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: Distilled Water
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.

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 Mass Fab
Make a Mass Fabricator.

Task 7.x Molecular Transformer
Molecular Transformer