Industrialcraft 2: Energy storage & movemet tutorial

Well, somebody asked for it, so here it is, a 20 minutes or so video about Industrialcraft 2 covering wiring, energy storage blocks, and transformers. Remember the wiki is here, and have fun!

Advanced Machines for MC 1.10 released!

You can get it in its forum page here. However, IT IS A BETA, still buggy. Install at your own risk, and HAVE BACKUPS of your game.

Also, Equivalent Exchange has been updated to EE2. While X3n0 states that everything should be ok, I'll try to update my version and tell you if I can't (backups, I love you xD).
EDIT: IMPORTANT Before updating to EEv2, empty your Alchemy Bags, or you will loose its content!.

Another thing, a sub-mod for Portalgun mod: The Portal 2 gels!

Finally, Railcraft 3.3.0 has been released. It works with MCForge 1.3.1+, but NOT with 1.3.2.0 (1.3.2.1 works fine).

Advanced Machines new stuff (IC2 mod)

Hey, how are you doing? Yesterday I downloaded an updated copy of the Advanced Machines mod for Industrialcraft 2 (the one that adds the equivalent to the induction furnace machine to the macerator, extractor and compressor) and found that there were four new items. Three of them are craftable, and those are "Advanced solar panels".

Now, before you scream "Overpowered!", let me say you something: each one of these new items requires 8 solar panels of the previous echelon, plus a voltage adapter, so in the end you are changing space for adapters (the most powerful panel, the HV Advanced Solar Panel, requires 512 solar panels, and one LV, one MV and one HV adapter to be crafted. And it takes a single block of space and produces 512 EU/s). See the video :)

Mods updated

Ok, first goes first: Industrialcraft 2 has been ported to Minecraft 1.0. However, expect it to have bugs & problems, since it is a direct port. Also, for those of you playing SMP, this port has tons of problems (including a messed GUI crossing with the new alchemical block used to turn water-filled bottles into awesome stuff). There has been no new additions from the 1.337 version, and regarding Enchantment of IC2 items, it will be blocked (there is a function in the MCforge code that allows that).

The second thing, while Zeldo's Additional Pipes (also called Zeldo's Teleporting Pipes) have not been updated officially, he has given permission for a new guy to release a ported version for BC 2.2.7 on Minecraft 1.0, until Zeldo releases an updated version himself. You can find this updated version here.

Also, about Millenaire and some bugs: rest easy guys, I tracked the error and solved the situation. It was simply some sort of code oversight somewhere so when the ID resolver changed Millenaire's blocks IDs there were problems with the upgrade of the civilizations with custom blocks. Deleting the config file of the ID resolver and raising the priority of Millenaire to 1 solved the issue, and fortunately it only costed me a crowbar from Railcraft, all the mineral for Forestry, and some minor stuff. And I will be testing IC2 tomorrow, but I bet I will be forced to remove one mod to make room for Alblaka's work. Most likely I would remove Forestry (and increase the size of the cactus farm).

Stay tuned, and remember to backup your game before adding/upgrading anything!

Industrialcraft 1.3.37

 Edit: Solar panels working, but one of the recipes for the electric furnace is broken (confirmed as bug), to be specific the one using an iron furnace with a piece of refined iron and a RE battery.

Ok, alblaka released the latest version of IC2 a few hours ago. It took me about two hours to make the video, so you might have already seen some of the details in other channels, but here it is.

With more than 70 changes, this update still is for Minecraft Beta 1.8.1, but I advice against taking it for the time being. Essentially, the Solar Panels don't work. Also, Alblaka has promised a hot hotfix in a few hours, so have some patiente.

Grab the mod at his blog as always, and rest assured that he and Eloraam had a talk about the overlapping parts between IC2 and RP2 with a satisfactory conclussion for everybody (essentially, she included some parts of BC2 and IC2 in her mod because those are needed parts for her future projects, and were quite hard not to "copy": you can't make something that moves items like a pipe does without using a pipe, or making some electrical gizmos wihtout electricity).

