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saopaulo13

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Everything posted by saopaulo13

  1. speaking of keeping up with entries, again so much has happened in playing, it will be hard to describe it all. First, I finally got the pitchblende and processed it to some usable uranium. I build a minimum reactor, after fiddling with the reactor simulator, which yielded 40 EU/t. This would have been 80 EU/t, but in EU mode, reactor output is reduced to half. 40 EU/t is not enough to keep my base going -- which basically means running mining drills for coal, the occasional mining for ore, ore processing, and generating the many various fluids with the IHL machines (chem reactor and the fluidized bed reactor), and occasionally runningthe AR machines. Thus my dream of switching from oil/creosote liquid-fuel boiler power to nuclear power was a bit premature. My initial reactor setups also all made use of reflectors; these are used up rather quickly (10k seconds instead of 20k), and require tin and copper. After tinkering with the reactor simulator some more, I figured out that the best setup involves just overclocked heat vents and component heat vents. The OHVs take 36 heat from the reactor hull and remove 20 heat by themselves, leaving 16 heat that need to be removed otherwise; the CHVs remove 4 heat vents from themselves and from neighboring components, so 4 CHVs around each OHV works out exactly. Arranging them in a checkerboard pattern works, even though I was wondering if that means that some CHVs are doing double duty. But nothing is blowingup, so it works. With this knowledge, I designed a reactor setup with 4 quad elements (16 fuel rods), of which 2 are placed side by side to squeeze out some extra ticks. This yields 280 EU/t, which are again only 140 EU/t effectively. With the AR machines able to cheaply produce heat vents (the basic ingredient in making more advanced components), getting the materials was not so difficult. But even though I got the larger reactor up and running, it's still not enough to power the base; eventually I will have to switch to a fluid reactor setup, which requires housing (lots of lead) and a system for producing power from heat via steam. Looking up some tutorials online, it looks doable, but will have to wait for a bit longer. So in the meantime I went back to getting more oil; my first two runs to filling a drum (256k) were all done with manual labor, drenching the wells bucket by bucket, which required digging down by hand, a lot of work. I too late discovered that the IC miner in connection with an IC pump placed next to it can do all this work by itself. It just needs enough mining pipe, and a fluid ejector upgrade to move the oil into a drum placed next to the pump. (More upgrades work wonders in speeding up the process). Quickly gathering enough oil, I was able to get tons and tons of more gasoline and the various gases. Most crucially, I also finally realized that I had been running my two boilers (one liquid and one solid, intermittently) with a 2x2 setup, which never generated enough steam to maximize the output from the turbine. As soon as I upgraded the liquid fuelbox to 3x3 and added the high pressure boilers on top, my turbine started reaching 100% efficiency, meaning 200 EU/t output. My MSEU was finally filling up to the brim. (When upgrading the fuelboxes and adding more boilers, temperature resets to zero. Getting a large boilerto 100 degrees takes a long time, and a lot of fuel. While running the fuel box on gasoline, I had been collecting the creosote oil from my two coke ovens in a drum; it took almost half ~128k to get the boiler hot.) I also started to produce chlorine in high volume. It is one of those liquids that produce slowly from saltwater and are expensive in terms of energy; it is used in the production of rocket fuel antecedents. After running one or two 16K tanks of saltwater through the AR electrolyser and getting only a few buckets of chlorine, I filled up a drum of saltwater at the sea shore, using a pump. Splitting saltwater also produces tons of sodium hydroxide solution, which is needed for aluminum processing and also for one of the precursors for rocket fuel. The AR electrolyser needs a lot of power -- so much that it shut down parts of my base that were connected in series to it -- thankfully, I had neough stored up, thanks to my newly upgraded boiler. After that, while the drum of saltwater was slowly processing into chlorine and sodium hydroxide solution, I made some ammonium -- nitrogen and hydrogen -- needed for the next step of rocket fuel production. After much running back and forth, also processing the various intermediate petrochemical products in between, building one more IHL FBR to be able to process more ammonium, making co2 to make methanol, the chlorine was ready, 2 16k tanks of it (out of 256k saltwater!) There were 4 more steps combining the various precursors, to [forgotten how to spell that], then chloramine, then hydrazine and dimethylhydrazine, all VERY slow in production, to finally the first bucket of rocket fuel!. Rocket fuel! Space is near! ... but a lot more to do.
