Posts by Gus_Smedstad

I'm having some issues transporting things to and from the Nether.

I've got an Advanced Miner II up and running in the Nether over the Nether Quartz vein. It's not strictly necessary, since I've physically visited the vein now, and I can probably wall it off if I wanted to harvest it by hand. I'd prefer to make the Miner viable for a variety of reasons.

The problem is drilling fluid, which I'm transporting by hand. It doesn't last long, and since it's the Nether, I can't gather water locally to make it on site.

With my oil rig, I've got an automated Railcraft system that I like quite well. It only transports 32,000 liters of Heavy Oil or Nitro Diesel at a time, but it to does it completely automatically on demand, and it's had no trouble keeping up with my usage.

I just spent a little time messing with carts going through Nether Portals, and I'm unhappy with the results. Trains decouple and turn into individual carts. I tried putting down some coupler track on the other side to re-link the train, but the carts ended up on different tracks. This despite having anchors down so the carts should have had time to move. I believe part of the issue is that carts lose all momentum on traveling through the portal.

Trains rather than individual carts are pretty important. The locomotive allows Railcraft to do routing, and the Anchor Cart means it keeps moving. Without anchor carts I'd have to put down anchors covering the entire route from the portal to the Nether Quartz miner.

I'm not sure it can be done with vanilla portals. Any suggestions? I'm thinking about experimenting with other mods that have better portal support. I've seen mention here and there that Mystcraft portals will transport trains intact, or possibly Enchanced Portals 3.

Mystcraft is frankly fairly "heavy" in my mind, it adds a lot of things I probably don't want, if all I'm using it for is a Nether Portal alternative.

EDIT: I've watched a couple of videos of people using Mystcraft to solve this sort of problem, and it seems a little... cheaty. No routing or trains needed, and only very short lengths of track, because you can put the spawn point for the portal anywhere. Thus you link the portal directly to the liquid unloader for whatever fluid you're moving. Two kinds of liquid? No problem, just set up separate portal pairs.

Vanilla Nether portals don't let you choose your destination, though you can move Overworld portals a fair distance and have get them to link to a fixed Nether-side portal. Moving the Nether side of course ends up moving the link point a long distance in the Overworld, so this sort of instant-transport shenanigans isn't possible.

I may go the Mystcraft route anyway, but implement a house rule that says I can't do that. That I have to place the spawn point more-or-less where a vanilla Nether portal link would go. Thus pretending the Mystcraft portals are just better behaved Nether portals.

Quote from Drawfox

On my energy topic, anyone tried crop -> Methane as fuel?

The thought has crossed my mind, but I haven't run the numbers.

So, I just found a Nether Quartz vein, after I started searching correctly. 16th site I checked had it.

Now I've just have to see about mining it.

It doesn't really matter what color I chose. Yeah, sure, I didn't want to put up purple overhead lights everywhere, but I really didn't have enough dye of any color to put up a significant number of lights. Heck, white used to be the color I had in large quantities, because I'd picked up a fair amount of bonemeal from skeletons during regular play.

The only easily renewable colors are green, brown, and red. You can farm those - brown from cocoa pods, green from cactus, and red from "roses." Put any flower into an IC2 crop stick, no matter what the color, and it turns into a "rose" which can then be farmed like any other crop.

There are the flowers and the complicated methods for farming those, but honestly, those farming methods rather suck. They're not crops the way cactus, cocoa, and roses are. You're basically at the mercy of the random number generator, and flowers don't generate all that quickly even if you've got Forestry bees running around.

I'm aware that my motivation's a bit frivolous, since torches do the job. Sometimes you have to put the torch on the floor if the room is big, and that's ugly, but it works, and that's the stopgap I've got in quite a few places.

I really hadn't intended to shut you down.

As for being better informed, I learned about white tulips being light gray and flower-farming yesterday morning, when I started griping to myself about sources of white dye.

