Minecraft - f13 Server is: chugging along... again (Read OP)

[koro]

I apparently started in a location that's both kinda good (rubber trees abound, and a volcano!) and kinda bad (no oil at all).

Tempted to burrow into the volcano and make it my base.

I totally ditched MAtmos Sounds and Mo'Creatures though.

[Rendakor]

I have a love/hate relationship with MAtmos; I generally don't mind it, except I built my base pretty high up so whenever I'm inside or running around nearby there's this awful wind blowing sound that just. never. ends.

[Sky]

Yeah, the wind should shut off when you're inside, or dampen the way rain does.

[Rendakor]

It kind of does, but I think my iron bar windows don't block sound. I could wall them up but I rather like looking around outside from time to time.

[koro]

So I've got some stuff going in my Technic world. I've hollowed out a sizable chunk of a volcano to serve as my base and I've used a small natural cave underneath it to dig down to bedrock, finding some diamond and redstone fairly quickly while sacrificing one of said diamonds to get up to a max tier diving rod. I even nabbed a couple tungsten.

So now I'm not sure what to do. I finally managed to get a few rubber trees planted outside after scouring a half dozen biomes for them (no swamps nearby) and I have a couple water mills in a nearby lake feeding into a battbox so that I have a little reusable power, but I'm not sure where I should be going from here. I don't know how to set up some kind of automated rubber farm (can you?) or how to really get started with Thaumcraft.

[Rendakor]

To get started in Thaumcraft you first want to make a Quaesitum; this is how you research TC items. Paper goes in the top right, anything else goes in the left. The better quality items, the higher chance of discovering something. Regular items yield Fragments, researching Fragments will give you Theories, researching Theories will give you Discoveries and actually let you make things. You also probably want a sugar farm of some kind if you're doing a lot of Thaumcraft; you need tons of paper, plus bookshelves are good for boosting researching.

Then to actually make these items you want the following:

• Crucible: To break items down into vis.
• Vis Tanks and Conduits: To store/transport said vis
• Filters: To remove (mostly) useless taint from your tanks
• Infuser: To actually make items

I'm not sure how to make automated tree farms of any kind without Forestry; for my rubber needs I just use bonemeal on saplings until I get a bunch with the little rubber nodes and harvest them every so often; anything that doesn't have the nodes gets chopped down but save your rubber wood. The key here is getting an Extractor ASAP, since 1 sticky resin becomes 3 rubber (and 1 rubber wood becomes 1 rubber) that way. Solar panels are better than water mills, with geothermal generators better still (put one right next to a pump pumping lava for LOTS of IC power). If rubber's really a problem (or any item really) you can fix that with Equivalent Exchange pretty easily.

[koro]

I've got an extractor, macerator, and electric furnace hooked to a normal Generator, but so far my only method of powering the generator has been ferrying RC batteries from my water mill to a battbox connected to the generator. I'm not sure how to get started with geothermal; isn't it finite and reliant on lava?

And do you have to do much Nether trawling to get started with Thaumcraft? I noticed a lot of glowstone necessary in things.

[Rendakor]

It is finite, but if you're at a volcano it will take a LONG time deplete. I'd strongly suggest locating your base near whatever power source you're going to use; carrying batteries back and forth sounds awful. If that's not going to be geothermal and your water source is far, maybe build solar panels instead? Also, you can power a generator with coal, which still seems less annoying than carrying batteries.

Glowstone is the one resource in the game I don't mind conjuring the shit out of with Equivalent Exchange, simply because the Nether is a) annoying and b) buggy with some mods (teleport pipes in particular like to break/disappear when you zone into the Nether or the End) so I generally only go there once or maybe twice ever. That said I don't remember using a LOT of it; just finding one glowstone deposit usually gets you at least a couple stacks of dust which should last you a little while.

[koro]

I'm working on making some solar panels now. It's really slow going with how many steps it takes to just get one thing made.

I'm also not sure how I'd actually start the geothermal stuff, seeing as my home is in the base of the volcano while all the lava (and I assume it uses source blocks) is at the top.

