I've been playing around with the experimental version with a recipe book mod, and there's one thing I can't figure out. A lot of good stuff requires iridium, but there doesn't seem any way to get a hold of any that I'm aware of. I do know how to run a replicator so that once I get one iridium I can make more iridium, but I don't know where I can get that first iridium short of spawning it in.
Anyone care to enlighten me?
I don't understand. I'm looking through my recipe book and I don't see any connection between clay and lithium. To me, lithium appears unobtainable and unusable. I did see the lithium entry in the list of items, but I don't see any uses for it.
EDIT: Let me guess, lithium is for GregTech or some other mod, and the only reason the items are in the IndustrialCraft item list is for compatibility. Same with silver.
Really? I took a list through the predenied suggestions and I didn't see it. Plus, stone dust is practically useless if you never use construction foam.
I took a look on Google. Apparently there is such a thing as "stone powder clay". I also looked at the wikipedia article for clay. Clay is a collection of hydrated silica minerals with a very fine grain size. Silica minerals of course come from common rocks. Stone dust is stone that is very very finely ground, so is therefore also very fine grains of silica minerals. The only remaining part to turn this into clay is hydrating the minerals, which of course is done with water.
I really don't see why this would be a problem. Is abundant clay unbalancing somehow?
With all the machines in Industrial Craft, it's very handy to be able to move items between inventories automatically. Vanilla MC has the hopper, but it has limitations, such as an inability to go up and a relatively slow speed. Buildcraft has a similar block, the Chute, which is faster but has more limitations (it can only accept items from pipes and manual transfers).
So I propose that Industrial Craft has its own variant, the Conveyor Belt. Each block of belt has an internal inventory, like hoppers. Unlike hoppers, conveyor belts can go in all six directions, just like the production lines in factories. The belts are powered by a motor, which sends a pulse down the line that activates the belts and has them move their items along (this means that only the motor needs to be powered, not the whole line). The motor block is an inline block, that is, it has a conveyor belt as well as having a motor, so it's placed in the belt path. Each belt block outputs to one side (to prevent branching) and draws items from inventories on all the other sides. Since the items are stored inside the block inventories, lag is low and they are not displayed outside moving along unless the developers actually feel like programming that in.
Technical information aside, the usage of the belt would be simple. Say you wanted to set up a simple production line: ores to macerate, then smelt. You first set up a chest that holds the ores. Belt 1 then connects from the chest to the Macerator. Belt 2 connects from the Macerator to the furnace. Belt 3 connects from the furnace to the chest that holds the final ingots. If done with hoppers, this would have to be built in a stairstep manner, as hoppers only remove items from the block above them; also, you would be limited to how fast the hoppers could, well, hop. This could also be done in Buildcraft, but it wouldn't be very compact and you might not have Buildcraft. Conveyor belts would be more compact and would not require an additional mod.
The primary downside to conveyor belts compared to hoppers and buildcraft wooden pipes and engines is that the belts must be powered. However, they wouldn't require very much, and can be made faster than their unpowered counterparts. After all, buildcraft wooden pipes and engines are slower than hoppers, and if you want more speed you have to increase to stone engines anyway. Here we're just putting it in Industrialcraft instead!
At the moment, Stone Dust (a byproduct of ore processing in the ore washing plant, added in the experimental versions) is plentiful but has few uses. Currently, the only ways to use Stone Dust are to use it to make CF powder, which is really only useful if you intend on using construction foam, and throwing it in the recycler for scrap.
I propose a recipe to make clay from stone dust. Clay is itself very fine stone particles that have been chemically hydrated. Since Stone Dust is itself very fine stone particles, finer than sand, it would stand to reason that mixing stone dust with water could produce clay.
The new experimental canning machine can mix dust and liquid, but it produces a liquid product and is inappropriate for this use. Therefore, this recipe should be done on the crafting table similar to the hydrated coal dust, unless a new machine appropriate for this task is made available.
I recently had a tree taken out in my yard, and the wood chipper got me thinking. What would happen if I macerated a log? Turns out, nothing. A macerator can handle stone, so I'm sure it could handle wood. So I simply suppose nobody's thought what to do with chopped up wood.