Also, sorry for the video being as a link instead the usual, but the video it's actually uploading, it would need another 20 minutes and it's already 1 AM here (and tomorrow is monday...). Not to mention I spent about 7-8 hours with some friends cleaning and rearranging two rooms of our club, so they can be -somehow- used despite the unfinished job made by the workers that remodeled the place.
Let's leave it with the name of "The third Fungus battle in the epic war of The Forge against the evolution of things better left unmentioned". Yeah, the club's name is "La Forja", The Forge in english.

Finally, as a little "self ad" (even considering most of you live in USA), if any of you happen to be in northern Spain these next 8, 9, 10 & 11 of december, please consider to come to the Public School Teodoro Cuesta, in Mieres (Asturias), for the RPG Convention we will be holding.
Or the next weekend (17 and 18), in Oviedo, in the Calatrava shopping center there will be an anime-related "party", with cosplay, para-para, and other stuff.

See ya!

Updating the production lines

As promised, here you have it. a short video about two factory lines: one to produce diamonds and the other to produce lava.

Weird dreams, great ideas

Ok, sorry for the quick update, byproduct of a random mind in a hellish speed thanks to too many hours toying with Minecraft...

Anyway, I was making automatic factories in my new base, in a new world, and enjoying the speed you can build stuff with Equivalent Exchange installed (the destruction catalyst allows me to make a room in the mountain quite quickly ^^), when I realized something (two somethings, actually... One being that I need the rotary macerator from the IC2 Advanced Machines' addon XD). That something was that a solar power station is not enough to cover my hunger for energy, so nuclear power should be harnessed! However, Mark 1 and Mark 2 reactors are too bad at producing energy at the levels I want it, so... I want to make a Mk III. And that means a reactor that needs babysitting... theoretically.

Let's have a look at a screenshot I made with a small circuit as a proof of concept, shall we?

You can expand the image, by the way XD.

I'm using Redpower 2 here, the parts that didn't changed much (if at all) from 1.7.3. You can see a big, glowing block, that is a placeholder for the nuclear reactor. The rest? Two clocks, a toggle latch and a counter.
The idea behind the contraption is to make a clock that will activate and then deactivate something for a given amount of time, once every X time. In the screen:

• Clock connected to green cable ("long Clock"): this marks the time between activations, for example once every 30 seconds it will tick.
• Counter connected to a clock, a green cable and a white cable: the counter is connected by the substraction side (set at "2") to the long clock using the green cable, this acts as resetting. The white cable blocks the short clock from ticking (unless the counter is "reset"), and the adding part is directly connected to the short clock (maximun count: "2").
• Clock connected to counter and white cables ("short Clock"): This one activates and deactivates the target device by moving the setting of the toggle latch twice.
• Toggle Latch: this keeps the device on/off.

How does this works?

It's simple, really, if you have trouble understanding this is because I'm bad at explanations (I always got blamed for the missing cookies...). First, the long clock ticks, moving the counter's powered side and thus liberating the short clock. Then the short clock does one cycle and ticks, moving the Toggle Latch's powered side, which in this situation will stop sending redstone current (and allowing the nuclear reactor to start producing power for a full cycle of the short clock); the second tick of the short clock will take the counter to a position where it blocks the short clock from ticking, and at the same time it changes again the Toggle Latch, returning everything to the starting position.

Option two: I found this on the official Industrialcraft 2 forums here.

Obviously, I am NOT the author of this one, and it has a really clean and streamlined distribution (also, I have tested it and it works). The way it is settled, the upper clock is sets the time the reactor will be "on", and the lower clock will set the time it is "cooling down".

I also found an interesting java app that allows to test the time of your reactor's disposition. Again, in the official forums of IC2, in this thread, but you can go directly from here (I'll add soon a link in the sidebar).

My next project will be an attempt to exploit Equivalent Exchange capabilities to allow for an endless (and safe) BC2's Combustion engines power plant.

