This is to be the landing page for my playthrough journal of the Gregtech New Horizons modpack.
My ultimate dream is to craft the Stargate. That is not a small ambition. Currently it takes between 5000-6000 hours for experienced players familiar with expert packs to "speedrun" GTNH. I am not an experienced player. In fact I've not used the majority of the mods in the pack before.
This is not a new world. Inspired by the Youtube "hundred days" craze I play modpack worlds through 100-day seasons and keep a journal of each season. At the end of a season I can either begin another season in that modpack, or swap to another pack. The 100-day setup gives a defined start and achievable endpoint which helps to avoid burnout. In a pack like GTNH that's necessary.
I don't intend to post the previous journals. I will start with Season Five, which is this one. The thread will update regularly until I have played for a hundred days.
Here is a summary of what happened so far:
Season One: 100 Days In GTNH
Went from nothing to steam age technology. Was lucky to find a Witchery cottage on the first day which was a huge help surviving the brutal early GTNH nights of hardcore darkness and Infernal mobs. Torches aren't easy to get early on, and don't even ask about what you need to construct a bed in GTNH.
Season Two: Surviving And Thriving: 200 Days In GTNH
Continued through to the late steam age, improving tech and tools. Got Tinkers' toolforge and set up some redstone automation for the smeltery. Acquired first steel. Accessed the Nether for the first time. Experienced my first machine room fire (did not end well) due to a steam leak.
Season Three: Miracle Electrical: 300 GTNH Days
Achieved first LV (Low Voltage) machinery, and completed the grueling quest for the Healing Axe which fills satiation whenever you hold it, finally achieving freedom from the tyranny of Harvestcraft. Insert memes about GTNH players licking axes all day long.
Season Four: Production Line: 400 GTNH Days
Continued in LV. Set foot in Twilight Forest for the first time ever. Upgraded from one to two and then four Bricked Blast Furnaces. This has caused some teensy little pollution issues in that I currently can't enter the steelworking area without a hazmat suit. Surely there will be no long-term repercussions for this.
I am using a skin of Dr. Eggman for obvious reasons.
I spawned on the other side of the mountain, and on the first day while exploring made my way around until I spotted the witch's cottage on the lower slope. She wasn't home so I waited out my first few nights in there. That cottage is the reason I stayed in this area: once I got to the point of needing more space it was simply easier to dig a hole at the base of the mountain and carry my little bit of starting stuff down rather than hauling it all off to somewhere else.
I lucked out massively. In GTNH water source blocks are not infinite. To get renewable water you must build Railcraft collection tanks, which will work better in humid biomes. Most of the local area is dry desert type biomes, which are terrible for that. Even the river biome is only average for yield. But thanks to that witch's cottage the spot I ended up settling in was oasis, one of the very best biomes for water collection tanks. Starting out as a GTNH newbie I had no idea that was even something I'd have to consider.
On the hilltop there is a rubber tree plantation, Tekkit Classic style. If you remember pruning rubber trees like this in 1.2.5 you are eligible for a veteran discount
I have tried hard to get stickreeds to spawn on IC2 cropsticks but I've had no luck yet so I'm still forced to tap the rubber trees.
On the riverbank are numerous crops and Harvestcraft fruit trees, along with my recently added IC2 crossbreeder greenhouse.
Food crops aren't as important now I've got the Healing Axe and don't have to constantly seek fresh recipes to cook, but I still harvest the Natura cotton regularly as an easier source of string than spiders.
The front door is not very pretty...
It used to be a little bit nicer than this but something from Infernal Mobs threw a fireball at me when I opened the door one morning and blew up the decorative porch and I've not gotten around to rebuilding it.
In front of the door is spectre glass, which is solid for me but not for mobs. I got fed up with zombies coming to bang on the door while I was in the workroom so constructed a trap. Anything that tries to approach the front door falls through the glass into a pit and then I can go and kill it through a murder hole. Spectre glass is crafted with ectoplasm which you get from killing ghosts (little floating slimes), which sometimes spawn when a mob dies.
It's scary out there at night with Hardcore Darkness...
Entrance
Every time you die in GTNH you drop a head. This is my collection so far, surprisingly few as I'm such a cautious player. GTNH is at least kind enough to include a gravestone mod so there's little risk of losing your stuff.
Turning around, we see the passage running deeper into the mountain. I've started putting stuff on armor stands to free up space in storage boxes as I've been getting so much crud from a local Roguelike Dungeon. Two doors nearby lead to the old workroom and my bedroom, which I almost never use as I don't approve of skipping nights.
Block choices are a little strange as they were selected not for aesthetics but more on how easy it was to craft large quantities of them. For main decorative blocks I chose variants of Ztones "tank" and "azur", crafted with iron and lapis respectively. Vanilla cobble, smoothstone and stone-brick slabs require a saw, and Chisel variant cobble/stone blocks require a chisel, and both of those tools have durability. Ztones blocks still need a saw to make the smoothstone slabs to craft the base tiles but you get significantly more blocks for the same durability. The Ztones blocks didn't have stairs or slabs associated though so for the roof cladding I went with cooked AE2 skystone, which was the only non-wood block I could freely craft stairs and slabs from at the time. Downside of using skystone is that it takes ages to mine.
The lanterns are Railcraft.
The old workroom still has the original look from before I gained the ability to craft Ztones blocks: chiseled cobble flooring and cobblestone stairs as a wall trim. Among the mod-cons here is water on tap: a Tinker tank is fed by a pipe from a Railcraft water collection tank outside, so I can dip into it with a bucket whenever I need to fill the cauldron or do some crafting with water. No need to go outside at night and risk the nasty mobs.
A little further along the main corridor there is an opening leading to a cactus farm.
This was a very early construction and hasn't been given an aesthetic upgrade. It was invaluable in the early days as I was using cactus for water while working inside the base at night, so that I didn't have to go outside and expose myself to danger collecting from the river. Now that I have water collection tanks I don't really need it any more. I sometimes cook up some cactus into coke for bonus steel production but it's not really worth it compared to charcoal. I'm keeping the installation in case I suddenly discover that I need a huge quantity of cactus for Reasons.
Steam/LV machine area
At the far end of the hall there's a main intersection area. As yet only one passage runs off from here. I plan to expand later on and give MV, HV etc., their own separate areas. Keeping the tech tiers segregated will ensure that I don't accidentally explode my entire LV machine line by plugging a MV device into it.
The first door in this corridor leads to a tiny oreberry farm growing aluminum oreberries. "Proper" Gregtech aluminum can't be made from oreberries but Tinkers' alumite toolparts and a few minor alloys can, so that's what I grow them for. I'll be getting into the involved process of making "proper" aluminum when I've advanced further technologically. A multiblock is required: the Electric Blast Furnace, or EBF. It will not be cheap.
The wall of storage drawers at the end of the passage is my LV crafting area, which is a bit of a mess currently as I ripped up some of the flooring to put down some Buildcraft auto workbenches to make crafting circuits a little bit less awful. There's a couple of Forestry workbenches here with saved recipes for complex machine components. On the left in a nook is the Tinkers' smeltery.
I set up some simple redstone to auto-pour stuff out. There's a redstone clock underneath activated by the lever. I prefer redstone installations to be silent so there's no piston, it's a torch inverter that blocks/unblocks the signal. In GTNH you don't use the smeltery to double ores (wouldn't it be lovely if things were so easy!) but it's needed currently for stuff like making glass, glue balls for circuits, raw aluminum. And of course Tinkers tool parts, but the listed three are the bulk operations.
Through the archway on the other side of the LV crafting area is the steam/LV machine room.
Two high pressure steam boilers feed steam to a Railcraft tank which acts as my battery-buffer. This steam is used to power various machines: a steam alloy smelter, four macerators, a forge hammer, a compressor. I am slowly starting to move over to LV but the steam machines are still seeing lots of use at the moment. In the foreground are some LV machines powered (inadequately) by steam turbines which in turn are fed from the big tank. The closest set is an automatic production line for wrought iron, which I currently use for hand tools to save on steel. The further set are a bunch of random machines plopped down individually.
Water is brought down to the boilers through pipes from a pair of Railcraft water collection tanks up on the hillside. If the boilers should ever run dry while operating I'd be in serious trouble but I massively over-engineered my water supply out of paranoia and have never yet come close to that.
Steelworks
Through the archway again, the back room is the steelworking area, with four Railcraft coke ovens and four Gregtech bricked blast furnaces.
I can't go in there without changing into the hazmat suit so I'm staying here for now. A description must suffice.
The four bricked blast furnaces share walls to save on some resources. Even so, getting the raw materials for them was a hellish grind. Brick, clay, calcite and gypsum are all required in large quantities and then the crafting recipes to make the bricks are really nasty. I've seen it humorously described as the "Great Filter" of Gregtech New Horizons--if you can slog through making the BBFs early on it's a good sign for the future.
The main problem with the coke ovens is getting rid of the creosote. If they fill up with creosote they'll stop working. I use buckets of creosote as my primary furnace fuel, but there's a limit to how much of it I can use, so I crafted a fluid trashcan and attached faucets and fluid pipes to the coke ovens. I can turn those on by hand to drain all the creosote in them.
The charcoal produced by the coke ovens is used to feed the bricked blast furnaces. Making steel this way is very slow and so I've kept them running continuously ever since I built them. Hence the pollution.
At the start of my fifth seasion of play in Gregtech New Horizons, I have been in LV Tier now for significantly longer than I would have liked. This is due to a Skill Issue.
I seem to be stuck in every direction I want to go. It's getting really frustrating. Can't mine the Tinkers' cobalt in the Nether without a better pick, can't make a better pick without the cobalt. Can't go for damascus steel either because I don't know how to get chrome out of ruby ore. Can't press on towards building an Electric Blast Furnace without invar, can't make invar without nickel, as I haven't been able to locate a nickel vein... It goes on and on.
One way or another, I need to find a way to move forward from here. I decide to head back to the one place I've not yet explored in detail.
In the Twilight Forest I'm blocked by bosses. By comparison to all the tech stuff stumping me, this issue sounds fairly trivial to solve. Though I don't have any personal experience of the mod I'm theoretically aware that you progress by killing the boss mobs which sequentially allows you to access new areas. And there's a boss arena just a little way north-east of my entry portal.
I'm really nervous about doing this because I've never been good at boss combat. How hard is this thing, anyway?
Well, I'm in mostly steel armor and I have a lot more hearts than usual thanks to all the boosts I got from Hunger Overhaul, so I'm fairly good on defense. The piston boots and hang glider combo give me a lot of maneuverability too so I should be able to keep my distance or evade it and escape if I need to. And my bow is pretty decent thanks to the Roguelike Dungeon loot drops I combined. I guess I'll give it a go.
...Huh, this isn't going badly.
Yeah, I can totally do this!
And it's down. I have just killed my first ever Twilight Forest boss.
But bad news... when I pick up the trophy, nothing happens. Bummer. I was kind of hoping beating the Naga would reveal the Thaumcraft section of the questbook, as I recall reading something to that effect somewhere, but evidently there's something else I've got to do first.
