Getting Started (Factorization)

This is a community created article by ShneekeyTheLost

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Factorization for Newbies
(A Reference Guide for the Rest Of Us)

So first off, what does this mod do?

 * Barrels which store lots of a single type of item
 * Complex system for significantly boosting your ore generation, up to triple if you want to wait that long
 * New toys

What mods does this mod work well with?

 * Redpower Tubes are intelligent enough to feed barrels properly
 * Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a lot of cross-compatibility with other mods yet

You will need the following to get started with this mod:


 * LOTS and lots of Silver and Lead
 * Some diamonds will be needed for the Grinder and Wrath Igniter

The Basics: Barrels and Pocket Crafting Tables
Here’s a couple of entry-level things you can find in this mod that you can get started on right away. Their utility, however, is… limited.

The Pocket Crafting Table seems like an awesome idea. You don’t need to drop a crafting table down to use it! Unfortunately, it DOES eat up the three right-most squares rows in your inventory. Not cool. Particularly not if you are already having inventory issues. But hey, what do you expect from a recipe that is just a stick and a crafting table?

A Barrel stores 64 stacks of a single item. Sounds cool, right? Well, a double-chest has 54 slots, so you’re only getting about ten more stacks out of it, and isn’t limited to a single item type. Granted, the picture on the front is really handy, however don’t expect these to replace chests. Particularly not with the Iron Chests mod around. They are useful for keeping your cobble/sand/gravel/dirt in, but that’s about it.

But hey, 64 stacks of storage for some logs and wooden half-slabs? Not too shabby.

Another very good advantage of Barrels is, like Iron Chests, they can be stacked up next to each other, unlike regular chests which don’t like staying next to each other.

Your First Machines
These first machines are of… limited value. There’s the Craftpacket Maker, the Craftpacket Stamper, and the Packager.

The first two are… not very useful. Basically, the Craftpacket Maker functions like a crafting square, only instead of the actual item being produced, it produces a Craftpacket of the item, which uses up some paper.

The CraftPacket Stamper lets you take a Craftpacket and make the actual item itself.

In theory, this is a cool idea. In practice, why not just make the item itself? If it didn’t require the stamper, it might have been useful to stack up items that normally don’t stack, but I can’t figure out any other reason to use them. Well, there is one reason to use the stamper, we’ll get to that in a bit.

The Packager is an interesting device. Give it a single type of item. First, it tries to craft something in a 2×2. If it can’t do that, it’ll try a 3×3. So, for example, if you feed it bricks, it will churn out brick blocks. Feed it wooden planks, it’ll crank out crafting tables. Feed it iron ingots, and it’ll churn out iron blocks. Useful if you are wanting to start compacting your metals down to blocks for easy storage, I suppose. Then again, Forestry’s Carpenter has a crating system that fills much the same niche.

Getting Charged Up
Here’s where all the silver and lead is going to be needed. You’ll also need some diamonds, and that Craftpacket Stamper, some TNT, and some obsidian.

So far, the only method of power generation in this mod is solar, unless you just want to keep making batteries. It’s going to take a LOT of steps to get there.

Step 1: Make a Battery. For that, we need Sulfuric Acid. There’s two ways to do this. First, is a couple of gunpowder, some coal, and a bottle of water, in your crafting square. However, if you manage to find a source of Sulfur (like, say, if you were pulverizing the right stuff with Thermal Expansion), you can use that instead. Now, surround that acid with four lead and four iron, and you get a battery. Fortunately, it starts off fully charged, because we’re going to need to make some magnets.

To do that, we need some lead wire. Six lead makes eight wires. Put the iron ingot in the middle, with seven wires, and the battery at the bottom, and you’ll get a magnet. Note that your battery is returned, but partially discharged. That’s handy.

Next, we need to make some Insulated Coils. One clay block surrounded by eight lead. We’re going to need four of them for our motor

That magnet we made, two iron ingots, the four insulated coils, and two more copper. Now we’ve got a motor. All we need is some way to run it. For that, we need a solar boiler.

