Getting Started (Age of Engineering): Part 2

This is a continuation from Getting Started (Age of Engineering). It has been broken into multiple parts because of the limit on number of crafting grids per article.

Age 5: The Ender Age
You may have breezed through the last 3 ages, but age 5 is going to be different. There is a lot to do here, and it may easily take as much time as the first 5 ages combined.

Some things you need to be looking for from the beginning: villages (for emeralds), slime islands, and mob heads (especially enderman heads). If you are playing on an established server, finding a village with villagers still alive, and a slime island that still has many blocks of slime may be difficult.

You may find emerald ore in the world, but it is quite rare. I've found it only as low as diamonds, and from what I hear, it may only spawn in extreme hill biomes.

We will need to go to The End dimension for this age, so it is worth taking time to make some good armor. While we are traveling to the end, it may be worth it to find an elytra to enable true flight (by way of jetpack), so it should be obvious now why this age frequently takes so long!

In addition to this, we are going to need many machine chassis for our new machines, so we will need to greatly increase our power capabilities so that we can use our empowerer for large recipes. So, we will be spending a lot of time mining for all the materials we need for such equipment.

Task 5.0: Alloy Smelter
Once you have this, you can make Quartz Glass, which is useful for making the Reservoir, a device that can provide your machines with unlimited water, and for making pressurized conduits. You can also now make Soularium, which allow us to make the metal press, and many other goodies from EnderIO. Here's those recipes:

If you play around with the alloy smelter a bit, you can see that it it can be restricted to only make alloys, or only smelt ores.

I think it's worth having 2 or 3 alloy smelters around, and have them on different settings. Then you can use conduits to automate how your materials are processed. Send ores into the furnace-restricted alloy smelter, and you won't need to worry about two metals going in at once and being turned into an alloy.

I'm a big fan of automation, so I'm making it the next thing on our Age 5 list.

Task 5.1: Conduits, conduits, conduits
In most modpacks today, there are multiple options for how to move things around, and AoE is no exception. I have settled on conduits when possible for 4 big reasons:

* You can have conduits of multiple types (item, pressurized fluid, redstone, energy) all in the same block, and they won't interfere with each other * Item conduits and redstone conduits have multiple channels, so you can have multiple pathways in one block by only placing one conduit. * Conduits can be set to not connect to conduits in the next block over, and no painting is required. * Where conduits meet machines, you can set them to only insert or only extract. This reduces the load on the server, and reduces the chance of something going wrong.

Conduit binder is annoying to make, but it's cheap, so it's worth making 6-8 stacks of it at once:

Note: stone dust can be replaced by Small Stone (Calculator), which is a waste product of the Extraction Chamber.

If you have a little CF Powder leftover, keep it. You can use it in age 7, if you want to use a CF sprayer to make reinforced stone for your nuclear generators.

Now that you have Conduit Binder, I would recommend making the following 4 types of conduits:

The last one requires ender pearls. If you don't have a good way to farm these yet, then don't worry about making conduits from them yet.

In addition to all the conduits, also make a Yeta Wrench. When viewing it in your inventory, hold down shift to see instructions on how to use it. I use mine the most when trying to adjust a conduit that connects to the bottom of a machine. You could dig down into the floor so that you can click with an empty hand on the connection pad, but it is easier to just shift-left click the node itself with a yeta wrench.

Task 5.2: Garden Cloche (optional)
This step is marked as optional, but it will make it much easier to get large quantities of seeds, because it can grow canola extremely fast. Thus, I would say that it is highly recommended.

Task 5.2.0: Advanced Greenhouse
For this, you will need to make another Basic Greenhouse. You could dismantle and use the one from before if you are sure you have enough coal dust from it already.

You will use your algorithm separator to make the tanzanite.

Don't place your large greenhouse yet. Save it to make the farmer.

Task 5.2.1: Farmer
Don't place your farmer yet, save it to make the garden cloche.

Task 5.2.1: Reservoir
If you are doing all of this in age 4, it's fine, but you will need to restock the water for your garden cloche manually. If you are in age 5, and coming back to this step, then you probably have an alloy smelter, and can make a reservoir:

Place the 4 reservoir blocks in the ground in a 2x2 grid, then fill two opposite corners with water (using water bucket). They will give an infinite water source.