[Rendakor]

Oh I didn't realize you were living in the bottom of the volcano. To do the pump set-up, you need to be at the top. You can use lava buckets but you're still carrying shit by hand that way; if you've got a lot of diamonds you could put the generator up there and run glass fiber cables down to your base (it only loses 1 EU every 40 blocks).

Solar panels are probably the way to go, particularly because tin cables are basically made for them. Just make sure none of them are more than 40 blocks from your batbox/MFE/MFSU or you won't get any energy from them. The cool thing about solar panels now is that you can combine them in sets of 8 into single block arrays, so you never need a crazy huge area for a solar farm.

The trick to IndustrialCraft is to make shit you'll eventually need, in advance. Coal dust is a big one that's just a huge PITA if you don't keep some on hand.

[koro]

Well I got a set of solar panels made up and they're sitting pretty on the bottom slope of my volcano, where they're enough to power a single extractor, macerator, and electric furnace all going at full blast overnight. I'm now just working on finishing mining out the bottommost level of the volcano as space, and then I can get some obsidian going (there are several large lava pools not far from me, but not close enough for convenient geothermal) for a nether portal, followed by some equivalent exchange, Thaumcraft, and setting up a quarry at a river delta leading to the ocean out a back entrance to my place. I'll have to set up some automated sorting/macerating/smelting for the quarry, and that'll probably come after I get equivalent exchange set up.

Edit: Also Rendakor, you mentioned not having messed with Redpower much in your LP series. If you haven't, I'd give the hacksaw recipes (where you use a saw on blocks to cut them into smaller bits) a try. You can make neat panels and things, and it's possible to nearly completely cover up the Redpower wires you have running around while still having them work. They also work nicely for IndustrialCraft cabling too.

[Xanthippe]

Glowstone is the one resource in the game I don't mind conjuring the shit out of with Equivalent Exchange, simply because the Nether is a) annoying and b) buggy with some mods (teleport pipes in particular like to break/disappear when you zone into the Nether or the End) so I generally only go there once or maybe twice ever. That said I don't remember using a LOT of it; just finding one glowstone deposit usually gets you at least a couple stacks of dust which should last you a little while.

When your mods upgrade to 1.3, you'll be able to trade villagers for glowstone (using emeralds, which so far are obtainable by trading villagers). While it's not as efficient as Equivalent Exchange, it is another source for glowstone.

Your mods sound fascinating, when I'm not completely lost in details.

[Rendakor]

Hmm alright, I'll take a look at the hacksaws next time I hop on.

And that sounds cool Xan; I haven't really been keeping up with the 1.3 patch notes because I almost exclusively play modded but its nice to hear they're giving the villagers something useful to do.

[koro]

So, I made a Destruction Catalyst.

WELP.

[Rendakor]

Best. Item. Ever. 

[koro]

So I'm looking to set up a macerator/furnace deal like you have going. What kind of cabling are you using to connect your power supply to the machines? Normal copper cable? I thought that stuff only carried current for 5 or so tiles?

[Rendakor]

Insulated copper cable, yea. It only drops 1 EU every 5 blocks; if you're coming from a BatBox or LV Transformer, you're outputting 32 EU/t so losing a few EU/t is not a huge deal, and your machines shouldn't be that far away. Glass Fiber is the only better alternative, but it's expensive and not really worth it at low voltages. The voltage drop from copper is only an issue coming directly from something like a Solar Panel which only outputs 1 EU/t, or over an extreme distance.

[Fordel]

I always get an itch to try the tekkit stuff, but I just know all I'll do is make the magic equivalency chest thing, and pump in a endless stream of cobblestone from cobble generators.

[Rendakor]

It's a hard thing to resist. I have a couple set-ups like that going, although I don't use cobble generators*; I pair energy collectors (creating EMC from light) with condensers to automate a few things:

• ThaumCraft fragment research, because it's either a giant resource hog (if you use bookcases) or a huge timesink (if you use cobble).
• Vis/taint generation too, mostly because of the clunky crucible UI.
• IndustrialCraft power through geothermals, although this is more of a habit from the days before solar arrays and tin cables made passive, renewable power a reality.

