newbie guide On the fine art of quarry mining

[Curunir]

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.

Edited February 26, 2015 by Curunir

[Kotja]

To make landmark rectangle three landmarks are enough,

You will have to right click on the landmark in corner,

[HeatHunter]

you'll also have an easier life when you place a redstone torch beside your first landmark, the landmark will emmit blue lines with a length of 64 blocks in all directions then

 

EDIT:

Also I would not recommend flooding a big quarry completely and then kill the source block, this will put your server at high load and will lag a lot untill all the water is gone...

better leave the water in the quarry and move on, or if you want to use that whole for building, use a filler to fill it up with sand and gravel and use the quarry again ^^

 

as quarry wholes can be really ugly, I recommend you getting familiar with mystcraft to create a mining world.

 

Pumping oil out of a quarry is time intensive, you might better start a new one...

(you won't need the oil anyways, once you create yourself a fuel ocean world)

 

small tip for mystcraft, ALWAYS have a second linked book equipped (might be in a backpack) as backup just in case you forgot to create one.

If you get into a dimension with no linked book, you are stuck there (don't really know if dying is an option to get back to the overworld) unless you are OP or this world has star fissures...

Edited April 1, 2014 by HeatHunter

[Curunir]

Pumping oil out of a quarry is time intensive, you might better start a new one...

Have you quarried recently? Oil is so overabundant that any medium-sized pit will eventually have three or four deposits, and effectively stop when they are all uncovered. If you just abandon the pit every time you hit oil, you will very rarely get any diamonds out.

My procedure is quite quick, five minutes per oil deposit on average. Although the lack of large-size, long-term liquid storage is annoying. I really miss Railcraft Steel Tanks for that.

 

Feel free to give hints about quarrying in other dimensions. I will add the Nether, but I don't use Mystcraft.

[HeatHunter]

a good quarry world would be

Linking panel, Desert Biome, Flat world, Single Biome, zenith phase, zero length, normal sun, no seas, no weather

 

this should give you a world where the sun is always at noon and it'll get you some sand...

 

you can also experiment withthe materials e.g. stone block, lava block should exchange all lava to stone but I'm not sure, not all combinations work.

The mystcraft wiki might help you getting started

 

EDIT: edited pages

Edited April 1, 2014 by HeatHunter

[Kotja]

About being stuck in mystcraft age:

In previous version of tekkit building a rocket, launching and returining to overworld worked.

[plowmanplow]

For the detail inclined it is important to note that the quarry can consume nearly 50 MJ/t (just over 48) which is nearly 500 RF/t. This is more than a hardened conduit can carry so, as previosly mentioned, Redstone Energy Conduit is your friend here. At that power level the quarry will be breaking around 5 blocks per second so make sure you are prepared to deal with the output.

[HeatHunter]

also good to know is that a quarry won't connect to itemducts and a tesseract won't connect to BC pipes (in fact, the BC Pipes will connect, but all the Items get spit out).

 

you'll want to use tesseracts in mid-late-game to teleport power to your quarry and to get the items directly to your base...

(in endgame you'll probably use MFR-Lasers for ressource-gathering)

 

You have to use a buffer chest in that case

I prefer the following setup to support a quarry:

Edited April 1, 2014 by HeatHunter

[Gorian]

you could always reduce that down to a tesseract with a conduit for power, and an ender chest on top for items

[HeatHunter]

good idea,

I also never tried putting the tesseract directly above the quarry, but I guess it's just the same as if I would use pipes...

[plowmanplow]

good idea,

I also never tried putting the tesseract directly above the quarry, but I guess it's just the same as if I would use pipes...

 

Yes, putting the tessie right on top of the quarry and using two pieces of REC is the simplest way. Tesies can move both energy and items at the same time and act as valid inventories for quarry output.

[Kezr]

On the topic of oil being annoying as hell and hard to deal with, does anyone know how to disable it from generating entirely? I tried setting the BC config file to not generate oil, yet it still appears. Had the same problem with qCraft ignoring me when I tried to tell it not to make quantum ore. Is there a separate config that handles part of the worldgen, and if so, where?