The GTNH questbook has nothing new to offer me, so I navigate to the vanilla achievements menu and check out the Twilight Forest section. It suggests that I craft a magical map, which requires reagents in the form of a raven's feather, glowstone dust and torchberry. OK, let's have a go at that then.
The raven is easily dealt with. I ramble around the hills and plains until I spot one then shoot it down with the bow. Now for torchberries... what are those and where will I find them? I've seen nothing like that aboveground yet.
In the course of my meanderings as I searched for the raven, I've drawn close to a large round hill. It's too uniform to be a natural terrain feature. I walk over to take a look and find a great chasm running into the interior, strewn with hanging stalactites of ore in various flavors. There's stuff visible down there in the dark, including spawners and loot chests, but I'm more interested in what's above me at the moment.
I reckon that's the famous torchberry. Well, famous in that I only just heard of it right now.
I bridge over and then pillar up to get it--a dangerous procedure, especially when a skeleton somewhere below spots me and starts taking pot-shots. I manage to snag the berry and leap back to safety. Then, as I turn around to leave--
I could've just grabbed that one and saved myself the trouble. Ugggh, situational awareness!
There's just the glowstone to get now. I've probably got some glowstone dust in storage somewhere back home but I'd rather just get it done here and now if I can. I spotted some glowstone deeper within the hollow hill when I was getting the torchberry. I dig around to get a piece, snag it and retreat once more to the safety of the surface.
Year Two Day Thirty-Six: Another Wall
Combining the three items gets me a Magic Map Focus, but not a Magic Map. OK, how do I make the map? I need a Tinkers' paper stack. And the paper stack recipe has been Gregified. When it says "stack" it now indeed means "stack": an entire 64 pieces of paper placed in a compressor will yield one paper stack item.
Back home I go then.
I don't have quite enough paper in storage so I have to withdraw some more sugarcane from my stockpile, grind it in the mortar for chad and press the chad between stone slabs to make up the shortfall. Into the steam compressor it goes, and out comes a slightly damp paper stack.
And now I realize that JEI wasn't showing me a crafting recipe, but a quest recipe--as in, the map focus and paper stack are the required reagents for completing a quest to get the magic map. A quest which I haven't actually unlocked the tab for yet, so I can't do it anyway. No Twilight Forest map for me. The effort was not wasted though, as I can just put the items away until I can use them.
But that brings me back to the roadblock again. Where do I go from here?
Year Two Day Thirty-Seven: The Naga's Secret Surprise
I guess I'll just go back to the Twilight Forest and prospect for ores some more. At least with the Naga dead I've got some fresh terrain in its vicinity to check over.
There's an ore chunk right by the Naga's enclosure, as a matter of fact. I start the usual process of digging down, and almost immediately hit an ore--
Wait, what? Nickel and cobalt!? Two of my roadblocks! Just like that!
I whip out my trusty steel hammer and get to whackin'. Unlike the Nether cobalt ore, this is mineable with my current tier. Although it's cobaltite, not cobalt, and I'm not sure how I get cobalt dust out of it. I'll figure it out. I have a direction again!
Year Two Day Thirty-Eight: Eureka
The cobaltite is a less common ore in this deposit, and it takes me some time to find a reasonable quantity of it. I return to the Overworld with nearly a stack of garnierite but only ten or so cobaltite. First step will be to macerate it and double it as crushed ore.
I pore over the ore processing information in JEI. Macerating cobaltite should give cobalt dust as a byproduct at about a 11% chance per operation--but not from my LV macerator as it doesn't have a slot for byproducts. Macerators only get that functionality in higher tiers.
But there's another option.
The macerator makes crushed cobaltite ore. Fine. That can be macerated a second time to give impure cobaltite dust. Also fine. This is the new part that I didn't comprehend last time I looked at this: you can wash the dust to get purified cobaltite dust. And if you put that through a centrifuge, you have about a 11% chance to get cobalt dust as a byproduct.
Any tier centrifuge.
And I already have an LV centrifuge.
OK then, let's test that theory. I double-macerate all my Twilight Forest cobaltite, haul the dust over to the cauldron in the old workroom and toss it in, then haul the purified dust back to the LV machine room and dump it into the centrifuge. It spins up and starts producing cobaltite dust... but not only cobaltite dust.
That's it! That's how it works, that's what I have to do!
I just bet this works for chrome too. Macerate ruby ore in the same way and put it through the centrifuge for chrome dust.
Year Two Day Thirty-Nine: From Theory To Practice
Now that I've finally figured out a way to get those byproduct items in LV, I'm able to go ahead and finish the long outstanding quest for cobalt brass.
Which unlocks a quest to craft a diamond tipped saw blade, using the cobalt brass I just made to craft a gear in the alloy smelter. Which in turn will allow me to construct a Basic Cutting Machine. I don't remember what I needed that for but I do recall that it was one of the roadblocks.
The Naga battle was kind of exciting but this session has been mostly a machine room grind subsequently, and I'm getting a bit tired of the machine room, but I want to test out one last thing before I quit. Can I indeed get chrome this way? I fetch some ruby ore out of the old workroom, double-grind it, wash it, and load it into the centrifuge.
Well, well. This changes everything.
I'm going to want to set up production lines to get these byproducts as soon as possible. Ah... but there I've got another roadblock waiting for me. The mechanical ore washer needs water to operate. And I don't know how to get water into it automatically but I'm guessing it's going to involve fluid transfer nodes. And for those I need Ender pearls.
Looks like I'm going back to the Roguelike Dungeon for another attempt then. I really hope there's an Enderman room in there somewhere.
Modded showcases are always interesting. On one hand, I'm totally unfamiliar with a lot of them, which means I probably can't appreciate them as well. On the other hand, for the same reason it sort of drags you back to a position as though you were new at Minecraft, and can make things more exciting to follow.
That's how it's been following Zen410's thread for me.
"Huh? I have NO idea if that's a major accomplishment or not. I have NO idea what that even is. Wait, that does WHAT?"
That's sort of how it goes, haha. But that also makes it interesting.
Yeah these comments are what I was worried about with starting to post my GTNH journal, starting midway through lacks all the context. But at the same time I don't think I can start from the beginning because it'd be a huge amount of content to add all of a sudden.
I'm going to keep posting it now regardless of forum engagement because I'm playing/journaling it anyway. If I'm journaling to myself on my hard drive or journaling here there's no difference.
This modpack does sound appealing to my reasearcher's soul, although perhaps too rough for my Hardcore one. 100 days is 100 Minecraft days, right?
Diamond-edged Obsidian doesn't work in GTNH? Or maybe that was a post-1.7 alteration.
It might, but the underlying issue (which would have been better explained in previous entries not posted) is that I can't use the cobalt/ardite without an Electric Blast Furnace. More on that shortly!
Modded showcases are always interesting. On one hand, I'm totally unfamiliar with a lot of them, which means I probably can't appreciate them as well. On the other hand, for the same reason it sort of drags you back to a position as though you were new at Minecraft, and can make things more exciting to follow.
That's how it's been following Zen410's thread for me.
"Huh? I have NO idea if that's a major accomplishment or not. I have NO idea what that even is. Wait, that does WHAT?"
That's sort of how it goes, haha. But that also makes it interesting.
Gregtech New Horizons makes me feel like I'm new at Minecraft. IndustrialCraft 2 is a keystone mod, indeed the Gregtech mod itself started as an add-on to IC2, and all my personal experience of IC2 comes from Tekkit Classic (1.2.5) so more than a little out of date by now.
I have a fair bit of prep to do before I'm ready for an expedition. It's a bit late in the day by the time I'm done with all the inventory sorting and gear repairing and so on, but the weather's clear so I reckon I can make it to the Roguelike Dungeon before night if I fly. I climb a little way up the mountain, ready the hang glider and jump.
A combination of careful steering and thermals gets me over the desert and into the goblin forest just as dusk is settling.
I'm not inclined to hang around topside in the Hardcore Darkness nights so head straight inside.
It's been a while since the last time I was here, and I have to familiarize myself with the dungeon's layout again. I've already cleared out level one entirely. There are still some loot chests on level two but they contain nothing of interest. Level three is where the action is at the moment. I navigate to the ossuary room I cleared previously, and find new unexplored passages beyond it.
And that's a baby creeper. My favorite mob of all time. That was sarcasm.
Using the bow, I manage to kill it without setting it off, but now I'm aware that I'm not carrying nearly enough arrows for an extended combat session. Dang, I knew there was something I was forgetting.
Having dealt with the baby creeper, I press on past the most recently claimed spawner to the unexplored end of the corridor. There's a big dark room here, with no spawners to be seen, but it's not vacant.
First an Armor Creeper, then this guy. Haah...
There's another passage leading off from the big dark chamber towards a small dead-end ossuary area. I rush it to light the spawners before they can spin up. There's a suspicious dirt block sitting in the middle of the open floor. As I eyeball it, it slyly shuffles a few paces towards me. Really? I approach and suddenly the block is a skeleton who lights me on fire.
I still struggle with the Mine & Blade Battlegear controls, and keep messing up, repeatedly opening either my backpack or the questbook menu as I flail around trying to hit the key that'll switch me into weapon-wielding mode. Which gives the ninja skeleton ample opportunity to put more fire arrows in me. After a few seconds of getting punctured Icome to my sanity and run away back down the corridor towards the empty room. Here I can dodge and hide around the corner to get a momentary respite from the hail of spicy arrows so that I can activate my sword.
Found it. Payback time.
The skeleton goes down in a few hits. I go back to work on dungeon clearance.
Now that I've lit up up the small ossuary where the ninja skeleton spawned, that corridor section is entirely pacified. I backtrack to the previous intersection and set my sights on the other passage. This one shortly opens up into another larger ossuary.
...Like I'm gonna fight that thing fair and square, pff. Cobble barricade time.
Claiming a foothold in this new area gives me some trouble as the nearby spawners in the sarcophagi are spitting out Brutal zombies. My steel rapier does great work taking those guys down now, though, thanks to its native armor-penetrating trait coupled with the Sharpness-boosting quartz I've been pilfering from this level's ossuaries.
Eventually I manage to kill everything that's currently menacing me, brute-force through the sarcophagus spawner gauntlet and light up the whole chamber to prevent any further spawns. Now the ossuary and all its loot is mine. There's still more of level three to explore beyond this point, and while I'd like to continue on, I've got a few concerns. Firstly, my inventory is getting really full due to all the armor and weapon mob drops. Secondly, I'm almost out of arrows. And thirdly, my steel armor has taken a beating, especially the chestplate. It needs replacement.
I decide to back off and return to base so that I can deal with all these issues.
Year Two Day Forty-Two: Pit Stop
Firstly, the replacement chestplate.
My old one had Prot I. I've got plenty of levels right now, plus the capacity to make bookshelves, and would rather like to have this piece of gear enchanted, so I open JEI to find out whether the enchantment table recipe has been Gregified.
...Vanilla enchanting is gated behind Thaumcraft.
I do have a Projectile Protection II book I picked up from a dungeon loot chest. I'll slap that on via anvil, it's better than nothing.
