Posts by Gus_Smedstad

It absolutely is worth making nitro diesel if your only oil source is oil sand. Nitro diesel is about 500 EU/L after deducting processing costs, one oilsand block centrifuges to 500 L, so one oilsand = 250,000 EU. That's about 10x the energy density of wood converted to charcoal via the charcoal pile (1 wood = 1.5 charcoal = 24,000 EU). Much less work, and you don't have to deal with the error-prone process of setting up the charcoal pile every 10 minutes.

Oilsand to Nitro Diesel still requires lots of mining. Personally, I prefer my power production to be completely automatic. My personal progression went like this:

Central steam plant fired by high-pressure coal furnaces. This required wood chopping, hand charcoal production, and hand loading of the furnaces, since they can't be automated.

Forestry tree farm. Apple Oaks at first. This got rid of the tree-chopping stage, and gave me a steady supply of wood.

Electric blast furnace. This gave me much better access to steel, which was important for the next stage.

Large Steel Steam Boiler, fed by the Forestry tree farm. This can be completely automated. You can feed fuel in by item pipe, and redstone logic can turn it on and off if you attach a Machine Control Cover to the bottom of the control block. Mine is set up with sensors on the main Railcraft steam holding tank, so it shuts off when the tank is full, and doesn't turn back on until it's empty. This is important because the boiler has a spin-up time during which it's inefficient, so longer runs are better.

Note that you can't automate wood -> charcoal production at this stage unless you re-enable the stone furnace charcoal recipe in the config (which I did). The pyrolyse oven is relatively high tech, and the Railcraft coke oven is very slow, you need a prohibitive number to feed even one large boiler.

Ethanol production from the Tree Farm using saplings and squeezed apples for mulch. 1/4 of the farm was devoted to carrots in case apples weren't enough. This proved to be very low output, and not worthwhile until later.

Nitro diesel refinery fueled by centrifuged oilsand. I got rid of the sulfuric acid this produces in an automated acid-battery setup, but power production was minimal. It was still required because otherwise sulfuric acid storage was a problem.

Moved the carrots into a separate farm, because the output of the combined farm tended to jam with either all wood or all carrots.

I bred trees with Forestry until I got something with a decent sapling drop rate, low sappiness (apple oaks are much worse than "low"), and decent maturity time. A mutated Hill Cherry, to be specific. The base Hill Cherry didn't work because the sapling drop rate was too low. This boosted ethanol production to something respectable.

A central power plant with priority-based power production - ethanol and sulfuric acid first, then steam, then nitro diesel. This cut down on my oil consumption significantly, because I wasn't always using enough power that I needed oil.

Seismic prospector and data sticks. Note that high-voltage technology for the data sticks is available as soon as you have an electric blast furnace.

Prospected and found a good-sized heavy oil source.

Oil rig on oil source.

Electric train automatically bringing heavy oil back to base. This is the main issue with oil rigs - the source is likely to be distant, and you need a way of getting the oil back to base. Your choices are hand-carrying lots of filled cells, pipes if it's not too distant, or rail. Hand-carrying enough fuel to make it worthwhile is a problem because of the cell cost - 128 tin per stack, and a stack of oil cells is only twice as energy-dense as a stack of oilsand.

Yeah, an extractor's fairly important, and a steam autohammer means you're not replacing hammers all the time. I think those were all the steam machines I ever built before moving on to electricity.

Once you've got a steam turbine for a power source, you'll want to concentrate on the machines which cut your current material costs in half. Metal Bender reduces the cost of plates from 2 ingots to 1, wire mill reduces the cost of wire from 1 plate to 0.5 ingot, lathe cuts the costs of rods from 1 ingot to 0.5 (or rather, 1 ingot -> 1 rod + 1/2 dust), polarizer magnetizes things for free instead of several redstone dusts, etc.

It does seem odd that we're potentially running around in powered armor wielding a sword and a bow and arrow.

Personally, my plans include a mining laser set to "long range" mode. I'm not fond of it as a mining tool, but as a flat-trajectory, fast-reloading, reasonable-damage weapon, it looks like it will be worthwhile.

Oh, heck, as long as we're talking arrows, why is it that glass and flint are the only options for arrowheads? We started using steel for arrowheads long before plastic fletching.

I did a little messing around in Creative mode with the nuclear reactor.