Last night I looked up "calcium white dye" and discovered that calcium compounds were only used as inert stabilizers in organic dyes, not as dyes themselves. Unless you count whitewash, which is not really a pigment and impermanent when used as a paint. Zinc oxide (ZnO) is a commonly used white pigment today, and something it would be entirely reasonable to make in a chemical reactor.

Historically there's white lead (2PbCO3·Pb(OH)2), which no one uses anymore because of lead poisoning. There's also titanium white (TiO2), but there's no way I or anyone else would want to sacrifice titanium for white dye.

My minetweaker-fu is still weak. I don't know how to discover object / resource names on my own, so I have to search other people's scripts for the proper syntax.

EDIT: Here's the Minetweaker script I created for white dye:

import mods.gregtech.ChemicalReactor;




val WhiteDye = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.02:32429>;
val ZincDust = <gregtech:gt.metaitem.01:2036>;




ChemicalReactor.addRecipe( WhiteDye, null, <ore:ingotZinc>, null, <liquid:oxygen> * 1000, 200 );
ChemicalReactor.addRecipe( WhiteDye, null, ZincDust, null, <liquid:oxygen> * 1000, 200 );

I'm not fond of most of the Forestry machines either, but I like the Multifarm well enough. I try and use Gregtech substitutes when I can.

I did have to use Forestry's Carpenter to make Bog Earth for the Peat Farm. It turns out that the Regulator can put things into specific slots in the Carpenter, so it's guaranteed not to jam when using multiple ingredients. The slot #''s for the input spaces start at 13.

Xaero's Minimap has waypoints, and you can see them an infinite distance away, including through walls. That's helpful, but I still find that the Nether's twisting passages of mazes all alike can confuse me.

I knew about Gregtech's white dye. I'm a little tempted to use Minetweaker to make a reasonable White Dye recipe. I.e. Calcium -> White Dye through the Chem Reactor or something. Given that Bonemeal is considered "white dye," calcium doesn't seem inconsistent. I've got a large supply of Calcium from ore.

White Tulips produce gray dye, not white. They're sort-of farmable. I've seen some videos for generic flower farming in vanilla Minecraft, doing things like using pistons to push the ground back and forth to break the flowers, and a hopper minecart running continuously to collect the drops.

I spent some time today in Creative mode, learning some things about IC2 crops (and by extension, Gregtech crops).

My motivation is a bit convoluted. I like the Project Red lighting options, particularly now that I have a very large supply of glowstone from redstone processing. It requires dye, however, and for the most part I want white or at most light gray dye for my lights. Currently I'm primarily limited by dye for replacing all my torches with overhead light fixtures on those big block lamps.

There aren't a lot of good options for getting dye, particularly white dye, in industrial quantities. I mean 10+ stack quantities, not 20-30 bonemeal. I have not found a Skeleton Spawner, for example, and waiting for skeletons to spawn in a darkened mob-grinder seems kind of slow, and also potentially annoying - zombie gargling irritates me.

Besides, I'm aware that there are some interesting plants available, and I didn't really understand the system.

Anyway, some online research and testing revealed a few things I didn't know. Namely, that a Forestry multifarm in Manual Orchard mode is actually pretty good at growing Gregtech crops. It keeps the Fertilizer and Hydration levels high, and it non-destructively harvests crops when they mature. While the material cost is somewhat high, it's not nearly as difficult to make a multifarm as it is to make an IC2 Crop Harvester under Gregtech rules. It services a much larger area than the IC2 Cropmatron or Harvester. You can even build the ideal 4-deep stack of dirt under your crops, because the vertical reach of the Multifarm above the farmland brick layer is considerable.

The tricorder can work as a limited version of the Cropnalyzer. It doesn't give growth stages like the Cropnalyzer does, but it does show you the hidden stats like nutrition and air quality.

The precise effect of air quality is still obscure. Height's very important - a ground level farm has very poor air quality compared to one at level 80 or 100. Several pages have mentioned that "flowers require high air quality," but no there are no numbers giving minimum air quality, as there is with light levels. The Cropnalyzer doesn't tell you that either when you look at a plant or a seed bag.