Year Two Day Forty-Three: Preparations Continue
I can make another gear upgrade too. I'll put all the recently collected ossuary quartz blocks onto my melee weapons.
I get the rapier up to 4.5 hearts base damage, but then run out of modifier slots on it. It'll gain more, once I've used it enough to earn it another level of tool xp, but that's a way off. I dump all the remaining quartz blocks on the longsword instead though I'm not using that one nearly as much as the rapier. In the dungeon, the rapier's usually a better choice due to all the heavily armored mobs.
It's night outside and I don't want to attempt traveling back to the Roguelike Dungeon in the dark, so I head down to the coal vein to kill time until dawn by digging out some more. I could use more torches anyway and coal gives the best recipe yield: three torches per coal, as opposed to charcoal's two.
What's a "bed"? Never heard of it.
Finally, I step outside to grab some feathers from the chicken farm and craft myself up another half-stack of arrows. I'm all set.
Year Two Day Forty-Four
Year Two Day Forty-Five: A Surfeit Of Skeletons
Back at the dungeon, I make another attempt at the upcoming ossuary room and persist at it for quite some time. I really want to get in there and claim it as I've still not found the stair down to level four and suspect it may be somewhere beyond, but there are multiple skeleton spawners through there. The results are predictable.
Giant skeletons with a crapton of health. Baby skeletons that can duck under my barricades. Poison skeletons. Ninja skeletons. Machinegunning gatling skeletons. Some skeleton variant I don't manage to identify that launches explosive arrows. All have armor, most of which is visibly enchanted. And some of them are showing up with Infernal Mobs buffs on top of that. Once the spawners in the room have revved up I find it impossible to kill the skeletons fast enough to make any headway. They're replaced faster than I can take them out.
I'm getting tired of combat and when I'm tired I get careless. I don't want to die in here and potentially lose access to the Healing Axe. I think I'll take a break from dungeon diving for now.
Year Two Day Forty-Six: At Last, A Path Forward
Back at base, I decide to see if I can figure out how to make invar. An alloy of iron and nickel, it's a key reagent for the Electric Blast Furnace, which I suspect will end up being key to ascending out of LV into MV, Medium Voltage technology. The Electric Blast Furnace is required to manufacture aluminum (real Gregtech aluminum not the fake and shoddy Tinker's raw aluminum).
Now that I finally have nickel from that Twilight Forest ore vein, I should be able to do this. But how exactly do I do it? There's no basic by-hand crafting recipe in JEI for invar dust. But there is a recipe associated with the Gregtech mixer. I guess I need to build one of those then.
A tin rotor, an electric motor, a LV machine hull, two circuits and some glass. I have to make the tin rotor and motor, but I've got all the rest of the items in storage, so crafting a brand new Gregtech machine is pleasantly painless for once.
After grinding up some of the nickel ore I collected to make dust, I carry my newest toy into the LV machine room, plonk it down, plug it in and dump some iron and nickel dust in to see what will happen.
It's doing it.
Shortly, the mixer delivers three pieces of invar dust. I carry them off to the iron furnace to smelt--and I have my first ingots of invar. It's not a quest-completion achievement in itself, but it feels like it should be given how much brain-straining it took me to get to this point.
I can see how this is to be done now. I think at this point I'm technically capable of making all the raw component materials required by the Electric Blast Furnace. But three invar ingots won't get me far. Just one of those heatproof casings will cost six ingots plus an invar frame which in turn is made of invar rods. I'm going to need well over a stack of the stuff to make all the parts for this thing, and that's before considering how I'm going to power it. I just bet it'll be super hungry.
And this is Gregtech New Horizons. It's a fair bet that I'll end up needing not one but many Electric Blast Furnaces.
So the best next move, I think, will be to look into setting up some machines to help with performing the various operations to make all these component materials. Which implies rearranging the LV machine room, a task that in truth is sorely needed. Currently I can't even run some of the machines I've already built, such as the electrolyzer, because they don't receive enough power per tick from the steam turbines and invariably stall out before finishing the operation.
Yeah these comments are what I was worried about with starting to post my GTNH journal, starting midway through lacks all the context. But at the same time I don't think I can start from the beginning because it'd be a huge amount of content to add all of a sudden.
No no no, I wasn't saying anything about lacking content.
For me it was just saying that modded playthroughs are a different thing for me entirely, because most of them are something I'm not too familiar with, thus I don't have the level of understanding to appreciate everything. But at the same time, that very reason makes them more appealing, and for the same reason Minecraft itself (or any new thing) was appealing all those years back; because everything is novel and unknown.
I do like the variety and complexity this mod set creates, but I was really crushed to discover Gregtech didn't update past 1.7 so I don't have a plausible way to combine it with the current RTG, which I'm not willing to give up. Backporting over the 1.8 changes is just too daunting. Two questions:
1) What are those colored vertical lines in the hangliding pic?
2) What, exactly, in your mod set, added the (scrolls up to copy) Rare despoiling Spitfire Skeleton of Fatigue with Gravity Poisonous Exhaust Bulwark and Cloaking?
For me it was just saying that modded playthroughs are a different thing for me entirely, because most of them are something I'm not too familiar with, thus I don't have the level of understanding to appreciate everything.
This is an interesting difference between modded and unmodded players. I don't understand much of what's going on either, but I'm looking at it with the thought "do I want to explore that?"
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Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
1) What are those colored vertical lines in the hangliding pic?
2) What, exactly, in your mod set, added the (scrolls up to copy) Rare despoiling Spitfire Skeleton of Fatigue with Gravity Poisonous Exhaust Bulwark and Cloaking?
1. Journeymap waypoint markers for ores. I should turn them off when taking screenshots but I'm so used to them I didn't think of it. Gregtech New Horizons uses a different ore generation mechanic, minerals spawn in giant veins spanning multiple chunks. For this reason there's little point exploring caves, all they contain is Infernal mobs and suffering. On the plus side when you find a vein you're pretty much set. Part of the early game is prospecting to find these veins. In the first of the posted episodes I was happy to finally locate a nickel vein (garnierite, nickel, pentlandite) in the Twilight Forest.
2. A Special Mobs variant skeleton with an Infernal Mobs boost. GTNH likes to inflict pain in all possible ways.
The worldgen is actually surprisingly nice. I have some lovely terrain screenshots. It uses something displayed as "Realistic World Gen Alpha" in the MultiMC listing. Not sure if that's something generally available or written specifically for GTNH. This modpack has an incredibly dedicated team, it's still being constantly updated and they've actually managed to get the pack to run on Java 17. A 1.7.10 modpack with a Java 17 compatible version.
As for Gregtech itself, I did hear a rumor that it's getting or maybe has already gotten a 1.19 port. Not sure which of the versions of Gregtech that would be, there's a rather complex history to that mod.
I spend the next few days playing around in the machine room, clearing some minor quests I'd not gotten around to and experimenting with the centrifuge to see what other interesting byproducts I can get. I'd amassed a huge collection of random crushed ores and ore dusts over time, materials I'd stashed because I knew they were probably going to be valuable but I didn't yet know how.
Poking around in the questbook I notice that there's an uncompleted quest to make antimony, one of two reagents required for batteries. It's made from stibnite, an ore found in the Nether. I have some stibnite sitting in the raw ores storage box, so haul it out and grind it to dust, then dump it in the bricked blast furnaces.
The quest instructs me to make only 32 antimony, but I set a couple of stacks of the stibnite dust cooking, figuring I'll end up needing it all anyway sooner or later.
That was easy.
The other initial reagent for battery technology is lead, and that's going to be more difficult. I've now found that I can get lead dust in small amounts as a byproduct from centrifuging silver dust, but that'll be a very slow process with minimal yield as the only silver I've found is scraps of Small ore, and the questbook wants me to get 32 lead. It instructs me to check out Thaumcraft for lead, but that's not an option yet because I've no Thaumcraft tab in my questbook.
So how do I gain access to Thaumcraft then, if it's not killing the Naga? I do some online searching and find a wiki statement that aluminum screws are required. Which in turn implies getting the Electric Blast Furnace up and running. OK. I was more or less coming to that conclusion anyway.
Year Two Day Forty-Nine
Year Two Day Fifty: Plumbing Refit
Currently, the LV machine room is fed from steam pipes running beneath the floor. This has been a troublesome setup as the basement I dug way back then is only two blocks tall, meaning I can't get around to do maintenance easily without touching spicy pipes and getting burned. Some of the idiosyncrasies of this awkward setup were grandfathered in due to the original Railcraft steam tank being in a different location. There's no reason to leave it this way now. I start pulling out all the existing steam pipes...
...then dig the whole basement area down one level. Now I can run the pipes overhead instead.
Much nicer.
Year Two Day Fifty-One: Fun With The Centrifuge
Subsequent to the basement refit, I'm able to install a third steam turbine. It's my hope that by splitting the LV machines up into smaller groups the more power-hungry processes will be more likely to complete. One steam line will be for the wrought iron production, which will remain untouched as it works fine right now; one for the miscellaneous random machines; and the third I want to use to experiment with the centrifuge.
As a test I set up the LV macerator feeding to the centrifuge. I want to be able to dump miscellaneous crushed ores in at the top and collect the centrifuged dusts and byproducts from the chest when it's done. I get a lot of random bits of crushed stuff of all kinds from "small ores" and it'd be nice to deal with them automatically rather than clicking everything in and out of machines by hand individually.
Good news, it works.
I do some more experiments with the centrifuge. I can centrifuge limonite dust to get hydrogen cells, and I can centrifuge compressed air to get nitrogen cells. I don't understand what I need these for yet, but the questbook says to do it so it must be important.
Year Two Day Fifty-Two: Scam Alert
I'd still like to solve the Ender Pearl supply issue. Ender Pearls are required for transfer nodes, which I want for moving fluids in and out of the Gregtech machines. I've not been able to clear those quests yet as I've barely seen any Endermen, let alone got them to drop their pearls. Looking through the questbook I notice an entry in Tips And Tricks. I've skimmed it before, but I read it again, this time more carefully, and this time I'm struck by a few details I'd overlooked.
Endermen in a smeltery yield liquid Ender. OK. And I can buy spawn eggs with the coins I randomly receive from completing quests. Huh. Well, what if I combine those two pieces of information--?
I navigate to the Coins tab. It's not even that expensive to buy an Enderman spawn egg! It only costs 10 explorer coins, and I have a couple of hundred of the relevant coin type by now. I go ahead and make the pan cast, buy the pearls and hurry to the smeltery. With great excitement I click my new spawn egg... but I get scammed! The Enderman that spawns isn't a default one, it's a Special Mobs "Blinding" Enderman, and apparently he's incompatible with that Tinkers' feature. He just loiters casually in the smeltery, quite comfortable, oblivious to the roasting heat.
I mutter a few swear words to myself, then stare him out and kill him in the main corridor. He drops a pearl at least, so I don't come out entirely empty-handed. Upon dying he also spawns a ghost slime which comes with an Infernal boost, so I then have to kill that while poisoned/withered/on fire/etc. I'm having a great day, how about you?
