anything else, such as the completed circuits. I just wanted to differentiate the chips, instead of using gray rectangles for all of them.

Circuits.zip

On an unrelated note: the transistors introduced a few versions back - 0.30? - are in a weird place, progression wise. You'd think they'd be drop-in replacements for vacuum tubes, since individual transistors are much, much simpler devices than IC's. Instead, they're used as a tier-3 ("advanced") circuit requirement, and you cannot make any circuits with transistors until you have IC technology.

Speaking of IC's, the actual chip and the packaged basic circuit are both called "Integrated logic circuits." They really need distinct name, like "Integrated Logic Chip" and "Integrated Logic Circuit," though thankfully they're visually distinctive, unlike the Biomass / IC2 Biomass liquids.

I didn't know GT drain covers collected rain. I never really saw the point of GT drain covers. Sucking up a single source block didn't seem worthwhile. I've committed now to the Agricraft wooden tanks, which I rather like. They're visibly hollow, and you can see the contained water, unlike the Railcraft tanks, and I'm hard pressed to argue which of the 3 collection rates is more "realistic" since none of them are GT and the baseline solution in other mods is usually infinite water.

I'll still test out the Gregtech drains, just in the name of SCIENCE.

"Hand stoking your water supply" - no. That's not the alternative. The alternatives are either infinite water sources (for steam setups) or power sources that don't involve steam (i.e. petroleum fuels).

I took a hard look at all sorts of steam turbines from other mods. Some of them return water condensed from steam. The Big Reactor turbines, for example, have an optional upgrade that does that, and they're large, interesting looking multiblocks. I'm reluctant to go that route, though, since they generally return RF, and it's unclear how the balance compares to GT steam turbines. It may be significantly less or more efficient. I wanted to use Magneticraft's steam boiler instead of GT's large boiler, just because it can be automated (unlike the small boilers) and doesn't explode (unlike the large boilers), but it turns out that Magneticraft returns about 1/6th the steam per charcoal that GT's boilers do.

I will say I'm rather enjoying the conveyor belts / inserter setups from Magneticraft. They're considerably bulkier and less efficient than item pipes, but they look great and are far less magical than item pipes. I haven't done much complex with them, but I do like that when there's a backlog or timing issue, it's highly visible.

Tested removing paint from a machine with a water bucket. It works. It’s unintuitive, and as far as I know undocumented, but it works.

I installed Agricraft, since it has a water collector, and compared it in a test against Railcraft water sidings and Forestry rain tanks. The Agricraft and Forestry tanks only work while it’s raining, while the Railcraft works at 1/3rd speed when it’s not. During rain, in the time that a Railcraft tank accumulated 10,000 L, 3x3 Forestry tanks collected 26,000 L (2,888 L each) and a 3x3 Agricraft tank collected 59,000 L (!).

I’m debating whether I consider this “fair” or not.

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.

Quote from MauveCloud

https://github.com/Blood-Asp/G…MetaTileEntity.java#L1261

Incidentally, that code makes me wince. Creating a new, temporary object just to check whether an existing object is a water bucket? That seems terribly slow and wasteful compared to how I’d imagine it can be done. I guess Java does memory management for you, unlike C++, so creating an object and then just letting the pointer go won’t create a memory leak, but it still looks like terrible practice to me.

I never paint my machines either, except unintentionally.

It would never, ever occur to me to right click on a Gregtech machine with a water bucket. Usually that’s a good way to make things explode. I’ll have to check it out.

Speaking of water, I’ve got a bit of a water crisis. I’m not using any of the various infinite water sources, since those seem like cheating to me, so I collect water for my boiler, ore washer, cutting machines, electrolysis, etc from Railcraft Water Sidings. I’ve got 8 of them, and they’re not keeping up with demand.

I could of course just plop down one of those infinite water producers (Thermal Expansion and Magneticraft both have them), but I’d rather a finite source that was a bit more efficient at producing water than the Railcraft water sidings.

I did experiment with the Rain Tank from Forestry. A 3x3 grid of them produces about 2.5x as much water as a Railcraft water collector... if it’s raining. Nothing if it’s not. I suspect that on average, they probably produce less overall, given how clear weather is more common than rain.

Man, I wish there were some way to remove paint applied via roller or spray can from a machine.

I color code my pipes and cables. This both makes clear at a glance what they are, and prevents cables of different voltages from connecting. Now and then I’ll right-click on something, thinking I have a wrench or other tool selected, and I’ve actually got a paint roller selected, and I’ll paint something accidentally.

This is sometimes minor, but sometimes it’s a disaster, effectively destroying the machine. For example, I just painted a MV transformer with the HV color (yellow). This means it cannot connect to MV wires unless I leave them unpainted. If, alternatively, I paint it the MV color (orange), the same problem applies to HV wiring. There’s no way to return the machine to its original, unpainted state.

I wish there were a tool to remove paint, or just that machines would forget their color when picked up, like cables do.

I completed my MV electrolyzer, and I needed only 1 tiny pile of gallium to do it. The way I organized my base, I had a long run between my LV steam turbine bank and my starting electric blast furnace, so I used transformers to up the voltage to 128v for the run to reduce cable losses. As a side effect, this meant I already had a 2amp 128v cable power source available for my MV electrolyzer, and didn’t need to make a MV turbine before I could start using it.