Anyway, on my "to do eventually" list is now to breed Gregtech crops like the Corpseplant and Corium. Oilberries not so much, since I've got a very steady supply of oil from drilling now.

"Careful not to get killed" is the bigger issue. My experience with running around in the large open spaces in the Nether is that ghasts are everywhere.

Getting lost is a problem too, even with a map mod installed. The map mod works well with the Overworld, but in the Nether what it shows rarely resembles the maze-like actual spaces. It's been a been help in keeping track of where I've tunneled and prospected, but not so great if I just explore the existing spaces.

Well, shoot. I thought the Wiki said 5x5 chunks, but when I double-checked, you're right, it's 5x5 blocks. It seems likely that because I was deliberately choosing spots midway between veins, I'm missing most of the veins.

5x5 blocks is very small, but my usual spiral 3x3 spiral staircase for manual exploration exposes about that many blocks, and I've had good results with that. I need to re-do my search with (+24, +24 ) offsets searching 3 chunks apart, like my original, manual search for ore.

It still seems odd to me, since it implies the code is checking for dozens of different variables names for PrimaryOre values instead of one.

Anyway, I digress. I'm still running the default worldgen config, which means I should expect nether quartz veins to generate. So far I've seen no evidence that they do. Up until the point I started using the seismic prospector, I assumed it was just because I was having trouble sinking exploratory shafts in the Nether.

Does it matter what you use to activate the Prospector? I've been using 8x stick of dynamite, since that was the easiest to make. My understanding is that the search box is 5x5 chunks no matter how you activate it, that the only difference between dynamite, TNT, industrial TNT, and nitro glycerol cells was the cost. I've taken to activating at (+48, +48 ) relative to the 96x multiple, on the theory I'm hitting 4 vein chunk centers from there. My grid is in multiples of 96, since the vein grid is 3 chunks apart and the oil grid is 6 chunks apart. That means I've got a 1 chunk gap between search areas, but that shouldn't matter.

The Dimensions section says "Nether_true=true" for Nether Quartz mixed veins, as does the mix {} section.

The way variables get declared in the config is weird. Why would you include the value of a variable in the name? The Nether Mix section declares "OrePrimaryLayer_522" to be 522, rather than what I'd expect, which would be declaring "OrePrimaryLayer" and the value is the ore ID. I get the impression the code is only looking for the presences of certain variables and the value is immaterial. But then, I've never done any Minecraft mod coding - my experience is all with C++ and similar languages.

Mainly I need the Nether Quartz for routing switches. Those things are 32 Nether Quartz each. Putting together one automated railroad to haul nitro diesel to the oil rig and oil back took all the Nether Quartz I had on hand.

Going anywhere through the Nether of course I find Small Ore deposits, but a single proper Nether Quartz vein should supply 100x what I've found from small ores.

I wasn't expecting finding one to be so hard. They have a weight of 80, which is the same as Coal in the Overworld, and I've found plenty of that. If anything, the odds should be better, because the table says there are only 8 ores in the Nether - Magnetite, Limonite, Tetrahedrite, Nether Quartz, Sulfur, Chalcopyrite, Redstone, and Nickel. 10% of the 3x3 chunks should be Nether Quartz, and I've covered about 180 so far (I'm hitting 4 chunk centers with each test), so I should have seen 18 of them by now.

I've found all the other ores. I'm wondering if Nether Quartz is not generating or not being detected by the Seismic Prospector.

36 sites prospected in the Nether with the Seismic Prospector. Not one Nether Quartz. Or any other Nether-specific vein, it's all stuff like tetrahedrite and nickel. Man, I hate searching for ore in Gregtech, even though I appreciate the way it forces me to venture far afield compared to conventional ore generation.

I found several high (500+ L/cycle) petroleum sources, but don't really know how I'd automated getting it through a Nether Gate. From what I understand, Nether Gates are not train-friendly, but they'll take one cart at a time - provided it's been recently placed by a mine cart dispenser. It would have to be some sort of Rube Goldberg setup where trains load oil on to singleton carts which travel through the gate and then immediate unload, where the oil can be transferred to a regular train.