Now, make both a Transfer Pipe, and a Transfer Node (fluid). It can pull water from your reservoir to go into your Garden Cloche.

Task 5.2.3: Garden Cloche
Bring in power from the top, and water from the bottom. In the UI, place soil in the bottom square and canola seeds in the top square. Then, exit the UI, and attach a chest directly onto the node in the middle block of the 3 blocks. Your output will go in there.

Task 5.3: Travel Anchors
If you are like me, this is about the point that you will need to expand your base. Do you have multiple floors? Do you want to jump through walls? If so, it is time to make Travel Anchors, and a Staff of Traveling.

Task 5.4: Metal Press
A Metal Press is not very expensive, and it will make it cheaper to make Bronze Gears, which is going to be nice considering how many Sturdy Casings we need to make now. After following these recipes, you will have enough to make 2 metal presses. There are metal press templates that we will want: Gears, plates, and wires.



Task 5.5: Canola Press or Fermenting Barrel
We are going to begin to need a lot more power now, so it's time to get the canola presses going. Make a press and couple barrels, and place all three along with an ender IO tank into a 2x2 square:

The press will take your Canola, and make Canola oil, which will go to the barrels, which change it to basic oil, which can then be pulled from the Ender IO tank.

If space is not an issue, you can keep 3 barrels going from one canola press, and then use them to power 3 oil generators.

Task 5.6: Oil Generator
Place this next to the ender IO tank, and have the tank push into the generator. You can probably keep 3 of these generators going at once. This will make lots of power!

If you are really ambitious, then you can use transfer pipes to take your canola directly from the garden cloche to the canola press. If you have more than 2 going, then you may need to move the oil further than just one block. If this is the case, use pressured fluid conduit instead of a fluid tank.

Task 5.7: Extraction Chamber (for circuits)
Circuits can be used for a lot of things. Most of them are optional, but there are almost certainly some that are mandatory. It takes a fair amount of power to do the processing, so now that we have our canola presses working, it seems like a good time to start our processing. First, make an extraction chamber:

Take a stack of cobblestone, and set it inside, and just wait for it to work. If you are in a hurry, there are upgrades to make it work faster, but by starting it early, you shouldn't need to do that. For each cobblestone processed, you have a 12.5% chance of getting some kind of circuit.

Unfortunately, once it gets one circuit, it stops. So, I'd recommend making a Wrench (Calculator), then digging down below your extraction chamber, and right click on the bottom face to turn it red (which means output). Put a hopper there, and have it send output to a nearby chest. Feel free to put a hopper above it also for inputting cobblestone.

There is a bug with this device that makes it stop running if it can't fill entirely with power. Mine tends to get to 39,995, and then stop. To fix this, you need to use Energy Conduit to deliver power to the extraction chamber (instead of the Wired Connector).

What I did is place one block of Energy conduit on top, and then place a wired connector off the side of the block of conduit. After doing this, it no longer gets stuck.

Task 5.8: Experience Obelisk (optional)
This is purely optional, and is quite expensive, but it is nice to be able to push and pull experience into this, so you won't lose it all on deaths:

In addition to not losing experience on deaths, you will waste far less experience when you enchant things now, so this is highly recommended.

Task 5.x: Vibrant Capacitor Bank
The Vibrant Capacitor Bank can hold 25,000,000 Rf, and has an interface that can be used for charging armor, weapons, drills, etc. We will be using a lot more power soon, so it is time to make one.

Task 5.9: Dark Steel armor (optional)
Now that we have an alloy smelter, we can get new armor, which will be very useful for going to The End:

Use these ingots to make a full set of armor. The non-enchanted versions are similar to iron, but you can put some great enchantments on them. Shift click to see the enchants possible.

Make a vanilla anvil to apply enchants.

For all 4 pieces you will want to enchant them first with a Vibrant Crystal and 4 levels of experience, followed by a Basic Capacitor and 6 levels of experience. If desired, you can enchant further with a Double-Layer Capacitor, followed by an Octadic Capacitor.

After these enchants, you will want to add Glider Wings to the Dark Plate (chest piece]], a Speed Potion to the Dark Leggings, and no fall damage to the Dark Boots. If you wish, you can add a Solar Panel to the Dark Helm.

