FTB Ultimate: Cliff Be Gone!

I had a crazy idea in my old FTB Ultimate world.  While flying around and showing Anne how desolate the Desert-2-Suns dimension was, I ran into a big cliff of worldgen mess, jutting up about 60 blocks from the desert with some tress along the top, but only about 20-30 blocks wide.  Hmm, I could fly up and put a few little platforms, add the markers and get my quarry to put that whole cliff into my ME storage.

It has taken way longer than expected, about an hour now.  But it's a fun thing to watch.  The desert level I'm trying to match is a hill running up to 78y.  The cliff has been dug down from 120 to 95 (2238pm).    2245 down to 91.  I have been sculpting some of the edges of the cliff sticking up into the sky.  I don't mind an odd spike here and there, and these have trees on them, so they look pretty cool.  2252: down to 87y. 2305: down to 81y.

2325: okay.  That section of the big cliff is done.  I started replacing the exposed stone with proper grades of sand and dirt, amd will replant trees at some point.

Fun project, but exhausting.  There is one other big slab of cliff to take down on some future day.



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250324

I had some more plans for the cliffs at Desert-2-Suns.  I did some landscaping with the many stacks of dirt blocks from the big quarry run.  Then ran cobblestone roads back to the main settlement and dropped another quarry there,  This time, I added an ME Chest with 64k storage along with the ender chest piping things back home.  With this setup, I can jut bring the disk back to base and put it in the IO Port to suck all the contents into my ME system.  A roughly 20x20x64 pit won't be more than 25600 blocks, and about half will go to the ender chest.  I ran out to the second saltpeter mine, about 400 blocks away, and it was incredibly dull, but I put a waypoint there and completed the road back to the Settlement.

While I was out there, I tested out an IC2 Terraformer with cultivation mode.  I don't think I ever played with one of those.  With an advanced solar panel and chunk loader, it very very slowly is turning small patched of desert into "not quite desert" with some dirt blocks, grasses and flowers.  It sounds like it will affect an 80x80 area.  I'll just let it run for a while in this wasteland dimension and see how it looks after a few more days.

Back at the main base, I rearranged the assembly machines hoping to add a router to pull the finished goods from all of them, but I forgot how those routers actually worked.  Anyway, I was able to put two hoppers over the one that uses lapotron crystals, since those don't stack.  Got 3 more copper bees up and running.

In my head, I saw that the ultimate hybrid solar panel needed coal chunks, and where had I seen those before?  Ah yes, in my Coal To Diamonds lab under the diesel fuel lab.  Classic IC2 stuff:
AAA/ABA/AAA (coal dust, flint) = coal ball
    -> compress to compressed coal ball (CCB)
AAA/ABA/AAA (CCB, obsidian) = coal chunk
    -> compress to diamond

Anyway, we need 3 coal chunks for an ultimate hybrid solar panel.  Not that I need more solar, I just wanted to see if I could find the lab with that distant memory in it.  I get a kick out of the retro look of these old labs with blocky autcrafting tables, comperssors and pipes.

The real resource hog in the Advanced Solar Panels mod is the enriched sunnarium alloy.  I have that process all set up on fabricators:
AAA/BBB/AAA (UU matter, glowstone) = sunnarium
AAA/ABA/AAA (irradiant uranium, sunnarium) = enriched sunnarium
    note: -A-/ABA/-A- (glowstone, refined uranium) to get one irradiant uranium
then it gets crazy:
AAA/ABA/AAA (Ir plate, sunnarium) = sunnarium alloy
    for Ir plate: 
    [Rolling machine] ABA/BCB/ABA (Ir ingot, advanced alloy, diamond dust) = iridium alloy ingot
    [Implosion compressor] IAI + 8 iTNT = Ir plate + 4 ashes
-A-/ABA/-A- (enriched sunnarium, sunnarium alloy) = enriched sunnarium alloy

So, sunnarium (Sun) = 6 UU + 3 gd
    irradiant uranium (irU) = 4 gd + 1 refU
    enriched sunnarium (eSun) = 6 UU + 3 gd + (32 gd + 8 refU) = 6 UU + 35 gd + 8 refU
    sunnarium alloy (SunA) = 8 Ir plate + Sun = 8*(4 Ir + 4 AA + D: + 8 iTNT)
So the final enriched sunnarium alloy (eSunA) = 4 eSun + SunA = 24 UU + 140 gd + 32 refU + 32 Ir + 32 AA + 8 D: + 64 iTNT

Also in my head, I calculated that the packager would be better and making scrap into scrapboxes than the autcrafting table ot fabricator, and yes, it works like a charm.

Last bit of the night: I stopped in at the Xy lab and made 21 fabricators using the fabricator line there.  It's so convenient being able to pull anything from my ME inventory with the wireless gadget, get whatever I need, use it, put the results back into the system.