Ah, on a sidenote, I published a video a few days ago with how to make IC2's solar plants now that you don't need to use the solar flower disposition. Here you have it for reference.

See ya!

IndustrialCraft 2 v1.22

So here we are, a new version of IC2, and I'll try it out ASAP. You can get it in Alblaka's forum. Remember to update Minecraft Forge too.

EDIT: now there's version 1.23 out, with some fixes (apparently the miner was not mining redstone ore or lapis, and the quantum helmet wasn't expending energy to keep you fed).

How to install it? Just delete the old .jar file you had in your .minecraft\mods folder and put that one instead (if you are doing a clean installation, be sure you have the pre-required mods before!). Also, don't use any mod for IC2 since they have not been updated yet (and I'm talking about the Advanced machines that expands the induction furnace to cover macerators, extractors and compressors, specifically).

Also, DO A BACKUP of the game!

If you have a problem of ID conflicts, then I advice you to reinstall the ID resolver mod if you were using it, since Alblaka added some new blocks.

I'll be back as soon as I patch the disaster in my worlds... all pipes got exchanged for Equivalent Exchange's  Nova Catalysts and exploded. Messy.

Edit: solved, I had deleted the config files for the IDresolver mod, restoring them and running the game again assigned fresh ID's only to the new blocks, so nothing got changed.

As for the new goodies, constructive foam and scaffolding are the new blocks (with some dependant sub-blocks you cannot craft but aid in the using of the foam), and some new derived items (pellets and foam-firing gun) and new icons for some stuff like the nuclear chambers, the terraformer and the electrical wrench.

Geothermal plant MkII

Hi again, I just finished with my small project of base in the Nether, with the primary objective being the development of a self-sufficient energy generation base. In this instance, that means Lava Cells production to feed geothermal generators. By adding the Equivalent Exchange mod (see the sidebar for the forum link) and with the help of the Teleporting Pipes mod (again, sidebar for the link) I was able to make a base that would require only Tin Bars from outside the Nether (since Tin is an IndustrialCraft 2 resource, it cannot be produced by Equivalent Exchange).

The tricky part, you might think, is the cobblestone generator, since it requires a water source. Leaving aside that you can use inventory editors and such (as I mentioned before), Equivalent Exchange has a recipe for crafting an ice block with the philosopher's stone and 8 glass blocks. You can then place the ice block in the nether, and break it to have a water source, solving the problem.

Another trick I used to avoid too much trouble with the limited capacity of Buildcraft 2's crafting tables was to connect the pipes to chests, which gives a greater buffer. For item distribution I used one of the extra pipes included in the Teleport Pipes mod, from where I also picked the pipes that teleport power and the ones that teleport liquids (in this case, the lava). The Wireless Redstone mod allows me to control the lava being send or not to the base (though it is mostly a redundant capacity, since I control the energy I send to the pump).

Essentially, the base is divided on two parts: Part one provides endless energy, while Part two crafts the lava cells proper.
While the base of the Lava Cell generator is the same I showed in the Geothermal Generator video, I made a more compact design, thanks mostly to the Advanced Wooden Pipes (from the Teleport Pipes mod), a version of the wooden pipes that applies a filter to what it gets or not (from the deployer, for example, it will take only lava-filled buckets, while from the chest where those go it will only take empty ones) and to the trick of putting the chests adjacent to the crafting table.
The energy generation "plant", on the other hand, I left it without any automated feeding to the steam engines to avoid... unfortunately explosions, let's say (I'd like to tell you that directly attaching a steam engine to a pump with 14 coal or less won't explode... but by putting a wooden pipe between engine and pump the overheating problems nearly dissapear). Anyway, 5 steam engines are a little overkill for a single pump XD.

