Age of Engineering Guide: Ages 4-6

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 4: The Farming Age
Age 3 was fast, but we will make up for it here. You may as well make 3 or 4 more of those sturdy castings, as we will use them all.

In addition to all the things you have been mining so far, you will also need blue slime blocks (find a slime island in the sky, and mine the blocks around the lake), and soul sand (from the nether).

Task 4.0: Crusher
I don't think the crusher is strictly necessary, but it is faster than the macerator from IC2 at this point, and it runs off RF, so it's nice to have when you suddenly realize you need to make multiple piles of coal dust.

If you really want speed, make 2 crushers, and then combine them to make a Double Crusher, and hook it directly up to a Powered Furnace from Actually Additions. This makes for a very nice ore processing system.

Task 4.1: Thermal Centrifuge
Please notice that the advanced circuits take Empowered Restonia Crystals and Empowered Palis Crystals, both of which are made with the empowerer. For now, you only need 2 restonia and 4 palis, but eventually you will need many more (of the restonia, especially). You can choose to do the small versions, which use 400,000 - 600,000 Rf, but if you do the large versions (4-8M Rf), then you can save a lot on resources.

The ingredients necessary to make Empowered Restonia:


 * Restonia Crystal or Restonia Crystal Block (full block is recommended)
 * Rose Red (plant a rose bush, and use Fertilizer on it to get lots
 * Ardite Ingot
 * Resonating Crystal
 * Red Garnet

The ingredients necessary to make Empowered Palis:


 * Lapis Lazuli or Lapis Lazuli Block (full block is recommended)
 * Prismarine_Shard (made from reconstructing Nether Quartz
 * Cobalt Ingot
 * Blue Slime Crystal - from Congealed Blue Slime from slime islands
 * Raw Fish - Eventually you'll probably want to making the fishing net from AA. Place it above the water, and a chest above it.  Right now, you probably can't afford the empowered emeraldic crystal, but you'll want to save this idea for later.

Crafting recipes:

The Thermal Centrifuge can be used to get better than a 2x return on processing ore. In addition to making 2 dust from one ore, an additional tiny dust of a different ore type will also be produced. However, it is often questionable whether the extra power is worth it.

For now, the main reason we need this is for producing lithium dust from nether quartz. It is a necessary ingredient for empowered diamatine, which we will use very soon.

The Thermal Centrifuge will continue to draw power when not in use. An EU-Splitter cable can be used to turn off power to it when not in use. Alternatively, you could just make 18 tiny lithium dust, then remove the thermal centrifuge and put it in a chest. It won't be needed again until we get to nuclear power.

Task 4.2: Thermionic Fabricator
The thermionic fabricator is used for making many types of electron tubes. The copper electron tubes are the first we will need, as they are necessary for making any capacitors from EnderIO.

Once you have this made, you can test it by making copper electron tubes. JEI lists several recipes, but only the ones that contain Thickened Glass and Redstone Ingot are usable. You will need to make Clear Glass from Enriched Sand also, and place it in the top left slot. It will be used up at a very slow rate.

The thermionic fabricator will continue to draw power even when not in use. Unlike the thermal centrifuge from IC2, though, you can turn it off with just a vanilla Lever.

Task 4.3: Algorithm Separator
For this task, you will need to make 6 power cubes, but that's not the hard part. The worst part is the Empowered Diamatine Crystal.

To make the Empowered Diamatine Crystal, you will need to use 2M Rf in the Empowerer, and provide the following ingredients:


 * Benitoite (mined from lowest or highest areas of the nether)
 * Fertilizer (made from sand and Apatite)
 * Lithium Powder (made in the Thermal Centrifuge)
 * Ash (from putting peat in a furnace)

There is a larger version that will save on resources, but the Rf cost is pretty high (20M). Eventually, you will want to only use the block version, but for now, it may make sense to just make the single version.

If you do want to make the block version now, you could expand your waterwheels to 2 (or 4), chunk load your base (with FTB Utils), and then go mining while you let it work. Or, you could build a few Coal Generators from Actually Additions, and then use them for an extra burst of power.

Once you get the empowered diamatine crystal, it is time to make the algorithm separator:

Immediately, you can use the algorithm separator for making redstone ingots for a much lower cost than before. More importantly, you will soon be using it to make Weakened Diamond, which is necessary for many age 5 tasks.