  2. Hi Viper, thanks for following! Making a doc is a great idea, perhaps I'll give it a try when I have time -- haven't kept up with diary entries in a while
  3. Having solved the rubber crisis -- I also realized that the CESU max output is 128 EU/t, so only regular copper cables are needed -- I wonder what my next priority should be. I noticed that I am running through fuel to burn at a steady pace, so I will either have to burn my reserves of methane -- or go on a new exp[edition to fill up my oil drum. The latter is tedious business, since I have not figured out yet how to built the IE pumpjack. I don't really need the methane anymore, since I can now make hydrogen easily with the AR Electrolyser. It's energy intensive, but also produces Oxygen and can be automated easily. Putting the old way through the refinery setup is also a lengthy process that requires constant switching disconnecting, and reconnecting of pipes and containers. (There is really no way I will figure out an automated setup for refining that can work for all the different fluids at once,.) but even if I burn my two or three tanks of methane (we are talking 16K Magneticraft fluid tanks, which I use for everything), I will sooner or later run out. Thus I resolved to get started with IC nuclear power. Luckily, I already found a source of pitchblende; using the Big Drill made it much easier digging through mountains of granite (the only layer where pitchblende spawns). Making the reactor and other required blocks requires a lot of resources, all of which I have, except lead. There is a lead mine 140m from my main base, where I already found the ore cluster; I need to set up a drill, power line, and rail link to get the led I need. In the meantime, I am thinking of making another MFE. The steam turbine seems to generatemore power when temperature is high, and my current mfe is hovering near full, with several machines running. If I make more energy storage, it presumable will draw down the steam from the boiler quicker, Ithink, but I'm not sure if this also affects fuel consumption. Currently, the temperature of the boiler only seems to be affected by fuel consumed and time spent. In any case, I'd rather store the energy in the form of readily available EU than in the form of steam. I am not so sure how the nuclear setup works. It says in the various guides that using a heat exchanger/steam heater is more efficient than using EU straight from the reactor. But the regular steam generated from my setup for the superheated steam (it generetes reguilar steam below 375 degrees and superheated steam above that temperature) seems not to be accepted by the steam turbine. Do I need the IC kinetic generator?
  4. So much more has happened ... and yet progress is still sooo slow. There is just always some item that needs one piece where it turns out that it needs a whole new production line. Figured out the small problem with the polymerizer, which was no problem at all. It just needs tiny piles of technical silicon for each batch of polycarbonate plastic. With those sheets, I went ahead and made a Big Diamond Drill. It's fantastic as it mines in a 3x3 area; so much faster. Cave-ins are a problem though, so mining this way requires some careful planning and placement of support beams. Also, as soon as I made the Big Drill, I realized that I needed yet another small one, for breaking machines that don't react to the IC wrench. Meanhwile, I am really enjoying the options that the AR machines give. Circuits and advanced circuits are so much cheaper now that I can make them with the Precision assembler. The Electrolyser is great as it makes producing Hydrogen and Oxygen easy. It uses a lot of power, so I need to set up another MFE. For which I will need Lithium, for which I will need Hydrogenchloride ... The last requires chlorine (naturally), which can easily be made in the Electrolyser from saltwater, but production is very slow, only 250mb per batch. Each bucket of HydroCl requires 1000mb chlorine. I am also trying to complete all existing quests in the HQM book; one of them is the Electric compressor. Itwould be really useful to have, as it allows pressure on demand and automatic shutoff above a certain threshold. This turned out to be another Rube-Goldberg-like goose chase.It requires a single advanced pressure tube, which needs the Pneumaticraft full assembly line set up. I made all the pieces already as they are required for the Precision Assembler, but now I will need to make them again. Should have thought about that and used them to make one or two of these advanced tubes before spending them on the AR PrAssembler. In addition to requiring tons