It is also recommended to make The Ender as a sword, if you haven't found one already, and a Dark Bow for a weapon. The sword is useful for getting mobs to drop heads (especially endermen), and the bow can be enchanted with Power V, and has an infinite supply of arrows, so it is a great weapon for fighting the ender dragon.

To make all of these, I believe you will need 27 dark iron. Dark iron takes a long time to make, so set it up, and then go mining.

Task 5.10.0: Soul Binder
If you have found any dungeons or mineshafts, and saved the spawners, good news, we can change them to create the creatures that we don't see often enough (ie. Endermen). To change what type of spawner you have, you will need to make a Soul Binder:

Task 5.11: New mining bags
Traveler's Sack

Void Sack

Item Filter (Actually Additions)

Place in the item filter all the items you don't want to pick up (Andesite, dirt, cobblestone, arrows, etc.). Then use it as a whitelist for your void sack, and a black list for your traveler's sack.

In the void sack, there is a red I in the top left of the interface. Click it to turn it green. Now, anything you pick up that matches the white list will instantly be destroyed.

The traveler's sack can also be set to auto pick up, but it doesn't always work if it is in your hotbar (not sure if this is a bug, or if working as intended). When you are done mining, place the traveler's sack in your hand, and shift click a chest to automatically empty everything from it into the chest. If you have that chest as the start of a long automation queue, this feature is extremely handy!

Task 5.12: Quadruple Battery
You made a double battery early, and then used to craft your empowerer. These batteries can be held in your inventory, and when you do, your armor, weapons, etc. will be filled from it.

You can upgrade the double battery as far as a Quintuple Battery. I recommend going at least as far as Quadruple Battery, which is able to hold 8,000,000 Rf -- enough to keep your stuff charged for a long time!

Task 5.x Machine Frame
Machine Frame (RFTools)

This should take you to age 6!

Task 6.x: Hazmat suit
This seems like a good point to beef up our IC2 machinery. Theoretically, you could wait until age 7, but in my playthrough, this was the point that it just made the most sense.

So, make yourself a full Hazmat Suit. You'll need the suit, leggings, Scuba Helmet, and rubber boots:

You'll need to be wearing all 4 pieces of this while carrying almost any type of nuclear fuel. It isn't necessary for Uranium ore (like what you get while mining), but after any processing at all, make sure you are wearing it.

Also, try very hard to not die while carrying nuclear fuel. If you do, you'll want to make a full new suit before picking up your gravestone.

Task 6.x: 100EU nuclear reactor
First, you'll probably want an offline reactor simulator for testing your setups, to make sure that they won't blow up. The best choice is the first link, but it is Android only. The second link is to a .jar that can be downloaded and used on Mac, Linux, or Windows:

* https://forum.industrial-craft.net/thread/12453-ic2-experimental-planner-for-android/ * https://forum.industrial-craft.net/thread/10998-ic2-experimental-reactor-planner-open-beta/ * https://forum.industrial-craft.net/thread/8966-official-new-reactors-design-thread/

The third link there is a list of popular designs. Use the hash that goes with any reactor listed there in one of the tools to see its setup.

The hash for the most popular 100 EU reactor is 21p0axsp4l073uhxj0vluhyyum4k6qvj0sqr867wl4ylcn4qdoix3yd83b78y8enonfoolys5g23280. That hash can be used in either tool. In order to build it, you will need * 1 Nuclear Reactor * 3 Component Heat Vents * 7 Overclocked Heat Vents * 2 Component Heat Exchangers

Place the reactor in the world, and place a lever on it. If you wish, you build a barricade around it using Reinforced Glass (Industrial Craft 2), in case of explosions. If you are playing single player, you can type "/backup start" before turning it on, just in case you have something wrong.

After turning it on, immediately open the UI, and begin watching the components. If something is going to blow up, you'll usually get some indication in the first 5-10 seconds of it running, and hopefully you'll be able to turn it off before it does.

Since the output of this reactor is below 128 EU/t, you can send the output directly into a CESU without blowing anything up. Of course, at this point, building at least an MFE is probably a better choice. If you have lots of resources to spare, build an MFSU.