I'm sure more uses will eventually be found, but I've thought of one. Throw a log into a macerator, and you get a certain number of woodchips. Woodchips used to make plantballs will produce 4 plantballs per log's worth of chips, similar to how plantballs made from saplings make extra. (In my other thread, linked here, I detail how a plantball is worth 1/4 the energy of a charcoal, and thus a log.) If these plantballs are used as is, this exchanges 1 use of a furnace to make charcoal for 1 use of a macerator to make wood chips - roughly equivalent. But if these plantballs are further processed into biofuel, the energy yield is increased over charcoal, at the cost of the bio-fuel process.
Without this suggestion, there is no way to macerate wood or use it to make biofuel, though realistically it would make sense to be able to do both. Additionally, further uses for wood chips may be realized.
Side note: It is currently possible to generate three times more energy from wood via scaffolding than via charcoal. I recommend that the fuel value of scaffolding be changed to 250, the value for a stick, from 750, the value for other wooden items.
I didn't want to make a new thread for this idea, since it has a few similarities (IC items getting enchanted). But why not simply use the vanilla enchant system, but with custom enchantments? Many of the vanilla enchantments don't make sense on IC2 tools, and there's new enchantments that could be made that would make sense on IC2 tools and not on vanilla items (for an example, one that causes less EU loss per use). I mean, the xp gained while playing is really only useful in enchanting (and repairing, but that's irrelevant in IC2); as it stands, enchanting isn't compatible with IC2, so it's a wasted resource. Using EU to enchant is not good, because EU has many more sources and uses whereas xp does not. So there's really no reason to use a new enchanting table, if one simply uses new enchants for IC2 tools in place of vanilla enchants.
Additional thought: One should be able to craft together plantballs to make larger fuel items. Perhaps four in a square, creating an object with the same fuel value as Coal, or eight in a square, worth twice a piece of coal. A plant brick or something? After all, we can now put coal together to form coal blocks, which have very long burn durations.
Musings: Could one, with this suggestion, power a chainsaw solely on leaves cut with the chainsaw? A chainsaw holds 10,000 EU and can cut 200 blocks per charge, equalling 50 EU per block. 8 leaf blocks make a plantball, which according to this suggestion should be worth 1/4 of a piece of coal. Coal is worth 4000 EU, so by extension a plantball is worth 1000 EU and a leaf block is worth 125 EU. Conclusion: Using a chainsaw to cut down the leaves of your trees to use in plantballs would yield an energy profit, though is nowhere near as dense an energy source as the wood itself.
Well the problem with drinking the stuff from the plantballs is because wood alcohol is methanol, which is horribly toxic but a perfectly useable fuel. The way I figured it is that the alcohol made from foodstuffs could be taken out with either mugs (to drink) or cells (to extract and use as fuel), but the stuff made from inedible plant matter would only be removable via cell, since you can't drink it.
Makes me wish there was corn in Minecraft. Maybe someone could make a cropcard for it, and then we can have whiskey!
Oh, and I saw somebody else suggest in another thread using apples to make cider. Don't see why not.
So we've got beer (wheat and/or hops) and rum (sugarcane). What other crops could we make drinks out of? We've got potatoes, carrots, pumpkins, and melons. Potatoes certainly could be used to make vodka. The others might be used to make some sort of wine.
But we've got all this alcohol, and doesn't it work well as a fuel? How about we can empty a booze barrel into a cell instead of a mug, run it through an extractor (still), and use the ethanol cells to fill fuel cans?
What else could we use to make ethanol? How about plantballs? They could break down and ferment in a booze barrel too, giving more extractable fuel. Of course, you wouldn't be able to drink it without killing yourself... Or maybe you could macerate a log, throw in the wood chips, and get wood alcohol.
The overall idea is that the net energy yield for the same ingredients would be higher with this method than with the traditional biofuel method due to the time investment in the fermentation.
Vanilla Minecraft has various uses for experience levels, such as enchantments using the enchantment table and repairs using the anvil. However, with IC2 these uses are pretty much completely superseded by technological solutions. As such, I've accumulated what would normally be a valuable currency and I have no idea how I should or could use it.
Does anybody have any ideas on where best to spend these levels? As far as I know, vanilla enchantments are disabled on IC2 tools and most of them wouldn't even work right anyway. And using the anvil for repairs or enchantment moving is pointless if the tools don't break and don't use enchantments. Or could a clever person think of a new way IC2 could utilize this resource?
I propose the plantball receive a direct fuel value.
Since it can be made from 8 reeds (reed fuel value 50 heat / 120 EU / 0.25 items each), among other possibilities, I believe it should have a fuel value 8 times that of a single reed (plantball fuel value 400 heat / 960 EU / 2 items / .25 charcoal).