of compressed steel (not a problem, since I have stacks and stacks of iron now) the assembly machines also need printed circuitswhich require black and cyan plastic sheets, and a large amount of blue pastic sheets for making pistons; 66 altogether. This means that to make the Electric compressor, I will have to run several tanks (16,000mbeach) of Naptha/Kerosene or LPG through the refinery setup toget enough ethene and liquid plastic. This requires superheated steam. My setup is complete and working, so the steam is cheap and plentiful, but requires the heaters being connected to the two dedicated CESU with gold cables. I have two pieces in reserve, which I use to connect and disconnectthe heaters manually as needed. Now, the superheated steam generates very fast; as long as there is storage room for the steam to go to, everything is fine, but once the drum I am using is filled, explosions happen. Because this pack is TFC-based, explosions do not do any damage to placed blocks (seems the authors of the mod thought it would be too harsh if a single creeper could blow up the results of months of grinding). However, dropped items are destroyed by these otherwise harmless explosions (steam explosions also do not damage the player). So when I was breaking my dedicated gold cable to shut down the heater once my steam drum was full, the explosion destroyed the dropped cable piece. That would normally be a non-event, but it so happened that I had completely run out of rubber, as I had just upgraded the Techborn Industrial Blast Furnace to make it all Reinforced Blocks, This was necessary to be able to process Titanium (2300 degrees), and because inserting lava blocks in the center of the Blast Furnace (as it says in the Techborn wiki) to get an additional 500 degrees doesn't seem to work in this pack. So upgrading the Blast Furnace required tons of circuits, which required cable, which required rubber. I could run my reserves of Butane through the Refinery setup to get rubber (a fastand high-yielding method), but for that I would also need the superheated steam. So I am back to tapping my Hevea Rubber Tree, waiting for the bowl to fill and the Latex to turn into rubber, so I can make the gold cable ....
  5. Much appreciated! I really thought I was the only one left on thisthread.
  6. Made the Polymerizer and polycarbonate! What a mighty stretch this was. HEre's how it went down: first, I had to get the 32+ multiblock chassis; these require filling basic machine frames with nickel, 500mb liquid nickel per frame, 2000 in total (8 chassis per frame, 4 frames.) To get 2000mbs I needed 14 nickleingots (144mb/ingot). This was hard to come by, had to go back to two old mines and scrouge the surface to get some more garnierite. The bulk of my nickel is locked up as sludge and needs the electrolyser to get processed. With the materials, making the blockm took some trial and error; the heater goes in the middle towards the back, the tank is in the center wall piece opposite from the control block. The Polymerizer finally formed. Now I needed the polycarbon material itself; thankfully, I had tons of kerosene and the superheated steam to process it; naphtamix going through the MagCr refinery gives pyrolysis gasoline (pygas) and hot ethene. I also had a lot of propene ready. Now however I discovered that I needed a lot of intermediate chamicals, such as phosgen, which in turn required carbon monoxide, hydrogenchloride, chlorine, oxygen, and chlorine. All of thes e are much easier to get once the electrolyser is up and running, without it, there are many steps, some of which require the lab electrolyzer, or the cryogenic distiller, both of which are very slow. Because I have tons of cracking fluid that can be made into syngas -> carbon monoxide ->phosgen, the only bottlenecks is phosphorus. thankfully, my 7 phosphor yield 28pieces of small phosphor. Another surprise was that the Polymerizer did not start before it was half filled with liquid feedstock, 8000mb, which makes the tank half full. It then uses only 500mb to produce 2 polycarbonate sheets. A bit strange, as it means that the first 7500mbs of polymer feedstock are essentially locked up or lost. I am refraining from reorganizingthe chemical production line just yet, as everything will become much easier with the electrolyser. Already the precision assembler got down the cost of circuits enormously. I can now also make heat exchangers cheaper which will make crafting the IC night vision goggles affordable. Otherwise I would have to go out to get much more tin. The techguns NV goggles, are actually better, but need energy cells,which need a fabricator to make. Not there yet.