OK, new plan... never mind B or C, we're probably up to around plan H at this point for sourcing pearls, but surely this one will work! I'll start dumping lapis on my longsword for looting, then I'll hunt and kill the Endermen the old fashioned way, in caves or dungeons.
A good puzzle sequence/ladder is fun, and generally I've found this an interesting modset, but
So how do I gain access to Thaumcraft then, if it's not killing the Naga? I do some online searching and find a wiki statement that aluminum screws are required.
seems a little arbitrary.
...then dig the whole basement area down one level. Now I can run the pipes overhead instead.
With GTNH so far I've found that it usually makes some sense in context. Unlike Divine Journey requiring compressed cobble and coal blocks for a furnace because more materials = grindier = "expert". I'm going to guess that aluminum screws will be needed to assemble the Arcane Worktable and/or Thaumometer, thus gating Thaumcraft behind the ability to make aluminum ingots.
I have about a stack of lapis in storage at the moment, along with a lot of unprocessed lapis ore. I dug out the ore back in season two while grinding for the original Bricked Blast Furnace, although I had no use for it at the time. It was a byproduct of getting calcite, the material I was actually looking for. Calcite is only found as a rare inclusion in lapis veins. As for why the majority of my stockpile is ore blocks: Mined in the regular way with a pick, in GTNH ores like lapis, coal and redstone drop as a block which then has to be broken down with the forge hammer to yield regular vanilla lapis.
I do also have a substantial amount of lapis dust which is one of the other possible drops from small lapis ores. Seeking to put that to use, I investigate the construction of an autoclave, which promises to turn dust into crystals.
The recipe is not too painful. The only really awkward component is an electric pump which in turn requires a tin rotor, tin screw and some rubber rings.
After I've crafted the pump, the remainder is plain sailing--just an LV machine frame, some steel plates, glass and circuits.
But as I'm at the point of setting it up I notice that the recipe to turn lapis dust into crystalline lapis lazuli will be extremely slow and costly in terms of power required. I really should read the fine print when I'm going to all the trouble of building these machines. It'd get a bit cheaper if I used distilled water, but then I'll have to make a Distillery too. I'm not confident that my current setup will be able to handle all this new hardware, so I decide to bench the idea for now. I'll just use the regular lapis I've got. It's no great hardship to go and mine some more of that if I need it, anyway, since I've got an ore vein right here in the home mountain.
I dump a stack of lapis into the steam compressor to turn it into blocks (since you can't do that in the regular crafting table in Gregtech New Horizons). It'll take a while for the operation to complete so I set about some regular errands around the base: topping up the bricked blast furnaces and coke ovens, collecting sticky resin from the rubber tree farm and so forth.
Year Two Day Fifty-Four
Year Two Day Fifty-Five: Success, Sorta
Let's see how much looting this will get me.
135/450 luck, Looting I. That's better than nothing.
It's night so I step outside to see if I can lure any Endermen.
Yeah... this is why I was reluctant to attempt hunting them vanilla style. The Gregtech New Horizons nights. Spotting any Endermen aboveground in the dark is pretty much a lost cause. It would help if I could make night vision potions, but brewing stands are gated behind Thaumcraft because of course they are.
All's not lost though. I can see an Enderman's icon on the minimap. I turn in that direction, and spot his purple eyes glinting in the distant darkness. I stare him over. Good news--he's a regular one. Better news--he drops two pearls. If I stoop to malicious minimap abuse this might actually be a viable strategy after all.
Year Two Day Fifty-Six: The Smallest Enderman
I remain outside, patrolling my front lawn through the remainder of the night but don't locate any more Endermen, unfortunately.
Ew.
He nails me with a long-lasting Slowness pot before I manage to take him out. I'm still laboring under the effects of that as I look up and see--
Ew. At least Concussion Creepers are mostly harmless on their own.
I spend the day inside processing and applying more lapis to my longsword, then head out again once it's dark. For the majority of the night I don't locate any Endermen either in the real-world or on the minimap, and as dawn brightens the sky I'm ready to give up, when I hear the distinctive teleport bamf and chuckle.
I locate the source of the sound on top of one of the water collection tanks.
Why is it so small? Is that a baby Enderman?
...I kill it. It drops a pearl. I'm officially a monster, but I'm up to six pearls in total now, which is significantly more than I had.
Year Two Day Fifty-Seven:
I've made a decision: it's time to start working on the Electric Blast Furnace. I strongly suspect that getting one of those running is going to open up all kinds of new and exciting options.
I crack open the questbook and take a closer look at the recipe. It's not great news. Firstly, there's the heat proof machine casing blocks. I'll need eleven of those, and each one requires six invar ingots and an invar frame. The frames can be made in the assembler, using four rods each. The lathe makes one rod from one ingot with a little bit of dust leftover to save some material.
So doing some hasty napkin math: forty-four invar ingots to make the frames, though there'll be some savings there. And sixty-six more ingots to make the casings. A hundred invar ingots total for the heat proof casings.
Looks like I'd better start grinding those nickel ingots back into dust...
I assume there's a flowchart-style diagram somewhere for GTNH progression? Also, as I understand it, you previously processed your nickel to ingots and now you have to make it back to dust?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Yes, I crushed all the nickel ore and cooked it, so I needed to macerate some ingots to make dust.
GTNH is remarkably well documented ingame. They have added new NEI tabs for such information as ore vein generation and processing chains which are very good. I find it impressive that I've managed to get this far with only NEI and the questbook as reference material and I'm not all that smart. That said, I've barely scratched the surface of the pack yet and I'm aware that things will get nightmarishly intricate. Chemistry degree level intricate. What sold me on starting GTNH as a matter of fact was a meme screenshot where someone had combined Gregtech chemical engineering and Tinkers' Construct to make a polytetrafluoroethylene pickaxe. Why you'd want a non-stick pick I have no idea, but it made me laugh so hard I decided I would have to try the pack.
What sold me on starting GTNH as a matter of fact was a meme screenshot where someone had combined Gregtech chemical engineering and Tinkers' Construct to make a polytetrafluoroethylene pickaxe. Why you'd want a non-stick pick I have no idea, but it made me laugh so hard I decided I would have to try the pack.
A Slik Touch pick? Also, forever chemicals in Minecraft, eww!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
I spend the next few days singlemindedly restocking minerals, hitting in turn the Twilight Forest nickel vein, then Overworld coal, copper and iron veins. In Gregtech New Horizons the answer to the question, "Do I need more [resource]?" is invariably yes.
Everything bar the coal will be fed directly into the steam macerators for doubling. The coal will be used to fuel the boilers and keep the steam flowing.
Coming out of vanilla, these Gregtech ore veins seem so huge when you first start digging into them--seven layers deep and goodness knows how many wide. But it soon becomes apparent just how much raw material one is going to burn through in the pursuit of technological advancement.
Thank goodness I have a Tinkers' hammer to dig 3x3 now. Looking back, I don't know how I managed to toil through the early period when all I had to work with was a pick.
Year Two Day Sixty-Two
Year Two Day Sixty-Three: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Headbanging to "Beast In Black"'s Revengeance Machine, I grind up nickel ingots in the macerators then dump the dust along with iron dust into the mixer. The invar, once cooked, goes straight into the lathe to be turned into rods at a slightly more than 1:1 ratio: the leftover small piles of invar dust get re-combined into dust then cooked back into a scanty handful of reclaimed ingots. By Grabthar's Hammer... (depressed tone) what a saving.
When the lathe is done making the rods, I drop them into the assembler, which turns them into invar frame boxes--the first component part for the Electric Blast Furnace's heatproof casings. I could do this manually in the crafting table for the same amount of material, but that'd also require use of a Gregtech hand tool and doing it in the assembler saves me a little bit of tool durability. And some sanity, which is also by now in short supply.
Shortly, I have twelve frame boxes. That's enough for the eleven heatproof casings and one more casing which will be required to craft the blast furnace controller. Next, I need invar plates. I can make those in the bending machine from ingots at a 1:1 ratio. Six are required per frame, seventy-two ingots in total.
I've only got one bending machine and it'll take a little bit of time to get through that lot, so I go off to find some other stuff to do in the meantime. I never AFK. Vanilla or modded, idle hands are forbidden in my worlds. I dump some rubber bars into the smeltery to turn into glue balls (I'm always going to be in need of circuits) and then go outside to chop the jungle tree with my lumberaxe so that I can refill the coke ovens for more charcoal.
...I always knew I was born to suffer. (sighs and starts pillaring up)
Year Two Day Sixty-Four: Countdown To Ignition Begins
Here they come. The first heatproof casings. I'm getting closer.
There are still some components wanted by the Buildcraft auto workbenches before they can make me any more basic circuits. I grab some glass out of storage and grind it in the macerators for glass dust then stick the dust in the alloy smelter with the ball mold to make more glass tubes. The glue balls are done so I grab them out of the smeltery's output chest and drop them into the relevant workbench. That'll net me a couple more basic circuits.
I open the recipe for the controller. It requires three iron furnaces--easily done, and cheaper now with the assembler. Three basic circuits are also required. I have those, and I have the tin cables.
I assemble the parts in the Tinkers' workstation, and withdraw the controller block to an unexpected shower of fireworks.
...While I appreciate the celebratory tone, uh-uh, you don't fool me, I know I'm nowhere near putting this thing together yet. Now, how do I make cupronickel?
It's night outside, and I pause my workshop grind when I spot an Enderman's icon on the minimap--a welcome sight. I hurry outside to see if I can find him. He's up on the mountainside and though it's pitch black up there I'm able to locate him by the glimmer of eyes. I attract his attention and lure him down onto the riverbank.
C'mon, drop it... drop it...
All right! Another double drop. That lapis on the longsword was a really good call. Not sure if the head is going to be useful at all but I'll stash it in the "special drops" box anyway.
Year Two Day Sixty-Five: Choo-Choo
Cupronickel is an alloy of copper and nickel, as the name would suggest. Upon investigation I find that it's not difficult to make at all. I don't even have to use a mixer with dusts. I can straight up dump copper and nickel ingots in the steam alloy smelter. CHOO-CHOO!
The CHOO-CHOO!... cupronickel needs to CHOO-CHOO!... be turned into CHOO-CHOO!... wow that machine is loud, lemme just step away a bit... 2x thickness wires. I can do that directly by running ingots through the wiremill on its no.2 setting.
The wires are destined to become cupronickel coil blocks. I need to manufacture sixteen of those, and various input/output/power hatches, before I can assemble the multiblock.
It looks like one of the big gating mechanisms for GTNH is machines that take massive amounts of components, right? But they're still one block. I like Astral Sorcery's technique of requiring support structures.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Massive amounts of components is right - you need millions or even billions of raw materials total along with 20+ real-world hours of running time to craft just one Stargate part, from what I've heard. But there's also massive amounts of infrastructure required to operate the multiblocks. That is where the real challenge will turn out to be, I suspect. I've never been good at logistics. I will have to learn.
This is to be the landing page for my playthrough journal of the Gregtech New Horizons modpack.