Connecting wires to a reactor in EU mode is impossible, because there's no way to craft Industrialcraft wiring, and Gregtech wires won't connect. However, a batbox directly adjacent to an operating reactor does receive power, and that can be transformed to Gregtech power via a transformer.

The Wiki page for the Fluid Reactor is misleading. I read it to mean heat vents didn't work in fluid reactors, and they do. The absolute basic one-rod, one-heat-vent reactor produces 8 HU/t, as expected, and core temperature does not rise. Coolant can absorb heat from vents, not just the casing. Interestingly enough, the tooltip for heat vents says "cannot be used in fluid reactors," even though they work.

I wasn't sure you can automatically refuel fluid reactors. You can. It turns out that the Access Hatch can connect to item pipes. Which means you can refill a reactor with fuel rods automatically. I tested it with reactor plating since that's inert.

Automatically removing spent rods can't be done with Gregtech. It requires a mod that has filters at the item pipe level, like Thermal Foundation. Without a filter, the item pipe removes everything.

The thermal monitor from Nuclear Control 2 can be attached to an reactor access hatch, and it will read the reactor temperature, and emit redstone if it's above the target level. Setting up an automatic thermal shutoff should be easy enough.

I imagine that you'd end up battering rocks with a tungsten steel club coated with a layer of lead.

Good point. I didn't bother to research whether it was possible to build an IC2 wrench from lead before posting.

When you think about it, a lead wrench is pretty silly. Lead's a very soft metal unless you alloy it with antimony. When I was a kid I had a setup for casting lead soldiers, and you could bend the pure lead versions with your fingers. As I said, you could fix that by adding antimony - but that also made it much harder to melt them down again if there was a flaw in the casting.

I've never tested this, either. I've always had level-2 or better wrenches - my first wrench was bronze.

One possibility it's that it's the wrong wrench. IC2 wrenches have a crafting recipe that's almost identical to Gregtech wrenches, and they look similar. The Gregtech wrench is the one with the recipe that involves a hammer. Remove the hammer and you get an IC2 wrench. IC2 wrenches will not break Gregtech machinery such as pipes.

Also, as long as I'm on the subject - wires require a wire cutter to break. That tripped me up when I first started playing, I thought they'd break with a wrench, like other Gregtech things.

Other mods may require a pickaxe or drill to break items. For example, if you break a Forestry machine with your hands, you destroy it instead of picking it up. That one got me too.

So, apparently if you have a blast furnace with multiple fluid input hatches, that can prevent it from recognizing a valid recipe. I put together a blast furnace with oxygen and titanium tetrachloride input hatches and added magnesium. It wouldn't process. I removed the oxygen hatch, and it started right up making hot titanium ingots.

On the other hand, the blast furnace has no problem with extraneous materials in an input hatch. For example, if I've got calcite in there for smelting brown limonite, and the brown limonite runs out, it'll smelt the aluminum dust that's also in there.

There's that, too. While tin can spawn up to level 120, and thus it's possible to see it as a surface deposit in Extreme Hills, the minimum height is 40. It can spawn anywhere but under oceans, really. Extreme Hills are only really required for Tetrahedrite, since that's the only vein with a minimum height above 60.

Looking over the vein table, I realized that the high maximum height for tin rather screws generation. It has a moderate weight (50) which means it get selected often enough. It's just that if the ground height is 65-70, there's a 65% chance the RNG will choose a starting point that's air. Which is why the lithium salt veins, which also have a weight of 50, but a height range of 50-60, are much more common.

I've discovered 3 cassiterite veins so far. As I discussed at some length a few pages back, what you want to do is dig vertical exploration shafts every 3 chunks. (I personally do spiral stairs rather than literal vertical shafts.) Because Gregtech veins are wide, thin rectangles, you'll almost always hit a vein digging vertically, and almost never hit one digging horizontally. While in theory you can spot exposed veins just by walking around in the mountains, my experience has been you'll miss 90% of the ores that way. Really the only exposed veins I've seen are magnetite and coal, and those are incredibly common.

As for "how much" the answer is a lot. Probably in the 1000 range. That's the way Gregtech veins are, they're a pain to find (except for the really common ones), but once you do, there's a ton of stuff to take back.

Quote from willis936

http://wiki.industrial-craft.n…php?title=Nuclear_Reactor

I assume you mean the mechanics and design methodology for placing the components in the reactor.

I do.