This means that the gallium bootstrapping problem isn’t severe, providing that electrolyzing bauxite provides gallium (which it definitely should, it’s not something you get from centrifuging, thermal or otherwise, which is the current method). From a design perspective, it’s stil a potential trap for the newcomer who might not prioritize bauxite electrolysis as job #1 once he obtained aluminum, though there are good reasons to do that anyway.

If you’re wondering about why I needed that MV cable run - my current base design is to put all my actively used machinery on the first level of my base, near my workshop. I put the blast furnace there. The level below is reserved for wiring and pipes. My steam storage tank is on level 3, along with the large bronze boiler and charcoal production. The steam turbines are immediately below the steam tank, because running high-capacity steam lines for any distance is ridiculously resource intensive.

I could have put the blast furnace on level 3 next to the steam tank, but that would have meant running up and down stairs all the time to feed it materials and collect ingots.

I used silver cable for the MV cable run, since I couldn’t make annealed copper until I had the blast furnace operational and a source of oxygen (currently the bauxite electrolysis). I had barely enough silver on hand to do it.

It’s just as well, because fairly soon I intend to upgrade that line to HV using MV transformers, to cut down even further on cable losses, and make it more practical to switch over to central power generation.

I’m experimenting in a Creative world. It appears that in .32pre4, the production cycle for an oil rig is 4 seconds, not 8. Production is still 1/2 the stated amount per cycle, but you get the full amount in 8 seconds. For example, in my test world I had a source rated “441-700 L of light oil” that actually produces 245 L per cycle, or 490 L every 8 seconds.

For crude oil, this means the break-even point is a source rated at 90 L (45 L / cycle) if you’re making light fuel, and 44 L if you’re making Cetane Diesel. I haven’t attempted to graph the probabilities of petroleum, but that looks easily doable.

For a light oil source like the one I’m currently testing, it looks like Gasoline is actually the correct usage, because Light Oil converts much more efficiently to Naphtha than Light Fuel. I haven’t run the calculations yet, since my foray yesterday assumed a Crude Oil source like Oilsand.

EDIT: It also appears that the actual draw of the Drilling Rig is 50 EU/ tick, not 128. A single 400,000 EU battery lasted for 100 cycles, generating 24,500 L of light oil. That’s 4,000 EU/cycle, or 50 EU/tick.

The actual break even points are thus 17 L/cycle (34 L claimed capacity) for light fuel and 9 L/cycle (18 L claimed capacity) for Cetane diesel.

That’s... good to know. I do believe I’ll quit again. I assumed that 0.32 was at least as functional as 0.28, so I never imagined oil would be broken. That pretty much ruins the game for me, for a variety of reasons.

I hate manually mining for fuel. The early game is only really tolerable for me once I have some sort of automatic tree farm set up.

My experience last time was that a couple of large tree farms and a large steam boiler can provide maybe 400 EU/tick reliably, which is not nearly enough for ore processing once 512 V pulverizers become part of the process, let alone blast furnaces. Of course it’s always possible to scale, but I cringe thinking about trying to advance much beyond MV with steam. Oil freed me from a great many energy headaches last time.

Oil and its complicated processing was one of the more interesting parts of the game. Multiple stages plus efficiency things like cracking at multiple stages.

I have zero interest in nuclear, given that “explodes and ruins months of hard work” is part of the design goal of nuclear. That the steam boilers have a lesser version of that pisses me off, but I do know how to build a simple automatic shutoff circuit now, and I’ve got an automatic backup mod if the truly stupid happens anyway.

In going over the various stages of production, I made a point of noting how much each step limited the eventual power production, in EU/tick. Last time around I didn't pay enough attention to that, and overestimated the value of some fuel production lines.

Light Fuel's limiting factor is the Oilsand -> Crude Oil step. That's 10 liters / second. 1 L of Light Fuel costs 29 EU to process from Oilsand, so it's (256 - 29) * 10 / 20 = 113 EU / tick. Since the next limit is Crude Oil -> Sulfuric Light Fuel at 25 L /sec, adding another centrifuge without adding to the rest of the line doubles the production.

Cetane Diesel's steps limited by both fermentation and ammonia production time. Both limit production to 5.2 L Cetane Diesel / second. The Fermented Biomass -> Ammonia step is also very energy intensive, adding 30 EU per liter of Cetane Diesel produced. Total cost is 66 EU / L, so net is 446 EU / L, or 446 * 5.2 / 20 = 115 EU / tick. It's about the same production rate as Light Fuel, only you have to double 2 stages to double production, not just 1. Still, it's a net of 223,000 EU / oilsand block instead of 113,500 EU / oilsand.

I seem to remember Nitro Diesel production in 0.28 was much faster, working out to around 500 EU / tick or something. Once you have HV and can produce ammonia efficiently, you're only limited to oilsand centrifuge speed, and 2 centrifuges can give you 900+ EU / sec of Cetane Diesel.

Of course mining oilsand for fuel is a big PITA, so the real low-maintenance solution is an oil rig - same as it was in 0.28.

