Mod's review: Industrialcraft

First of all, apologies for the wall of text from the previous entry. Second, apologies again: Industrialcraft cannot be described in detail in a single blog entry (not to mention, Alblaka, the mod's author, already has a blog, and a wiki). So I will just give a fast course about the critical points of the mod, starting with Alblaka's words: Industrialcraft is a second tier mod, meaning you won't get to see all the goodies in a fresh map without a lot of time and effort.

• New resources:

The most important new resource implemented by the mod is Energy (measured in "Energy Units" or EU, usually in a "per second" basis, so you will see a lot of EU/s). You can collect energy from lots of sources (burning stuff like in a furnace, from lava, water, wind, the sun, or nuclear reactors, but my favourite is solar energy, using the burning of stuff as a previous step or as an emergency backup). Energy can be an endless and self-supporting resource, and can allow you to never need to craft a pick, shovel or axe again (so you will save some diamonds), and if you go for renewable energy sources, never waste coal in the furnaces again (you will use it to craft solar panels and artificial diamonds instead).
The other three new resources in the mod are Tin, Copper and Uranium. The first two have independent uses or can be merged into bronze (which will act as Iron, only with more durability in armor, sword and tools, but can be used to craft rails, for example. This is great because Iron will be used for a lot of other stuff), and each uranium ore can be refined in a nuclear reactor (keep those surrounded by water or they will explode) into four uranium bars, and you can use those to craft bigger explosives or provide energy.

• New items:

More than a hundred new items. See the wiki for a detailed description (my only complain here is the absence of a complete recipe guide like the one in the Minecraft Wiki, you will have to look a lot of pages), but the most important are the chainsaw (use it to never need an axe again, it runs on energy), the drill (same as the chainsaw, making obsolete the shovel and the pick, and can be upgraded with three diamonds to make a diamond drill), and an endless string of upgrades for the base, to an extent that you will, most likely, either move to a new location after some time to mount a real base, of demolish entirely your old one to make it again with new mats.

• Buildcraft integration:

Industrialcraft (IC) and Buildcraft (BC) work great together, specially thanks to the automation the latter provides for resource gathering and the automation of an endless cobblestone factory (because Industrialcraft includes a recycling machine, and the recycled stuff can be either used to make a box that will spawn something random or to power another device). The only point where they "fight" is the mining well (BC)/miner (IC): both do the same, yet IC's one is more efficient (instead of a 1x1 hole to the bedrock, it explores a 5x5 shaft, getting only minerals -or liquids if you want-), being its only downside the need for energy instead of a redstone clock, and the need of mining pipes, which are not really cheap to craft (but you can get all back after the drilling).

While I think the mod is extremely great, it can also be extremely frustrating, also because the recipe to make artificial diamods requires obsidian... which requires diamonds to get in the inventory. When I tested the mod for the first time, well, I spent about five hours and never found any diamond. I ended crafting them from "universal matter", a new item you can make with a lot of time and energy (but fortunately it can be done with stuff you can mine with an iron pick). I'll give it an 8/10, and tell you that there is a SMP server with both IC and BC implemented, called Industrial Rage.
The only improvement I would ask for right away would be an automated wood harvesting method, since you will end going out of your mine a lot just to gather wood to be able to keep mining and building stuff. There was a mod that included it, but sadly it has fallen behind, being made for the 1.5 version of Minecraft.