FTB Ultimate: bee lab & assembling machines

3/3/2022 FTB Ultimate

I love these retro packs.  This is MC 1.4.7, easily 8 or 9 years old, and I have added to the world little by little until it would take 100 pages or 2-3 hours of video to describe every little thing.  I stopped by with some specific things in mind and got distracted by the primitive look of the tunnels under my city.  So I fixed up a few rooms, just simple stone brick around the edge of the floor and some wooden planks for the middle.  The tunnels themselves are one row of stone and the rest is dirt, which is crude but at least it's consistent.

(2118) I can't find any of the iron tank components for those tanks that used to be on the roof of the advanced machines lab, but maybe they were an offshoot of some sessions that were lost in time.  Anyway, there is a rolling machine in the TE workshop, but it's stocked up to make iridium alloy.  So I went to the rolling machine in the main lab and chucked in two stacks of iron.  It's fun having enough resources to make big batches of things where I'm used to only making 4 or 8 at a time.  I went to make the logger (Forestry) to go with my arboretum but needed sturdy casings, which needed bronze, so I went to the dust mixers in the TE lab (4 xy fabricators around a dispenser to mix bronze, invar and electrum dusts), dropped two stacks in the furnaces.  It all auto feeds into the AE network, which I can access with my wireless gadget from almost anywhere in the city.

(2128) So I made xy fabricators right under that plate bending machine for Railcraft iron tanks: wall, gauge and valve.  Threw in the materials, got 64+48 walls, 24 gauge (windows) and 32 valves.  Stash those in the network for a rainy day...

(2132) Back to the lab under the bee lab: make 8 sturdy casings, 12 diamantine electron tubes and the recipe for the logger, and make the logger.  Remember to turn off the thermionic fabricator, since it leaks power, not that I have any shortage of power.

(2307) I went down to the Twilight Forest "town" and setup the Forestry peat bog & turbary, then the arboretum and logger.  They were underwhelming.  I brought a carpenter and redstone energy cell for each setup, two buckets to make a 2x2 pool for each.  One cell was full but quickly drained to about 2/3.  The other cell was empty, and boy the pet-fired engines at 1 MJ per tick just don't cut it.  I turned off the energy cell output for a while, and only run it at 5 MJ/tick for long enough tp get the harvests done.  Meh.  But at least it was a major expansion to that town, and I can start adding more buildings and farms to that wide, flat plain soon.

Back home, I made fabricators for the top-tier XyCraft blocks: the platform, plate and shield.  They use 4 xy ingots and 4 aluminum+iron, 4 stone brick + obsidian, and the shield uses 4 plates & 5 iron.  Each recipe makes 4.  The stretch goal here is to make enough shield blocks to possibly shield a nuclear reactor somewhere down the line, since they are supposed to be highly blast resistant ... and super colorful.
 
I smelted all the xychorium (crystals) in the AE system using the 4 TE furnaces, and then just letting the indusction smelter burn through the stacks two items at a time.  I ended up stocking the barrels with about 16 stacks of fresh ingots for future crafting.

And it's after 11 on a work night.  Ugh.  Would like to explore more, craft more, plan more projects, but my eyes are done for the night.

##

3/4/2022 FTB Ultimate

I was reading old wikis about GregTech4 before bed last night, which naturally filled up my head with even more things to look at.  Some of those machines were unfamiliar to me, but the trouble with wikis is that they don't cover just one specific version.  I know I contributed over 100 articles to ftbwiki, and people later came back to replace my perfectly accurate information with stuff from later editions which is obviously not true in all modpacks.

Yeah, this version of GregTech4 does NOT have all those extra battery types based on the battery hull: no sodium, lithium or ther others.

I took out the 16k disk from the mob drops ME Chest next to my network hub and went over to the old old stone factory building with a new ME chest and a redstone energy cell.  At first, those ME chests seem pretty useless, since they're expensive and take a bit of power to operate.  But when you can take a disk with 30,000 or 40,000 items on it, stick it in your pocket, and drop it into a chest at another location, that's a win.  If you have an IO Port on your network, you can also take the disks from a ME Chest, set the IO port to "import into network", and drain the whole disk into your network, then put the empty disk back in the chest to collect more stuff.  That's convenient.