Back to topic, the energy production part goes as follows: the cobblestone generator produces 1 cobble every 4 seconds. 5 cobblestone get transformed into 20 dirt, which produces (with 20 saplings) 40 wood. 20 wood go to the furnaces (powered by a Klein Star, an item from Equivalent Exchange that provides infinite burning power to vanilla items. If that item becomes fully usable with steam engines... right now it acts like a single piece of coal) which in turn makes them into 20 charcoal. The other 20 wood blocks go for another alchemical transformation... producing 20 saplings. That means I turn 5 cobble into 20 charcoal, if I'm not mistaken. And when the redstone engines are really hot, the furnaces cannot keep the rythm (I think adding a fourth furnace would relieve most of the problem, though).
The worrying thing, of course, is that with Equivalent Exhange, some cobblestone generators and some base mats, using Buildcraf 2 we can stop farming forever...

Oh, and I made a diamond factory with Equivalent Exchange and the cobble generators, too. But that has been covered enough in the mod's forum thread ^^

Have fun!

Geothermal plant

So I was the other day mailing Eloraam because the deployer didn't interact with Buildcraft's tanks, when she told me that yes, they do... and I realized what my problem was. Anyway, I was able to end my project of an automated factory that needs only one input from the player in order to produce industrialcraft's energy. Here you have a video with the idea:

Explanations:

• The tanks need to be at the same height than the deployer, or it wont work (that was my mistake: I tend to bury half the tank).
• The charcoal can be kept being put thanks to a nearby tree farm, or put there manually (in the video, I did the second option).
• You can change the stone engines for the combustion ones (which can be powered by lava), but they overheat quicker and the only way to have water sources in the nether is cheating (place a water block, itemID 8, without using a bucket... and it can be placed).
• I lack BC2.2.2 extra pipes (bouncing and insertion, to be precise), and I didn't test the teletransport pipes.
• The input you cannot avoid is tin bars. You will get a 4:1 ratio in lava cells per each tin bar (you need 4 bars per 16 empty cells).
• The factory will consume lava, coal and tin. It will produce, in exchange, lava cells.
• The idea is to put this factory in the Nether, near a lava lake. once you have emptied the lake and the lava reserve from the tanks, you can pack all the system and go to another place.
• The energy production requires the player to take manually the lava cells from the nether to a geothermal generator in the "real" world, where they are used to produce energy. You can also put a geothermal generator in the nether in order to produce energy for your tools (the chainsaw, the energy sword, the drill,, the mining laser, and the armor).

Expanding the idea:

By cheating and placing water into the nether, we can make several cobblestone generators, run the cobble through a recycler and use the scrap and energy produced by this plant to create universal matter, that we will use later to make tin ore that we will macerate and then smelt into bars that we turn into cells. Or we can use Equivalent Exchange (which I am really reticent to).

Edit: I went home and made some tests.
First, 3 Universal matter are required to get 5 tin ore => 10 tin dust => 10 tin bars => 32 empty cells & 2 tin bars. Each Universal Matter needs 1.000.000 of energy, and each lava cell produces 20.000 energy. Without much looking into it, with 4 tin ore we can produce 32 lava cells => 640.000 energy, meaning the process won't yield any benefit. As for boosting the mass fabricator with scrap, 640.000 energy and 129 scrap (2 stacks plus a single unit) produces 3 UU-matter and the 83% of a fourth one, meaning the process can be kept self-sustaining by a really small margin that allows nearly no errors (testing method: an MFSU, 10 stacks of one use batteries => 640.000 energy. Connect to a Mass fabricator with a stack of scrap, and keep the fabricator with scrap).

Second, I installed the teleporting pipes, and the conclussions are quite clear, also: you cannot teleport stuff from the nether to the "real" world. You can, however, set up the factory near the portal, so you only will need to move the pump, steam engines and teleporting pipe.

And yes, I'll be testing Equivalent Exchange. I still have 17 block IDs left, after all, and 77 sprite IDs...

