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wormzjl

[TFC-0.79.29][ATLauncher] From stone age to the stars, Project Per Fabrica ad Astra

33 posts in this topic

perfabricaadastra.png

Project Per Fabrica ad Astra (through crafting, to the stars) is a hardcore technical-terrafirmacraft pack designed for experienced players.

This pack aims at providing a complete, believable and smooth experience from stone age to interstellar travel, with heavy engineering content in mind.
Survive, mine, craft, design your base and your automation, manage your power generation and consumption, shape the world with your hands and in the end create the massive factory you have ever dreamed of.
This pack provides many unique challenges in automation, as there are no magic block which can solve every problem. You will need to use all available tools: transport belts, trains, servos, redstone and gates, or even computers to reach your objective.

The gameplay can be identified with a few “ages”:

  • Stone age to Bronze age provided by vanilla TFC.
  • Steel age – Basic industry with Immersive Engineering and Industrialcraft 2, unmanned resource extraction and great increase in resource processing efficiency.
  • Petrochem age – Enhanced industry featuring chemistry and oil refining, powered by Magneticraft, Pneumaticcraft, IE and IHL. Have you ever seen a real oil refinery?
  • Aluminium age – Starting advanced rocketry, making advanced components and extracting minor elements from minerals.
  • Titanium age – Basic space flight, moon landing, UUM production by the particle accelerator, experimental fusion devices.
  • Tungsten age – Top-tier-insanely-complex material production, interstellar travel, ultimate productivity enhancement.
  • Endgame – Mekanism self-sustainable fusion as the ultimate goal.

This pack is intended for group playing due to its complexity, and is guided with quests and manuals with a storyline.
Join us on discord for discussions: https://discord.gg/AtupnpG
 

The modpack can be downloaded on ATLauncher:
https://www.atlauncher.com/pack/PerFabricaadAstra
If you already have ATL installed, just search for "Per Fabrica ad Astra" in the packs list, if not, you can get ATLauncher here:
https://www.atlauncher.com/downloads?

Some screenshots and flowcharts:

Spoiler

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Edited by wormzjl
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Very interesting, looks really promising. But how you managed mods like advanced rocketry to work? From what I know food in other dimensions doesn't decay, you managed to overcome this?

I also recommend Hardcore Darkness and Dynamic Lights duo as it pumps up the level. They are client-side mods that makes darkness actual darkness and hand-held torches lit. They require little configuration.

Btw, where's TFCTech? I see it in the screenshots but I don't see it in the mod list.

Edited by LightningShock
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On 2017/12/4 at 9:05 PM, LightningShock said:

Very interesting, looks really promising. But how you managed mods like advanced rocketry to work? From what I know food in other dimensions doesn't decay, you managed to overcome this?

I also recommend Hardcore Darkness and Dynamic Lights duo as it pumps up the level. They are client-side mods that makes darkness actual darkness and hand-held torches lit. They require little configuration.

Btw, where's TFCTech? I see it in the screenshots but I don't see it in the mod list.

I can add them as optional mods I think.

TFCtech shoud be in the list?

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1 hour ago, wormzjl said:

I can add them as optional mods I think.

TFCtech shoud be in the list?

I've checked the actual pack and I saw TFCTech, there are mods that just don't show up in your online mod list.

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1 hour ago, LightningShock said:

I've checked the actual pack and I saw TFCTech, there are mods that just don't show up in your online mod list.

That's weired, maybe atl's system is bugged

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Hey, just made an account to tell you I'm having a blast playing this. I'm going mostly solo, and I just got to the point where I've fully automated a steam boiler with coal coke. It's extremely satisfying trying to solve all the problems you normally just fix with a single magic block, while using the very limited tools available. 

About 120 hours in and loving every minute, thanks for making this awesome pack!

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How do you generate ores from other mods? Cause all I seem to find are the terrafirmacraft ores.

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I'm really loving this pack.  It's a hard climb, but worth it.  Playing on a new map at tconetwork.net.  Mature friendly people.  :)

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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 can be 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.

 

 

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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 ... 

 

 

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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 ...

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More adventures in PFAA: 

I figured out some more things along the way. I was transferring the power from the Railcraft to a CESU, 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 in the 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 are insanely expensive ...


 

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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 chaining the 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 ...

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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. 

 

 

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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. 

 

 

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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 which goes 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.)

 

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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. 

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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, and butane 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 ... 
 

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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 pour it 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 below the 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.

 

 

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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 ...

 

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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. 

 

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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 nickle ingots (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 28 pieces 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 reorganizing  the 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.
 

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Created this account just to say I'm enjoying your adventure! I am currently playing through and just about to start electrical production. Your entries are very thorough, keep up the good work! :D

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Much appreciated! I really thought I was the only one left on this thread. 

 

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