[randomchance]

Good guide for a beginner.  Just a few tips to add:

 

1. A redstone torch next to a land mark will shoot out tracer beams 64 in all directions.  This makes it trivial to place the other 2 landmarks.  To get the frame up, break the redstone torch and rclick the marker in the middle (same as HeatHunter said)

 

2. I usually quarry over the ocean.  No blights on the landscape, instant obsidian, and being (mostly) static water, very little lag.  As for the oil, the pockets are fairly well contained in the water and can stay there.

 

3. Using a bucket of monster essence will displace both oil and water if you get a decent cover.  Tip the bucket in the corner of the first layer and walk away and it will cover the entire area in 8 layers.  The only time lakes and oil become a problem is when they are in the sides, which is reasonably easily dealt with by bricking them up.

 

4. Deep storage units and itemduct are pretty easy to get up early.  You can make a primitive sorting system to get rid of the cobble/dirt/sand/gravel to leave you with roughly a double chest of good stuff from a 62x62 quarry.  Upgrade to ender chests asap to save having to move the DSU/pipes each time.

 

5. Energy production is a bit tricky early on without using the bugged generators.  I usually use a few energy cells.  1 hardened cell roughly equals a double chest of stuff.  Tesseracts are the way to go later on for energy.

 

6. Mining in the nether is a complete mess.  You used to be able to use oil/sludge/sewage to deal with the lava but it is still problematic.  Oil tends to catch on fire (still does the job though).  Nether also seems to have a peculiar habit of leaving stray columns of netherrack in the middle of the quarry, not sure why.  Admittedly this was in 1.2.7, haven't tried 1.2.8.

Edited April 2, 2014 by randomchance

[Curunir]

Thanks for all the hints and alternatives. This rounds the topic quite well, save for that fiendishly hard endeavour - quarrying in the Nether.

 

 

1. Why bother?

Tekkit has Nether Ores enabled, so you will find all sorts of ores also in Netherrack-enclosed variants down there. This should not matter much, given you can get copious amounts of ores from plain old Overworld quarries, but there are some sought-after loots here:

• Nether Quartz - not necessary in large amounts, but needed for a few recipes; also nice decorative building material
• Glowstone - I have not hit that yet, but the quarry should harvest it just like everything else
• Nether Platinum - there is no Platinum in Tekkit, so this will pulverize to Shiny Metal, which is extremely rare and precious
• Nether Diamond - can't hurt to get more of those, unless you already mass-produce them with EE3
• Nether Redstone - this is very useful if you smelt it and then pulverize the ensuing Redstone Ore to get some Cinnabar (byproduct)

So, we are doing this mostly for Teh Shiny, because Cinnabar can be induction-smelted with Ferrous Ore to get a guaranteed Shiny Ingot, and Nether Platinum will yield it directly. This also means that Nether quarrying is more of a mid-to-late game thing, when Shiny Metal becomes the limiting factor of your progress. Until then, pulverizing Ferrous Ore should provide just enough to get by.

Unlike manual mining, the quarry has the great benefit of never causing any ores to explode. It will also - to my knowledge - not attact the ire of Zombie Pigmen.

 

 

2. What Is Different?

Placement is an issue, as you probably want to avoid putting your quarry above a lava ocean. Try to find a "dry" place and invest some time digging/climbing upwards. The Nether (bedrock) ceiling is at 128 blocks, so you could theoretically place your quarry on height level 123 for maximum working space. You will have to carve out the space for your Landmarks, but the quarry will do the rest and eliminate all blocks inside once you start it. If working that way, stand by with a few buckets, in the event the elimination should uncover lava source blocks. There will be no "lakes" this high up, but single lava blocks can spawn here, and make a mess of your quarry. So be quick and skim them off, or relocate your quarry altogether.

 

2.1 Water?

Water cannot exist in the Nether and will evaporate if placed. This makes the occasional enclosed lava source blocks a big problem, as you cannot deal with them by flooding the pit. You could opt to closely observe your quarry and bucket the lava out once it is uncovered. But this is a tedious manual process that only serves as a fallback.

 

2.1 Cryotheum!

It is possible to use oil instead of water for flooding, but it will eventually catch fire and can be a hassle after that. Enter Thermal Expansion's Gelid Cryotheum: The anti-lava can exist fine in the Nether and will do the same job as water to turn that lava into obsidian. It can also be made into a "Cryo Curtain", effictively using only one source block. Do note, however, that it flows as slowly as lava, and will often take some time to reach where you want it to be.