Task 4.4: Carpenter
Strictly speaking, you can get by with 1 of these, but I highly recommend making 2 now:

One can be hooked up to infinite water (once you get it), and be used for making conduit binder, and the other should be placed near a squeezer. The squeezer's main task will be to turn 100 seeds (almost any kind) into 1 bucket of seed oil, which will then be used in the carpenter. In addition to seed oil's normal use (Impregnated Stick and Impregnated Casing), it is also needed for a Machine Chassis, the base of all EnderIO machines.

Task 4.5: Squeezer
Throw extra seeds that you have (regular seeds or canola seeds) into the squeezer.

You will need 100 seeds to make 1000mb of seed oil, so if you are stuck, jump ahead and make the garden cloche from age 5. You won't be able to automate it entirely (because of the need for water), but it will work pretty well without automation. The greenhouse from calculator is also great at automating seeds, and can be used if you don't want to wait for the garden cloche.

Task 4.6: Machine Chassis
This will complete the age:

Take a bucket of seed oil, and put it into the UI for the carpenter. Make a recipe by dragging the items for the recipe to the crafting grid in the top left. Then place the resources for the carpenter to use in the large area in the lower part of the UI, and watch it work.

Drop the item and pick it up to trigger age 5.

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.

Another option for Emeralds is to mine for them in extreme hills or extreme hills+ biomes. Emeralds are found there in the same y-levels as diamonds (strip mining at y=11 is the best for me).

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.

The first task is the alloy smelter, because it is needed for many of the other tasks. After that, the order that you follow is kind of up to you. There will be a few steps that you can't 100% complete in the order that I give, for example, 5.1 is the conduits, but one type of conduit (redstone) isn't available until after you have made a Forestry centrifuge, which is listed later.

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.

Task 5.1: 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. Creating them is very slow, so it is worth starting it now. They also take a lot of power, so for now, we are going to do the first step. Even if it can't be run 100% of the time, running it a little will make a bit of stone dust, which is very useful for making conduits.

First, make some weakened diamonds using your algorithm separator, and then use those to 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, and this seems to happen if you power it with connectors from Immersive engineering. 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). Alternative, I believe an Energy Laser Relay can work well for powering calculator machines.

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.

In addition to running cobblestone through your extraction chamber, you'll also want to run dirt through it to make dirty circuits. You could do cobblestone now, then switch to dirt later. Eventually, you'll probably want to make 2 extraction chambers, and dedicate one to cobblestone and one to dirt. The outputs of these machines do not stack, so I'd recommend making a separate crate for storage from each extraction chamber. Eventually you'll get machines that can clean your circuits, and at that point, they can be easily stored in a drawer array.

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

Task 5.2: 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.

If you have an alloy furnace and conduit binder, you should be able to make 3 types of conduits. The 4th below (Redstone conduits) will also require a [Centrifuge (Forestry)] to make the silicon for the redstone alloy.

The energy conduits require ender pearls. If you don't have a good way to farm these yet, then don't worry about 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 5.3: 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.

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.

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

Reservoir
If you have played a lot of 1.12 packs, you probably know this item as an "Endervoir", but in 1.10, it is still called a "Reservoir".

The garden cloche can be built in age 4, but I have it here primarily because the easiest way to generate water for it is a reservoir, which requires an alloy smelter. It's not a bad idea to build the garden cloche in age 4, but you will need to restock the water for it manually.

The garden cloche is also useful for your carpenter. If you made 2 carpenters, you can have one filled with water constantly from your reservoir, and use the other for anything else (eg. seed oil).

Place the 4 reservoir blocks in a 2x2 grid (can be vertical if you wish), 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.

Garden Cloche assembly
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 5.4: 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. For the staff of traveling, you'll need to jump forward to task 5.12 to make the soul binder if you want to make it now.

These are a huge quality of life improvement, so I recommend doing it, even if the recipes look a bit expensive. Travel anchors that are placed vertically can be used like elevators. The staff of traveling can be used to jump to any travel anchor, over a very large distance, for just a small amount of power.

A capacitor bank from Ender IO can be used for charging your staff. Better yet, a battery from actually additions held in your inventory can recharge your staff as you use it, and it can be recharged in a capacitor bank. There is an upcoming task for these items.

