So, Equivalent Exchange 3

[Curunir]

I dropped a comment about my lava-to-diamond processing chain elsewhere, and somebody got curious. So allow me to elaborate on it a little.

 

1. Prelude

First, what happened so far in the Equivalent Exchange universe. EE2 was part of the old Tekkit, and can still be used in Tekkit Classic. It was a very big, very powerful and very server-taxing mod because of its extreme empowerment and endgame options. You were basically generating blocks, any kind of blocks, in any amount desired at some point. A whole chunk of diamond blocks? That was kid's stuff when you had Dark Matter, or even Red Matter. Also, massively overpowered endgame armor and equipment above and beyond what even power armor can do.

 

EE2 is gone, closed source, abandoned, most likely never to return. So a friendly coder set out to remake it from scratch in friendly open-sourced EE3, and that has been lingering in pre-alpha stages for so long now that people were wondering why Tekkit was still dragging it around. But no matter how glacial the development pace, something usable is here now. It is quirky, very limited yet, and resembles a humble little alchemy mod more than the old galaxy-size EE2, but there is power here.

 

2. What is EMC?

Blocks have value. Not just usage value, but EMC value. The rarer and harder to get, the higher. EMC stands for Energy Matter Currency, and simple blocks like dirt have EMC=1, with diamonds at EMC=8192. In Tekkit, press shift while hovering over a block to see the EMC value displayed through Waila. Not all blocks have it, although in a theoretically ideal modpack, all should have a value (cut the Tekkit people some slack, that is tons work).

 

3. What to do with it?

EE3 has not terribly many blocks of its own. You will want a Calcinator, an Aludel and a Glass Bell, all quite simple and cheap to produce.

 

3a. Calcinate!

You can place any block with EMC value in the top slot and add any vanilla fuel in the bottom one. It is basically a furnace, with different results. As this is alchemy, you will get magickal dusts for your efforts.

• very low EMC value = ash (worthless)
• low EMC value = Verdant Dust (green)
• medium EMC value = Azure Dust (blue)
• high EMC value = Minium Dust (red)

For now, we just want the Minium Dust. It seems that anything over 8000 EMC will yield it. Yes, that means you will have to sacrifice some diamonds or emeralds here. Do this only if you have some to spare, otherwise advance some more in the game until you have some to spare. The absolute minimum to get started is 8 Minium Dust, so 8 diamonds or emeralds have to be burned.

 

Update: It seems like you can also calcinate fully repaired pieces of gold armor for minium dust. This comes in handy when you generate those with an MFR Grinder or a Peaceful Table. Keep in mind that you can simply repair-craft two identical items to get one with higher durability, which will eventually get you fully repaired ones without using an Anvil. Credit goes to SirLappy for that find.

 

3b. Get Stoned

Craft yourself an Inert Stone from 1 gold ingot, 4 iron ingots and 4 smooth stone (I rely on your ability to look up recipes in NEI by pressing R). Now you need the Aludel. Place the Glass Bell on top of the device, otherwise it is not complete. If you open it then, there are three slots. The lower one is again for vanilla fuels, the middle one will take your dusts, and the top one your "target item". Place the Inert Stone there, add 8 Minium Dusts below it and fuel the whole thing. You will be rewarded with a Minium Stone.

 

4. Alchemy!

Contrary to popular belief, the EE wiki is not dead. You can see a barebones EE3 recipe list here, which should give you a first idea of your newly gained powers. Not all recipes work right now, but a few crucial ones do.

 

5. An Example: Lava To Diamonds

This process chain harnesses the power of several mods besides EE3, namely Thermal Expansion and Extra Utilities. You should only start it when you have enough diamonds to make a handful of Minium Stones. You need at least three Minium Stones for automation, but you could just opt to jiggle it all manually with a single Stone and no Cyclic Assemblers. In that case, do yourself a favour and use at least a Machinist's Workbench.

1. Use an Ender-Thermic pump in the Nether and connect a Tesseract for (nearly) infinite lava. This is a tested process, look up the details with the usual guides.
2. Build yourself a battery of Igneous Extruders. They need no power, just lava and a water supply, and generate obsidian. Why obsidian? Because it has EMC=64, which is not huge, but high enough to make this viable. Don't forget to change the Extruders to obsidian in the interface, as they default to stone. I am running eight Extruders, but more will make things go faster (no idea how many one pump can sustain, but more than eight for sure).
3. Set up a Cyclic Assembler. Feed it the obsidian from your new generator. Write the Obsidian-to-Iron-Ingot recipe to a schematic and place at least one Minium Stone in the Assembler's inventory, as the stone is an ingredient (In case you did not follow that link, 2x2 Obsidian with a Minium Stone added to the crafting grid). It will not be consumed, but degrade over time, so you need to refill Minium Stones at some point.
4. I prefer to set up another Cyclic Assembler at this point to craft the resulting Iron Ingots to iron blocks. Why? Transmuting works with blocks, too, and will take fewer charges from the Minium Stones in the next steps.
5. Next Cyclic Assembler. The concept is the same like in the first Assembler. Write a schematic for Iron-To-Gold (8 iron blocks and a Minium Stone yield one gold block), feed the iron blocks in and place at least one Minium Stone.
6. Final Cyclic Assembler: Same procedure, just with eight gold blocks. Which will yield one diamond block.