Other than that, I've got a condenser that eats all the cobble/dirt/gravel from my quarries and makes diamonds, and a big EMC flower set up for powering Klein Stars, and that's about it. Although I should note I've had to consciously resist the urge to just dump EVERYTHING into a condenser or relay and pull out what I need, when I need it. I've done that heavily in past Technics but it removes the fun of going out and mining (and setting up crazy sorting systems) and results in you never leaving the house, even in a video game, which is just depressing. EE is really a crazy powerful mod though, particularly for those items that are obnoxious to farm (glowstone, slime balls, soul sand, ender pearls).

*I'm guessing you mean something like a mining well/quarry over a lava/water mix that creates and mines cobble forever? If so, I can't see how that'd be more efficient than the energy collector.

[Fordel]

I want to say there is some single block miner thing, I saw it in a youtube video on one of the yogscast channels. In the space of 3 blocks it mines a cobble every second or whatever. I'd probably just setup like, a thousand of those things and feed them into the chest and go back to what I always do in minecraft.


Colonize the world and find new and amusing ways to murder proudft.

[koro]

So, sugar cane farming. I pretty much copied your (Rendakor) cane farm setup with the pistons and streams of water, but uh... it seems grossly inefficient considering 80% of the cane bits will land back on the source blocks you have them growing from and not in the water.

Am I missing something?

[Sky]

So I'm looking to set up a macerator/furnace deal like you have going. What kind of cabling are you using to connect your power supply to the machines? Normal copper cable? I thought that stuff only carried current for 5 or so tiles?

I've got a setup like this:

ocSSSSS
GBccccS
SSSSSSS

And in front of that

ooMMFF
SSSSSSS

S= Stone
G=Generator
B=Batbox
F=electric furnace
c=insulated copper wire
o=open air block

Basically, I have a generator next to a batbox that outputs along the copper wire set into the wall behind my 4 machines that sit on a stone shelf in front of the wire (could've been on the floor, but that's how I had it set up initially with regular furnaces). Another copper wire goes up through the roof (4 wire lengths) to another batbox. That batbox is fed by aluminum wire that leads to my solar array.

[Rendakor]

So, sugar cane farming. I pretty much copied your (Rendakor) cane farm setup with the pistons and streams of water, but uh... it seems grossly inefficient considering 80% of the cane bits will land back on the source blocks you have them growing from and not in the water.

Am I missing something?

Do you have a redstone repeater set to maximum on it? With that the pistons stay out longer and which seems to prevent that. It's still pretty inefficient but I'm not really good with setups like that; it generated more than enough for my purposes if I just left it alone and did something else for a while. Also make sure that there isn't a block in the middle between the second height of the cane. The top center O in this diagram is very important, despite the temptation to have the dirt blocks for the next layer there.

PCOCP
SCOCS
SDWDS

P=Piston
C=Sugar Cane
S=Stone
D=Dirt
W=Water
O=Open air

Otherwise, you could do a more elaborate system with obsidian pipes, like so (this diagram is from overhead):

SPPPPPPPPPS
SCCCCCCCCCS
SXRXRXRXRXR
SCCCCCCCCCS
SPPPPPPPPPS

X=Obsidian Pipe
R=Redstone Engine

You'd set the main collecting pipe in the ceiling and drop the obsidian pipes so that they're on the same level as the second height of the cane; that way anything that ends up sitting on the first height gets sucked up and piped away. You could probably even switch to still water instead of running which would allow to just extend the farms as long as you like without running into issues with water running distances. I'd debated putting this together but my sugar farm got ruined due to that lag issue I posted about in the mods thread in the subforum, and I don't really need to farm sugar anymore now that I have the Harvest Goddess band so I just never bothered.

Sky, your setup is nice to prevent power drop, but I like things spaced out so I can pipe things into and out of them.

[koro]

Here is my cane setup. I think it's how you did it:



Leaving it on overnight produced a goodly bit of cane, thankfully. I think it seems to work better if you're not physically there looking at it and are instead inside somewhere away from it.

Anyway, I got my macerator/furnace setup working good, and they're all pumping output into an alchemical chest designated for ores. I just need to set up some more splitter pipes for all the other shit I'm likely going to be digging up while quarrying and I'm good to go.