So I wasted my day delving into the confusing world of .31+ fuels. I had a pretty good grasp of how combustion fuel production worked in .28, but pretty much everything has changed, and many of the new fuels have recipes that rapidly become confusing if you're just casually browsing NEI, since they have a half-dozen steps or so to complete.

Methanol is on the list just because you can burn it, but you never should. Its energy value is low, and it's primarily a precursor to gasoline. When you eventually want it, the pryolyse oven is the way to get it, since wood -> wood vinegar -> methanol is much, much faster and cheaper than biochaff -> biomass -> fermented biomass -> methanol.

Diesel makes no <bleeping> sense. It's inferior to the EU value of its ingredients - the light fuel alone has 67% more energy than the resulting diesel - and it's not an efficient precursor to anything. If you want to make cetane-boosted diesel, you use the light fuel directly, because mxing it as diesel first cuts the cetane diesel yield in half.

Ethanol is now something you can produce without using IC2 machines. It's now a precursor for high octane gasoline, which means it's always relevant. The primary bottleneck is converting various foods to biochaff via maceration. That takes a significant amount of time. You'd need banks of macerators to run any good-sized base. Still, it's one way to turn saplings into energy if you've got an automated tree farm.

Light fuel is unchanged from .28. It's a decent fuel, and one of the least-complicated things to make, but it converts 1:1 to cetane boosted diesel which has twice the EU.

Gasoline is hideously complicated to make because it requires 4 ingredients, most of which have fairly complex production requirements. It's also inferior to cetane boosted diesel, which is much easier to make, and uses less resources. It is, however, a precursor to High Octane Gasoline. It's also possible you might make it if you're getting the naphtha for free from a distillation tower when making light fuel.

Cetane Boosted Diesel is, like is prior incarnation Nitro Diesel, the sweet spot if you have oilsand or an oil rig. It's just light fuel + nitric acid. Nitric acid requires ammonia, which is slow and expensive to make before HV, but still worth doing. The other caveat is that the production line is plants -> biochaff -> biomass -> fermented biomass -> ammonia -> nitric acid prior to HV, which means plant production is a possible bottleneck, and the fermented biomass and ammonia steps are both very, very slow prior to HV. There are enough steps involved that running on simple light fuel for a while may make sense.

It does get much simpler and faster once you can convert nitrogen and hydrogen directly into ammonia at HV.

High Octane Gasoline is the end-fuel for the combustion generator. 20% of its volume (6 out of 30 cells) is cheap nitrous oxide, which you can make from air, and of course it's 50% higher EU than Cetane Boosted Diesel. It's ridiculous to make, though. It's complex enough that it's potentially a goal just for the sake of having cracked it.

It's Gasoline + Nitrous Oxide + Ethly Tert-Butyl Ether + Toluene. Gasoline is Naphtha + Toluene + Methanol + Acetic Acid. So you've got 7 production lines and about 18 steps, not including the occasional canning machine or distillation tower.

Oil -> Sulfuric Naptha -> Naptha -> Toluene.

Wood -> Wood vinegar -> Methanol -> Acetic Acid.

Naphtha + Toluene + Methanol + Acetic Acid -> Gasoline

Air -> Nitrogen + Oxygen -> Nitrous Oxide.

Plants -> Biochaff -> Biomass -> Ethanol

Oil -> Sulfuric Refinery Gas -> Refinery Gas -> Butane -> Butene + Ethanol -> Ethly Tert Butyl Ether

Gasoline + Nitrous Oxide + Ethyl Tert Butyl Ether + Toluene -> High Octane Gasoline.

Sphalerite isn’t the same as Zinc ore for game balance, because they have different byproducts even if the end result is still Zinc. If straight Zinc ore was getting generated in large veins, the Gallium issue wouldn’t exist, since it has Gallium as a LV byproduct.

Saltpeter isn’t generated in large veins, in the Nether or not. It’s only in small ore deposits.

Incidentally, I took a look at the Custom Ore Generation mod for this play through. The Gregtech scripts for COG are based on the Geologica Ad Astera mod, and has the same problems when trying to actually play with Gregtech. Tin is very, very sparse, and tetrahedrite doesn’t get generated at all.

Long term it’s probably unplayable even if those things were fixed, because you can’t use the every-3rd-chunk vertical prospecting technique. Sooner or later you’ll run into a bottleneck with a critical mineral and it’ll be impossible to find it, even with seismic prospectors.

Quote from EconBrony

Gus_Smedstad

Have you tried Infitech 2u: Fear the Night yet? Its an updated version of Infitech 2 running gt5u 5.09.31.

I generally don’t do mod packs because they tend to throw more mods than even I want into the game often, with multiple tech packs that give you multiple, somewhat conflicting methods of doing things.

I have a specific goal in mind for returning to Gregtech this time, which is to play it out with Magneticraft’s conveyors and inserters exclusively, never using item pipes. So far it’s been interesting, actually seeing ores and dusts move around. I’ve tinkered with the recipes so those are competitive in cost with item pipes - as written, I’d never touch the conveyors because they require plastic, despite being actually less functional.