Redpower 2: The Deployer and a cobblestone generator

Ok, I've been toying around with the machines from Redpower 2, and the deployer, while it's quite interesting, it's not the godlike machine I thought it was going to be XD.  First let's take a look at the block, and its innards:

 The funny thing of a deployer is that does almost the same thing Steve? does with a right click of the mouse wehn receiving a redstone current pulse. However, some items require a little care (for example, you can use the deployer to empty a bucket of water, or to retake the water source if there is an empty bucket inside the deployer, as long as there is a block to support the water, the same way you cannot place a water source in the middle of the air). Doing this allows me to place a music disk when I want:

And here we go with Portal: not only can the deployer put turrents in front of him (yeah, it can put 9 turrets in the same block), but he can fire portal guns too!!

 This made me though about IC2's mining laser...

And yes, it works. It also consumes less energy (I had put the laser into long range... but it was consuming like mining only).
The deployer can also plant seeds, however, it only plants in the block in front of him, so it's not really efficient.

Let's make a catapult... with Portals, again:

The range is a litte short, but it's an easier way to make a catapult than the usual with pistons. Also, I checked and the deployer accepts Buildcraft's pipes, allowing for endless supplies. And with the block breaker, it also allows for other things (but you can usually do that kind of things with one of the blocks from Better than Wolves, so it's not as useful unless you don't want to install that mod).

And since we are talking about the block breaker, I made a small video about making a cobblestone generator with this machine. Quite more efficient and cheap than Buildcraft's based ones were!

I'll now try to complete my small world, since I now have RedPower 2 cabling and logic gates (but I still miss the extra pipes... oh hell... XD).

Mod updates

So, for all of you who are interested, the 1.8.1 compatible version of several mods has been released. Currently, we have:

• Industrialcraft (with SMP support! Expect a few bugs, however)
• Better tha Wolves
• Minecraft Forge (obviously, since you need it for some of these mods XD)
• Portal
• Mo's Creatures
• RedPower 2

However, you should know some details:

First, Redpower 2 is an ALPHA, a pre-release with probably tons of bugs (according to Eloraam herself), with some nasty possibilities about corrupting your savegames. You have been warned!

Second, Buildcraft's thread seems to not show in the usual URL... nor can it be found using the search... However, I manually found it here, and I updated the link in the sidetab. Also, SpaceToad has opened a contest for the best 5 worlds made using Buildcraft (using the default config file, and maybe only minecraft... sadly).

It also seems like MineFactory has found some loving modder that not only updated the mod for 1.8.1, but also added some really interesting features for those people who don't have machines that can keep up with thousands of tiny blocks flowing around pipes, or laying down a pipe system kilometers in length... now it includes minecart support! so carts will pick up/drop out stuff inside chests! Also, Minefactory reloaded is SMP-compatible!

I'll try to upgrade all my stuff to Minecraft 1.8.1 and make a huuuuge map with all the stuff integrated. Before sunday, I hope. Bets are on the table, I'll start in about 14 hours...

Edit: it's all working, at least for now... The IDresolver mod (see the sidebar for the link XD) has proven to be extremely useful, and my only regret is that I couldn't install Steamcraft (the game runs out of terrain sprites). Right now, I have installed the following mods in my 1.8.1 version of the game:

• Modloader, Audiomod, Minecraft Forge, Modloader MP, IDresolver, SingleplayerCommands, ToomanyItems, and the GUIAPI
• Wireless redstone and Wireless remote
• Better than Wolves
• Buildcraft 2.2.0
• Industrialcraft2 1.15 (plus the "patches". The working sound fix is here (apply last))
• Minefactory reloaded
• Redpower2 (currently disabled, but I'm waiting for a TMI compatible-version).

For now, the only trouble I found was solved by changing the order of the mods in the .minecraft/mods folder (put first Industrialcraft2), and that TooManyItems doesn't show all the goodies after some RP2 ones. Oh, and that the game went from 16Mb of the basic version to 64Mb without any map loaded... and that my texture packs no longer work fine because of the hunger bar ^^.

The future of mods in short term

Notch released this tweet yesterday... with the 1.9 preview. So we can expect a 1.10 version of Minecraft before a month or so, so my advice: Stay in Minecraft 1.7.3 if you want to keep all your mods.