Not that I need more oil right now.

At least prospecting the Nether by tunneling around at level 120 has been safe. No open spaces, and trenches are protection against the occasional lava pocket.

The 1.10.2 version definitely wasn't ready for prime time when I tried it, but that was 3-4 months ago. I haven't been watching the discussion on Github.

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Going back to the subject of power supplies that Drawfox brought up, I tend to fiddle with mine even when I don't have a real need. I added an underground peat farm today.

This is more Forestry than Gregtech, but it turns out peat farms suck. The Large Boilers (steel in my case) can burn peat, which is good, but the difference in fuel output between the tree farm and the peat farm is dramatic. My Very Large (27 x 27 diamond) tree farm produces far more than a single Large Steel Boiler can burn, and the Very Large peat farm doesn't produce enough to keep one running. If both are fully supplied, I think it's like a 3:1 difference in fuel output between the two, if I include the ethanol output as well as the wood.

It has a benefit though - the tree farm turns dirt into sand in a 1:1 ratio as it exhausts the soil, and the peat farm turns sand into dirt in a 1:1 ratio when it harvests peat (which isn't how peat works if you do it by hand). So a pair is a closed loop, no need to clean out sand or add dirt. I now see the peat as a valuable side effect rather than the primary benefit of the peat farm.

I'd read here and there that you needed several peat farms to service one tree farm. That's not what I'm seeing. My impression is it's more 1:4, one peat farm can service a tree farm 4x as large, because the tree farm doesn't burn out soil that quickly. I need more time with the setup to see how it works under heavy load.

If it does stay the way I'm seeing, I need to figure out what to do with the rest of the peat farm. If it's worth the hassle of trying to run a mixed farm, I've had poor results in the past because if one function hits a storage limit, it halts the other one as well. I.e. a mixed carrot / tree farm stops if it's not using up all the carrots.

My future plans for headache-inducing power plant revisions include distillation towers for heavy oil, cracked heavy fuel, and cracked light fuel (I've got the oil cracking operating already). "Headache inducing" because of the product-balancing problem, since the distillation tower produces everything at once, and because it's large and I'm not sure I left enough space.

I've been getting it from the lithium ores in the salt deposits. I do have a mesa nearby, I should really see how things go if I start electrolyzing clay dust.

Quote from MauveCloud

FWIW, lithium batteries are not the highest capacity batteries you can make at MV and HV: an advanced batpack (from IC2) stores 600k EU (compared to 400k for a medium lithium battery), an energypack stores 2M EU (compared to 1.6M for a large lithium battery), and a charging energy crystal stores 4M EU.

I was using the Feed the Beast page on the Battery Buffer as a reference, which is why I thought lithium was the highest-storage option available for HV and below.

The advanced batpack isn't supposed to be a battery. Using it that way feels like cheating. The material costs are considerable, I guess, at 18 bronze, 6 x sulfur, 6 x lead, 6.5 x copper, and a basic electronic circuit, versus 4 x battery alloy, 1 x copper, 8 x lithium, and some plastic. Though it's easier to come by 18 bronze than 8 lithium, and sulfur's so plentiful I'd be grateful for a real use for it.

I wasn't aware of the IC2 "charging" items at all. If they work with Gregtech power tools, that could be pretty handy. I've graduated to a MV drill now that I'm making Titanium, but it would be nice to have extra power along instead of lugging around a set of pickaxe heads.

While I'm never sure how much IC2 stuff it supposed to be there in Gregtech, the Energy Crystal is clearly part of mainstream Gregtech 5U, since it's part of the construction path for the Distillation Tower.

I just noticed I made an error earlier. Glycerol trinitrate only requires nitrogen and carbon, no sodium needed. So it's even less resource intensive than I said earlier, since carbon dust is easy to obtain. Boosting light fuel to nitro diesel is such a big boost in energy I don't know why you'd ever burn light fuel, particularly since the resource cost is low.