 

 

2.2 Copious amounts of Netherrack

The filling material being Netherrack, enormous amounts of it will arrive in your storage. There is no really elegant solution to deal with it, as Extra Utilities has no compression recipe for Netherrack. These are your options:

• pulverize it for gravel, which can be compressed, also obtaining sulfur as a byproduct
• smelt if for Nether Bricks, which can be combined into Nether Brick blocks, thus saving three quarters of the space and providing large amounts of cheap building material for your monuments (if you like them to be dark red)
• feed it into a void pipe for destruction
• simply store it for posterity, for which another Deep Storage Unit should be ideal

 

3. Cryo Limits

Cryotheum will deal nicely with single lava blocks and smaller groups of them, adding obsidian and some cobblestone to the quarry output. However, since lava flows a bit faster in the Nether and Cryotheum does not, Cryo will often lose race conditions against lava, which will arise when you try to drive your quarry pit through a lava ocean (sidewall lava blocks may generate adjacent cobble or obsidian faster than the Cryotheum is able to reach it, thus preventing the lava from ever being converted). This can send your quarry into an infinite loop and will effectively turn it into a Cobblestone and/or Obsidian generator. That is why I recommended finding a "dry place".

So, if you hit a lava ocean or large lake, feel free to harvest some of it as obsidian and cobblestone, but be prepared to abort operations once the quarry gets stuck. The distribution of rare ores seems entirely random in the Nether, so you probably gain nothing by brute-forcing your way through that layer and going deeper down.

 

3.1 Alternative

In case you are surrounded by lava oceans, or good quarry space is scarce for a different reason, you could opt to pump the lava out first. The Ender-Thermic Pump (ETP) from Extra Utilities is very convenient for that, as it will replace the lava with stone. You may want to set up an EE3 diamond generator running on that lava. Note that the ETP reaches quite far and deep, but not necessarily to the bottom of a lava lake, so you might need to relocate it eventually. In a pinch, a Buildcraft pump will also do, but it won't neatly turn the lava into stone. It does have the advantage of pumping out everything below it and whatever other liquid blocks it can reach from there, until its nozzle hits something solid.

 

 

4. Conclusions

If you use Cryotheum, quarrying in the Nether can be actually easier and more convenient than in the Overworld. Mostly because there is no oil here to get in the way. It also creates the unsightly pits very far from home, and will eventually supply all the ores you need in quantity, not just most of them.

 

4.1 Lag

Somebody pointed out that collapsing a water curtain will seriously lag the server out in Multiplayer (probably the same for a Cryo Curtain). This may be, but it will only take a few minutes and could be done in a period of low activity. Just leaving the key block in place is of course also an option.

Edited February 26, 2015 by Curunir

[Kotja]

I had neat trick for nether quarry in previous tekkit (in current version it will be harder)

I built two columns of cobblestone so that cobblestone is last block in layer that will be mined.

On quarry i put diamond pipe, that sends anything but cobblestone into tesseract and cobblestone to redstone pipe and then into tesseract.

When teseract passes through redstone pipe it emits signal to the RS latch (I used PRC) and latch will turn on and shuts down tesseract (set to low). Quarry will turn off and i fill lava pockets and mine unmined columns down to bedrock.

Then I reset latch.

[HeatHunter]

4.1 Lag

Somebody pointed out that collapsing a water curtain will seriously lag the server out in Multiplayer (probably the same for a Cryo Curtain). This may be, but it will only take a few minutes and could be done in a period of low activity. Just leaving the key block in place is of course also an option.

 

don't underestimate this problem, if you have one source block flooding a 62x62x64 hole, that would be ~250k minus a few layers where the liquid flows in the beginning

the problem with flowing liquids is exponential, the more liquid there is, the higher is the lag...

The CPU of the Server I'm running is not the newest (Core 2 duo 2,2Ghz) and it took around 2-3h to get a single quarry hole dry. Playing was impossible during that time...

But that also was in Minecraft < 1.6 so maybe they changed how liquids work and it performs better now...

 

as a storage solution I can recommend storing items in deepStorageUnits (as randomchance mensioned) this is a 1x1 block that is able to store 2b items of a specific type.