[Sky]

I'm new, I don't know how to pipe things in or out or anything.

[koro]

Let's start simple: we'll say you want to pump iron ore from a chest to a furnace to smelt, and then into a second chest to store it.

You need wooden transport pipes connecting to the front of the chest and the front of the furnace; those pull stuff out of things.
You need stone or cobblestone transport pipes to actually move the stuff; stone and cobblestone pipes are more or less functionally identical, but stone pipes won't connect to cobblestone and vice versa, letting you have two pipelines running side by side that don't connect to each other.
You'll need some engines to work the pumps; for simple things like furnace pumping redstone engines work splendidly, since they can be run on something as simple as a single lever.

Here's a quick-n-dirty MSPaint example:


The pipes are situated like that because for most things, the input side is the top and the output side is the front. Also, if I had used the same kind of piping for both the chest-to-furnace and furnace-to-chest, the pipes would have connected, leading to roughly half the stuff that's meant to go to the furnace actually going to the chest, and stuff coming out of the furnace going backwards either to the furnace again (which will muck it up) or back to the origin chest. There are ways around that using iron pipes, but for the most part it's less of a headache to just alternate pipe types.

Just place fuel in the furnace and what you want to smelt in the leftmost chest and flip the lever. If you connect the engines via redstone wiring (through Red Power or otherwise) they'll both run with the flick of the one lever.

[Severian]

I want to say there is some single block miner thing, I saw it in a youtube video on one of the yogscast channels. In the space of 3 blocks it mines a cobble every second or whatever. I'd probably just setup like, a thousand of those things and feed them into the chest and go back to what I always do in minecraft.


Colonize the world and find new and amusing ways to murder proudft.

That would be from "Tekkit with Duncan", he's using the Block Breaker from Redpower 2. It's this episode, and the first part of the next for some improvement:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11Hsua7bdOo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu7Iy53ATxE

I am going to resist this in fear of it trivializing my entire Technic world. So far I have also been able to resist dumping my mined uranium into the condenser, but we shall see. I may not be cut out for full-scale industrialization; I am finding that I enjoy spelunking too much to abandon it for strip mining.

[koro]

Alright, got most of the hard part of my sorting logistics worked out.

Stuff that comes out of the quarry will be sent via pipeline to a large storage chest which is connected to an electric engine (they pump fast) with its own switch and power supply. From there, it hits a diamond pipe that separates out sand, gravel, cobble, and dirt to be sent to an energy condenser and turned into something useful for Equivalent Exchange, like diamond. Fuels - redstone, nikolite, uranium, etc. - are also filtered out here to head into their own chest. A bit further down iron, tin, silver, copper, and gold are sent off to the macerators and smelters via appropriate sorting. Coal also goes to its own macerator with a 50% chance of being sent to the fuels chest instead, so I get a stock of both raw coal and coal dust. Everything else continues on down the main pipeline with diamond, Red Power gems, obsidian, and flint going into the ores chest alongside the normally smelted stuff via another splitter where the two sections meet. A final splitter siphons off Thaumcraft crystals, and a final chest catches the other miscellaneous stuff.

Only about half of all that is actually built, but from some dry runs of testing on a superflat test world, it should work out.

Edit: Ugh. I'm half-tempted to just make a second infinite geothermal setup at my quarry area instead of going through the incredible hassle of making 3-4 LV Solar Arrays. It's way overkill as far as power goes, but it uses far fewer resources to set up.

[Rendakor]

Your sorting setup sounds good. I had to separate my smelted bars from my diamonds/gems because (even in an alchemical chest) I just had too many bars. Another thing to think about, a 50% chance to re-smelt iron into refined iron. I really wish they'd add EMC values for more IC machines, so I could just pull Solar Panels/Arrays directly out of my Klein Star. I run the infinite geothermal setup because it's such a pain to go through the 20 step process to make a decent solar power setup.