I read through that page, and there's more information than I've seen elsewhere, but it's obviously incomplete. There's no mention of moving the heat to any other block. It mentions "heating mode" but says nothing about what that means. It says "HEATING MODE being dependent on surrounding the reactor proper with other certain blocks" but only talks about reactor cores and reactor chambers, no mention of the names of the "certain other blocks."

Obviously the Large Heat Exchanger has to get hot coolant cells out of the reactor somehow, but that page makes clear the placement of coolant cells within the reactor's internal grid matters, so I can't see how you move hot cells out and cold cells in automatically.

EDIT: OK, I found the "Fluid Reactor" page in the same wiki. That covers the alternate reactor form, which is a proper multiblock, and I gather is primarily about generating heat for use in a Large Heat Exchanger. I haven't really studied the page fully yet.

EDIT 2: That page is using some terms in ways that don't make sense to me. It talks about using heat vents extensively, but it also says the heat vents are useless because the heat is "applied to the core reactor instead of the air" and that you can't use that heat. It also says the "core temperature can't be cooled," which implies any heat vent will eventually cause a melt-down, since all heat vents and Reactor Heat Vents "dissipate heat," but "heat dissipation" no longer means heat dissipation, it means moving heat to the core where it cannot be removed.

As written, it appears you never want to use anything but heat exchangers or advanced heat exchangers. Those don't move heat to the reactor core, they move it to the casing, where it can be used by coolant.

Also, if I read it correctly, a Fluid Reactor can only generate steam, either via IC2 Heat Exchanger / Steam Generator pairs, or a Gregtech Large Heat Exchanger. In either case you absolutely need a Large Turbine, since both steam options demand distilled water, and large turbines are the only way to generate EU while recovering the distilled water.

Is there a good go-to page for learning the basics of fission reactors in Gregtech? I've looked into the subject a couple of times and quickly gotten lost. I understand there's some mechanic involving reactor design, but I don't have any idea what the rules are. I gather it's not a regular multiblock like the Large Steam Boiler.

Not that I need a reactor right now. I got my oil cracking up and running, so I'm converting all that heavy oil I'm pumping into heavy fuel -> cracked heavy fuel -> light fuel -> cracked light fuel -> naphtha or LPG for Teflon, and as a side effect I refactored my nitro diesel refinery to siphon light fuel from that setup. Conversion's 1 heavy oil -> 2.5 heavy fuel -> 4.4 cracked heavy fuel -> 1.78 light fuel, compared to the old 1 Heavy Oil -> 1 Oil -> 1 Light Fuel setup.

Demand on my hydrogen has been pretty fierce, mainly because of the oil crackers. I'm currently running an oxygen surplus because I'm electrolyzing water to get hydrogen + oxygen. That may prove to be a problem in the future.

Hah, I missed that the black small pile in the lava centrifuge recipe was tungstate. It was black so I assumed it was dark ashes, and I didn't check the tooltip.

EDIT: I hadn't realized the IC2 jetpack was so cheap. That said, the primary reason I don't go running around in the large open caverns in the Nether isn't that I'm on the ground, it's Ghasts. While I have a stockpile of fire protection potions, that's no help against the explosive damage from Ghast fireballs.

I'd like a lot more Nether Quartz, but I hate mining the Nether. Heck, I've found it difficult to do shaft exploration to find veins - so far, I've explored a large area without finding any, but a lot of chunks blocked my exploration due to hazards.

The seismic prospector isn't so much help, since I expect it will report nether quartz everywhere due to the common Small Ore nether quartz blocks. Prospector reports aren't very specific, either, since they tell you what's in the general vicinity, but not where if you're trying to hand-mine anything.

I'm thinking an Advanced Miner or two might help. At least they'll clear out those small deposits of Nether Quartz. Supplying them in the Nether seems a little problematic, though.

It'd be nice if there were some way to turn lava into energy. There's a lot of lava in the Nether, and the pump should be able to get it. However, if I understand things correctly, the only way to turn lava into energy right now is the High Pressure Lava Boiler. Which requires water, which I'd have to hand-carry to the boiler, and it's a bronze-age machine, which means it's automation unfriendly. No way to match consumption to demand, as I can with redstone control of the Large Steel Boiler. If I read the entry correctly, it can't even accept water by pipes, they have to be placed in by hand.

Overall it'd be better to just carry in Nitro Diesel cells, or even run the fuel in via minecart, as I'm doing with my oil drilling rig.

Am I reading this correctly? That there's no good way to generate energy from lava in the nether? That the main use of lava right now is centrifuging it for gold, silver, tin, and copper, which are generally available anyway?