  7. More progress. I got the train to my hematite mine up and running. All it took is a simple setup with two loops and one locking track. The Energy loader charges the CESU cart that drives the electric locomotive while the train is stopped. Using manual switch to get the train going again. This could be automated, but not necessary, as mine production rate is pretty slow. Also figured out that I don't need a chest cart, the two slots of the CESU cart will fill up with ore; that is plenty of room. Rationalized my base a bit; things were all over the place and required a lot of needless walking. I set up a quasi assembly line for making sodium hydroxide using the bronze tub,which is used for smelting purified bauxit into alumina. Aluminum production is really slow though; the recipe in the guide using the electrolytic bath is not implemented. Thus I finally got enough aluminum to make the precision assembler (20+ machine frames = > 40 aluminum). This will cut the cost for eletronic circuits in half. Getting there also required setting up the Pneumaticraft assembly line. Thankfully, they fixed the awful tendency of PC items to despawn. The Etching Acid that is made with spider eyes required some scrambling, because there a so few spiders that spawn. Made a lot of plastic processing all the various liquids and gases from the refinery. The only unsolved bug at this point is that there is no way to select white or orange plastic in the plastic mixer's menu, so I had to use NEI for those. The Industrial Blast Furnace is needed for silicon ingots, which are needed for the boule and silicon wafers. It's very expensive and the heating via internal lava blocks does not seem to work in this pack. So I had to make about 24 reinforced machine casings. I hope I can reuse that housing for the grinder once I get there. But with the precision assembler, the circuits are cheaper; once I make the cutter, I can also make advanced circuits, which will save a lot of lapis lazuli and rare and precious glowstone. There really should be a way to extract glowstone from lava or blaze powder, or to craft it with phosphorus. Still haven't found a cryolite deposit, just plenty of cinnabar.
  8. I guess I'll try the nether again some other time, going to the correct depth, once I run out of quartz. The strange crafting grid bug resolved upon reloading. With the emeralds and the PCB blueprint purchased through the Amadon tablet, I can now begin to build the PnCr infrastructure. I also started getting the materials for the mulit-block Polymerizer. But it will need a lot of nickel, at least 13 ingots for the multiblock chassis. Once It's built, a lot of things become available, such as the Big Drill, various guns, and machine upgrades. Not that I have any use for guns, as there are barely any mobs spawning. Too many cows. The cows, btw, multiply like crazy, but only the first one gives milk. The two sheep eat my grain, but won't let themselves be sheared, and won't breed either. Same with the pigs. I don't really need to the meat or the leather, as rotten flesh can be readily processed in the Techgun Chemical Lab. But the Wool is crucial. Starting the Crystallizer - now that I have the mats for the Quartz furnaces - will hopefully get me going towards the electrolyser. Once that's up and running, my tanks of garnierite sludge can be processed into the liquid nickel I need. If on the other hand I need polycarbonate pastic for the electrolyser ...
  9. So I got the gold and exchanged it for the emeralds. This was totally frustrating, as the TFC gold ingot was not usable. The only way to convert tfc gold into regular minecraft gold in the pack is to melt the gold, either in a crucible or in the wire will, and pourit into a one-time use mold. And that 160 times ... (I admit I cheated on this one.) Whoever came up with that is crazy. Meanwhile, I figured out that the crystallizer, for which I thought I had all the necessary materials, requires 6 quartz crucibles. I have the quartz, which drops randomly while mining, but just barely. This reminded me of the nether, where there should be lots of things that I need, such as glowstone, sulfur, more quartz, and netherwarts for potions. It's impossible at this point to build the Techgun night vision goggles; the IC goggles are possible, but I have run out of copper and tin, as well as iron, and need to stock up again. Night vision potions also need carrots; I have tons and tons of TFC ones, but they don't convert to regular carrots. (Same with the mushrooms, btw, whcih are supposed to convert, but no luck.) The nether without night vision sucks ... ... went there nonetheless to check it out, partially because I can't imagine what a tfc nether would look like. It turned out an flat dimension with absolutely nothing in it and bedrock as the floor. After some research, I found out that this is because of TFS's additional height, the Overworld portal needs to be below y 128 for the nether portal to spawn belowthe bedrock ceiling. After returning from the flat neither,the crafting grid that is normally enabled reverted to 2 x 2, with no way to increase it again. Must be a bug connected to the nether, so I deleted the files. But that means that the nether is officially unplayable in this pack.