Task 6.x: IC 2 Overclocker upgrades
Distilled Water isn't necessary for making Overclocker Upgrade (IndustrialCraft 2)s for IC2 machines, but by using it over regular water, you can greatly reduce the amount of lapis required. We have enough power now, so, let's do it.

Task 6.x.x: Boiler
First, you need to make another Electric Heater. You've made one before, but this time you will need to make 10 Coils, because we are going to need to take it all the way up to 100hU/tick. Attach it to power. The nuclear reactor that you built in the last step should be exactly enough to keep it going (handy, huh?).

This time, build a Boiler, and attach it to the Heater (once again, the large orange squares show where heat connections can be made.  You'll need to connect them.

Supply water to the boiler using fluid transfer nodes.

Task 6.x.x: Condensor
Next to the Boiler, attach a Condensor. Make one more basic Heat Vent, and place it in the boiler. This will speed up how fast it works, and keep it from exploding. Hook it up to power. It won't use much, so you can power it and the boiler at the same time from your reactor. If you can't give it power, that's ok, it will work without it, just it will be a bit slower.

Place a fluid tank next to it to pull out the distilled water.

Task 6.x: Mining drill
Make a Mining Drill, and charge it in your 25M capacitor bank. Make it your active tool and then sneak-click to access the upgrade bank. Give it each of the following 5 upgrades. They are expensive, but worth it:

Now, you can use this tool to mine a 5x5x1 area at once, and it will handle dirt and gravel the same as if it were stone! Sneak-left clicking can be used to mine just a single block. The fortune upgrades are great for when you encounter diamond or emerald.

Task 6.x: Restoration Chamber, Reassembly Chamber
Build a Restoration Chamber and Reassambly Chamber for processing your damaged and dirty circuits.

Task 6.x: Elytra, Iridium shards
Go to the End, and using your glider, explore the outer islands. When you find End cities, look for airships, and then loot them. You'll want to find one Elytra, and 8 Iridium shards.

Task 6.x: Forestry Bees
This could go anywhere in the guide, but I think near the end of age 6 makes sense. The goal will be to get some imperial bees that can be producing royal jelly while we do all the busy work in age 7. Once enough royal jelly is made, we can build an Aviary, which is necessary for continuing the wintery line of bees.

Build a single Bee Smoker (it never wears out), a Portable Analyzer, and a number of Scoops. You'll need a number of plains bees and forest bees. You can get the plains bees easily from the mining dimension. Use the smoker on a hive for a few seconds, then break the hive using the scoop. You'll get a princess and a drone, and a honeycomb.

Build another Garden cloche, squeezer, and carpenter, because we are going to need a lot of impregnated wood and impregnated sticks. If you want to build a tree farm, now is the time to do it. Personally, I just got stacks of dark oak by using my lumberaxe in a roofed forest. You can use many different choices in the cloche. I chose to just use regular seeds, then piped them into the squeezer, and then piped the seed oil into the carpenter. I recommend fully automating this.

Make 10-15 Apiarys. You're going to need 50+ Impregnated Frames also, but these don't stack, so you may want to craft them as you use them. You'll want to find a chunk in the world that you can use for your bee stuff. It will need to have normal climate and normal humidity, so basically this means forest or plains. Make sure you have it chunk loaded, and clear enough space for your apiaries. You'll need to have flowers around (although the bees will create more), and you'll need an open view of the sky.

As you have been collecting bees, you may have noticed that sometimes you get a stack of drones. This means that these drones have identical stats for both the dominant and recessive traits. If you don't have stacking drones, begin randomly creating some by mating a princess and drone of the same type (ie. Plains) in an apiary.

Once you get about 5 drones that are the same, you can force a princess of that same type, by brute breeding. Place an apiary with an item conduit pulling out, then branch the item conduit. Send one branch back into the apiary, and send the other to a chest. Place 5+ drones and one princess in there. The princess will die, and any drones that match the 5 in the apiary will join that stack. All non-matching drones will leave. The new princess will be more similar to the drones than the old one, and will take the her place as queen. Eventually you will get a princess that matches the drones completely (assuming that the dominant and recessive genes of that drone were identical). Once you have succeeded with this, the pile of drones will begin to grow, and you will have automated honeycomb production.

