newbie guide On the fine art of quarry mining

[EvilOwl]

Thanks Curunir for a fine tutorial. Now I'm quarrying the nether like a mad man.

On the blue fluid: now after a bath in it I fill my reactors with a buildcraft flood gate. It's safer this way

 

With the Cryotheum quarry lake in place any spawned Ghasts have a problem, can hear them screaming like hell.

I also noticed some pesky pigmen turning into snowman on contact with the cold hearted fluid.

I need some magnum torch on the quarry pit edge to stop the pigmen spawning.

 

As for the netherrack I tend to pulverize some of it for gravel. Why you ask?

I cover some parts of my ocean with gravel (one layer buildcraft filler) quickly destroying the water source blocks beneath than place a quarry on top of the gravel to mine through the gravel to the ocean floor. After that I put the cobblestone back to the quarry pit, and a layer of dirt on top so my small island is getting bigger.

Edited May 5, 2014 by bochen415

[TOSU1]

This gets you soooo much resources. 50k iron and still coming.

[Uprox]

Some newbie questions to go with starting to quarry mine.

     When I last played tekkit there were still the energy conversion chests, so I could get away with pumping my quarry directly into one of those and as long as I had atleast 1 of whatever item i wanted I could pop it in to get however manny I wanted. This has lead to several problems with  my setups that I have been trying to solve. First question, from what I see people talking of the new condensed cobble there is no useful way to turn 500 stacks of cobble into 3 stacks of iron ore, or anything else like that for now with EMC values right?

 

    My next issue is trying to create a sorting system for my quarry. I'm only a few hours into my single player and this is my first quarry setup so I dont have many machines or power to run a ton of pulverizers and the like. I am just trying to get things sorted into chests for now, and then add it to a processing chain later. Sofar I am using chests and wooden transport pipes with redstone engines. Are there simple faster options for getting things out of a chest and into a pipe system that i should use? My quarry is spitting out filler faster than my current transport can pull them out. Everything backs up and I got stuff fallin out of pipes everwhere!

 

     Lastly a question about sortng pipes. Been trying to use diamond pipes to manage my sorting, but I cant seem to get them to output the way I want. Example: tube in from quarry, I want it to sort dirt coble and gravle into pipe green, iron ore, tin, corpper, silver, and other ores into pipe yellow, and anything else in the system into  pipe blue.  What i get happening is that whenever a new item like gold ore, or somethign i havent gotten before to put into the filter ui shows up, my diamond tube poops it out a side with no pipe and nothing is going into the blue pipe where I want it to go. My next stop after finishing this post is to re read up on the diamond  trasnport and just see if I'm using the interface wrong (Edit: Yup.. looks like the diamond pipe uses its non color side even if it has no pipe to it. Should be fixable).  Other than that, is there a piece of pipe/machine filter i can use that I can configure to have my main quarry output pipe going through it and I want it to pick out one type of item or block from the tube, to send down another pipe, and let everyting else pass along?

 

Thanks for any help, I'm sure i'll be around again with more questions.

 

P.S. anyone have a link to a setup for automating the cobble compression?

Edited May 24, 2014 by Uprox

[Curunir]

Your old setup has been using Equivalent Exchange 2. While that is gone for good, the current Tekkit has more than enough tools to help you out. We do have Equivalent Exchange 3, that is why there still are EMC values for items, but EE has been greatly reduced and is still a work in progress on top of that. I wrote a little introduction about it >here.

 

The old Buildcraft pipes do work, but I prefer Thermal Expansion's Itemducts for transport. Can be upgraded with glowstone to Impulse Itemducts for high speed, but the normal ones are enough for a quarry. Itemducts allow for advanced sorting if you apply Pneumatic Servos to the pipe heads and then open the interface with an empty hand. Cheaper than Buildcraft pipes and more powerful overall.

 

As for storage, the end-all solution is an Applied Energistics ME network. This requires some learning and lots of resources, so you are probably better off starting with an assortment of Strongboxes. These have the added benefit of being transportable even if full (shift-wrench to break, don't use a pickaxe) and can hold quite a lot if upgraded at least to Hardened level. For mass items like Cobblestone, Dirt, Gravel, Sand and Netherrack, a few early Deep Storage Units will serve you well. These hold just one type of item each, but can stash millions (!) of that item and can also be carried around while filled. You can even opt to integrate them in your ME network once you build it.

 

This also beats the compression recipes for convenience. If a single DSU can hold millions of Cobblestone, there is no need to compress it. I only came around to using DSUs after I wrote that recommendation earlier. It is still an option, but DSUs are the easier one. If you want to try the compression, just use a chain of Cyclic Assemblers, with each one's output feeding into the next one's input, and place schematics in each one.