Task 5.5: 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 three metal press templates that we will want: Gears, plates, and wires. So, if you have the space in your factory, you may want to just make 3.

Construction
The Metal Press is relatively simple to make. It uses:
 * 2 s
 * 1
 * 1
 * 1
 * 2 s

The orientation the Conveyor Belts are in is important; one should be facing into the Piston and one should be pointed the opposite way, away from the Piston. The orientation of Piston also matters; it should be facing down, as if it is to push the Redstone Engineering Block.

After it is fully arranged, shift right-click the left or right side of the Piston with an Engineer's Hammer to complete the multiblock.



Canola press and fermenting barrels
We are going to begin to need a lot more power now, so it's time to get the canola presses going. Make either 1 or 2 canola presses. Then for each press you made, also build 3 fermenting barrels (cheap), and 3 oil generators (not cheap):

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.

Make a storage drawer with a void upgrade, and put canola seeds in it. Then use item conduits to send the output from your garden cloche (or other farming system) to the drawer and also to your canola presses. The presses will not accept seeds, so no filters are needed.

I believe that the canola press will automatically push oil to any adjacent barrels, but I find it easier to use pressurized fluid conduits to connect the presses to the fermenting barrels. It isn't necessary to tell the conduits where to insert and extract, since the press will push automatically once a route exists to the barrels.

Oil Generator
Use pressurized conduits again from the fermenting barrels to the oil generators. Connect the generators with energy conduits, and then connect them to a vibrant capacitor (if you have one already, or to your immmersive engineering capacitor.

Crystallized and Empowered upgrades to oil
The amount of RF from a bucket of Oil is 120. You can increase this to 280 by crystallizing the oil. To do this, place the oil in world, drop in a crystallized canola seed, and then pick the Crystallized Oil back up.

The amount of RF can be increased again to 400 by placing crystalized oil in the world, dropping an empowered canola seed in, and picking it up. This makes Empowered Oil.

In age 5, I don't need more power than I can make with plain oil in 6 oil generators, but if you want to set up the crystalized or the empowered oil now, there's no reason you can't. If you decide not to do this now, then bookmark it, and come back later when you do need more power.

You'll need the following dedicated components:


 * Atomic Reconstructer (converts canola seeds to crystalized version)
 * Automatic Precision Dropper (3)
 * Fluid placers (2)
 * Fluid collectors (2)
 * Redstone conduits
 * Scanner (4)
 * Empowerer and 4 display stands

Of those components, really the dedicated empowerer is the only expensive part. But setting it all up can be a bit of a nightmare. I'd recommend watching Direwolf set it up if you haven't made this setup before. In that episode he only sets up the first part. The later part (with the empowerer) is in episode 25.

Task 5.7: Other optional power sources
The quest book lists a number of other options for RF, and they may be decent choices if you don't want to pursue Canola:


 * Ethanol


 * Solar Panel Mk 3 (produces 32 RF/tick)


 * Solar generator multiblock from Environmental Tech

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 5.9: Centrifuge (Forestry)
This is fairly simple to make, and you'll need it to make silicon from silicon dioxide:

Task 5.10: 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.

Either recipe will work, but I usually find the first one to be easier, because it contains less single capacitors.

The 64 empowered restonia is the big cost of this process. I recommend automating your empowered with simple hoppers, and then letting it transform 8 restonia blocks while you go mining. It will take quite a bit of power.

For the electrical steel, you will need to make silicon, using the Forestry centrifuge.

Task 5.11: 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 5.12: Mob spawners (optional)
Going to The End and taking The Ender is a good way to get enderman heads and enderpearls, but sometimes you want your own spawner at home. I ended up making two rooms for powered spawners in my base. One was used for enderman, and the other for blazes.

Slice'N'Splice
The Slice'N'Splice is needed for making Z-Logic controllers, which are important for making some of the EnderIO filters, and also for making things such as powered spawners:

Soul Binder
If you have found any dungeons or mineshafts, and broken the spawners and saved the scraps, 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.

Even if you decide to skip making a powered spawner, you should still make the soul binder. You'll need it for prescient crystals, for stuff like the Staff of Traveling.