I personally got about 8 automated apiaries going, and gave each of them 3 impregnated frames. I chunkloaded them, and let the frames wear out. This gave me plenty of honeycomb for a lot of bee analyzing. I didn't bother with impregnated frames during the main breeding steps.

Now that you have a lot of honeycomb, begin centrifuging it. Place a hopper above the centrifuge so that you can put in 5 stacks of honeycomb at once. You will get honeydrops, which you can now use with your portable analyzer. Placing one honey drop and a stack of drones in the analyzer will then put visible stats on the drones that you can use for breeding purposes.

Now, set up a number of non-automated apiaries. With them, begin breeding forest + plains bees. With a bit of luck, you should get common bees, or more likely hybrid bees that are part common and part forest/plains.

Look up imperial bees in JEI. You'll notice the recipes always specify which type of bee needs to be the princess, and which type needs to be the drone. Just ignore this. All the bee breeding recipes are symmetrical, in other words you can switch which is the drone and which is the princess. The main thing you need to learn now is the path from imperial all the way back to common.

Once you understand this pathway, you are ready to go. I recommend having 10+apiaries all running at once. When you get offspring, just throw out the drones that are upgrades, and keep going until you get imperials. It takes a long time. When it becomes night, go to sleep, since bees do not function at night. Hopefully you won't have too much rain.

For other stats, you can basically ignore them all now. You can introduce mutations once you reach imperial. Focusing on stats early is just going to bog you down. That said, you want to avoid any that say they only produce 1x offspring. This is referring to how many drones you get, and you really want 2 or 3 drones made if you are going to be effective at breeding. I think the 1x mutation is fairly rare. Just throw it out if you get it.

Once you get imperials, then set up your automated breeding system again, and force breed stacks. Make impregnated frames again, and put 3 in each apiary, because you now care about the output. You will need lots of imperial jelly.

Now that we have bees going steady, it is worth moving on and finishing this age.

Task 6.x: Pattern Storage
Make one Pattern Storage (Industrial Craft 2) to advance to the next age.

Task 7.x: Void Resource Miner
The void resource miner can generate resources for you, as long as it has access to the void.

Task 7.x Storage Scanner (RFTools) (Optional)
This thing is amazing. It is a crafting station, but it can scan all your nearby chests, and let you pull items from them for your crafting, even if they are not directly connected!

Task 7.x Cobblestone Generator
Create a Cobblestone Generator (Tiny Progressions) from Tiny Progressions, and upgrade it to at least tier 4.

Task 7.x Scrap Maker
Make 2-4 Scrap Makers, and supply them with cobblestone from your cobblestone generator. Pipe their output to a storage drawer.

Task 7.x Mass Fab
Make a Mass Fabricator. Pipe scrap into it, and then place a fluid tank next to it to draw out UU matter. If the only reactor you have is the 100EU reactor from before, it is time to either upgrade it, or make a second reactor to go with it. The 420EU reactor from the reactor design thread is a good choice.

Please note that this machine will use up as much power as you can give it, yet it is only a tier 3 machine! To get it above 512 EU/t, you'll need to give it a Transformer Upgrade.

If you connect a MFSU directly to a mass fabricator, and do not use a transformer upgrade, you will create a very large crater!! Its explosion is similar to a nuclear reactor, so do not let this happen! If you are playing on a server, I highly recommend making a single player world with cheats to set all this up, just so you can be sure you have a setup that won't explode.

Task 7.x MFSU
An MFSU is fairly expensive to make, but now seems like the best time to do so.

My preference is to use Glass Fibre Cables at this point, so that you can use just one power source to connect all your machines. Glass fibre cable allows you to carry any tier of power of great distances without having much loss.

In the next few steps, we are going to be creating a couple tier 4 machines (scanner and replicator), but they don't draw nearly as much power as the Mass fab. I recommend branching the power from the reactor two ways. One way goes to your Mass fab (protected either with a transformer upgrade or with an inline HV transformer), and the second goes to the MFSU. All your machinery (including the upcoming scanner and replicator) can draw from the MFSU.