My ultimate dream is to craft the Stargate. That is not a small ambition. Currently it takes between 5000-6000 hours for experienced players familiar with expert packs to "speedrun" GTNH. I am not an experienced player. In fact I've not used the majority of the mods in the pack before.
This is not a new world. Inspired by the Youtube "hundred days" craze I play modpack worlds through 100-day seasons and keep a journal of each season. At the end of a season I can either begin another season in that modpack, or swap to another pack. The 100-day setup gives a defined start and achievable endpoint which helps to avoid burnout. In a pack like GTNH that's necessary.
I don't intend to post the previous journals. I will start with Season Five, which is this one. The thread will update regularly until I have played for a hundred days.
Here is a summary of what happened so far:
Season One: 100 Days In GTNH
Went from nothing to steam age technology. Was lucky to find a Witchery cottage on the first day which was a huge help surviving the brutal early GTNH nights of hardcore darkness and Infernal mobs. Torches aren't easy to get early on, and don't even ask about what you need to construct a bed in GTNH.
Season Two: Surviving And Thriving: 200 Days In GTNH
Continued through to the late steam age, improving tech and tools. Got Tinkers' toolforge and set up some redstone automation for the smeltery. Acquired first steel. Accessed the Nether for the first time. Experienced my first machine room fire (did not end well) due to a steam leak.
Season Three: Miracle Electrical: 300 GTNH Days
Achieved first LV (Low Voltage) machinery, and completed the grueling quest for the Healing Axe which fills satiation whenever you hold it, finally achieving freedom from the tyranny of Harvestcraft. Insert memes about GTNH players licking axes all day long.
Season Four: Production Line: 400 GTNH Days
Continued in LV. Set foot in Twilight Forest for the first time ever. Upgraded from one to two and then four Bricked Blast Furnaces. This has caused some teensy little pollution issues in that I currently can't enter the steelworking area without a hazmat suit. Surely there will be no long-term repercussions for this.
I am using a skin of Dr. Eggman for obvious reasons.
Table of Contents
Base Tour Season 5
Season Five: Blot Out The Sun: 500 GTNH Days
Episode 059: Roadblock Unblocked [Days 400-404]
Episode 060: EBF Awaits [Days 405-411]
Episode 061: Steam Pipe Reshuffle [Days 412-417]
Episode 062: In Pursuit Of Pearls [Days 418-422]
Episode 063: This Puzzle Is Coming Together [Days 423-430]
Episode 064: Mica Mica Mica [Days 431-435]
Episode 065: Dungeon Battle Royale [Days 436-446]
Episode 066: The Wrong Tin [Days 447-455]
Episode 067: A Bigger Better Boiler [Days 456-470]
Episode 068: Brown Out [Days 471-474]
Episode 069: A Salt And Battery [Days 475-482]
Episode 070: Stir Crazy [Days 483-486] [1 death]
Episode 071: It's Aliiive [Days 487-493]
Episode 072: Winding Down [Days 494-499]
[To Be Continued]
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
Base Tour as of Season 5 Start
Outside
I spawned on the other side of the mountain, and on the first day while exploring made my way around until I spotted the witch's cottage on the lower slope. She wasn't home so I waited out my first few nights in there. That cottage is the reason I stayed in this area: once I got to the point of needing more space it was simply easier to dig a hole at the base of the mountain and carry my little bit of starting stuff down rather than hauling it all off to somewhere else.
I lucked out massively. In GTNH water source blocks are not infinite. To get renewable water you must build Railcraft collection tanks, which will work better in humid biomes. Most of the local area is dry desert type biomes, which are terrible for that. Even the river biome is only average for yield. But thanks to that witch's cottage the spot I ended up settling in was oasis, one of the very best biomes for water collection tanks. Starting out as a GTNH newbie I had no idea that was even something I'd have to consider.
On the hilltop there is a rubber tree plantation, Tekkit Classic style. If you remember pruning rubber trees like this in 1.2.5 you are eligible for a veteran discount
I have tried hard to get stickreeds to spawn on IC2 cropsticks but I've had no luck yet so I'm still forced to tap the rubber trees.
On the riverbank are numerous crops and Harvestcraft fruit trees, along with my recently added IC2 crossbreeder greenhouse.
Food crops aren't as important now I've got the Healing Axe and don't have to constantly seek fresh recipes to cook, but I still harvest the Natura cotton regularly as an easier source of string than spiders.
The front door is not very pretty...
It used to be a little bit nicer than this but something from Infernal Mobs threw a fireball at me when I opened the door one morning and blew up the decorative porch and I've not gotten around to rebuilding it.
In front of the door is spectre glass, which is solid for me but not for mobs. I got fed up with zombies coming to bang on the door while I was in the workroom so constructed a trap. Anything that tries to approach the front door falls through the glass into a pit and then I can go and kill it through a murder hole. Spectre glass is crafted with ectoplasm which you get from killing ghosts (little floating slimes), which sometimes spawn when a mob dies.
It's scary out there at night with Hardcore Darkness...
Entrance
Every time you die in GTNH you drop a head. This is my collection so far, surprisingly few as I'm such a cautious player. GTNH is at least kind enough to include a gravestone mod so there's little risk of losing your stuff.
Turning around, we see the passage running deeper into the mountain. I've started putting stuff on armor stands to free up space in storage boxes as I've been getting so much crud from a local Roguelike Dungeon. Two doors nearby lead to the old workroom and my bedroom, which I almost never use as I don't approve of skipping nights.
Block choices are a little strange as they were selected not for aesthetics but more on how easy it was to craft large quantities of them. For main decorative blocks I chose variants of Ztones "tank" and "azur", crafted with iron and lapis respectively. Vanilla cobble, smoothstone and stone-brick slabs require a saw, and Chisel variant cobble/stone blocks require a chisel, and both of those tools have durability. Ztones blocks still need a saw to make the smoothstone slabs to craft the base tiles but you get significantly more blocks for the same durability. The Ztones blocks didn't have stairs or slabs associated though so for the roof cladding I went with cooked AE2 skystone, which was the only non-wood block I could freely craft stairs and slabs from at the time. Downside of using skystone is that it takes ages to mine.
The lanterns are Railcraft.
The old workroom still has the original look from before I gained the ability to craft Ztones blocks: chiseled cobble flooring and cobblestone stairs as a wall trim. Among the mod-cons here is water on tap: a Tinker tank is fed by a pipe from a Railcraft water collection tank outside, so I can dip into it with a bucket whenever I need to fill the cauldron or do some crafting with water. No need to go outside at night and risk the nasty mobs.
A little further along the main corridor there is an opening leading to a cactus farm.
This was a very early construction and hasn't been given an aesthetic upgrade. It was invaluable in the early days as I was using cactus for water while working inside the base at night, so that I didn't have to go outside and expose myself to danger collecting from the river. Now that I have water collection tanks I don't really need it any more. I sometimes cook up some cactus into coke for bonus steel production but it's not really worth it compared to charcoal. I'm keeping the installation in case I suddenly discover that I need a huge quantity of cactus for Reasons.
Steam/LV machine area
At the far end of the hall there's a main intersection area. As yet only one passage runs off from here. I plan to expand later on and give MV, HV etc., their own separate areas. Keeping the tech tiers segregated will ensure that I don't accidentally explode my entire LV machine line by plugging a MV device into it.
The first door in this corridor leads to a tiny oreberry farm growing aluminum oreberries. "Proper" Gregtech aluminum can't be made from oreberries but Tinkers' alumite toolparts and a few minor alloys can, so that's what I grow them for. I'll be getting into the involved process of making "proper" aluminum when I've advanced further technologically. A multiblock is required: the Electric Blast Furnace, or EBF. It will not be cheap.
The wall of storage drawers at the end of the passage is my LV crafting area, which is a bit of a mess currently as I ripped up some of the flooring to put down some Buildcraft auto workbenches to make crafting circuits a little bit less awful. There's a couple of Forestry workbenches here with saved recipes for complex machine components. On the left in a nook is the Tinkers' smeltery.
I set up some simple redstone to auto-pour stuff out. There's a redstone clock underneath activated by the lever. I prefer redstone installations to be silent so there's no piston, it's a torch inverter that blocks/unblocks the signal. In GTNH you don't use the smeltery to double ores (wouldn't it be lovely if things were so easy!) but it's needed currently for stuff like making glass, glue balls for circuits, raw aluminum. And of course Tinkers tool parts, but the listed three are the bulk operations.
Through the archway on the other side of the LV crafting area is the steam/LV machine room.
Two high pressure steam boilers feed steam to a Railcraft tank which acts as my battery-buffer. This steam is used to power various machines: a steam alloy smelter, four macerators, a forge hammer, a compressor. I am slowly starting to move over to LV but the steam machines are still seeing lots of use at the moment. In the foreground are some LV machines powered (inadequately) by steam turbines which in turn are fed from the big tank. The closest set is an automatic production line for wrought iron, which I currently use for hand tools to save on steel. The further set are a bunch of random machines plopped down individually.
Water is brought down to the boilers through pipes from a pair of Railcraft water collection tanks up on the hillside. If the boilers should ever run dry while operating I'd be in serious trouble but I massively over-engineered my water supply out of paranoia and have never yet come close to that.
Steelworks
Through the archway again, the back room is the steelworking area, with four Railcraft coke ovens and four Gregtech bricked blast furnaces.
I can't go in there without changing into the hazmat suit so I'm staying here for now. A description must suffice.
The four bricked blast furnaces share walls to save on some resources. Even so, getting the raw materials for them was a hellish grind. Brick, clay, calcite and gypsum are all required in large quantities and then the crafting recipes to make the bricks are really nasty. I've seen it humorously described as the "Great Filter" of Gregtech New Horizons--if you can slog through making the BBFs early on it's a good sign for the future.
The main problem with the coke ovens is getting rid of the creosote. If they fill up with creosote they'll stop working. I use buckets of creosote as my primary furnace fuel, but there's a limit to how much of it I can use, so I crafted a fluid trashcan and attached faucets and fluid pipes to the coke ovens. I can turn those on by hand to drain all the creosote in them.
The charcoal produced by the coke ovens is used to feed the bricked blast furnaces. Making steel this way is very slow and so I've kept them running continuously ever since I built them. Hence the pollution.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
Episode 059: Roadblock Unblocked
Year Two Day Thirty-Five: The Naga
At the start of my fifth seasion of play in Gregtech New Horizons, I have been in LV Tier now for significantly longer than I would have liked. This is due to a Skill Issue.
I seem to be stuck in every direction I want to go. It's getting really frustrating. Can't mine the Tinkers' cobalt in the Nether without a better pick, can't make a better pick without the cobalt. Can't go for damascus steel either because I don't know how to get chrome out of ruby ore. Can't press on towards building an Electric Blast Furnace without invar, can't make invar without nickel, as I haven't been able to locate a nickel vein... It goes on and on.
One way or another, I need to find a way to move forward from here. I decide to head back to the one place I've not yet explored in detail.
In the Twilight Forest I'm blocked by bosses. By comparison to all the tech stuff stumping me, this issue sounds fairly trivial to solve. Though I don't have any personal experience of the mod I'm theoretically aware that you progress by killing the boss mobs which sequentially allows you to access new areas. And there's a boss arena just a little way north-east of my entry portal.