Next, make a Soul Vial and click it on the enemy whose soul you wish to capture. Take a brokne spawner and the filled soul vial, and place them in the soul binder to change the spawn type.

Next make a Powered Spawner:

Finally, place the broken spawner and the powered spawner together in a vanilla anvil to get a powered spawner of the type you want. Hook it up to power, and you have the most important part of a mob farm!

Task 5.13: New mining bags
Traveler's Sack - nice but not necessary

Void Sack - Mandatory (In my opinion)

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!

You can also make a Bag of Holding, but if you are playing on a server, beware that it is very buggy in 1.10. It will often void your items, so don't use it to hold things you don't want to lose.

Task 5.14: 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 5.15: The End
Make some eye of enders, find the stronghold, and travel to the end. Defeat the dragon, then explore the islands and end cities. Things you want to get:


 * Elytra (necessary for all flight-related recipes in this pack)
 * End rods (for making machine frames)
 * Chorus fruit flowers (optional, only needed if you want to have unlimited end rods)
 * Dragon's Breath
 * Iridium shards from end city chests

Regarding iridium shards:

Once you have 9 shards, you can make make the pattern storage needed to get from age 6 to age 7.

Once you have 36 shards and you are in age 7, you can make the 4 iridium ore necessary to build the molecular transformer. The molecular transformer can easily make more iridium from iron.

Before going to the end, you may already have some shards from dungeons and mineshafts in the overworld and from nether fortresses. If you don't have many, then it is imperative that you get them now while you are in the end.

Ideally you would like to have 45, so that you can afford both the pattern storage and the molecular transformer. But, you can get by with just 9, if necessary. The pattern storage (plus scanner, mass fab, and replicator) can generate the other 36, but it is a bit expensive. I usually find 18-27 total in chests, and then replicate the rest to get to 45, but it is up to you how to do it.

Task 5.16: The Vat
This will be needed later for rocket fuel and Dew of the Void, but for now its main purpose will be to make nutrient distillation:

Mob Farm with Killer Joe
If you decided to skip the powered spawner earlier, it may be worth making a standard mob farm now using Cursed Earth.

In either case, you can also now makee a Killer Joe. It is basically a device that kills enemy mobs very efficiently. It doesn't require power to run, but does require Nutrient Distillation.

EnderIO Inventory System
We can't make a full AE2 system yet. In age 6, we can make a storage scanner (from RFTools). But if you want something now, or if you dislike the RFTools solutions, then it is time to make an Inventory Panel from EnderIO.

You'll need the Inventory Panel from Ender IO. It can hold 2 buckets of Nutrient Distillation, and will operate for a long time without needing a refill.

Make some item conduits, and connect the inventory panel to your storage crates or drawer controller. You'll need to install a Remote Awareness Upgrade for each connection to an external storage device.

Task 5.18 Machine Frame
The Machine Frame (RFTools) will be needed for nearly everything in age 6. This is the last thing you need to get to age 6 also.

''NOTE: There seems to be a bug with the carpenter from forestry. If you can't get the recipe to work, or can't get it to accept Nutrient Distillation, then break the block and place it again.''

Here is the recipe:

Age 6: The Automation Age
Theoretically, you could build the Pattern Storage immediately and jump to age 7. But it wouldn't be much use without a mass fabricator to generate UU matter or the energy infrastructure to back it up.

Since age 6 is called the automation age, it makes sense to set up things that require a lot of waiting now. Our goal here is to begin work on 4 major items: IC2 nuclear fuel processing (to plutonium), circuit processing (calculator), Forestry bees, and ore mining (Environmental Tech).

Hazmat suit
Handling uranium requires a 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.

Uranium processing
I would recommend making a new line of IC2 machines for processing nuclear fuels. You'll use it now to turn uranium ore into Enriched Uranium Nuclear Fuel, and use it later to reprocess your spent nuclear rods.

You will need to make 4 machines:


 * Macerator
 * Ore Washer
 * Thermal Centrifuge
 * Fluid/Solid Canning Machine.

The ore washer must be connected to a water supply. It doesn't need to be fast, so you can split it off a reservoir that you are already using.

The ore washer produces products that can go to the thermal centrifuge, and other byproducts that can't. Just place a chest to capture these, and connect them both with your item conduits. Just give the chest a lower priority and the thermal centrifuge a higher priority.