Seven iron ingots and a iron bar makes a Solar Boiler. The Bar on top and a case out of iron around it and there you go. On top of the boiler you need the steam turbin. Put the motor at the bottom and put a lead ingot to each side. in the middle the fan, made out of 5 iron ingots, next to it a solar pannel on each side. A bar at the top and 2 iron ingots and there you go.

Now, your Solar Turbine won’t do anything by itself. It’s going to need water, and it’s going to need mirrors to focus more sunlight onto it to boil the water inside the boiler to make steam to power everything.

Well, hop on over to Thermal Expansion, there’s a machine there called the Aqueous Accumulator, which will cover your water needs. Just put the solar turbine on top, and you’re done. For the rest, you need mirrors. LOTS of mirrors.

Eight silver around a glass pane makes ONE mirror. You’ll probably want… oh, twenty or so of them. So yea, multiple stacks of silver being used here.

Now place your mirrors around your turbine. Each one needs a clear line of sight and line of effect to your turbine, and need to be able to see daylight as well. Put them in a square formation. You’ll know if they are working because they will rotate to ‘face’ the turbine. If they don’t, then they don’t have line of sight. They’re pretty stupid about it, even tall grass can block line of sight. Or another mirror. So be sure you have a large flat area to put your mirrors around it.

Oh, by the way, your wire will ALSO block line of sight, so running your wires might get a little interesting. You won’t be able to make a complete square, because one square on one of the sides will need to be the output.

But hey, at least now we can recharge that battery. Now let’s see what we can do with this power.

Your Manufactorum and You
Okay, remember how I was telling you about diamonds, that craftpacket stamper, some TNT, and some Obsidian? Yea, we’re going to need that for one of the machines here. But let’s start off with something a bit more basic.

Ever wanted your furnaces to run on power without needing to turn it into some other kind of furnace? Well, Factorization can do that for you. It’s got a Heater which can power a furnace, instead of needing coal. You’ll need six of those insulated coils, and another couple of pieces of lead. Hook it up to lead wire, and it’ll power any furnace it touches. Like, say, the new Slag Furnace. Nothing special here, just some cobblestone. It’ll have more use in a bit. Just remember that it can be ran with your new heater.

Now then, you’ll need four TNT, four Obsidian, and a Diamond BLOCK. Yes, this eats up nine precious diamonds. Now, this recipe can be hard to find in NEI. Look up a diamond block, and hit ‘u’, and you should find it. We’re making a Craftpacket. Now put it in the Stamper.

A small explosion later, and you now are the proud owner of eighteen diamond shards. Wut?

Eight diamond shards around an iron ingot nets you a Diamond Cutting Head. This is used for a couple of things. The Grinder is a machine which is used in refining your ores. The Angular Saw needs a charged Battery in your inventory, but is effectively a silk touch pick that runs on Factorization Charge. You can also grind up Diamond, Redstone, and Lapis Ore.

Remember that motor we made for the Solar Turbine? We’ll want another one of them. In fact, go ahead and make two of them while you are at it. And another Turbine. We’re going to make a Grinder and a Mixer.

Now that we’ve got our Diamond Cutting Head and Motor, all you need is some iron and lead to make the Grinder. The Mixer is that turbine, a motor, a cauldron, a couple of lead, and a couple of water buckets.

Here’s how it works so far:
Grinding up your ore produces dirty ore gravel. Throwing that in your mixer with some water produces clean gravel and sludge, plus your empty bucket. Throw that in your Slag Furnace, and you’ll get Reduced Chunks.

At this point, you can smelt your reduced chunks for double ore output. But there’s another step we can take, if you are patient.

Making the Crystallizer is easy… it’s a stick, some string, and a cauldron. Using now, that’s another matter.