I'm really nervous about doing this because I've never been good at boss combat. How hard is this thing, anyway?
Well, I'm in mostly steel armor and I have a lot more hearts than usual thanks to all the boosts I got from Hunger Overhaul, so I'm fairly good on defense. The piston boots and hang glider combo give me a lot of maneuverability too so I should be able to keep my distance or evade it and escape if I need to. And my bow is pretty decent thanks to the Roguelike Dungeon loot drops I combined. I guess I'll give it a go.
...Huh, this isn't going badly.
Yeah, I can totally do this!
And it's down. I have just killed my first ever Twilight Forest boss.
But bad news... when I pick up the trophy, nothing happens. Bummer. I was kind of hoping beating the Naga would reveal the Thaumcraft section of the questbook, as I recall reading something to that effect somewhere, but evidently there's something else I've got to do first.
The GTNH questbook has nothing new to offer me, so I navigate to the vanilla achievements menu and check out the Twilight Forest section. It suggests that I craft a magical map, which requires reagents in the form of a raven's feather, glowstone dust and torchberry. OK, let's have a go at that then.
The raven is easily dealt with. I ramble around the hills and plains until I spot one then shoot it down with the bow. Now for torchberries... what are those and where will I find them? I've seen nothing like that aboveground yet.
In the course of my meanderings as I searched for the raven, I've drawn close to a large round hill. It's too uniform to be a natural terrain feature. I walk over to take a look and find a great chasm running into the interior, strewn with hanging stalactites of ore in various flavors. There's stuff visible down there in the dark, including spawners and loot chests, but I'm more interested in what's above me at the moment.
I reckon that's the famous torchberry. Well, famous in that I only just heard of it right now.
I bridge over and then pillar up to get it--a dangerous procedure, especially when a skeleton somewhere below spots me and starts taking pot-shots. I manage to snag the berry and leap back to safety. Then, as I turn around to leave--
I could've just grabbed that one and saved myself the trouble. Ugggh, situational awareness!
There's just the glowstone to get now. I've probably got some glowstone dust in storage somewhere back home but I'd rather just get it done here and now if I can. I spotted some glowstone deeper within the hollow hill when I was getting the torchberry. I dig around to get a piece, snag it and retreat once more to the safety of the surface.
Year Two Day Thirty-Six: Another Wall
Combining the three items gets me a Magic Map Focus, but not a Magic Map. OK, how do I make the map? I need a Tinkers' paper stack. And the paper stack recipe has been Gregified. When it says "stack" it now indeed means "stack": an entire 64 pieces of paper placed in a compressor will yield one paper stack item.
Back home I go then.
I don't have quite enough paper in storage so I have to withdraw some more sugarcane from my stockpile, grind it in the mortar for chad and press the chad between stone slabs to make up the shortfall. Into the steam compressor it goes, and out comes a slightly damp paper stack.
And now I realize that JEI wasn't showing me a crafting recipe, but a quest recipe--as in, the map focus and paper stack are the required reagents for completing a quest to get the magic map. A quest which I haven't actually unlocked the tab for yet, so I can't do it anyway. No Twilight Forest map for me. The effort was not wasted though, as I can just put the items away until I can use them.
But that brings me back to the roadblock again. Where do I go from here?
Year Two Day Thirty-Seven: The Naga's Secret Surprise
I guess I'll just go back to the Twilight Forest and prospect for ores some more. At least with the Naga dead I've got some fresh terrain in its vicinity to check over.
There's an ore chunk right by the Naga's enclosure, as a matter of fact. I start the usual process of digging down, and almost immediately hit an ore--
Wait, what? Nickel and cobalt!? Two of my roadblocks! Just like that!
I whip out my trusty steel hammer and get to whackin'. Unlike the Nether cobalt ore, this is mineable with my current tier. Although it's cobaltite, not cobalt, and I'm not sure how I get cobalt dust out of it. I'll figure it out. I have a direction again!
Year Two Day Thirty-Eight: Eureka
The cobaltite is a less common ore in this deposit, and it takes me some time to find a reasonable quantity of it. I return to the Overworld with nearly a stack of garnierite but only ten or so cobaltite. First step will be to macerate it and double it as crushed ore.
I pore over the ore processing information in JEI. Macerating cobaltite should give cobalt dust as a byproduct at about a 11% chance per operation--but not from my LV macerator as it doesn't have a slot for byproducts. Macerators only get that functionality in higher tiers.
But there's another option.
The macerator makes crushed cobaltite ore. Fine. That can be macerated a second time to give impure cobaltite dust. Also fine. This is the new part that I didn't comprehend last time I looked at this: you can wash the dust to get purified cobaltite dust. And if you put that through a centrifuge, you have about a 11% chance to get cobalt dust as a byproduct.
Any tier centrifuge.
And I already have an LV centrifuge.
OK then, let's test that theory. I double-macerate all my Twilight Forest cobaltite, haul the dust over to the cauldron in the old workroom and toss it in, then haul the purified dust back to the LV machine room and dump it into the centrifuge. It spins up and starts producing cobaltite dust... but not only cobaltite dust.
That's it! That's how it works, that's what I have to do!
I just bet this works for chrome too. Macerate ruby ore in the same way and put it through the centrifuge for chrome dust.
Year Two Day Thirty-Nine: From Theory To Practice
Now that I've finally figured out a way to get those byproduct items in LV, I'm able to go ahead and finish the long outstanding quest for cobalt brass.
Which unlocks a quest to craft a diamond tipped saw blade, using the cobalt brass I just made to craft a gear in the alloy smelter. Which in turn will allow me to construct a Basic Cutting Machine. I don't remember what I needed that for but I do recall that it was one of the roadblocks.
The Naga battle was kind of exciting but this session has been mostly a machine room grind subsequently, and I'm getting a bit tired of the machine room, but I want to test out one last thing before I quit. Can I indeed get chrome this way? I fetch some ruby ore out of the old workroom, double-grind it, wash it, and load it into the centrifuge.
Well, well. This changes everything.
I'm going to want to set up production lines to get these byproducts as soon as possible. Ah... but there I've got another roadblock waiting for me. The mechanical ore washer needs water to operate. And I don't know how to get water into it automatically but I'm guessing it's going to involve fluid transfer nodes. And for those I need Ender pearls.
Looks like I'm going back to the Roguelike Dungeon for another attempt then. I really hope there's an Enderman room in there somewhere.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
This modpack does sound appealing to my reasearcher's soul, although perhaps too rough for my Hardcore one. 100 days is 100 Minecraft days, right?
Diamond-edged Obsidian doesn't work in GTNH? Or maybe that was a post-1.7 alteration.Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Modded showcases are always interesting. On one hand, I'm totally unfamiliar with a lot of them, which means I probably can't appreciate them as well. On the other hand, for the same reason it sort of drags you back to a position as though you were new at Minecraft, and can make things more exciting to follow.
That's how it's been following Zen410's thread for me.
"Huh? I have NO idea if that's a major accomplishment or not. I have NO idea what that even is. Wait, that does WHAT?"
That's sort of how it goes, haha. But that also makes it interesting.
Yeah these comments are what I was worried about with starting to post my GTNH journal, starting midway through lacks all the context. But at the same time I don't think I can start from the beginning because it'd be a huge amount of content to add all of a sudden.
I'm going to keep posting it now regardless of forum engagement because I'm playing/journaling it anyway. If I'm journaling to myself on my hard drive or journaling here there's no difference.
It might, but the underlying issue (which would have been better explained in previous entries not posted) is that I can't use the cobalt/ardite without an Electric Blast Furnace. More on that shortly!
Gregtech New Horizons makes me feel like I'm new at Minecraft. IndustrialCraft 2 is a keystone mod, indeed the Gregtech mod itself started as an add-on to IC2, and all my personal experience of IC2 comes from Tekkit Classic (1.2.5) so more than a little out of date by now.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
Episode 060: EBF Awaits
Year Two Day Forty
Year Two Day Forty-One: Another Dungeon Run
I have a fair bit of prep to do before I'm ready for an expedition. It's a bit late in the day by the time I'm done with all the inventory sorting and gear repairing and so on, but the weather's clear so I reckon I can make it to the Roguelike Dungeon before night if I fly. I climb a little way up the mountain, ready the hang glider and jump.
A combination of careful steering and thermals gets me over the desert and into the goblin forest just as dusk is settling.
I'm not inclined to hang around topside in the Hardcore Darkness nights so head straight inside.
It's been a while since the last time I was here, and I have to familiarize myself with the dungeon's layout again. I've already cleared out level one entirely. There are still some loot chests on level two but they contain nothing of interest. Level three is where the action is at the moment. I navigate to the ossuary room I cleared previously, and find new unexplored passages beyond it.
And that's a baby creeper. My favorite mob of all time. That was sarcasm.
Using the bow, I manage to kill it without setting it off, but now I'm aware that I'm not carrying nearly enough arrows for an extended combat session. Dang, I knew there was something I was forgetting.
Having dealt with the baby creeper, I press on past the most recently claimed spawner to the unexplored end of the corridor. There's a big dark room here, with no spawners to be seen, but it's not vacant.
First an Armor Creeper, then this guy. Haah...
There's another passage leading off from the big dark chamber towards a small dead-end ossuary area. I rush it to light the spawners before they can spin up. There's a suspicious dirt block sitting in the middle of the open floor. As I eyeball it, it slyly shuffles a few paces towards me. Really? I approach and suddenly the block is a skeleton who lights me on fire.
I still struggle with the Mine & Blade Battlegear controls, and keep messing up, repeatedly opening either my backpack or the questbook menu as I flail around trying to hit the key that'll switch me into weapon-wielding mode. Which gives the ninja skeleton ample opportunity to put more fire arrows in me. After a few seconds of getting punctured Icome to my sanity and run away back down the corridor towards the empty room. Here I can dodge and hide around the corner to get a momentary respite from the hail of spicy arrows so that I can activate my sword.
Found it. Payback time.
The skeleton goes down in a few hits. I go back to work on dungeon clearance.
Now that I've lit up up the small ossuary where the ninja skeleton spawned, that corridor section is entirely pacified. I backtrack to the previous intersection and set my sights on the other passage. This one shortly opens up into another larger ossuary.
...Like I'm gonna fight that thing fair and square, pff. Cobble barricade time.
Claiming a foothold in this new area gives me some trouble as the nearby spawners in the sarcophagi are spitting out Brutal zombies. My steel rapier does great work taking those guys down now, though, thanks to its native armor-penetrating trait coupled with the Sharpness-boosting quartz I've been pilfering from this level's ossuaries.
Eventually I manage to kill everything that's currently menacing me, brute-force through the sarcophagus spawner gauntlet and light up the whole chamber to prevent any further spawns. Now the ossuary and all its loot is mine. There's still more of level three to explore beyond this point, and while I'd like to continue on, I've got a few concerns. Firstly, my inventory is getting really full due to all the armor and weapon mob drops. Secondly, I'm almost out of arrows. And thirdly, my steel armor has taken a beating, especially the chestplate. It needs replacement.