The items will be saved inside this DSU even if you break it and place it in another place.

In mid-endgame it can also be attached to an me network.

Edited April 2, 2014 by HeatHunter

[Curunir]

Thanks for the warning, HeatHunter. I play mostly on my own (powerful) LAN server, where it was not an issue at all. But the largest pit I dug so far has been 60x12, so it probably was far from the worst case.

I did mention that I create the water curtain usually only after the quarry dry-mined to height level ~25. That way, the curtain will only be a single block wide above that level, and only spread for the last few layers. Maybe that, together with keeping to stripe pits (like my 60x10 standard) can keep it manageable.

 

About the Cryotheum in the Nether quarry, another option would be to completely fill the quarry area with one layer of Cryo before starting, so the blocks just drop down as the quarry progresses. As Cryotheum actually drops like sand (if slowly), you would just have to scoop it up again at the end. It is expensive, though, because even a standard 9x9 quarry would require 81 buckets, made from 324 Cryotheum Dust. Also, this would probably perform no better against sidewall lava blocks. Just avoid the lags.

Edited February 26, 2015 by Curunir

[randomchance]

Deep storage units are awesome for a single type and cheap to boot.  Haven't found a reason to use Extra Utilities compression on anything with them in place from the initial turtle and pipe network when in a hovel, then moving them into the tower and attaching to ME network.

 

The low lag way for dealing with liquids in quarries was to use a force field to displace the water before the quarry was set up.  Not sure if this is in the current Tekkit these days.  Anyway it is not something I use much quarrying over the ocean, which avoids 90% of the flowing liquid issues.

 

After my last experience quarrying the nether I think I will avoid it entirely this time round, although the cobble latch idea Kotja suggested is quite a nifty (although labour intensive) solution.

[Kotja]

OR

How to build force field with sponge so big?

[HeatHunter]

whats more power intensive?

 

sponge module, or invert module? both should replace water I think

 

btw. excellent idea to use mffs for that

[Kotja]

What does invert module?

[HeatHunter]

last time I tested it, it inverted the force field so anything inside it would become a force-field block...

[Dash16]

Great quarry guide Curunir!  Its taken me quite a long time of trial and error to learn all this stuff on my own, but for those not familiar with Quarries this is a godsend.

 

One other thing you can do to maximize output from a quarry is hop in the hole once it hits 20 or so and use a silk touch pick on all Lapis Ore, Redstone Ore, Diamond Ore or Emerald Ore you find.  I also like to grab Certus Quartz (at pretty much all levels), which can be a bottleneck into getting a massive AE network going.

 

Throw the ores into a pulverizer for cinnabar, double diamonds/emeralds/certus and heaps of lapis and redstone.

[Curunir]

Thanks. I thought about adding more details and "trivia" stuff, but I think it is better this way, when everybody chimes in with their own ideas. Tekkit is about choices, options and different solutions after all.

 

The thing about Silk Touch is very valid, but the problem is that you can try enchanting 100 times and still not get it. I got it once in all (!) my Minecraft career, and that was certainly more than 300 enchanting tries. Always enchanting to books helps, as the Anvil will allow you to transfer the result to an item of your choice.

A Silk Touch pickaxe will of course vastly simplify the gathering of actual Redstone Ore (not broken into dusts) to generate Cinnabar in a Pulverizer, thus enabling mass production of Shiny Metal. But for all those who had no luck getting Silk Touch so far, harvesting and smelting Nether Redstone is a good alternative. With the added bonus of occasional Nether Platinum blocks that pulverize to 4 Shiny Dusts each.

[Curunir]

About server load when collapsing cooling curtains: Some time ago, I checked server CPU usage when draining a water curtain from a quarry. Server load was increased, but not dramatically so. It was a Core i5-3570k, so it might still be more taxing for slower servers.

However, when collapsing a Gelid Cryotheum curtain, I noticed no load increase whatsoever. Looks like TE is really thorough about optimizing its stuff. Here is a picture to give you an idea about the size.

 

 

So I recommend using Cryotheum for these purposes. When applied correctly, only a dozen buckets will create a fill of this size, which can eventually be held up by leaving a single bucket/block in place.