You’ll need a heater for this thing to function properly. You can process up to five stacks at a time, but it’s going to take 20 minutes for the dang thing to finish off. However, smelting that result nets you three ingots per ore. So it depends on how badly you want your metal.

But right now… I’m gonna have to go with Wrath.

So we’ve got some diamond shards left over from making our grinder. What to do with them?

Well, if you’ve got ready access to Nether Brick, it might be time to get your wrath on. Specifically, a Wrath Igniter.

Functions like your bog-standard flint and steel, but instead of making fire, it makes wrathfire, which is a whole different beastie.

Igniting iron blocks will make dark iron blocks. But watch out, when the wrathfire burns down, it makes a BUNCH of regular fire. Unfortunately, you only get four dark iron out of each dark iron block.

Oh, watch out for Obsidian, though. Wrathfire will melt it back into lava.

For a more sustained wrathfire, you’ll need to build a wrath forge out of netherbrick. Just make a 3×3 base out of nether brick, your next row should have two spaces… one for the block you are cooking and one for the wrathfire. Then cap it with more netherbrick. Light the center block, and you should have a sustained wrathfire. put your iron block in the front slot, let it cook up, then take it when done.

Wrath Igniters can also be used to make Wrathlamps. These babies will light up a HUGE area, and an amazing 30 blocks down. Some Dark Iron, some glass panes, and some silver. Now put your Wrath Igniter in the middle and hit combine. Yes, you get your wrath igniter back, even though it does use up some of its durability.

The other thing you can build is the Item Router. It is… a very complicated machine, and really deserves its own guide. It takes a lot of getting used to, so you might want to play around with it a bit. Basically, it works with inventories in a line, as long as they are all touching each other and one of them is touching the item router. It can be used as a type of sorting system, but it uses a different logic process. There are also some upgrades you can shift+Right Click onto the machine to use.

There are also logic matrices, however the Logic Matrix Programmers are only found in deep dungeons.

The other toy at this tier is the Bag of Holding. It’s a rather kludgy mechanic, when several other mods have more useful means of portable storage devices. It doesn’t hold a candle to Forestry Backpacks, for example, or the Canvas Bags from RP2. Play around with it if you like. You can expand it as well, although it’ll cost you ender pearls to do so.

There’s also ceramics and even mechanized armor, but they aren’t quite done yet, so I’ll merely mention them, and mention that you should play with them at your own risk.

That about sums it up for this mod. Most people never get any deeper than the Barrel, but the Angle Saw is actually quite useful for silk-touching diamond ores, and there IS a method for tripling your ore output, even if it does take forever.

This is a community created article by Vegoraptor

Currently in its original format. Please add formatting, crafting recipes, images, spelling, grammar, etc. Don't forget to cite the original author!

Factorisation is a mod mainly aimed at people who love making things compact and fully automatic, it is best used in line with RedPower or, if you have not gotten this far yet, Buildcraft. In worldgen, it only adds silver and lead. So, the first thing you might want to use when you have set up a sorting system is the Packager. This automatically crafts the inserted item in a 2x2 respectively 3x3 pattern, creating blocks from ingots or brick blocks from bricks. But be careful, it only operates if it has enough of the material, so either create a controlling system, e.g. with a chest plus filter, or one for every ore.

Furthermore, there is a pocket craftingtable, used by pressing C. Now you can craft in the highlighted area of your inventory, use this like a regular workbench. Also, while you are in this window, press X to automatically clear the area, C again to drag and rotate, and B to balance the stacks in the grid as exact as possible.

Now to the so slag furnace, this is kind of your tier 1.2 ore processor, as it has a slight chance of doubling the output for ores (120%). In some cases, you even have the possibility to get an additional ingot of another ore.

Back to logistics, there are also barrels. These accept only one kind of item, but 64 stacks of this (upgradeable later on) and, for the best part, if used with RedPower Tubes, it will only accept this item, so no more tinkering around with dyes and sorting machines, this takres a bit more space than a system with chests and sorters would, but it is cheaper and far easier to operate and expand. To insert items, rightclick with them in your hand on the barrel, doubleclick to place all stacks of that item inside, leftclick to pull a stack and shift-leftclick to pull one item out.