I decide to back off and return to base so that I can deal with all these issues.
Year Two Day Forty-Two: Pit Stop
Firstly, the replacement chestplate.
My old one had Prot I. I've got plenty of levels right now, plus the capacity to make bookshelves, and would rather like to have this piece of gear enchanted, so I open JEI to find out whether the enchantment table recipe has been Gregified.
...Vanilla enchanting is gated behind Thaumcraft.
I do have a Projectile Protection II book I picked up from a dungeon loot chest. I'll slap that on via anvil, it's better than nothing.
Year Two Day Forty-Three: Preparations Continue
I can make another gear upgrade too. I'll put all the recently collected ossuary quartz blocks onto my melee weapons.
I get the rapier up to 4.5 hearts base damage, but then run out of modifier slots on it. It'll gain more, once I've used it enough to earn it another level of tool xp, but that's a way off. I dump all the remaining quartz blocks on the longsword instead though I'm not using that one nearly as much as the rapier. In the dungeon, the rapier's usually a better choice due to all the heavily armored mobs.
It's night outside and I don't want to attempt traveling back to the Roguelike Dungeon in the dark, so I head down to the coal vein to kill time until dawn by digging out some more. I could use more torches anyway and coal gives the best recipe yield: three torches per coal, as opposed to charcoal's two.
What's a "bed"? Never heard of it.
Finally, I step outside to grab some feathers from the chicken farm and craft myself up another half-stack of arrows. I'm all set.
Year Two Day Forty-Four
Year Two Day Forty-Five: A Surfeit Of Skeletons
Back at the dungeon, I make another attempt at the upcoming ossuary room and persist at it for quite some time. I really want to get in there and claim it as I've still not found the stair down to level four and suspect it may be somewhere beyond, but there are multiple skeleton spawners through there. The results are predictable.
Giant skeletons with a crapton of health. Baby skeletons that can duck under my barricades. Poison skeletons. Ninja skeletons. Machinegunning gatling skeletons. Some skeleton variant I don't manage to identify that launches explosive arrows. All have armor, most of which is visibly enchanted. And some of them are showing up with Infernal Mobs buffs on top of that. Once the spawners in the room have revved up I find it impossible to kill the skeletons fast enough to make any headway. They're replaced faster than I can take them out.
I'm getting tired of combat and when I'm tired I get careless. I don't want to die in here and potentially lose access to the Healing Axe. I think I'll take a break from dungeon diving for now.
Year Two Day Forty-Six: At Last, A Path Forward
Back at base, I decide to see if I can figure out how to make invar. An alloy of iron and nickel, it's a key reagent for the Electric Blast Furnace, which I suspect will end up being key to ascending out of LV into MV, Medium Voltage technology. The Electric Blast Furnace is required to manufacture aluminum (real Gregtech aluminum not the fake and shoddy Tinker's raw aluminum).
Now that I finally have nickel from that Twilight Forest ore vein, I should be able to do this. But how exactly do I do it? There's no basic by-hand crafting recipe in JEI for invar dust. But there is a recipe associated with the Gregtech mixer. I guess I need to build one of those then.
A tin rotor, an electric motor, a LV machine hull, two circuits and some glass. I have to make the tin rotor and motor, but I've got all the rest of the items in storage, so crafting a brand new Gregtech machine is pleasantly painless for once.
After grinding up some of the nickel ore I collected to make dust, I carry my newest toy into the LV machine room, plonk it down, plug it in and dump some iron and nickel dust in to see what will happen.
It's doing it.
Shortly, the mixer delivers three pieces of invar dust. I carry them off to the iron furnace to smelt--and I have my first ingots of invar. It's not a quest-completion achievement in itself, but it feels like it should be given how much brain-straining it took me to get to this point.
I can see how this is to be done now. I think at this point I'm technically capable of making all the raw component materials required by the Electric Blast Furnace. But three invar ingots won't get me far. Just one of those heatproof casings will cost six ingots plus an invar frame which in turn is made of invar rods. I'm going to need well over a stack of the stuff to make all the parts for this thing, and that's before considering how I'm going to power it. I just bet it'll be super hungry.
And this is Gregtech New Horizons. It's a fair bet that I'll end up needing not one but many Electric Blast Furnaces.
So the best next move, I think, will be to look into setting up some machines to help with performing the various operations to make all these component materials. Which implies rearranging the LV machine room, a task that in truth is sorely needed. Currently I can't even run some of the machines I've already built, such as the electrolyzer, because they don't receive enough power per tick from the steam turbines and invariably stall out before finishing the operation.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
No no no, I wasn't saying anything about lacking content.
For me it was just saying that modded playthroughs are a different thing for me entirely, because most of them are something I'm not too familiar with, thus I don't have the level of understanding to appreciate everything. But at the same time, that very reason makes them more appealing, and for the same reason Minecraft itself (or any new thing) was appealing all those years back; because everything is novel and unknown.
Yes, yes do that! We got another. All that is needed now is TheMasterCaver.
I do like the variety and complexity this mod set creates, but I was really crushed to discover Gregtech didn't update past 1.7 so I don't have a plausible way to combine it with the current RTG, which I'm not willing to give up. Backporting over the 1.8 changes is just too daunting. Two questions:
1) What are those colored vertical lines in the hangliding pic?
2) What, exactly, in your mod set, added the (scrolls up to copy) Rare despoiling Spitfire Skeleton of Fatigue with Gravity Poisonous Exhaust Bulwark and Cloaking?
This is an interesting difference between modded and unmodded players. I don't understand much of what's going on either, but I'm looking at it with the thought "do I want to explore that?"
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
1. Journeymap waypoint markers for ores. I should turn them off when taking screenshots but I'm so used to them I didn't think of it. Gregtech New Horizons uses a different ore generation mechanic, minerals spawn in giant veins spanning multiple chunks. For this reason there's little point exploring caves, all they contain is Infernal mobs and suffering. On the plus side when you find a vein you're pretty much set. Part of the early game is prospecting to find these veins. In the first of the posted episodes I was happy to finally locate a nickel vein (garnierite, nickel, pentlandite) in the Twilight Forest.
2. A Special Mobs variant skeleton with an Infernal Mobs boost. GTNH likes to inflict pain in all possible ways.
The worldgen is actually surprisingly nice. I have some lovely terrain screenshots. It uses something displayed as "Realistic World Gen Alpha" in the MultiMC listing. Not sure if that's something generally available or written specifically for GTNH. This modpack has an incredibly dedicated team, it's still being constantly updated and they've actually managed to get the pack to run on Java 17. A 1.7.10 modpack with a Java 17 compatible version.
As for Gregtech itself, I did hear a rumor that it's getting or maybe has already gotten a 1.19 port. Not sure which of the versions of Gregtech that would be, there's a rather complex history to that mod.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
Episode 061: Steam Pipe Reshuffle
Year Two Day Forty-Seven
Year Two Day Forty-Eight: Antimony
I spend the next few days playing around in the machine room, clearing some minor quests I'd not gotten around to and experimenting with the centrifuge to see what other interesting byproducts I can get. I'd amassed a huge collection of random crushed ores and ore dusts over time, materials I'd stashed because I knew they were probably going to be valuable but I didn't yet know how.
Poking around in the questbook I notice that there's an uncompleted quest to make antimony, one of two reagents required for batteries. It's made from stibnite, an ore found in the Nether. I have some stibnite sitting in the raw ores storage box, so haul it out and grind it to dust, then dump it in the bricked blast furnaces.
The quest instructs me to make only 32 antimony, but I set a couple of stacks of the stibnite dust cooking, figuring I'll end up needing it all anyway sooner or later.
That was easy.
The other initial reagent for battery technology is lead, and that's going to be more difficult. I've now found that I can get lead dust in small amounts as a byproduct from centrifuging silver dust, but that'll be a very slow process with minimal yield as the only silver I've found is scraps of Small ore, and the questbook wants me to get 32 lead. It instructs me to check out Thaumcraft for lead, but that's not an option yet because I've no Thaumcraft tab in my questbook.
So how do I gain access to Thaumcraft then, if it's not killing the Naga? I do some online searching and find a wiki statement that aluminum screws are required. Which in turn implies getting the Electric Blast Furnace up and running. OK. I was more or less coming to that conclusion anyway.
Year Two Day Forty-Nine
Year Two Day Fifty: Plumbing Refit
Currently, the LV machine room is fed from steam pipes running beneath the floor. This has been a troublesome setup as the basement I dug way back then is only two blocks tall, meaning I can't get around to do maintenance easily without touching spicy pipes and getting burned. Some of the idiosyncrasies of this awkward setup were grandfathered in due to the original Railcraft steam tank being in a different location. There's no reason to leave it this way now. I start pulling out all the existing steam pipes...
...then dig the whole basement area down one level. Now I can run the pipes overhead instead.
Much nicer.
Year Two Day Fifty-One: Fun With The Centrifuge
Subsequent to the basement refit, I'm able to install a third steam turbine. It's my hope that by splitting the LV machines up into smaller groups the more power-hungry processes will be more likely to complete. One steam line will be for the wrought iron production, which will remain untouched as it works fine right now; one for the miscellaneous random machines; and the third I want to use to experiment with the centrifuge.
As a test I set up the LV macerator feeding to the centrifuge. I want to be able to dump miscellaneous crushed ores in at the top and collect the centrifuged dusts and byproducts from the chest when it's done. I get a lot of random bits of crushed stuff of all kinds from "small ores" and it'd be nice to deal with them automatically rather than clicking everything in and out of machines by hand individually.
Good news, it works.
I do some more experiments with the centrifuge. I can centrifuge limonite dust to get hydrogen cells, and I can centrifuge compressed air to get nitrogen cells. I don't understand what I need these for yet, but the questbook says to do it so it must be important.
Year Two Day Fifty-Two: Scam Alert
I'd still like to solve the Ender Pearl supply issue. Ender Pearls are required for transfer nodes, which I want for moving fluids in and out of the Gregtech machines. I've not been able to clear those quests yet as I've barely seen any Endermen, let alone got them to drop their pearls. Looking through the questbook I notice an entry in Tips And Tricks. I've skimmed it before, but I read it again, this time more carefully, and this time I'm struck by a few details I'd overlooked.
Endermen in a smeltery yield liquid Ender. OK. And I can buy spawn eggs with the coins I randomly receive from completing quests. Huh. Well, what if I combine those two pieces of information--?
I navigate to the Coins tab. It's not even that expensive to buy an Enderman spawn egg! It only costs 10 explorer coins, and I have a couple of hundred of the relevant coin type by now. I go ahead and make the pan cast, buy the pearls and hurry to the smeltery. With great excitement I click my new spawn egg... but I get scammed! The Enderman that spawns isn't a default one, it's a Special Mobs "Blinding" Enderman, and apparently he's incompatible with that Tinkers' feature. He just loiters casually in the smeltery, quite comfortable, oblivious to the roasting heat.