Edited May 25, 2014 by Curunir

[Uprox]

Thanks for the reply and help. I think I've seen the Applied energistics stuff in someones video. those are the items based around a computer like setup with memory cards right? And I will have to look at the new item ducts.

[Curunir]

Yes, an ME network is basically a storage solution with data cards instead of chests. With the recently added Extra Cells sub-mod, it also works for liquids. But you need tons of quartz and other resources to get it up to a meaningful size, and it does have its limits in the mass storage area (above a few hundred thousand units, which you will reach eventually for Cobblestone and some other items). An end-game ME network usually has a few drives with two or three dozen max-sized cards, and DSUs attached via Storage Bus interfaces to hold truly high-quantity items.

[Roversword]

With the ender quarry I was under the impression that some of the drawbacks have been solved/eliminiated.

Additionally I also thought that the Ender Quarry is not that expensive as the Buildcraft Quarry (well, at least in terms of diamonds).

 

However, I do not know how it behaves with fluids (such as water, oil, lava...) which it might encounter.

 

And as for quarrying the Nether, maybe pumping out the lava with an ender pump (you might need it for power anyway) is a solution.

[Curunir]

The Ender Quarry would be an option if it was included in Tekkit. As it stands, we are on an old version of Extra Utilities that does not have it, apparently.

 

About pumping the lava out prior to quarrying, this is recommended if you are surrounded by lava oceans and have little to no "dry land" to quarry (or for any large bodies of lava your quarry encounters). However, flooding the pit with a lava-converting coolant is not really optional, as there are numerous single lava source blocks dispersed between the Netherrack, which will stop operations if not removed. Unless you want to constantly run through your pit with a bucket, the Cryotheum solution seems to work best.

[Nensec]

I am using liquid redstone for my nether quarries ( gives a nice cool red wall ) and acts just like water, flows as fast too. Has no special effects like teleporting or trying to kill you

[EvilOwl]

Definitely gonna try this one out. I have bad memories including cryotheum.

[sniperxprime]

I think I have found an elegant solution to the problem of underground oil preventing the quarry from mining all of the ores.

 

Once the quarry is done mining to bedrock use a filler to place a single layer of cobblestone inside the quarry structure frames at the top while the quarry is turned off then using the filler again place approximately 7 layers of sand and/or gravel above the cobblestone layer.  This way when the quarry is restarted it will destroy the cobblestone causing all of the sand and/or gravel to fall through filling in all of the oil.  To restart the quarry it may be necessary to break one structure frame so that it will destroy the cobblestone.  As an added plus all of the sand and/or gravel will be recollected at the end by the quarry with all of the ores it can now mine so you will be ready to go again once finished.

[Kotja]

About lava pockets in nether: it is easy to use bucket and jetpack.

[HeatHunter]

About lava pockets in nether: it is easy to use bucket and jetpack.

 

still harder than just putting a bucket liquid redstone on top of your quarry

[AxeGarian]

Holy wow, there IS a use for Gelid Cryotheum after all? Sweet!

 

Idea on how to deal with all that Netherrack: Feed it into Magma Crucibles to turn it into Lava, BC Pump the Lava Lakes & the Magma Crucibled Lava into Magmatic Dynamos to turn into Power that will be fed into Resonant Energy Cells.

 

The Single Lava Blocks that are dealt with by the Gelid Cryotheum &/or Buchet of Destabilized Redstone can become Obsidian of course.

 

Why all the fancy schmancy 'curtain shenanigans'? Just place a single bucket early in the Quarrying then it'll spread out over the blocks then the Quarry will mine that Layer then it'll drop itself down & spread out further, then the Quarry will eventually reach that Layer & Mine it then it'll drop down & spread again, & it'll keep going like that till it's spread out over the whole Quarry Hole. No need for many Buckets of the stuff.

 

I built Land Marks ages ago but nothing I did would make them cooperate with my Quarry so I been stuck with its default width this whole time. I'll try your exact directions with it & see if it works & if there was something I didn't know to do that I wasn't somewhere... especially now that I have my first Resonant Energy Cell, default Quarry Size is gonna get a bit obsoletely small... & slow...

 

Many thanks for the tips here.

 

Edit: Wish my Firefox Spell Checker worked on this Forum.

Edited February 27, 2015 by AxeGarian

[Valkon]

Why all the fancy schmancy 'curtain shenanigans'? Just place a single bucket early in the Quarrying then it'll spread out over the blocks then the Quarry will mine that Layer then it'll drop itself down & spread out further, then the Quarry will eventually reach that Layer & Mine it then it'll drop down & spread again, & it'll keep going like that till it's spread out over the whole Quarry Hole. No need for many Buckets of the stuff.