For what I saw in the Minecraft forums, we can expect a 1.8.1 version for RedPower and Industrialcraft 2 (meaning a new version of Minecraft Forge, most likely), but I didn't found more mentions about other mods (I didn't checked them all, anyway). What is really important, however, is that unless the code related to the mods remain unchanged, there won't be much mod actualizations for a while, at least until the whole "adventure update" is released (yeah, Notch is releasing that update in minipatches).

In case you want to check the news, by the way, I found some tours made by Paulosoaresjr and updated to Youtube. Here you have them:

• Village monks, swamps and a little of snow biomes
• The update to the Nether
• Snow biomes, and a snow golem

I'll advice to subscribe to his channel, since about 13 hours ago only the first one was up (I'll live in GMT+1, so I was sleeping while he was uploading XD).

Have a nice weekend!

Recycling and matter making with Buildcraft

Hi people, today I'll show you some IC2 and BC2 interactions. Specifically, the recycler and the mass fabricator. Both are old friends, and they seem to work ok in the new version with BC2, as long as we put the pipes in the right places.

About energy, both get it from behind (so you can't see it in the screenshots), the recycler from a batbox and the mass fabricator from a MFS unit, both with default settings and with the relevant cables (remember the basic copper cable can't handle more than 32 EU/s, which is the batbox output, and the MFS outputs 512 EU/s, which require glass fibre cable or HV cable).

The Recycler setup:

As you can see, it takes the items to be recycled from the upper side, and the output is on one side (remember the energy goes in from behind). Other experiments I made show that you can place the wooden pipe in the back of the recycler too.

The green pipe is an Insertion Pipe and the blue & white a bouncing pipe, both from Buildcraft's Extra Pipes mod.

Personally I use a cactus farm to feed a recylcer. A big cactus farm with two chests with two wooden pipes each as buffer (but depending of the size, you might need more to keep fed the recyclers).

The Mass Fabricator setup:
Like the recycler, the output is on the side. The input, however, is under the block, since the scraps are placed in the lower part of the machine.

As a bonus, I'll show you the surface of my latest base, played in a world with the "Industrialcraft2" seed. I spent most of the time getting materials and setting up a really big cactus farm (in truth, I think I should have made the farm wider instead of so high, but since this was the first time I was trying to make a really big one...). By the way, the mass fabricator devours the scrap now, in exchange for not needing almost any energy (in the video there are about three solar panels directly connected to the mass fabricator, all the others being connected to the MFS unit). I'll admit I cheated with the cabling, since I was taking the chance to test the range and energy loss of the fiberglass cable.

And without delay, here is the video:

Farms: a new approach

Hi again people, I've been updating some ideas and concepts to the post-minecraft forge, and refining some ideas. Let's have a look, first, at some of my old designs on farming:

These are the basic designs I shared with you in July, as a compendium of sorts, for a wheat farm, a cactus farm, a sugar cane farm (fully automated), and a mushroom farm (that could be made fully automated, but I prefer semi-automated). I also made an antry for a semi-automated tree farm at the end of august. So now, I present you with the updated version of my tree farm idea and a new version of an old video of mine, the semi-automated food cans factory.

Here we are, the Quarry used to take all trees in an area and not keeping the drilling until reaching bedrock. It needs, as a minimun, a quarry, a builder, the temporary use of a template drawing table, two combustion engines, and the pipes and chests (and blocks) needed to store and distribute the harvested goods. Everything else (the lights, for example) is just some stuff I put to make things easier to manage or faster.
The concept lies around the inhability of the quarry to mine the cables introduced by Eloraam's RedPower mod, and the only "problem" of the video is that I put the quarry too close to the ground. If you use the white-crusted trees, putting the quarry block on the ninth block of elevation should suffice, but if you are using IC2's rubber trees, I'd advice to put it 15 blocks over the surface where you plant them.