Also, will an Advanced Miner II run into trouble if the mining head hits lava? Which it inevitably will in the Nether. I'm assuming it doesn't care. As I understand it, the pump shares the same drill-head mechanics as the oil drill and the advanced miner, and it can pump out lava.

Crash report. It appears that the Monster Repeller caused a crash, given that the proximate stack mentions denyMobSpawn(). This is with .28pre.

---- Minecraft Crash Report ----
// Ooh. Shiny.




Time: 2/6/17 2:32 PM
Description: Exception ticking world




java.util.ConcurrentModificationException
	at java.util.ArrayList$Itr.checkForComodification(ArrayList.java:901)
	at java.util.ArrayList$Itr.next(ArrayList.java:851)
	at gregtech.api.util.GT_SpawnEventHandler.denyMobSpawn(GT_SpawnEventHandler.java:29)
	at cpw.mods.fml.common.eventhandler.ASMEventHandler_132_GT_SpawnEventHandler_denyMobSpawn_CheckSpawn.invoke(.dynamic)
	at cpw.mods.fml.common.eventhandler.ASMEventHandler.invoke(ASMEventHandler.java:54)
	at cpw.mods.fml.common.eventhandler.EventBus.post(EventBus.java:140)
	at net.minecraftforge.event.ForgeEventFactory.canEntitySpawn(ForgeEventFactory.java:112)
	at net.minecraft.world.SpawnerAnimals.func_77192_a(SpawnerAnimals.java:169)
	at net.minecraft.world.WorldServer.func_72835_b(WorldServer.java:161)
	at net.minecraft.server.MinecraftServer.func_71190_q(MinecraftServer.java:625)
	at net.minecraft.server.MinecraftServer.func_71217_p(MinecraftServer.java:547)
	at net.minecraft.server.integrated.IntegratedServer.func_71217_p(IntegratedServer.java:111)
	at net.minecraft.server.MinecraftServer.run(MinecraftServer.java:427)
	at net.minecraft.server.MinecraftServer$2.run(MinecraftServer.java:685)

Quote from willis936

This contradicts experiments I did a few years ago. I could not reach a pipe's rated throughput, even when it was a single pipe block, without using 1 shutter per pipe block.

I just had a situation in my Survival mode world where I was pumping a lot of fluid through a very long (20+ segment) Tiny Bronze pipe, and got the full 400 L/sec rate. It increments in 1/2 second updates, so the number increased in steps of 200, which can misleading. It was definitely pumping at 400 L/sec because it took 5 seconds to fill 2 cells with fluid.

So no, you don't need shutters or pumps to get the full rate. The only case where pumps are going to help is if you're moving significantly less fluid than the pipe's capacity. Then you get backwash.

Quote from Blood Asp

You can move controller and hatches after attaching covers to them. It even stores the set configs of them.

I thought I had an a work-around which wouldn't require a wireless cover, but it didn't work.

I put the controller cover on the Oil Cracker control block's side, and applied redstone to a Project Red wire running across that adjacent block. The wire normally energizes any block it's running across. This works, for example, if the machine control cover is on a pipe segment, there's a stone block on top of the cover, and a wire running across the stone block.

It didn't work.

I'm aware it's not required for Teflon, it just seemed worthwhile.

What I'm hearing is that I'll have to take the "shut off intake" approach until I can make Titanium.

How does that work? Attach a machine controller to the control block before the structure's complete, and a wireless receiver cover on another side, again before it's complete?

Not that a wireless cover is an option for me as yet, that requires a EV sensor, which in turn requires titanium. The reason I'm building the Oil Cracker is to make Teflon, which I need to make a vacuum freezer which will let me cool ingots, such as kanthal and titanium.

You can't attach a machine control cover to the control block of an Oil Cracking unit. My understanding is that if the output hatch is full, any further output gets destroyed. I wanted to create some redstone circuitry to shut down the Oil Cracker if the tank I'm using as an output buffer gets full.

I can of course always shut down the pipe supplying input fluid, but that doesn't do anything about the fluid still in the input hatch, which will continue to process.

The requirement that the control block be centered is a little inconvenient for this as well. I initially thought this meant "any casing in the middle ring," but putting it on the bottom-center so I've got another face exposed to place the machine control cover results in "structure incomplete." I'd rather have one face of the control block visible so I can see if the cracker's active.