After the Thermal Centrifuge, you will need to use a crafting grid to get the enriched uranium:

Next, you will place iron plates in a metal former to get empty fuel rods, and then fill them with enriched uranium in your canner:

Task 6.2: nuclear reactors


If you want to design your own reactor, you'll need 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.

If you don't want to design your own reactor, don't worry, I've picked out 2 great choices, one that uses the smallest reactor possible (no additional chambers, and one that uses the largest possible (6 additional chambers).

The hash for the small (100 EU) reactor is 21p0axsp4l073uhxj0vluhyyum4k6qvj0sqr867wl4ylcn4qdoix3yd83b78y8enonfoolys5g23280. The reactor can process 6 uranium at a time. That hash can be used in either tool. In order to build it, look at the images on the right. The full part list is there. Build one Nuclear Reactor and all the components listed in the screenshot.

Place the reactor in the world, and place a lever on it. If you wish, you build a barricade around it using Reinforced Glass, 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.

Place all the components inside. As long as you haven't turned on the lever, it won't run, so you can move things around safely at this point. You want to place the components exactly as shown in the screenshot.

After turning it on, immediately open the UI again, 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. If things are running correctly, a few components will show a small amount of damage in their damage bar, and others will appear undamaged. If things are not working right, you'll see the damage bars decrease past 25%. If this happens, quickly exit the UI and turn it off.

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.

The second reactor design will process 28 uranium at a time (instead of 6), and produce 420 EU per tick (instead of 100). Considering the cost of components to the rate of uranium processed, it is more efficient than the small design, but the small design is still decent.

When the reactors are done, *Do Not* throw away the depleted uranium. Right now, depleted uranium is our main objective, and generating EU is secondary. Depleted uranium needs to be processed in a centrifuge to create Plutonium, and Pt is further processed to make RTG pellets. RTG pellets are needed for all endgame power generation methods, and we would like to start these in age 7, so that is your main goat in age 6.

As far as what to do with the power that is generated, you'll want to use it to make UU matter (see task 6.4).

Task 6.3: IC 2 Overclocker upgrades
Distilled Water isn't necessary for making Overclocker Upgrades 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.

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 small nuclear reactor that you built in the last step should be exactly enough to keep it going (handy, huh?). If you don't have a nuclear reactor, you can get by with lesser power, as long as you have a MFE (or MFSU) to store a lot of power.

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.

Condensor
Next to the Boiler, attach a Condenser. 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.

If you don't use a heat vent, then you won't be able to use the steam as fast as you create it. The result will be lots of explosion sounds and visual effects. Even though these sounds are disturbing, I don't think they will destroy any blocks. But they would hurt to walk through.

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

The fluid tank will output a redstone signal for how full it is. Unfortunately, the electric heater cannot be toggled with redstone, so you will need to make an Eu-splitter cable and place it inline to the power for the electric heater. If you want to automate turning the heater on and off, take the redstone output from the tank, compare it with a comparator, and send the result to the eu-splitter cable.

Overclocker upgrades
Now that you can make distilled water, make a Fluid/Solid Canning Machine. There is a button near the center of the UI that lets you change between 4 different mods. You'll need to toggle it to the last mode (fluid enrich).

Pipe water or distilled water into the canner (you can't add water through the UI), place lapis dust in the center slot, and empty universal cells in the left slot. You will get coolant out on the right side.

Use the coolant to make overclocker upgrades. You may use them to speed up your previous IC2 machines. You will need a lot of these very soon for your recyclers.

Task 6.4: Recyclers and Mass fabricator
First, make a Mass Fabricator:

Note: It is very important to realize this device can only accept tier 3 (HV) power! If it is given EV power, it will make a very large explosion! You will want to give it EV power, since 512 EU/tick is not enough for your needs, so you will need a transformer upgrade once you are ready to feed it EV power.

The mass fabricator can start converting your EU to UU matter immediately, so you can hook it up now. But, it will do this a lot more efficiently (8x I believe) when also processing scrap.

To start making scrap, you'll need 2 (or more) recyclers, with approximately 6 overclocker upgrades each:

Use item conduits to take their output and send it to the matter fabricator. To feed the recyclers, I recommend making 2 emerald level Cobblestone Generators:

Once you have this set up, you should be sending the majority of you EU to it.

