Getting Started (Factorization)

This is a community-written guide. It was written to help players to get accustomed to Factorization in versions prior to Minecraft 1.6.

Factorization for Newbies
Factorization 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 first off, what does this mod add?

 * Barrels which store lots of a single type of item
 * Complex system for significantly boosting your ore generation, up to triple output 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

The Basics: Barrels and Pocket Crafting Tables
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

Here are a couple of entry-level things you can find in this mod that you can get started on right away. However, their utility 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, especially 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? It can be manipulated by using hotkeys:
 * "C" opens the crafting grid interface and can drag and rotate the grid's orientation.
 * "B" balances stacks placed on the grid.
 * "X" clears the crafting grid.

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 it's 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 Cobblestone/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. They can also be stacked up next to each other like Iron Chests, 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 Paper.

The CraftPacket Stamper lets you take a Craftpacket and make the actual item itself. In theory, it's 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 and 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 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, the 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, it can be made with two piles of Gunpowder, some Coal, and a Water Bottle in your crafting square. However, if you manage to find a source of Sulfur (for example, if you were pulverizing the right stuff with Thermal Expansion), you can use that instead of Gunpowder. Now, surround the acid with four Lead Ingots and four Iron Ingots to get a Battery Block. Fortunately, it starts off fully charged, because we’re going to need to make some Magnets.

To do that, we need some Lead Wire. Three Lead Ingots make 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 Block is returned but partially discharged. That’s handy.

Next, we need to make some Insulated Coils. One Clay pile surrounded by eight Lead Ingots. We’re going to need four of them for a Motor.

Using the Magnet we made, two Iron Ingots, four Insulated Coils, and two more Lead Ingots, we now have a Motor. All we need is some way to run it. For that, we need a solar boiler.

Seven Iron Ingots and some Iron Bars makes a Solar Boiler. Place the Bars on top and a case out of iron around it and there you go.

On top of the Boiler you need the Steam Turbine. Put the motor at the bottom and put a lead ingot to each side. in the middle the Pressurizer, made out of 4 Iron Ingots and a Weighted Pressure Plate, next to it a solar panel on each side. Place some Iron Bars at the top with an Iron Ingot on both sides.

Now, your Steam Turbine won’t do anything by itself. It’s going to need Water and mirrors to focus more sunlight onto it to boil the water inside the boiler to make steam 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 Steam Turbine on top, and you’re done. For the rest, you need mirrors. LOTS of mirrors.

Eight Silver Ingots 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're out of line of sight. They’re very sensitive; any transparent block, even tall Grass, can block line of sight, 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 Furance Heater which can power a furnace, instead of needing Coal. You’ll need six of those Insulated Coils, and another couple of Lead Ingots. 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 run with your new heater.

Now then, you’ll need four TNT, four Obsidian, and a Block of Diamond. 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 them 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 Steam 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. To make a Grinder we're going to need some Lead and Iron Ingots, and for the Mixer, we'll need a Pressurizer, Water Buckets, a Cauldron, and some Lead Ingots.

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 an empty Bucket. Throw the clean ore gravel in your Slag Furnace, and you’ll get Reduced Chunks of that metal.

At this point, you can smelt your Reduced Chunks in a Furnace 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 Furnace Heater for this thing to function properly. You can process up to five stacks at a time, but it will take 20 minutes for the dang thing to finish off, so processing the maximum amount at a time is strongly recommended. 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 have access to Nether Bricks, it might be time to get your Wrath on. Specifically, a Wrath Igniter. It functions like your standard Flint and Steel, but instead of making fire, it makes Wrathfire, which is a whole different beastie.

Igniting Blocks of Iron will make Blocks of Dark Iron. But watch out, when the Wrathfire burns down, it makes a bunch of regular fire.

Beware of Obsidian, as well; Wrathfire will melt it back into Lava.

For a more sustained Wrathfire, you’ll need to build a Wrath Forge out of Nether Brick Blocks. Make a 3×3 base out of Nether Brick blocks, and for the next layer, build it out of Nether Brick blocks but leave two spaces… one for the block you are cooking and one for the Wrathfire. Finally, cap it with more Nether Brick blocks. Light the center block, and you should have 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 including an amazing 30 blocks down. It can be crafted with 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 at the expense of 1 durability point.

The other thing you can build is the Item Router. It is a 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're 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 (Factorization). It’s a rather clunky mechanic compared to several other mods which have more useful means of portable storage devices. 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. 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.

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 correctly, 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 Cobblestone Drive. It generates Cobblestone every 2 seconds, 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.

Credits

 * This guide was originally created by ShneekeyTheLost. It has been adopted by this wiki.