I think that depends on the size of your quarry. A single bucket wouldn't cover a maximum sized quarry, for example.

[Curunir]

I updated and cleaned up some parts of the text yesterday that were a bit ambiguous, and added a few details that I simply didn't know when I first wrote it.

 

As for the curtain, this is a method that can be employed easily in a running Quarry by just moving along the edge of the pit. You can of course flood it before you even start, but that will spread the liquid over more blocks, which has two disadvantages:

• Performance might drop more, because more water blocks are generated and updated.
• The water will impair your sight more than a curtain would, so it is harder to spot problems from the edge.

You avoid these if you only start flooding when the arm has already reached y=20 or so, but at this point a single water source block will not be sufficient any more. Of course, if the Quarry starts at a sufficiently high y level, even a single corner-placed water source block will cover the entire pit once it reaches lava level. I have no idea how high it needs to be for that, but for a 64x64 pit, this might require higher placement than sea level. Do respect the chunk update storm that all this water will cause. It should be safe in singpleplayer, but multiplayer may be different story.

 

Also note that Cryotheum will (slowly) drop like Sand or Gravel, so you cannot just splash it into the pit. It needs to rest on the edge and flow over it for the source block to be preserved. Alternatively, you could place it on a single solid block above the Quarry frame area. I never said a curtain was the only way, it's just my way.

 

If you have copious amounts of Cryo to spend, here is a truly elegant option: Flood the entire Quarry pit with Cryo one block high using a Buildcraft Floodgate. The cryo carpet will sink eventually as the Quarry progresses, and you can suck it back out with a Buildcraft Pump at the end. You do the math on how many buckets that will take - even a 9x9 standard pit will already need 81.

Edited February 27, 2015 by Curunir

[AxeGarian]

I updated and cleaned up some parts of the text yesterday that were a bit ambiguous, and added a few details that I simply didn't know when I first wrote it.

 

As for the curtain, this is a method that can be employed easily in a running Quarry by just moving along the edge of the pit. You can of course flood it before you even start, but that will spread the liquid over more blocks, which has two disadvantages:

• Performance might drop more, because more water blocks are generated and updated.
• The water will impair your sight more than a curtain would, so it is harder to spot problems from the edge.

You avoid these if you only start flooding when the arm has already reached y=20 or so, but at this point a single water source block will not be sufficient any more. Of course, if the Quarry starts at a sufficiently high y level, even a single corner-placed water source block will cover the entire pit once it reaches lava level. I have no idea how high it needs to be for that, but for a 64x64 pit, this might require higher placement than sea level. Do respect the chunk update storm that all this water will cause. It should be safe in singpleplayer, but multiplayer may be different story.

 

Also note that Cryotheum will (slowly) drop like Sand or Gravel, so you cannot just splash it into the pit. It needs to rest on the edge and flow over it for the source block to be preserved. Alternatively, you could place it on a single solid block above the Quarry frame area. I never said a curtain was the only way, it's just my way.

 

If you have copious amounts of Cryo to spend, here is a truly elegant option: Flood the entire Quarry pit with Cryo one block high using a Buildcraft Floodgate. The cryo carpet will sink eventually as the Quarry progresses, and you can suck it back out with a Buildcraft Pump at the end. You do the math on how many buckets that will take - even a 9x9 standard pit will already need 81.

Ahh, i'm playing Tekkit SP. Also I was talking from the point of view of Overworld Mining. I guess i'm not yet qualified to talk about Nether mining yet.

 

As for Water impairing Sight, hasn't for me in ages. My MPS is equipped with Night Vision. Night Vision sees through the Water with ease when you're above it & looking down through it. 8) (It's also sweet to have in the Nether. )

 

Edit: Oh, just remembered another tip: Angel Blocks can be your friend, especially when dealing with high elevation or Quarrying over the Ocean. Wouldn't blame any of ya a bit if ya saw the Angel Block in the NEI & thought to yourself "What's the point of that?", but having 1-5 of these dudes can be the best use for Chicken Feathers you'll ever find.

Edited March 1, 2015 by AxeGarian

[Torezu]

Holy wow, there IS a use for Gelid Cryotheum after all? Sweet!

I realize this section is for Tekkit, but I discovered another use for it - in 1.7.10.  200 mB (2 dust worth) poured on top of Thaumcraft 4 Cinnabar in a Magma Crucible/Fluid Transposer combo ore generates a Thermal Foundation/Expansion Cinnabar crystal.  That's all I have to say.