This value is numerically consistent with the fuel values for cactus and saplings, the other burnable items that can be made into plantballs (cactus is the same as reeds, and saplings have twice the energy as reeds but give twice as many plantballs) and logically consistent with the many other things that can be turned into plantballs that cannot be burned on their own (leaves, wheat, etc.).
In addition, the main use for plantballs, biofuel, still produces a product with much more energy than the plantballs themselves (a biofuel can provides ~10,000 heat / ~26,000 EU, whereas the six plantballs required to make the biofuel only provide 2,400 heat / ~6,000 EU on their own). Therefore, this process remains profitable, if inconvenient.
Lastly, some may argue plantballs would be unable to burn well. Yet some of the ingredients used to make plantballs, reeds and cactus, themselves should be subject to such logic, yet they still are useable as fuels, albeit poor ones; and if the plantball's ingredients can burn, why can't it as well?
Summary: A plantball should be as good a fuel as the sum of its ingredients.
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Sources: Suggestion: "Brown" Charcoal, or a less bulky way to burn plants like reeds A previous thread of mine on a related topic. I did not post there because necroing is bad.
Wheat should be able to be burned for fuel points. Another person's thread on a similar topic that showed up on my search. Although they had some good ideas, I did not want to necro a year old thread.
How about the classic sugar + sulfuric acid? If one had enough sugar, the carbonized output could count as "charcoal".
Love this idea, it has so many possibilities.
One thing that I think needs considering is the pressure of the reaction. For example, take the hydrogen + nitrogen = ammonia reaction; you need very high pressures for that to work. Some way to compress or expand or pump or release pressure of gas or liquid would be useful.
I'd like to see processing of wood and plantmatter (read: plantballs) into some sort of efficient fuel. Given water, yeast/enzymes/some sort of digester, low pressure/heat, average pH and quite a bit of time one can get ethanol or methanol from either of those; a more high-powered industrial process uses water, high heat, and high pressure which is released after the process finishes, boiling off the water and giving a high yield of basic hydrocarbons. The first process would probably be a lower tier, less efficient process, and the second would be a higher tier, more difficult process that gives a higher amount of fuel.
It's the wooden equivalent of a machine block.
Wow, I'm surprised at the positive response. I expected more like "that's totally useless dood". Thanks!
Name: Muffler Upgrade
Suggestion: This item goes in the upgrade slot of a machine and reduces the volume or eliminates entirely the operating noises of machines. Although there are hackish ways to do this, and one can always reduce the volume on one's computer or Minecraft (at the cost of reducing everything else), it would be nice to have a legitimate way to do this, and in a selective manner. Some machines, especially when they have a few overclockers in them, have extremely irritating noises, and there may be cases for whatever reason that one would want to have a "stealthy" base (or reduced environmental impact base, as I am planning with mine).
Recipe: 8 wool around 1 wooden chest gives 1 Muffler Upgrade (the idea being that the chest contains the wool, and the wool is the sound-proofing. Wood, too, has some sound-absorbing ability of its own.).
Oh terribly sorry, I couldn't find it on the search. I cede priority to you and hope yours gets more traffic as a result. *mumbles* darn inefficient search function grumble grumble *mumble*
Simply put, some items are more valuable than others. Therefore, these more-valuable items should produce more/be more likely to produce scrap in a Recycler.
For example, if you dumped in Tin Dust it would produce more scrap than, say, cobblestone, and the extra scrap can be used either in scrap boxes or a massfab to get other useful items.
In short, it would allow transmutation of what you have a lot of (tin, copper) into other stuff you have little of (iron) at a large trade disadvantage.
Alternatively, the valuable items could be fed directly into a massfab amplifier slot with a custom amplifier amount, similar to how scrapboxes are worth 9x as much as individual scrap.
I was thinking of this tree tap bucket things. If right click empties the inventory, then put a deployer with a stick in it facing the resin collector. I mean, you could always just build a forestry rubber farm. From personal experience I end up recycling most of the resin coming out because "oh good god too much rubber". I mean, after running one on a server for a day I could have supplied every male in China with a box of condoms
Not everyone uses every possible additional mod with IC2. I would think suggestions would best be made based on IC2 with no other mods - and this certainly works well for that.
On the same note, a deployer with a treetap in it wouldn't work? Funny.