  10. Some more progress. First, I figured out that the Drum from Extra Utilities has a very high transfer rate, so putting it on top of the steam boiler sucks up the superheated steam fast enough for it to be worthwhile. It still can't keep up with all the steam generated, so the boiler keeps making loud banging noises. But a full drum of superheated steam can finally begin to convert all the naphta, propane, andbutane that I have amassed. Meanwhile, I made a black steel pickaxe, judging it not worth the effort to make enough blue steel for an anvil to get the top tier tools. Immediately afterwards, I realized that Industrialcraft has powered mining drills. I made a diamond drill an will make a Big Drill a s the next step. I assume it has a greater range, can't find any info on it. 3 x 3 digging would be awesome. When making the second steel drum - the first one is holding my oil supply - I needed 6 Black Steel plates (recipe in this pack). 6 black steel, with maximum mixing, require 1 black bronze, 2 steel, and one nickel ingot for maximum yield, 6 weak steel. That together with 6 more steel gives the Black steel. (Mixing manually in an induction smelter is more efficient than using the IE arc furnace, which yields only 4 weak steel). The problem was, I converted all my garnierite prematurely into sludge, before being able to build the AR Electrolyser (curiously spelled with an s instead of z, the author must be British.)Thus I had to go out and mine one more piece of garnierite (poor), yielding 3 small crushed piles, which together with another pile I had left yields just one ingot. My garnierite mine is running dry, and I haven't found the ore cluster yet. Advancing further then suddenly turned out to be a major challenge. Overlooked by me earlier, some pneumaticraft parts are required for the other AR machines, in contrast to the AR Chemical reactor. Things like the advanced tube require assembly, which requires the assembly line setup, the machines of which require PCBs. This in turn requires a UV light box, which requires ... a PCB blueprint. The ONLY way to get that is through the Amadon Tablet. I've seen this item pop up in recipes before, but never paid any attention to it. Now it turns out it's pneumaticraft device for quasi-village trading, getting items otherwise not available, among them the PCB blueprint. Charging it up via the pressure station was no problem ... but it only accepts emeralds as currency. The blueprint costs 8 emeralds. I have 3, coming from a randomly discovered flawless emerald. Are there deposits somewhere? It is also possible to buy emeralds for ... 32 gold ingots each. That's 160 ingots for the missing 5 emeralds. There is a rich gold mine close by, but processing all that gold will take forever. And that is just the first step to getting setting up PCB production and the assembly line ...
  11. Some more progress. It's all step by step. I finally managed to build the AR Chemical Reactor! This means access to cobalt and other rare materials. I am also finally getting the hang of managing all the different refining steps. Among the benefits is that I get more powerful LNG as fuel, and can produce Rubber from Butane. This is sorely needed, since my one Hevea Tree just died. I think I'll build the AR Crystallizer next. For a boule(which becomes a Silicon wafer), I need Technical Silicon. The AR Electrolyzer, which gives easy access to a lot of chemicals, also seems within reach, It can make Titanium if I'm not mistaken ... Meanwhile, I lack glowstone dust. My only source is Bischofite, which has a 50% chance of dropping glowstone when it's milled. The advanced circuits need glowstone. Too bad that I can't get it from blaze powder, e.g. via the Centrifuge. Building the AR infrastructure should take a while. I checked the recipe for rocket fuel, and it seems very hard to get (=slow). But we'll cross this bridge when we get there. My trusted Black Steel pickaxe also finally broke. I want a Blue/Red Steel one, but do I really need to make a top tier anvil for that? It seems that the foundry metal caster can't make high-tier pickaxes.