I do use a lot of of sodium, but mostly for ore-washing and large batteries. Yeah, lithium's a lot better, but 512 volt batteries require so much material (32 each!) that I can't really afford anything but sodium. I'm not really making the large batteries for raw energy storage anyway, I'm usually doing it to put a clamp on how much current a given power line can supply. I can be sure that a 4-battery buffer is never going to supply more than 4 amps, so I can safely use 4 amp cable downstream of the buffer.

Quote from Drawfox

I'm away from my PC right now, is it possible to make ethanol using GT machines?

Not with just Gregtech, no. While the distillery will make Forestry Biomass into Ethanol, the only way to get Forestry Biomass is a Forestry fermenter. I'm not sure I would bother with Ethanol if I didn't have a Forestry tree farm collecting saplings on a regular basis. Collecting saplings by hand is much too labor intensive for what you get.

It's worth noting that Forestry will ferment plantballs as well, and you can make those from carrots or wheat. I'm doing it with my excess carrots, but the output is trivial.

It seems to me that if you're talking really renewable, solar and plant-based energy are you only choices, and if you're going to go with a plant source, you want some auto-harvesting option. Forestry mulifarms are one choice for the auto-harvesting. Thaumcraft is obviously another, though I don't know anything about it. Gregtech / Industrialcraft has no provision for it; the crop-matron only maintains, it doesn't harvest. A vanilla piston setup can auto-harvest pumpkins or melons, but you'd need some sort of collection mechanism.

The extractor won't remove fluids from filled cells. The Fluid Canner will move fluid in to or out of a cell, but won't destroy fluid.

Quote from MauveCloud

Buildcraft has a void fluid pipe, and AE2's Matter Condenser can accept liquids. Also, Extra Utilities has a trash can for liquids (which presumably returns the container, or you can pipe the fluid to it).

I have various reasons for not wanting to install those, mainly the large number of things they'd add that I don't feel right using for one reason or another. Pretty much everything in those mods but the trash disposal items.

If I'm going to bite the bullet and add a mod that I mostly don't intend to use, I think maybe I'll get the rest of Thermal Expansion for the Nullifier, which can destroy liquids. I've got Thermal Foundation right now for pipes that handle things Gregtech pipes won't. I try and avoid using them, but they handle things like my treefarm mixed-output which isn't possible with Gregtech.

Quote from MauveCloud

I think several pages back, somebody determined that oilsands ore isn't plentiful enough for a nitro diesel power system. It takes a while to breed oil berries, and you'll need several full fields of them to make a decent supply of (nitro) diesel. Also, you might need some other crops to cover the "nitro" part of nitro diesel.

Oilsand is in fact quite plentiful, and the veins are dense. It's not renewable, and it requires mining, but it's much less work than chopping wood.

You don't need anything other than oil, salt, charcoal, and enough machinery to make nitro diesel. You get nitrogen by compressing air and then centrifuging it, sodium by electrolyzing salt, and carbon by electrolyzing charcoal dust. Nitrogen, sodium, and carbon gives you tri-nitro glycerol, and tri-nitro glycerol and light fuel gives you nitro diesel. The demand for salt and charcoal is very low - it's mostly the oil for light fuel you need.

Because of my setup, I have large supply of effort-free charcoal. Salt's a problem mainly because it produces chlorine, and nothing seems to consume that in mass quantities. Rutile dust + Magnesium + Chlorine -> Titanium does some, but then recovering the magnesium requires more sodium and produces almost as much chlorine as the titanium smelting consumed.

I'm thinking about going to a process that produces sodium while producing different byproducts, like electrolyzing clay dust or lapsis dust. I haven't actually done that yet, so I don't have practical experience with it yet.

Alternately, I need to find a way to destroy liquids to get rid of the excess chlorine. I'm using Void Chests to destroy excess stone dust and cobblestone, but that doesn't work for liquids. I'd have to can them first, and losing the tin for the cells would be prohibitively expensive.