I mutter a few swear words to myself, then stare him out and kill him in the main corridor. He drops a pearl at least, so I don't come out entirely empty-handed. Upon dying he also spawns a ghost slime which comes with an Infernal boost, so I then have to kill that while poisoned/withered/on fire/etc. I'm having a great day, how about you?
OK, new plan... never mind B or C, we're probably up to around plan H at this point for sourcing pearls, but surely this one will work! I'll start dumping lapis on my longsword for looting, then I'll hunt and kill the Endermen the old fashioned way, in caves or dungeons.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
A good puzzle sequence/ladder is fun, and generally I've found this an interesting modset, but
seems a little arbitrary.
Ahh, remodeling for processing reason. Fun times.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
With GTNH so far I've found that it usually makes some sense in context. Unlike Divine Journey requiring compressed cobble and coal blocks for a furnace because more materials = grindier = "expert". I'm going to guess that aluminum screws will be needed to assemble the Arcane Worktable and/or Thaumometer, thus gating Thaumcraft behind the ability to make aluminum ingots.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
Episode 062: In Pursuit Of Pearls
Year Two Day Fifty-Three: Not So Useful Autoclave
I have about a stack of lapis in storage at the moment, along with a lot of unprocessed lapis ore. I dug out the ore back in season two while grinding for the original Bricked Blast Furnace, although I had no use for it at the time. It was a byproduct of getting calcite, the material I was actually looking for. Calcite is only found as a rare inclusion in lapis veins. As for why the majority of my stockpile is ore blocks: Mined in the regular way with a pick, in GTNH ores like lapis, coal and redstone drop as a block which then has to be broken down with the forge hammer to yield regular vanilla lapis.
I do also have a substantial amount of lapis dust which is one of the other possible drops from small lapis ores. Seeking to put that to use, I investigate the construction of an autoclave, which promises to turn dust into crystals.
The recipe is not too painful. The only really awkward component is an electric pump which in turn requires a tin rotor, tin screw and some rubber rings.
After I've crafted the pump, the remainder is plain sailing--just an LV machine frame, some steel plates, glass and circuits.
But as I'm at the point of setting it up I notice that the recipe to turn lapis dust into crystalline lapis lazuli will be extremely slow and costly in terms of power required. I really should read the fine print when I'm going to all the trouble of building these machines. It'd get a bit cheaper if I used distilled water, but then I'll have to make a Distillery too. I'm not confident that my current setup will be able to handle all this new hardware, so I decide to bench the idea for now. I'll just use the regular lapis I've got. It's no great hardship to go and mine some more of that if I need it, anyway, since I've got an ore vein right here in the home mountain.
I dump a stack of lapis into the steam compressor to turn it into blocks (since you can't do that in the regular crafting table in Gregtech New Horizons). It'll take a while for the operation to complete so I set about some regular errands around the base: topping up the bricked blast furnaces and coke ovens, collecting sticky resin from the rubber tree farm and so forth.
Year Two Day Fifty-Four
Year Two Day Fifty-Five: Success, Sorta
Let's see how much looting this will get me.
135/450 luck, Looting I. That's better than nothing.
It's night so I step outside to see if I can lure any Endermen.
Yeah... this is why I was reluctant to attempt hunting them vanilla style. The Gregtech New Horizons nights. Spotting any Endermen aboveground in the dark is pretty much a lost cause. It would help if I could make night vision potions, but brewing stands are gated behind Thaumcraft because of course they are.
All's not lost though. I can see an Enderman's icon on the minimap. I turn in that direction, and spot his purple eyes glinting in the distant darkness. I stare him over. Good news--he's a regular one. Better news--he drops two pearls. If I stoop to malicious minimap abuse this might actually be a viable strategy after all.
Year Two Day Fifty-Six: The Smallest Enderman
I remain outside, patrolling my front lawn through the remainder of the night but don't locate any more Endermen, unfortunately.
Ew.
He nails me with a long-lasting Slowness pot before I manage to take him out. I'm still laboring under the effects of that as I look up and see--
Ew. At least Concussion Creepers are mostly harmless on their own.
I spend the day inside processing and applying more lapis to my longsword, then head out again once it's dark. For the majority of the night I don't locate any Endermen either in the real-world or on the minimap, and as dawn brightens the sky I'm ready to give up, when I hear the distinctive teleport bamf and chuckle.
I locate the source of the sound on top of one of the water collection tanks.
Why is it so small? Is that a baby Enderman?
...I kill it. It drops a pearl. I'm officially a monster, but I'm up to six pearls in total now, which is significantly more than I had.
Year Two Day Fifty-Seven:
I've made a decision: it's time to start working on the Electric Blast Furnace. I strongly suspect that getting one of those running is going to open up all kinds of new and exciting options.
I crack open the questbook and take a closer look at the recipe. It's not great news. Firstly, there's the heat proof machine casing blocks. I'll need eleven of those, and each one requires six invar ingots and an invar frame. The frames can be made in the assembler, using four rods each. The lathe makes one rod from one ingot with a little bit of dust leftover to save some material.
So doing some hasty napkin math: forty-four invar ingots to make the frames, though there'll be some savings there. And sixty-six more ingots to make the casings. A hundred invar ingots total for the heat proof casings.
Looks like I'd better start grinding those nickel ingots back into dust...
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
I assume there's a flowchart-style diagram somewhere for GTNH progression? Also, as I understand it, you previously processed your nickel to ingots and now you have to make it back to dust?
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Yes, I crushed all the nickel ore and cooked it, so I needed to macerate some ingots to make dust.
GTNH is remarkably well documented ingame. They have added new NEI tabs for such information as ore vein generation and processing chains which are very good. I find it impressive that I've managed to get this far with only NEI and the questbook as reference material and I'm not all that smart. That said, I've barely scratched the surface of the pack yet and I'm aware that things will get nightmarishly intricate. Chemistry degree level intricate. What sold me on starting GTNH as a matter of fact was a meme screenshot where someone had combined Gregtech chemical engineering and Tinkers' Construct to make a polytetrafluoroethylene pickaxe. Why you'd want a non-stick pick I have no idea, but it made me laugh so hard I decided I would have to try the pack.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
A Slik Touch pick? Also, forever chemicals in Minecraft, eww!
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Episode 063: This Puzzle Is Coming Together
Year Two Day Fifty-Eight
Year Two Day Fifty-Nine
Year Two Day Sixty
Year Two Day Sixty-One: Embracing The Grind
I spend the next few days singlemindedly restocking minerals, hitting in turn the Twilight Forest nickel vein, then Overworld coal, copper and iron veins. In Gregtech New Horizons the answer to the question, "Do I need more [resource]?" is invariably yes.
Everything bar the coal will be fed directly into the steam macerators for doubling. The coal will be used to fuel the boilers and keep the steam flowing.
Coming out of vanilla, these Gregtech ore veins seem so huge when you first start digging into them--seven layers deep and goodness knows how many wide. But it soon becomes apparent just how much raw material one is going to burn through in the pursuit of technological advancement.
Thank goodness I have a Tinkers' hammer to dig 3x3 now. Looking back, I don't know how I managed to toil through the early period when all I had to work with was a pick.
Year Two Day Sixty-Two
Year Two Day Sixty-Three: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
Headbanging to "Beast In Black"'s Revengeance Machine, I grind up nickel ingots in the macerators then dump the dust along with iron dust into the mixer. The invar, once cooked, goes straight into the lathe to be turned into rods at a slightly more than 1:1 ratio: the leftover small piles of invar dust get re-combined into dust then cooked back into a scanty handful of reclaimed ingots. By Grabthar's Hammer... (depressed tone) what a saving.
When the lathe is done making the rods, I drop them into the assembler, which turns them into invar frame boxes--the first component part for the Electric Blast Furnace's heatproof casings. I could do this manually in the crafting table for the same amount of material, but that'd also require use of a Gregtech hand tool and doing it in the assembler saves me a little bit of tool durability. And some sanity, which is also by now in short supply.
Shortly, I have twelve frame boxes. That's enough for the eleven heatproof casings and one more casing which will be required to craft the blast furnace controller. Next, I need invar plates. I can make those in the bending machine from ingots at a 1:1 ratio. Six are required per frame, seventy-two ingots in total.
I've only got one bending machine and it'll take a little bit of time to get through that lot, so I go off to find some other stuff to do in the meantime. I never AFK. Vanilla or modded, idle hands are forbidden in my worlds. I dump some rubber bars into the smeltery to turn into glue balls (I'm always going to be in need of circuits) and then go outside to chop the jungle tree with my lumberaxe so that I can refill the coke ovens for more charcoal.
...I always knew I was born to suffer. (sighs and starts pillaring up)
Year Two Day Sixty-Four: Countdown To Ignition Begins
Here they come. The first heatproof casings. I'm getting closer.
There are still some components wanted by the Buildcraft auto workbenches before they can make me any more basic circuits. I grab some glass out of storage and grind it in the macerators for glass dust then stick the dust in the alloy smelter with the ball mold to make more glass tubes. The glue balls are done so I grab them out of the smeltery's output chest and drop them into the relevant workbench. That'll net me a couple more basic circuits.
I open the recipe for the controller. It requires three iron furnaces--easily done, and cheaper now with the assembler. Three basic circuits are also required. I have those, and I have the tin cables.
I assemble the parts in the Tinkers' workstation, and withdraw the controller block to an unexpected shower of fireworks.
...While I appreciate the celebratory tone, uh-uh, you don't fool me, I know I'm nowhere near putting this thing together yet. Now, how do I make cupronickel?
It's night outside, and I pause my workshop grind when I spot an Enderman's icon on the minimap--a welcome sight. I hurry outside to see if I can find him. He's up on the mountainside and though it's pitch black up there I'm able to locate him by the glimmer of eyes. I attract his attention and lure him down onto the riverbank.
C'mon, drop it... drop it...
All right! Another double drop. That lapis on the longsword was a really good call. Not sure if the head is going to be useful at all but I'll stash it in the "special drops" box anyway.
Year Two Day Sixty-Five: Choo-Choo
Cupronickel is an alloy of copper and nickel, as the name would suggest. Upon investigation I find that it's not difficult to make at all. I don't even have to use a mixer with dusts. I can straight up dump copper and nickel ingots in the steam alloy smelter. CHOO-CHOO!
The CHOO-CHOO!... cupronickel needs to CHOO-CHOO!... be turned into CHOO-CHOO!... wow that machine is loud, lemme just step away a bit... 2x thickness wires. I can do that directly by running ingots through the wiremill on its no.2 setting.
The wires are destined to become cupronickel coil blocks. I need to manufacture sixteen of those, and various input/output/power hatches, before I can assemble the multiblock.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
It looks like one of the big gating mechanisms for GTNH is machines that take massive amounts of components, right? But they're still one block. I like Astral Sorcery's technique of requiring support structures.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Massive amounts of components is right - you need millions or even billions of raw materials total along with 20+ real-world hours of running time to craft just one Stargate part, from what I've heard. But there's also massive amounts of infrastructure required to operate the multiblocks. That is where the real challenge will turn out to be, I suspect. I've never been good at logistics. I will have to learn.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]