  12. Finally got plastic! ... but no white plastic needed for the Advanced Rocketry Interface or the MFE Thankfully, the Liquid Heat Exchanger from Industrialcraft is able to cool down the hot gases, hot ethene to ethene. It needs 10 heat exchangers and another steam generator to move out the heat. That with chrome dust as a catalyst in the FBR gives liquid plastic. To heat the Plastic mixer to a decent temperature, I am using 4 air compressors running on coke coal. Will try to upgrade to an electric compressor as soon as I have the materials. So now the liquid plastic is in the Mixer, and I am trying to make the white plastic. After looking for a while, I figure out how to use the plastic tab. but the last row where the white plastic is is disabled! I can make yellow, pink, black, etc, but No White Plastic! What am I doing wrong? Also managed to blow myself up in my attempt to make more superheated steam. I let the steam generator run without paying attention while I was trying to figure out the plastic mixer, then when I came back it was at 500C. Foolishly turning on the water, the whole things blew up. I should have just cut the electricity, but there are no easy switches for the IC cables and and I have to break them manually each time to shut down the heaters. The transfer of the steam through the liquid hopper is VERY slow, even on the lowest setting (using 1mb of water per tick) the generator produces more than can be transferred, This limitation of fluid transport in the pack is really challenging. The superheated steam is also used up very fast in the IE refinery at a ratio of 10/1 (100mb of steam to each mb of ethane),so a full tank of supersteam only generates 1600 mb of ethanemix.That goes into the Magenticraft refinery to produce hot ethene, and a little bit of ethan whichgoes back into the IE refinery. Altoghether generation of hot ethene is quite slow. (This also means that while I could hook up a kinetic generator to the Heatexchanger/Steam generator combo to get some additional power, but it would be minimal, only generating a few mbs of regular steam while the hot ethene is cooling. That steam is useless for the Railraft boilers (what a pity) and needs to go into a kinetic generator. Too much effort, so the excess heat is going to waste. The heat coming off from the exhanger is also too intermittent to contribute to making superheated steam in the other setup.)
  13. The cobalt is indeed gated. So no batteries and no MFE for now. That leaves the MV Capacitor from IE as mass power storage. I am currently running the base with 3 CESUs but three are frequent power bottlenecks, even though the turbine should produce enough to run everything. Also started building a rail network, in order to not have to go back and forth to the mine I am getting hematite ore from. I never build much with railcraft, so this is all new. Track is very cheap in this pack; I think I'll use an electric locomotive and a batbox to power it. I just need to figure out the holding tracks and the switches. In order to get to the Techreborn machines, I need the precision assembler; for that, I need white plastic for the interface. So no more postponing refining the plastic. I now have tons of intermediate product that can all be refined, I just need a lot of superheated steam. It's all set up, but I need to refill the power storage and fill the boiler with gasoline. It's being refined right now.
  14. The cobalt is indeed gated. So no batteries and no MFE for now. That leaves the MV Capacitor from IE as mass power storage. I am currently running the base with 3 CESUs but three are frequent power bottlenecks, even though the turbine should produce enough to run everything. Also started building a rail network, in order to not have to go back and forth to the mine I am getting hematite ore from. I never build much with railcraft, so this is all new. Track is very cheap in this pack; I think I'll use an electric locomotive and a batbox to power it. I just need to figure out the holding tracks and the switches. In order to get to the Techreborn machines, I need the precision assembler; for that, I need white plastic for the interface. So no more postponing refining the plastic. I now have tons of intermediate product that can all be refined, I just need a lot of superheated steam. It's all set up, but I need to refill the power storage and fill the boiler with gasoline. It's being refined right now.
  15. Figured out some more things. All the bugs turn out to be features Part of the problem is that there is only bare-bones documentation for the IHL mod. 1) wire mill works, to get the molten materials, glass, copper, etc, one has to put the solid materials int the top input slot. This is pretty counter-intuitive - how can the wire mill melt metals? But it works. 2) Electrolysis bath needs thick cable, 135 is best. (not in the docu). Rectifier/transformer is no longer needed; bug interfacing with IE wires seems not a problem. But does not seem needed for aluminum. 3) distilled water (needed for Lithium chlorate for batteries) is made by chainingthe output of the chemical reactor to the input of the cryogenic distiller. I thought first that they hade to touch each other, but that didn't work. Connecting them with a fluid hopper (my favorite item in this pack) worked. I realized that I will need LOTS of tarwater for the distilled water. I got a spruce sapling via the fertilizer quest, but it turned out that it's the wrong type, the TFC one was needed. (So there is a TFC spruce tree in the game, I have to go look for it). So no resin. Using tarwater to get distilled water is slower and needs lots and lots of wood flour, which however is cheap. For the batteries, I will need some cobalt also. I hope that isn't gated! Meanwhile, lots and lots of fuel, and the base is cluttered with gas tanks. I have so much oil that I will take a while before I can get to refining all the LPG and Natural gas. It also needs to be all automated. To be continued ...