A mass fab with no transformer upgrades will explode (violently) if it receives any EU packets that are more than 512 EU. But, it can receive an unlimited number of packets. So, you could have 100 nuclear generators, each producing 420 eu/t, and sending all the power to the mass fab, and it will not explode! But, if you sent all power from multiple reactors to an MFE, and then went to the mass fab, you would be restricted to only 512 EU/t, because the MFE will never emit more than one packet per tick.

My favorite way to handle energy at this point is to make an MFSU or MFE that holds all the power for my main operations line. Set it to emit a redstone signal when empty or partially full. Place a single redstone dust on the ground next to it, and then have a redstone conduit connect to that dust.

Next, make an EU splitter cable. Take the power output from one nuclear reactor, and split it into 2 lines. One line should go straight to your MFE, and the other should go through the EU splitter to your recyclers and mass fab. Connect the redstone conduit to the splitter. Now, when the MFE wants power, it will disable the power going to your mass fab, ensuring that the MFE will fill as fast as possible.

Sometimes I've found this buggy. When a splitter gets a redstone signal, it is clearly supposed to split the cable network into two separate cable networks, but those two cable networks should continue to operate normally. I've seen a bug where it will also disable the cable network that goes to my MFE. When this happens, it seems that a block update may fix it. What I have done is place another splitter on the line to the MFE and place a button on it. If the bug occurs (and the MFE stops getting power), I use the button to disrupt the line (just for a second), and after it reconnects, power can flow again.

Task 6.5: Restoration Chamber, Reassembly Chamber
Build a Reassembly Chamber for processing your damaged circuits. If you are making dirty circuits also, then make a Restoration Chamber as well.

After the circuits have been cleaned/reassembled, they need to be analyzed. Make an Analysing Chamber. Unlike the other two chambers, this one does not need power. In fact, it somehow generates power when used!

For most blocks from calculator, the green side is "input" and the red is "output". For the analyzing chamber, the red side outputs the trash items that are produced by it. A few may be useful, so you can send it to a storage crate and clean it out occasionally, or you can just put a void upgrade in the chamber so it doesn't produce these.

The green sides ("input") are for circuits, both input and output. So, if you are using conduits to automate this, have a conduit on a green side that is set to both input and output. The output from the green side will take your analyzed circuits, and store them. I highly recommend sending them to a Drawer Controller with an array of 28 drawers.

You actually can't make the drawer controller until you have processed a few blue circuits first. Start with them, then use them to make the forestry circuit that you need for the drawer controller.

Note that analyzed circuits still do not stack. Or, you could say that they stack in sizes of 1 per stack. Fortunately, a default drawer can hold 16 stacks, so it can hold 16 circuits. It's not great, but it's far better than any other options.

Task 6.6: 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 6.7: Stoneburnt
There's a lot of nice stuff from ExUtil2 that needs grid power, so it is possible you've already dipped into it. If not, then this is a good place to start.

Start off by making 9 solar panels, and placing them anywhere that is chunk loaded. They do not need to be connected with wires or conduit:

Make a Resonator and place it:

Now, make a stack of Polished Stone and place it inside. It will slowly be turned to Stoneburnt.

If you wish to speed things up, use a bit of stoneburnt to make any other mill from the mod (water mills tend to be the easiest) and set them up as shown in the guide book. Once you have enough grid power, you can afford to put speed upgrades in your resonator.

Task 6.8: Tier 1 (or 2) void ore miner (optional)
It is time to get started in Environmental Tech!

Silk Touch
If you don't already have a silk touch tool, then you'll need to make one. Make a pickaxe from Tinkers (obsidian will do), and make a Silky Jewel. Apply it in the tool forge. Use this silk touch pick to get 3 diamond ore and 3 nether quartz ore. Also, save 3 iron ore.

Make 3 tier 1 void ore miners, then combine them to make a single tier 2 void ore miner.

Diagram and component list in the wiki
Take a look at the page on the Void Ore Miner. That page is currently based on the 1.12 version, and I imagine that soon it will be updated to the 1.16 version, but it is still useful for us.

