Search the Community

Greetings, Tekkiteers! When I started using the Buildcraft Quarry, I ran into many small problems and annoyances that were not covered by any wiki or guide. So now that I have largely mastered that art, allow me to share my insights in a concise and (hopefully) compact manner. 1. Why Quarry? Mining is tedious. Really tedious. It may be exciting to hunt for The Shiny at the start, but after doing it over and over again, it eventually loses its luster. Especially when you need to ramp up your production in mid-to-late game to feed that ravenous machinery. There will come a point where even for the most medieval of us, a robot that does the manual work will be a welcome relief. Buildcraft has you covered. The BC Quarry is a machine for strip mining, that means it will remove (almost) anything in its path, block for block, layer for layer, until it reaches bedrock or an obstable that it cannot mine. 2. Make One! You will be ready to make a quarry once you acquired 11 diamonds, 8 gold ingots, 28 iron ingots, 28 cobblestone, 1 redstone dust and 30 sticks of wood. Most of that goes into crafting BC gears, and the rest into a diamond pickaxe. All of this will be consumed in the making. As always, I rely on your ability to use NEI or the wiki for the actual recipe. 3. Power It! The quarry runs on Minecraft Joules (MJ). In Tekkit, use any kind of Redstone Flux (RF) production and connect the quarry via Thermal Expansion conduits, which will automatically convert to MJ. It is highly recommended to use at least one energy cell as a power buffer, and using at least Hardened conduits and cells. The quarry uses lots of power, so Leadstone-level gear is too weak. Using Redstone-level is recommended. A small, early Yellorium reactor will power a quarry easier and quicker than any other setup, but you are of course free to design your own. 4. Place It! As a quarry will strip-mine, you may want to place it out of sight from your home/base, to avoid looking (or falling) into a square pit later. On the other hand, you might want to use it to excavate a space for your future underground base, and cover the pit with a filler later. Note that when placed and powered, the quarry will start building a 5 block high frame in front of it, inside and below which its mining arm will then operate. All blocks obstructing this space or the frame itself will be destroyed (not mined!), so take this into consideration. Especially make sure to not place your power source or any related machinery inside the frame area. 4.1 But Where? If you dislike disfiguring the Overworld with large rectangular pits, you could opt to disfigure a random Mystcraft Age instead. Choose one you don't like, but that is safe enough for you to do maintenance in if needed. Or quarry the Nether right away - instructions on the special requirements for this included >further down in the thread. Or just place it in the Overworld, but far away from your base. No matter where you decide to set it up, keep in mind that the Quarry does its own chunkloading. So as long as you put the power feed and output processing within one of the loaded chunks, you should be fine. But better check chunk boundaries to be sure. 4.1 Landmarks If just plonked down, the quarry will default to a 9x9 space right in front of it. You can modify this area with Landmarks, which are just Redstone Torches re-crafted with Lapis Lazuli. Landmarks are glitchy, so don't be surprised when they malfunction. It will often suffice to just repeat what you were doing, or moving everything by one block, to make them cooperate. Place three Landmarks defining a rectangle, all on the same height level, to claim the area you want to quarry out. You are marking the lower corners of the frame this way, so keep the block destruction in mind. Once all three necessary corners are marked, right-click the middle Landmark (I think any of them works, but middle works best). Red lines should connect them and visibly frame the rectangle you defined. If not, check if you actually made a rectangle or maybe went off by one block. Try breaking and placing all Landmakrs again. Also don't right-click before all are set. Keep in mind that the frame will extend to five blocks above the Landmarks. The maximum space possible is 64x64 blocks for the frame, i.e. 62x62 blocks enclosed. 4.1.1 Landmark placement beams It may become tedious to correctly place Landmarks for larger pits. You can get some placement help if you apply a Redstone signal (Lever or Redstone Torch will do) to an inactive Landmark. Blue "ghost beams" will emerge in all directions and extend 64 blocks, which is conveniently identical to the maximum frame dimensions. So for max-sized Quarry, place one Landmark, activate the blue beams, place the other two exactly at the ends of the beams, return to the first Landmark, turn the blue beam off (remove Lever) and activate the read beam (right-click Landmark). Then place the machine against that Landmark from the outside of the rectangle. Note that it needs to face the Landmark directly, otherwise it will ignore your rectangle and default back to its 9x9 scheme. 4.2 Call it Bob if you like If the quarry accepted your framing and is powered, it will form a yellow-and-black pre-frame, and a little robot cube will laser the actual (orange, non-mineable) frame onto it. The Quarry will also announce how many chunks it will keep loaded. Or none of this happens, and it will tell you that your frame is out of boundaries or too small. This sometimes occurs even when you did it right. Try breaking and re-placing the Landmarks, or maybe reduce the size by one block. Sometimes the pre-frame will not show although everything is correct. This is just a visual glitch. Oh, and the Landmarks will drop when the quarry accepts them, so you can run and recover them now. 4.3 Maintenance Shaft The quarry will proceed into an ever-deepening rectangular pit. Do yourself a favour and dig at least a 1x1 ladder shaft next to it, ideally starting directly under the frame. You will likely find yourself down in the hole at some point, and having a ladder to get back up is vastly preferable to the alternatives. Unless you can already fly. 5. Loot! Don't power the quarry before you placed a chest on top or next to it. If powered sufficiently, the quarry will mine quickly and spout lots of blocks out of its top side. With the 9x9 default size, quarrying from sea level to bedrock will roughly fill one diamond chest. Most of which will of course be cobblestone, followed by dirt, sand and gravel. I recommend Reinforced Strongboxes for their portability, so you can easily swap them out if they are full. Later in game, you can hook your output to whatever automated sorting pipe and factory you are building. 