Now the second encarnation of my food factory using a wheat farm, I had to encase it because I'm playing with Mo'Creatures and birds seem to be able to mess with the farmland. Sadly, right now the interaction between IC2's machines and BC2's pipe system is a little messed up, and IC2's mod team's priority seems to be the release of a stable SSP and SMP version. This means that extracting the finished product with pipes is out of the question, sadly.

Here we can see the insertion/extraction distribution I've been seeing with my pipe distribution (I'll post the screenshot next): numbers are the spots where stuff goes in, while the letters indicate the order of extraction. Yeah, it's a mess...

Here is the attempt I made to fix the problem, without any success, I'm afraid... (the idea is that if the wooden pipe extracts the wrong item, that item would be reinserted in the right pipeline). Not because the idea was wrong, but because it extracts too quickly and it tries to extract first the item being canned (2A in the previous image), quicker than the machine can process it.

Oh, and as a final reminder, porting IC2 to 1.8 will take about 4-5 weeks, so don't update your minecraft too quickly.

Enjoy the game, and leave comments!

Industrialcraft 2: first impressions

First of all, the wiki has been updated. You can found it here, and it's quite interesting because it has a lot of recipes.

Ok, so I've been playing for some hours in a newly generated map, and these are my conclussions (I also checked some of the new stuff in a testing map using TooManyItems):

Map Seed: Industrialcraft2
Coordinates: 19, 85, -183
Time played: around five or six hours.
Mods used: Industrialcraft2, Buildcraft 2, RedPower (with all "addons"), Mo' Creatures, and some more that had no impact over the game, because I didn't use anything (in fact, from Buildcraft I still have to make something, but I can see oil around).

What I have now: some rubber trees plantation, a normal tree subterranean plantation, 11 solar panels, 2 batboxes (I'm only using one), an extractor, a macerator and two electric furnaces. And tons of cobblestone, of course XD. I also have more raw materials (inlcuding about 5 uranium ore), but it would be of small interest.

One of the first changes I noticed is that copper and tin ore are quicker to mine using the non-IC picks, and that you now need at least an iron pick to harvest the uranium ore. I also noticed in this map that, while I found lots of redstone in the lower levels, I found nearly no iron, and about minimun quantities of iron; coal, however, was nearly everywhere with in big veins.

Another thing I noticed (and I think it's a bug) is that the rubber trees grow insanely fast.

About my thoughts on the new ways the mod works, I'm happy to see the cabling is now more easy, setting solar plants is also more simple (no more need for the flowers!), and things look much more smooth. The only downside I found was that, coupled with Buildcraft's piping system, things work randomly regarding blocks inserted/extracted (no matter if you cannot put those items manually, with the pipes they will be put wherever there is free space).This means that a battery has to be put in the powering hole, and the item extraction might be something a little complicated. Hopefully this problem will be solved in the next release of Minecraft Forge, Buildcraft or Industrialcraft.

On monday I'll share with you all a new video about my Food Factory idea, with the new IC2 and BC2, so until then stay tuned and enjoy this small video about the new block of IC2 called "induction furnace" (it can take two blocks different or equal and process them quicker the longer it's burning).

Oh, and a good youtube channel with some videos about IC2 is this one, which has a lot of the new stuff showed up and explained. Enjoy!

IndustrialCraft 2 released!

And you can download it here! It requires Minecraft Forge 1.0.6, so download that aswell.

However, remember to visit Alblaka's blog, in http://www.industrial-craft.net/

How to install the mod: right now it seems (I cannot promise anything) to work like buildcraft and redpower: ypu download the file, put it in your mods folder, and profit. Alblaka advices to inject the contents of the file inside the minecraft.jar (remember to keep a backup in order to not need to make a clean install from scratch).

I'm curently testing the mod, but this month is quite a busy one for me, so it will be small updates most of the time. Meanwhile, I can tell you that a new suit (a quantum one) has been added, with some more machines (like an induction forge, able to work with two ores at once, and that requires time for warm-up, after which it will burn the items faster and faster), and new cable types. I'll add some data: the gold cables don't seem to transmit current, and there are insulated and uninsulated versions. Oh, and the new cables look a lot like Builcraft pipes, since they no longer use a whole block.