Just know that what the wiki shows as a Structure Panel will be a "Machine Base" in 1.10. And, what the wiki shows for Structure Frame will be called a "Structure Block" in version 1.10. The Null Modifier in the wiki is called a "Base Modifier" in v1.10

Despite these differences, the multiblock shapes have not changed, and the list of components for each tier in the wiki is still useful.

It is highly recommended to make an extra tier 2 structure block, and then use it to make the Assembler [(Environmental Tech). This wand-type device is extremely handy. Place a controller block in the world, then hold right click with the wand on the controller, and all the components for building the multiblock will be pulled from your inventory and placed in world for you.

Expensive ingredients
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 and approximately 4 stacks of gold ingots. It may take significant time to get everything you need.

If you looked at the recipes for the machine base, you'll see that you need a lot of triple compressed cobblestone. Each one of these is crafted from 729 cobblestone. It is time to automate some crafting.

Option 1: RF Tools

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.

Option 2: Extra Utilities

Build 3 Mechanical Crafters. Once you place them in the world, they will indicate "0 Crystal Flux", but that's ok. They don't actually consume any CF. Place them in the world, and connect them with item conduits to your cobblestone generator, and use filters in the conduits to pull from one to the next. Unlike the 1.12 versions, these use a common area for input and output, so you will need the filters.

Setting it up and using it
For the lens, you can use a clear lens if you want, but I recommend making either a green lens (for uranium) or cyan lens (for diamond), and using them at the beginning.

Place the controller in the world where you want it. Put the rest of the blocks for the multiblock in your inventory and hold the assembler in your hand. Right click (and hold) on the controller, and the assembler will build the multiblock for you.

Connect power to the controller on any side, and place a chest of any kind on any side. The controller will auto push its results to the chest.

The main thing to know about 1.10 environmental tech (if you are used to the 1.12 version) is that you can skip tier 1. Also, Litherite / Erodium / etc. do not even exist in 1.10, so you don't need to worry about farming them! Mica, however, does exist, and you will need it for anything that is tier 3 or higher, so you will need to farm it as soon as you can get a resource miner going.

Mica is also required for advancing to age 8, so if you decide to skip this step for now, you will need to come back to it eventually.

You'll want to make both the ore miner and the resource miner eventually. In 1.10, there is no botanical miner, so you don't need to worry about that. I've found the gold cost to be too high for me to build both in age 6, so I usually build just the ore miner now, and then transform it later in age 7 into a resource miner.

If you wish, you can also build the solar arrays from EnvironmentalTech, but I find them too expensive in this pack. Canola oil should hold you over until you have Plutonium, at which point you can get into Advanced Generators.

Task 6.9: Pattern Storage
Get 10 Silicon dioxide, and use them to make 2 Crystal Storage from IC2.

Make 16 blocks of Iron Scaffolding and make a wall with them.

Make a CF Sprayer and 4 CF Powder.

Find a canning machine that can be used. If you want to move liquid out of a canning machine temporarily, you can put an enderIO tank next to it, and use the UI to have it pull from the canning machine. Now click the button on the canning machine to switch tanks (if necessary), since the enderIO tank can only pull from the canning machine's output tank.

Once it is free, use another enderIO tank to put 4 buckets of water in the canning machine. Change it to the "fluid enrich" mode, and add the CF powder. You will get Construction Foam.

Hit the "switch tanks" button to move the foam from the output tank to the input tank, and use the operation button to change it to "fill tank". Place the empty sprayer in the top left slot. It will fill, and you can pull it out from the top right.

If you do not wish to use the canning machine, you can possibly just throw CF Powder into a water source block in the world to make construction foam, then draw it out with the sprayer. I have not tested this, but I hear that it works.

Now, use the CF Sprayer to spray your wall of iron scaffolding. Wait about 10 minutes and come back, and many of the blocks will have changed into hardened stone (IC2). If you don't want to wait, just right click them each with sand, and they will instantly transform (the sand is lost). Harvest them with a pickaxe.

The hardened stone can now be used to protect against explosions, but for now, you'll need 3 to make the pattern storage. I don't recommend using it, however, since fused quartz from EnderIO is 3x as effective as hardened stone, and is easier to make. Save the extra hardened stone for later, it is used in some age 8 crafting recipes.

Make one Pattern Storage to advance to the next age.

Guide navigation
You can continue reading this guide by going on to the next part:

Age of Engineering Guide: Ages 7-9