5.1 Fillers Ahead A great mass of rubbish, mostly cobblestone and dirt, will choke up your storage if not dealt with. An elegant way to handle it is compression. Use the Compressed Cobblestone (and -Dirt, -Sand, -Gravel) recipe from Extra Utilities to stow it all away. Pipe the stuff out of your buffer chest with itemducts and route it into Cyclic Assemblers, which will dump the compressed stuff into long-term storage. Note that there are two compression levels for sand and gravel, while there are four for dirt and eight (!) for cobblestone. Makes for interesting decoration, if nothing else. Of course, you could just opt to void-pipe the mass items, or stack them in Deep Storage Units. Especially a Cobblestone DSU may be useful once you decide to visit the Deep Dark dimension. 6.Oil This is annoying. Oil is quite abundant in Tekkit right now, and most quarry sites will hit one or more deposits at some point. The quarry cannot mine oil, and will ignore all blocks covered with it, which somewhat defeats the purpose here. There is no elegant solution that I know of, so this is what I do. 6.1 Suck It First, stop the quarry when you see that it hit oil. This will usually require cutting the power - I usually place a lever on the energy cell to do that quickly. The quarry seems oblivious to redstone signals. Then get yourself a Buildcraft Pump if you don't have one already (mostly iron needed). Also craft yourself a handful of Portable Tanks, ideally Reinforced ones. Grab those, along with a small energy cell, some conduits and fluiducts, and get down to the oil. The deposits are usually orb-shaped with a single topmost block. Dig that top oil block free, unless it already is visible, then place the pump directly above it. Wire it up and attach fluiducts with portable tanks to one side, then start pumping. The pump will extend its nozzle directly downward, remove the oil blocks and fill the tanks. Continue until the oil is gone, then remove your stuff, climb back up and power the quarry up again. Once you get a little practice, these little excursions are quite simple and quickly done. And they get you oil, which could be useful for power generation. 6.2 Stuff It If you really don't want that and just need the oil to be gone, grab a stack or two of sand (or gravel) and simply fill the deposit in. The sand will displace the oil and leave only air when mined again. Be smart - let the quarry do the removing. 6.3 Kill It With Fire! I never tried this, but supposedly placing lava above oil will make the oil respond like water. This means it turns into solids (cobblestone or obsidian) and can be mined by the quarry. Unfortunately, lava obstructs the quarry just like oil does (see 8), so you would need to place/remove the lava often for this to work. I don't see this working faster than pumping or sand-filling. 6.4 Invoke Higher Powers I heard that at least one server community was so annoyed with the overabundance of oil that they had an admin remove it from chunk generation. It can still be generated with Oil Fabricators to fuel those rockets. Also, it might be enough to just disable Galacticraft oil, because that is what you will find underground. Regular old Buildcraft oil usually only forms in and around desert and ocean biomes, you can identify it by the surface geysers. 7. Water The quarry mines fine through any amount of water, so it can basically stay. However, if an oil deposit is uncovered below a water source, it will mix in funny ways and make the methods from 6.1 and 6.2 very difficult. So I actually recommend removing water when it is uncovered, unless you know there is no oil, or don't care if all the blocks below any potential oil will remain unmined (note that this often affects the most worthwhile ones, like diamonds). 8. Lava Lava stops the quarry from mining anything beneath it. This will often completely block off diamonds from your reach, so you want to solve this. 8.1 Water After All It is recommended to flood your quarry. Yes, I said above that you should remove water, and I stand by that. But once the quarry is down between height level 20-30, it will be past any oil that might have been there, and nearing lava levels. That is the time when I recommend flooding your quarry with water. If there is a flow covering the mining level, any uncovered lava will turn into obsidian immediately, which can be mined fine by the quarry (you did sacrifice a diamond pickaxe when you built it, remember?). Works also for lava blocks in the side wall, so you can even drill through an entire lava lake. Note that this will put quite a lot of obsidian into your buffer chest, which might choose to overflow at this point. 9. Bonus Tip: Water Curtain With all this, you should be ready to make a big, clean hole in the ground. But there is one more thing that might help. Flooding a pit of this size (9x9, and even more so if you go larger) is tedious both when placing and removing those water blocks. But due to the way water works in Minecraft, you can actually get away with placing just a single source block. Just place the water in one corner of the pit, right on top of the edge. Let it flow for a second or two, then put it back in your bucket and quickly place it one block further along the edge. Repeat for a few blocks until it has "wandered" for a bit. Then look into the pit. You will notice that you are creating a "curtain" of water that still encompasses all the area where your one block has been. Do this for one complete edge of the pit and leave the water block in place when reaching the end. That one block will keep the whole curtain up, until you remove it. 10. Enjoy! Where to go from here? I recommend not going 64x64 in a hurry, as you will want some hands-on practice before you scale up. I like making 60x10 pits, so flooding is easy by just going along one of the long sides. After that, just do another 60x10 right next to the existing pit ("Stripe Quarrying", if you will). But at this point, you should be equipped to make your own decisions. I hope this helps the newbies, and maybe even some more seasoned players. Read on >here if you are also interested about the additional pitfalls and windfalls when quarrying in the Nether.