FTB Ultimate: IC2 Crops & other nostalgia

3/10/2022 FTB Ultimate

Tinker with the IC2 crops a bit.  The cropnalyzer can take an advanced lappack for power.  It lasts way longer than the red crystals.

(2111) Under the bee lab, I made a stack of tin electron tubes, then 40 farm blocks, then turned some of those into a gearbox, 2 hatches, a controller, and whatever that other block was.  I went with brick as the base material this time.  Booked over to Plains Base and setup the multiblock farm.  With no circuit board it comes up as a managed arboretum, which is what I wanted.  I ran some power over from the energy tesseract I setup next to the weird flesh-to-methane IC2 powerplant.  I had planety of hill cherry saplings and dirt, and some water, but did not have any fertilizer.  I setup 4 xy fabs to make the basic gears: wooden, stone, iron, tin.  I'm running very low on tin, oddly.

So, I tp'd back to volcano base (no crash) and walked to VeeCity in the rain.  The coolant cell plant I built over the river had four 30k coolant cells ready, and a heap of other cells.  But to make more I needed copper wire.  Back at the city, I got 5 stacks of rubber from the rubber farm and turned that back on.  Used my wireless to get a stack of copper, dropped it in the wiremill, and the xy fabs cranked out: 53 4xIns NV cable, 53 gold cable, 53 copper cable.  Looke like when multiple xy fabs are pulling from the same inventory, they round-robin the goods, since I dropped another stack of rubber into the central dispenser and got 10,11 and 11 of those different cables.  I guess if I only wanted copper I could have pulled out the stuff left over from last week.

Doh!  This time, booking TO the Plains Base gave a world tick crash.

(2147) My first multiblock farm in this world is setup and running.  It could use automation for water, but I put a chest nearby with 2 buckets, a 2x2 pool nearby, a few stacks of fertilizer.  It already made over a stack of cherry wood, so I started revamping the town.

Back at the coolant cell factory, the xy fabs are setup for:
-A-/ABA/-A- (tin, water can) = 10k coolant cell (10Kc)
AAA/BCB/--- (10Kc, ICW, elec circuit) = overclocker upgrade
AAA/BBB/AAA (tin, 10Kc) = 30k coolant cell (30KC)
ABA/ACA/ABA (tin, 30kC, dense copper plate) = 60k coolant cell (60kc)
ABA/CDC/ABA (tin, [Na], [K], 10kc) = 60k NaK Coolantcell (60kNaK)
and I just added AAA/BBB/AAA (tin, 60kNaK) = 180k NaK coolantcell

While I was looking at the dense copper plate recipe (it's 8 copper plate in a compressor), it turns out it's also the key part of the reactor chamber (8 DCP around a machine block), so I threw two stakc of Cu into the plate bender.  Made 4 reactor chambers then -A-/BBB/-C- (adv circuit, reactor chamber, generator) for my first IC2 nuclear reactor.  Then some more copper, compressed, 3 more reactor chambers.  I will read up on the other components before bed.

Speaking of nuclear options, I was wondering if the IC2 nuke could be used as a crazy mining tool in some far corner of a desert world.  But they are crazy expensive and need 4 re-enriched uranium cells, which means you have to have the reactor anyway.

I made a white-purple-white pair of ender chests where one automatically feeds into the ME network.  So wherever I go, I can drop down this other chest and send stuff back home.

In the recycling house, it's kinda funny that a few of the most common items like dirt will not give scrap at all.  Unless you get a handsaw and cut it into microblocks -- those recycle just fine.  ;-)

I guess I cheated myself the one mass fabricator over by the lightning rod MFSU, since there is no recipe to make another.  The mass fab is disabled by default in GregTech4 packs, since Gregorious thinks we should use his 10x more expensive matter fabricator to do the same thing.  Meh.  The standard recipe would have been ABA/CDC/ABA (Gd, adv circuit, adv machine block, lap crystal), but it produces nothing.

Yeah, in GregTech/Recipes.cfg there is the line
B:Massfabricator=false
which I set to true.

Sure enough, the recipe now works.  I ran it in the ME Terminal and comically, I had exactly 2 each of the advanced bits.  Made some more advanced bits and two mass fabs altogether, which I put next to the main IDSU on a glass fiber HV line.  I can see the power taking a dive even in full daylight.  Each got a stack of Th dust (a byproduct of processing forcicium), and they are up to 24 UU each and we're only down by 8 million EU.  Anyway, I put levers on them so I could turn them off.  I will make the uber-expensive matter fab at some point.  I was just watching an old Hermitcraft video where Hypno had a whole floating array of dozens of hybrid/ultimate panels and they could still barely keep a matter fab making one UU per 10 minutes.

I shut 'em off, have to get to bed.  Made 76 UU for 11 million EU and about 24 Th dusts.

What weird systems we invent for ourselves.  These deep puzzles with so many different goals and routes to get there ... priceless.

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3/11/2022 FTB Ultimate

The IC2 crops were half weeds again, so I added two cropmatrons.  Kinda fun revisiting that old stuff again.  The cropmatrons cover a 9x9x3 area, so four blocks in all directions with the machine at the center.  Each has a batbox and single solar panel.  The weed-b-gone is made from grin powder (one of the funniest names for an ingredient, just macerate spider eyes), an empty can & redstone.  It also uses hydration cells (run water cells through an extractor), which annoyingly do not stack.  And you can also add the grey fertilizer.  The main point of the cropmatron is to keep weeds away.  So I had to move my 3x3 crop breeding plots closer together.

Other than that, I booked over to the "jungle base", which was never much of a base.  I expanded the cobble wall, put a frame of a building around the link book, added another building, collected bees and cocoa, then planted two jungle trees to harvest for vines and logs, and added a small mineshaft that ran into an abandoned mine down around y=24.  For fun, I made the corner pillars of the linkbook house out of jungle logs and put cocoa pods on them for future harvests.

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3/12/2022 FTB Ultimate

Just one short hour before bed.   I added a little house where those iron chests held the old IC2 crop seed bags all those years, this time for barrels to hold the flowers the bees are constantly making.  Oddly, after gathering them together from all different chests, it looks like there are only 8 or 9 different flowers in that whole multi-colored mess?  Hard to believe.  But I setup 15 chests, figuring there would be a flower for each color, and most of them just sit there empty.  I guess many of the colors are combos of other colors, but I really thought there was more variety here.  Certainly, in other later modpacks there are far more varieties of flowers.

In the IC2 crop area, I got my first stickreed.  Always a nice little surprise when, after reed after reed after reed, one finally shows those little orange dots when fully grown.  Across the various wikis, there are a lot of odd little bits about cross-breeding these things.  Things like: if you put a snow block under a netherwart crop, it will turn into terra wart.  Don't know, let's mythbust it!   Or, eating terra wart will remove all negative effects except blindness.  I didn't know that, I only ever grew them for decoration, a spot of blue.

Over on Desert-2-Suns, I found that second saltpeter farm and gave it a proper waypoint.

And the netherwart with the snow block under it DID turn into terra wart.