And by the way, a heads up: Industrialcraft2 has block ID conflicts with Better than Wolves. There goes my dream of having them together, at least for now...

Upcoming changes to Minecraft mods

Ok people, here we are again. I was going to show you some "homemade" stuff, but I found something much more interesting, and that is what's going to fall in our lap in a few weeks or even less.

First, the great news, Minecraft Forge is a growing project that now has inside both Eloraam, Alblaka and SpaceToad among others, meaning we can expect much greater compatibility between their mods in the future, and the even greater news is that we can expect much less pixel-intensive version of Industrialcraft as a side effect.

Second, the upcoming new update to Eloraam's mods, aside from glowing blocks, is this:

Yeah, that is Eloraam's work: we can see both some lights and the option of putting the logic gates in walls or in the ceiling. Also, she has promised a screwdriver for some use with the plates (and that we will be ablo to put the plates by themselves, so covering logic gates will become possible).

Now for Industrialcraft, I'll advice you to go to Industrialcraft's blog and check. Can't say anymore here.

And finally for Buildcraft, the upcoming changes are avaiable as a beta in the mod's forum page, with the advice of only using them for testing without any other mods (because it might get unstable). SpaceToad made a video of the upcoming Buildcraft 2.0:

 In short: A new liquid (oil), a new tool (the wrench, which is used among other things to change the pipe's settings, like which exit the items can use in a steel pipe), and a new mechanic for all the actually redstone-powered pipes and machines: they will now require engines, that are activated by redstone and come in three speeds: wood, stone and iron (each one is quicker than the previous). While all engines require a redstone source to start working (and that can be a continuous source, like a lever or a redstone torch), stone engines also require something to burn (like coal), and iron engines require oil (and they need a lot of oil buckets to get filled). See the video for more info on that.

Stay tuned!

Base 101: The Floating Base

This one is my personal favourite for SSP, and consists into the making of a floating surface where you will live and have all your stuff, safe from mobs if rightly lighted (since there are no flying mobs outisde the Nether at the moment).

Pros: Easy to spot, you don't usually need to make a beacon to mark where is it; You don't need to level any ground, nor you need to worry about mobs reaching the ceiling; you will get very good views of all around, and when going out of the base you will have it easy to see if there are mobs around.

Cons: no access to any resource whatsoever, you will need to set up a farm if you want to have wood avaiable; you will need to descend a long stair to get to your mining operation. And if you are in a SMP server, your base is easy to spot (so if PvP is fair game, it will be easy to get to you. On the bright side, you will see them coming if you are looking).

Finally, there is a mixed pro & con with this base: because you make it over the ground, it will cast a shadow because it blocks sunlight, so if you make it big enough (60x60 for example) you will be making a spawning spot for the mobs (the passive mobs won't be spawning there, however). So you could make a mob grinder, and then cover the light above. If you have Buildcraft, with a pipe line you can get all to your base automatically. Or it can serve as a protection of sorts in SMP, since during the day the monsters might spawn only there...

Let's see now some images from this:

The shadow making a grinding trap:


Underside photo of my floating base (incidentally, under that base there is a forest I call "the thousand candles forest" because of all the torches I placed there XD):


From the top (using the Fly command of the Single Player Commands mod):


Incidentally, all this photos are "outdated": not only were they taken in 1.6.6, but also before the latest versions of Integrated Redstone and Buildcraft were out. While that map is saved (and more advanced, in the case of the floating base), I'm playing now in another installation of the game with the latest pre-1.7 versions of the mods I use, but I will be out of reach for the whole weekend (but I will play in my laptop... assuming minecraft works with it, of course XD), so the next update will be on Monday.

On an off-topic, Paulosoaresjr published a few more videos: two from a 1.7 test, one from Terraria, and the first video of the second season of Man Vs Minecraft. And he really proves he knows how to set the mood in that last one ^^

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.