There are also craftpacket makers and stampers, in the maker you put paper and the items to craft with, select the shape they should get put into. If more than one kind of item is required, pull the created craftpacket out and reinsert it to go on. This can also be used in a transport line. The stamper transforms the craftpacket into an item with one exception, wich are diamond shards. This is the only craftpacket createable in a regular workbench, and just needs to put into a stamper. But be careful, cover your ears.

Let's go on to the more advanced stuff, featuring electricity in an even more realistic way than RedPower offers, without being all that complicated. Now, the first thing to craft is a acid-lead accumulator, being already full when crafted, wich makes perfectly sense if you think about the way those operate.

With this battery and some lead wires (almost as healthy as orange juice) you can go magnetize an iron ingot to create a permanent magnet and with this a motor to make our first hydrothermic generator, also called solar turbine. Sitting on a 1x3 pond of water all by itself it does not much, but place some mirrors around and be careful they do not obstruct eachother. Wrom there, draw the wires to a batery or directly to the processors.

One of those is the heater. Place it next to a (slag) furnace or crystallizer to increase its efficiency respectively power it. This guy needs around five mirrors to run without loss.

The next one is the grinder, being the first pearl of the ore processing necklace. It adds 40% probability for doubling to moth regular and slag furnace. That darkish ingot gets explained later on. The grinder needs around eleven mirrors.

Next one is the mixer, washing the gravel with water to get clean gravel and slush wich can be used to make clay. The cleansing does nothing to the output, but it is needed for the next step, wich is reducing the gravel in a slag furnace. Now the output is at a whopping 200%. By the way, the mixer only needs two mirrors to operate.

Now, if you really want to get serious, you might want to add a crystallizer, wich dissolves the reduced chunks in acid under the influence of heat (add a heater) to let them slowly reassemble when cooling off, creating purest crystalline metals. Smelting these gets you 300% of the output you would normally get, but keep in mind that one crystallisation circle takes full 20 minutes, so better add full five stacks to the cycle.

Now for that strange metal you saw in the grinder recipe, this is dark iron. It forms when iron blocks are lit on fire with a wrath igniter, but be carefull, fire spreads. Hint: Netherbricks are almost the same to wrath fire as netherrack is to normal fire. There is also a wrath lamp, lighting an area in 9x9x30 to maximum lightlevel, but keep in mind those are actual blocks, so lighting a working quarry with this is not the best idea as it gets distracted by them.

There is also the Bag of Holdings, wich kind of expands your inventory. It stores every item right of it in itself, and when pressing ´ the content of the affected space and the bag itself change, so you will want to put it in the 4th column from the right. The bag can be expanded like shown, adding another column, this is repeatable. In this case you will want to put it in the 5th, 6th etc column.

Router not covered, imho needs an extra page.

Last but not least there is the Mecha armor. Crafted from Mecha chassis in the usual orientation for the armor pieces. The armor itself does nothing, except being indestructable. To add effects, you need to modify the blank chassis in a Mecha modder. In there, place the armor in the slot highlighted with M and the upgrades alongside. For example, you can embed armor in the mecha hull, also more than one of a kind, but keep in mind they need to have the same place to be worn (no headpants : and have to be the same tier, so no gold-diamond intermixing, also this is vanilla only.

Now to the interesting part, the actual upgrades. My personal favorite is the shoulder-mounted piston. If configured corectly, you can push blocks around just by walking by, great when portalgun is disabled.

The next one is the buoyancy barrel. If you are drowning, it inflates and propels you right back to the surface.

And at last, the cobble drive. It generates cobble by buttonpush, so you can quickly build your way out of steep shafts.

That about finishes it, be sure to take a look at the Router page.