I had fun breaking up those barrels of stone and cobble stairs and slabs and putting them all into the ME chest.  Those barrels had between 3 and 50 stacks each, and the whole thing is sitting in one block using only 9708 of 16384 bytes on a 16k storage disk.  The other reason for coming here is that the mob drops disk was almost full of unstackable enchanted armor and weapons, so I moved those to an iron chest upstairs for a future gallery of armor stands.

I made a new silk touch unbreaking-III pick and while I was at the enchanting lounge I made a few sets of potions: regeneration, night vision, fire resistance.  Good stuff.  I hopped over to the Nether only to get hit with dropped bees, so I cleared that out: 64+38 sinister drones, 64+39 fiendish drones, 32 demonic drones, 48 embittered drones and about 7 stacks of simmering combs.  Back to the Nether for some sphalerite ore ... fought a ghast and found two big veins of the stuff, got 2x64+53, and it's one of the only sources of chrome in the world (each one drops a tiny pile of yellow garnet dust in the Industrial Grinder), so it's good to have.

My bees have been insanely productive.  In my bee lab ME network, I have 11K beeswax, 10K honey drops, 4467 honeydew, 2199 phased pollen, 2442 propolis, 809 royal jelly, 800 watery propolis, 761 sugar, 748 snowballs, 541 honey capsules, 537 cocoa beans, 522 refractory wax, 461 wheat, 433 redstone, 395 handfuls of jelly babies, tons more.

I brought some ashes and propolis to the TWilight Forest town.  Ran the peat bog for half a minute to get 19 peat, which I could now turn into 9 bituminous peat (which I have never used before because propolis is usually in short supply) for a whole 2 MJ/tick.

Quick trip to the end, where I jetpacked around to tiny isles full of angry teleporting weirdos.  I crashed when linkbooking home.  But I got 40 tungstate, 8 olivine, 1 sodalite ore.  The wolframite gives tungsten (formerly known as wolfram), and the others are not exciting -- the real ore to find in those end meteors is sheldonite, which gives 2 iridium nuggets & 2 platinum dust in the industrial grinder.

After grinding some stacks of sphalerite ore, I have 64+56 yellow garnet dust ... into the centrifuge they go.  Each 16 gives 5 andradite, 8 grossular, 3 uvarovite, and the uvarovite is the one with chromium in it: in the electrolyzer, 20 of those with 12 empty cans gives 2 Cr dust and other stuff.    So, let's see, one sphalerite ore = 2 tiny piles of yellow garnet = 1/32 of that first recipe, which is 1/20th of that second recipe that gives 2 Cr, so it takes 320 sphalerite for one Cr dust.  Can that be right??

Later on ... I was running batches through the GT Assembling machines.  Once again, the processes are:
RI# + 2 El# = basic circuit board (BCB)
BCB + 3 ICW = IC2 El.Circuit (EC), compare to original IC2 recipe of 6 ICW + 2 RS + RI.
2 RI# + EC = 4 Machine Parts (MP)

2 El# + EC = Advanced Circuit board (ACB)
Lap + Gd = 2 advanced circuit parts (ACP)
ACB + 2 ACP = IC2 advanced electronic circuit (AC), compare to IC2 recipe: EC + 4 RS + 2 Gd + 2 Lap
8 Em + AC = 4 data storage circuits (DSC)

Pt# + AC = elite circuit board (ECB)
ECB + DSC = data control circuit (DCC)
ECB + LapX = energy flow circuit (EFC)
DCC + 8 DSC = 4 data orbs

At the end of the factorization processing line, I have crystalline metals: 2x64+63 iron, 2x64+17 lead, 64+36 tin, 3x64+25 silver.

Then I worked on my supply of chromium and titanium.  Cr only comes from ruby dust and yellow garnet dust.  Ti only comes two tiny piles at a time from bauxite dust or [UU MATTER] UUU/-U-/-U- -> 2 Ti:.

Each fusion coil needs a highly advanced machine block, which needs 4 chrome plate and 4 titanium plate EACH.  So, I need roughly 400 of each metal.