  16. More adventures in PFAA: I figured out some more things along the way. I was transferring the power from the Railcraft to aCESU, the only larger power storage unit available at this stage - no plastic or Lithium Cobalt batteries yet. This required an MV transformer, as any low power device connected directly to the Railcraft turbine would explode. I was connecting the transformer to the turbine via a gold cable, which limits the power transferred to 512 RF/tick. Although the turbine specs say 200 RF/t, it actually seems to be much more at 100%. I replaced the gold cable with an HV cable - 2048 RF/t - and the efficiency rate of the turbine went way up. Still trying to maximize the steam transfer from the boiler to the turbine. I also built the IE refinery, to take a step closer to plastics. My base is strewn with tanks with the various refining products. Thankfully, Magneticraft tanks are cheap. For oil supply, I made a drum (expensive but worth it) and filled it manually at a well. Haven't figured out yet how to use a pumpjack, maybe it requires an oil source block? The IE refinery needs superheated steam. To make that, I made the IC boiler. It runs on HU and needs 200 HU to produce superheated steam instead of regular steam. For that, I need 2 heaters, To get the HUs needed, each heater needs 10 coils; these need lots and lots of copper wire. So more copper mining (thankfully I have a mine with an ore drill close to my base), crushing, macerating, washing, smelting ... (one of the things I like about this pack is that how it makes you set up a whole new operation to get that one machine you need to progress). I now have the Supersteam thing set up. My only problem is that once I try to connect pipes to the boiler to transfer the steam to a tank or to the IE refinery, they start filling with water instead of steam. I experimented with many different setups and succeeded only once to fill a tank with steam. Then I finally had the superheates steam in the refinery and it started processing my ethan into ethanmix. That went into the Magneticraft refinery and produced hot etylene. Now I seem stuck. The chart says I need to cool down the hot substances in a heat exchanger. This was not necessary for the first stage products I got from running LPG through the MagRefinery. But the hot etylene doesn't seem to do anything inthe FBR; it's certainly not turning into liquid plastic (the goal of all these endeavors). Must I build the multiblock heat exchanger from Advanced generators? Another big project ... PS. I'm also still trying to figure out how to connect the Electrolysis bath. The less than clear in-game guide only mentions Aluminum and liquid cryolite (I can already make aluminum through the Industrial electrolyzer, even though it's twice as expensive), but I need ti for Potassium, made from Rock Salt. (This is for Urea, which is for Fertilizer, which I need to get the Spruce sapling, which is for resin, which will eventually give me distilled water which is needed for I forgot what ... I guess there is no way to use my own piss for urea instead ...). Maybe the problem stems from the weird flexible cable setup. I have a copper cable, but it's unclear if it's the right spec. Also, on one of my tries to connect the cable, there was a weird bug in which I became entangled in tentacle-like spirals of cable that seemed to drag me back to to the bath (this is not an exaggeration). In the meantime, I made the IC Eletrical Jetpack (so cheap!) and was looking at some boots that could break the fall. The space boots need iridium and are out of reach for now (how am I going to space to get iridium without them?) The only other option seems to be the Techgun Commando boots; these cut fall damage to 50%. Not perfect but better than nothing. Saw that they were made out of Carbon Plate and thought, how easy! Built the Techguns metal press and made a blast rod in the bottling machine, to get blaze powder. Thankfully, blaze rods are cheap in this pack, requiring only a metal rod and some lava. Filling the metal rods didn't work at first; then I remembered that there are two types of Lava in this game, tfc and vanilla. To convert from one to the other, I transferred TFC lava from a magneticraft tank via a minecraft metal bucket (these are also cheap, making red and blue steel practically superfluous) to a mekanism basic tank. It then worked. With blaze powder from grinding the blaze rod and one of the plentiful diamonds from compressing coal, I made carbon mesh for the plates used in the boots. Then I discovered that the boots also need titanium plate ... I actually have all the requirements to build the Techreborn blast furnace (to make titanium) and the Grinder (to increase ore yields and eliminate one step of processing), it's just that they areinsanely expensive ...