Thanks for the link Sevarian; I'm not that far in Duncan's Tekkit series because I didn't realize he had his own until ~episode 20 of the main channel's Tekkit series. I have no problems dumping Uranium into EMC, although Uranium seems to be worth more in Tekkit than in Technic; the Yogscast guys use Uranium to get tons of stuff while it's only worth half a diamond in Technic. My loose rule is that I only burn useless mats (Uranium, Tungsten, Nikolite, Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald) into EMC for use in EE, I don't convert them into regular materials to trivialize the rest of the experience. With that in mind, once you're approaching the Dark Matter/Red Matter level even Tungsten's 16k EMC is a drop in a bucket.

[koro]

I've been mostly using my front door machines (extractor, macerator, electric furnace hooked up to my initial solar panels) for small stuff like rubber, charcoal, and for refined iron. If I end up needing a whole lot of it in a hurry often, I'll probably make room and slot in a sixth furnace for a 50% chance of refined iron.

At any rate, I got the whole sorting system finished up (looking at the finished product, it's a whole lot simpler than it sounds) and the quarry going; it's running splendidly so far. I do need to make a fourth solar array if I run it overnight, though, as the nighttime power usage is a bit harsh with it going full blast.

Also, I've been getting some good mileage out of Iron Chests. An Iron chest holds as much as two linked normal chests, and is a godsend for small spaces like my quarry's storage. They're great if you don't want to sink the mats into an alchemical chest for mundane stuff, and the crystal chests are a kind of nice novelty.

[koro]

Hm. After about 30 or so hours, my Technic world's become pretty much unplayably laggy. I wonder what's causing that, and if it's something that's fixable.

[Mrbloodworth]

QUIT TROLLIN ME! - Full Minecraft Snapshot 12w34b

Also:

[Rendakor]

Hm. After about 30 or so hours, my Technic world's become pretty much unplayably laggy. I wonder what's causing that, and if it's something that's fixable.

Do you have a lot of/very long pipes with tons of shit in them? That's often the culprit for me, particularly if you're using quarries that are far from your base. If this is the case, you can mitigate this by using teleport pipes but if you do that, be careful if you go to the Nether or the End as those two dimensions like to bug out teleport pipes. MystCraft gives me problems too; after switching between worlds a few times I need to exit the game and relaunch it just to unload the other worlds and reduce lag.

[koro]

I've got a slightly long (20-ish tile) long pipe to my original quarry that I have yet to move again, and I haven't done any Mystcraft yet. Rebooting alleviated it a bit, but I think my biggest problem might be the outdated Java runtime I'm using. It's tolerable for the moment though.

That said, I'm considering either starting a new world or doing some extremely far-ranging exploration to find a new place to settle. My current digs are a weird intersection of biomes: taiga south at my front door, jungle just northwest at my back door, extreme hills to the east, another taiga north of the hills, desert southwest of the taiga, and a massive forest to the northeast. No flat land whatsoever, so a destruction catalyst would be nigh-essential for creating any sort of flat land for home building. It also doesn't help that there's a taint infection on the south side of the forest, originating deep in the water. Block containment is untenable for it and clearing the taint itself via the magic shovel or taint-destroying potions is merely a band-aid. I have no idea how to reduce the amount of actual atmospheric taint in the area to stop the natural spawning of taint blocks, since raising Aura doesn't seem to counteract it. My Thaumcraft lab in my volcano is teetering on the brink of having too much taint in the air as well, despite being maxed out on Aura, and I can't figure out how to do anything about it.

Plus, while it's kinda cool, basing myself out of a volcano has some definite disadvantages; chiefly, it's a bitch to do any sort of expansion. To do any safe outward lateral expansion, you have to stop the cascading lava flow along the side, which nixes most of the aesthetic appeal of a volcano base outright, plus you have to constantly build around the central pillar of lava source that extends all the way to bedrock. The fact that it's all basalt is also another problem; destruction catalysts won't touch the stuff, electric drills are nigh-essential to mine it at any decent pace, and it's really hard to get lighting to play nice with it, considering it's all one uniform black color.

[Rendakor]

My destruction catalyst works fine on basalt, so not sure what the issue is there. But if you're using an old Java that probably explains it; 20 blocks long isn't that much. I had 100+ long pipes from quarries and pumps in an old Technic world and it caused all kinds of lag, particularly when I'd load/unload that chunk.