Place a switch on a block next to the Mass fab, and turn it the mass fab off. Run your reactor enough to get the MFSU to about half full, then turn on the mass fab. Now your MFSU should stay full enough to give power to all your slower machines, and once the MFSU is completely full, all excess power will go automatically to the mass fab.

Task 7.x Scanner
Build a Scanner (Industrial Craft 2), and connect it to power. Place the Pattern Storage (from age 7) directly next to it. Now begin scanning things that you would like to make from UU matter. I suggest the following choices:

* Sturdy Casing (~6.401 mB) * Machine Frame (~12.504 mB) * Machine Block (~7.101 mB) * Machine Chassis (~8.840 mB) * Basic Capacitor (~4.723 mB) * Calculator Assembly (~0.062 mB) * Power Cube (~0.180 mB) * Iridium Ore (120 mB)

You can find a full list of replication prices here:

* https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MxHwK9dF2ZdpVEcz90cfb5F9fvqTvlUJC97e4BETAEA/edit

After the scanning process is complete (approximately a minute), click the far-right button to store the pattern to your storage.

Task 7.x Replicator
Build 3 Teleporters, and then use them to build one Replicator. Place it so that is touching your pattern storage, and connect it to power. From it's UI, select an item you would like to make, and then click the center button (the big green arrow). It should be created.

Once you have 480 mB, you should make 4 Iridium Ore. You'll use them for the next step. Thankfully, we only need to make 4 at this price!

Task 7.x Molecular Transformer
Molecular Transformer

Making this take 4 iridium ore, but once you have it, you can make iridium ore using just power and iron ingots. We will be needing a lot of iridium in the future.

The main reason you are building this is for iridium, but do notice that it can create clay out of cobblestone also, which is quite handy!

Task 7.x Liquid Nuclear Reactor
Once you have 40 Iridium ore, you can make a decent liquid nuclear reactor. I'd suggest dismantling your old one, and building this instead.

Task 7.x Void ore miner
This is quite expensive, but later we will need ores that can only be obtained by using the ore miner.

For this, we are going to need triple compressed cobblestone. Each one of these is crafted from 729 cobblestone. It is time to automate some crafting.

Build a Crafter Tier 2, and read through the Automatic Crafting with RFTools page. Set up recipes for compressed cobblestone, double compressed cobblestone, and triple compressed cobblestone in the crafter, and set the last of those (the triple) to go to external storage. Make a new cobblestone generator for it, or borrow the one from your nuclear setup.

Build either a tinker's tool with silky (needs emerald block), or make a vanilla pick with Silk touch (make the enchantment in your anvil, and apply using the enchanting table). Use this to get the ores that you need to build the tier 1 void ore miner.

Craft a book for Environmental Tech, as it is the easiest way to find the block diagram for the void miner multiblock. Craft all the components, and set it up facing the void. Give it lots of power.

Begin looking at the necessary components. If you want to make a tier 2 miner, you are going to need 33 structural blocks (tier 2), and that is going to require 2+ stacks of energetic alloy and 2+ stacks of electrical steel. To get the 132 ender pearls, you can use your enderman spawner from before, but I recommend just going to the End, and slaughtering a lot of endermen there. You will need a stack of diamonds also, which was actually a problem for me at this point.

You may wonder why I said 33 structural blocks instead of 32. You will want to make an Assembler (Environmental Tech) also, and it requires another structural block!

You will need a resonator to make Stoneburndt. Make water mills for grid power, and then get that going.

Once you get all the component blocks made, you'll want to find a 7x5x7 space to build the multiblock. It will need to face bedrock, so building over a lava lake is a bad idea. If you discover that your location is over a lava lake or water lake, you can use your wand to fill it in with cobblestone, then mine it out.

For the lens, you may want to make a cyan lens (for diamond preference) or a green lens (for uranium preference). It's up to you.

To build the full miner, place the main controller right above where you want your multiblock to go. Dig a 1x1 shaft all the way down to bedrock. Then use the assmebler, and hold right click the assembler on the controller, and the components for the multiblock will be built under the controller.

Place a chest next to the controller, and connect power, and you will begin getting resources!

At some point, you'll want to make a resource void miner (tier 1) also. You will only need to replace the controller. With it, you can get Mica, and then use that to upgrade your void ore miner to be faster and more precise.