  17. Figured out that oil refining setup thanks to the (insane) flowchart in the guide, which I had overlooked before. Meanwhile, my railcraft boilers are producing lots of steam, but the transfer to the turbine is very slow and it never reaches more than 50% efficiency. Trying all pipe setups, BC, IE, fluid hoppers, etc. Since no one is here, this may well be a private game diary ...
  18. Addendum. I finally figures out how to get the hot metals into the IE bottling machine, for the custom Magneticraft recipes -- the liquid hopper _from Pneumaticraft_ did the trick. Note: the _other_ liquid hopper from Magneticraft did _not_ work. Also. figured out that the oil refining process requires using the Magneticraft machines first, before moving on to making plastic with the Pneumaticraft refinery. I wish this was somehow better explained in either the Quest book or the in-game guide. However, non of the Custom "Meta Mod" fluids seem to be working in game. NEI shows them, but gives no recipes. The Oil Distillery - first step to process oil found in the world - despite being properly charged and connected, does not produce hot crude. There is oil and charge in the tank. I guess this pack is dead, no answers, sigh ...
  19. Hey, is the is pack still being maintained? Anyway, I started playing and enormously enjoy the challenge. I noticed some problems that seem to be bugs, some of which are potentially game-breaking. 1. The wire mill does not make glass fiber (needed for the chemical reactor). I tried every combination, water, oleaic acid, liquid glass, correct die, doesn't work. There also seems to be no way the die canbe configured, if that is what the problem is. 2. The heating cable and the cooler from Magneticraft both need to be build by putting a copper block / a machine frame through the Immersive Engineering bottling machine (according to NEI at least.) That simply doesn't work. Bottling machine otherwise works fine. Also, liquid pumped in (liquid tin / liquid nickel) via buildcraft pipe simply seems to disappear. 3. (potentially game-breaking) -- no way to put oil into the Pneumaticraft refinery. I tried all the fluid pumping options the pack offers, no success. The oil bucket also always seems to revert to Magneticraft oil, not the Pneumaticraft oil, whenever I pick up oil with a bucket. Haven't found a way around that. This was a bug in an old version of Pneumaticraft (~2015), so I wonder if that's the problem. 4. Some recipes work, but only with very specific ingredients. E.g. the CESU battery unit needs bronze plates made with the IE metal press, which look exactly like the bronze plates from the metal former (but they have different ids.) 5. Udary mod tucker bag is in NEI, but uncraftable. Makes transporting animals almost impossible. General pack balance: A. Generally, although the progression is awesome, some basic materials are insanely difficult to find (kaolinite, graphite, garnierite, rock salt, lime stone ...). Wool yarn is essential, but very hard to harvest, even if you find sheep. No way to substitute with string or hemp or jute. B. Techgun Ore Drills have VERY low yields/very high power requirements. Practically, this makes playing without NEI cheating impossible. Ore clusters seem to only spawn as single blocks;although many are sometimes found close by, they still only count as single blocks for the purpose of drilling. Although the idea for this pack seems to be that one has to run several bases for extraction etc and connect them with wires and rails, without a cheap chunk loader this becomes impractical. Ender pearls by the way seem to never be dropped when killing Ender men. C. Although techguns give plenty of guns and cool armor, there is practically no need for them; mobs are underpowered. Perhaps adding blood moon or Zombie awareness would work ... D. Not sure if there are meteors in the game - haven't found any despite exploring for thousands of blocks - they seem essential for the AE press templates. Perhaps they are only on other planets? I hope these things can be fixed ... still looking forward to getting plastic. Can't wait to launch into space and look down on the world where I spent so much time running around.