The process will yield many more diamonds than are consumed in the making of the Minium Stones. As long as you have lava, it will slowly fill your treasury with diamond blocks. Feel free to pipe in excess iron and gold from your quarries at the respective points. Of course, all of these transmutations can be reversed to get back gold, iron, or even obsidian. Just keep in mind that the Stones degrade.

 

Enough for now. Feel free to chime in with your own insights and ideas.

Edited June 4, 2014 by Curunir

[efflandt]

One source of emeralds to make minium dust is villagers. I found villagers that would take wheat or wool for emeralds and got 9 emeralds within 2 MC days (extra one for a tinker table). I used their own farms for wheat and there were plenty of sheep near the plains village. It just took some time to gather the quantity of wheat and wool.

[Kotja]

Any ideas what will be EE3 in future?

There are other dusts and research table but they are useless.

I would like something like scrap, scrapbox and UU-matter from IC2

[Curunir]

I have no idea where Pahimar wants to go, or how far he will go until he retires from the project.

But there are other things in there that work already. You can use the dusts to infuse wood planks or wool in the Aludel, at a rate of one dust per plank/wool. Infused wool can be used to make Alchemical Bags, which are craftable, but not usable yet. Infused wood is for Alchemical Chests, which do work already. The red one has quite a lot of room, although I think it it adds no real benefits over the diamond/obsidian chests, and nothing beats the portability of TE Strongboxes.

 

P.S.: Maybe you like videos better than reading.

Edited March 23, 2014 by Curunir

[Curunir]

There is a statement from Pahimar about his involvement here.

 

So we should not expect major things for a while yet, I guess. It is nice of him to have contributed so much when he had so little time to begin with. Glad to have basic functionality back, and things can only improve from here.

[Curunir]

A few notes:

• A single Minium Stone will last for 1520 uses before it vanishes.
• You can alternatively generate obsidian by placing a source block of lava and a block of Gelid Cryotheum in a fashion that obsidian forms between them, and have it auto-mined infinitely every time it reforms.
• Given a source of smooth stone (e.g. another Igneous Extruder), it should be no problem to pipe out some iron and gold from the process chain and autocraft Inert Stones, so you always have them readily available.
• Automating a Calcinator works fine with Itemducts. Pipe fuel into the bottom, material into the sides, and results out of the top side.
• Automating an Aludel to autocraft Minium Stones is difficult, but possible with some downsides. Pipe fuels into the bottom, and both the dusts and the Inert Stone from the side (Itemducts with whitelists are your best friends and enable a simple delivery bus). You will have to make sure that you pipe in the Stone first, otherwise the dust will end up in the top slot and block the Aludel. Remaining problem: I could not auto-extract finished stones from the glass bell.
• Itemducting the Alchemy gear looks really weird, but it works.

[Darth Crater]

 

• Automating an Aludel to autocraft Minium Stones is difficult, but possible with some downsides. Pipe fuels into the bottom, and both the dusts and the Inert Stone from the side (Itemducts with whitelists are your best friends and enable a simple delivery bus). You will have to make sure that you pipe in the Stone first, otherwise the dust will end up in the top slot and block the Aludel. Remaining problem: I could not auto-extract finished stones from the glass bell.
• Itemducting the Alchemy gear looks really weird, but it works.

 

I was able to extract finished stones from the Aludel Base - apparently it's not actually in the glass bell, just displayed there. 

[Curunir]

Oh, good. Thanks for the hint.

Time to make a fully automated factory then.

[Dash16]

I was able to automate making Minium Stones with an AE Network based on the info in this thread.  The trick to the Inert Stone is make an export bus that connects to the bottom of the Aludel, so one is always being injected into the top slot.  Minium Dust is made on demand then piped into the bottom slot via ME Interface.  Import Bus on the bottom only removes the completed Minium Stone.

 

Thanks guys!  

[Curunir]

It has been mentioned elsewhere, but here is a quick way to get infinite Obsidian to fuel that alchemy pump:

 

• dig a 9x1 trench
• place two MFR Block Breakers along the side at the 3rd and 4th block, so that their faces are part of the trench wall
• provide a power source to the Block Breakers
• make sure the Block Breakers have an inventory to drop their items into
• place 1 block/bucket of lava at the "short" end of the trench, i.e. the one closer to the Block Breakers
• place 1 block/bucket of Gelid Cryotheum at the far end of the trench

This should result in Obsidian and Cobblestone forming right in front of the Block Breakers, being broken and re-forming infinitely, as long as you power the machines. Tested in 1.2.9c.

And here is what it looks like. I made a nice cover so I won't fall into the trench, which does not interfere with operations as long as you place it above the trench.

 

 

My test setup has three breakers, just in case. But the blocks always just form in front of those two.

[ToxicGummi]

I believe that obsidian can also be transmuted by using two logs with a minium stone. Visual: http://i.imgur.com/TDPfq0r.png?1

 

Setting up an autocrafting station with a (degradable) minium stone and a tree farm could produce obsidian cheaper, and possibly faster than using machines.

 

I didn't realize that minium stones weren't made from mob drops anymore. 

Edited June 5, 2014 by ToxicGummi

[Curunir]

That recipe does work, too. However, if you require one transmutation per piece of Obsidian, that will be a very fast-degrading stone. This will be a nice option to start if you have neither easy access to lava nor to Gelid Cryotheum yet (although making the ten Cryotheum dusts required to fill one bucket should not be too hard). As the Obsidian Trench only needs two Block Breakers running continuously, all this takes is a little power to run. This should be a better deal than degrading your expensive Minium Stones, especially when you have a reactor and don't need to worry too much about power.

 

Always good to have options, though.

Edited May 21, 2014 by Curunir

[Nensec]

Hey Curunir,

Really awesome design for the obsidian generator.
I adopted it myself (x3) and added a little technical mayhem to it:

 

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4 cyclic assemblers as you explained, except it has a step in between there with the chest.

 

The chest has has the function of being a switch.

The chest has 3 attachments, namely an itemduct and 2 import busses.

 

Why 2 you ask?

One is to export Obsidian while the other is to export all the Cobblestone!

Behind the wall there is a level emitter, tied to the supply of Obsidian in my ME system.

When it dips too low the redstone torch will turn off on the wall there.

This will cause the 2nd import bus to activate and start sucking out the obsidian that is in there.

At the same time, the item duct feeding the diamond generator will be turned off as it is no longer has a redstone signal giving the ME system supply full priority on the obsidian.

 

'>

Now this was a tricky part, to make sure that the first cyclic assembler would never run out of minium stones..

In the end I used a buildcraft pipe together with a gate in it.

The gate is set to emit a redstone signal whenever the adjacent inventory is empty.

This signal travels into the block above it which then travels into the adjacent export bus above the assembler.

I can do this, because I have configured the itemduct that is sucking out obsidian to only transfer 1 block at a time meaning at some point the minium stone will be used up and there won't be any spare obsidian in the assembler left.

It will only be briefly that it is empty, but it is enough for that export bus to receive a redstone signal from the gate behind the assembler; telling it to get/craft a minium stone.

By the time it is finally done making that minium stone the inventory would long be not empty anymore so it would never craft more than 1 stone.

 

I am tempted to expand this to the other 2 assemblers but they don't get nearly as much drain on the stone as the first one to make iron.

 

For those interested here is my setup for the minium stone maker:

'>

 

To prevent dust from getting in the top slot I make sure to simply keep 1 dust in there.

The dust created will stack on top of it making the stone always go in the right slot.

Edited May 20, 2014 by Nensec

[vanasten1]

really appreciate this topic! made 16 Igneous Extruders to make the process faster. Im not the best when it comes to knowhow of techinal mods but im learning lol.

[Curunir]

Update: It seems like you can also calcinate fully repaired pieces of gold armor for minium dust. This comes in handy when you generate those with an MFR Grinder or a Peaceful Table. Keep in mind that you can simply repair-craft two identical items to get one with higher durability, which will eventually get you fully repaired ones without using an Anvil. Credit goes to SirLappy for that find.

 

Also added in-line.

[SirLappy]

Update: It seems like you can also calcinate fully repaired pieces of gold armor for minium dust. This comes in handy when you generate those with an MFR Grinder or a Peaceful Table. Keep in mind that you can simply repair-craft two identical items to get one with higher durability, which will eventually get you fully repaired ones without using an Anvil. Credit goes to SirLappy for that find.

 

Also added in-line.

right on.  didnt even realize this wasnt known... makes sense when you think about it though.  4 gold = 1 diamond, so any single item made with at least 4 gold should calcinate to a minium dust, assuming the emc is defined.  I just used it as a way to get diamonds earlier if I hadn't found any yet, but did have > half a stack of gold.  Burn 8x gold boots, and suddenly you can get diamonds whenever you need.

[TeEmze]

Couldn't you do it with a lava producer too? I mean if it's powered with enough Energy, for example with an Big Reactor? Or is it too less Lava per tick? I'm just going to try it...

Or could you take a terrain smasher too? It doesn't need any Energy....

And another question: Does it give any (cheap) method, that's better than redstone energy conduits?

[TeEmze]

Couldn't you do it with a lava producer too? I mean if it's powered with enough Energy, for example with an Big Reactor? Or is it too less Lava per tick? I'm just going to try it...

Or could you take a terrain smasher too? It doesn't need any Energy....

And another question: Does it give any (cheap) method, that's better than redstone energy conduits?

​I have some solutions:

The lava producer's too slow

The terrain smasher smashes the Lava too