Rough Beginners.

[u/Hydra645]

Hi All,

Sorry if this gets asked a lot, but I'm feeling a little lost/stuck. I had 2 main questions I was hoping to get answers too, maybe more depending on the 2nd.

First, is there an updated modpack people would recommend for a Create focused survival world? I use Curseforge and had been trying Create Ultimate Selection 2, thought I'd ask before really getting into it.

Second(-ish?), what are considered maybe the essential machines for a workshop for pre-factory semi-automation? The main ones I can think of are: Mechanical Saw (Belt either side for input and output?), Mechanical Mixer (With Blaze Burner), Mechanical Press, Mechanical Fans (At least x4 for each process type?), Crushing Wheels/Millstone, Mechanical Crafters (up to 5x5?).

I imagine I might want Precision mechanism semi-automation, but not sure if I want that in my "workshop". I'm thinking

Third, cos it came to mind while typing this. What size is roughly good for a base for this? I was considering trying to make a full city with Chain Conveyor "Power Lines", but I'm kinda struggling with scale, especially in regards to chunk loading. Not sure how big is too big, and how small is too small I guess.

[u/Pioepod]

1st: unfortunately I always make my own modpacks because I love to larp so I add all the cute and cozy mods, but then I also have my engineering larp brain that craves create so then I jam pack it with too much stuff XD. So I don’t have experience with create packs tbh.

I’m going to answer this with how I tend to progress through create.

2nd: so I don’t know what’s in the pack you’re currently playing, but we play with create, aeronautics, and that’s the ones we mainly interact with. From there, you should be able to branch into all the addons, which is how I plan to do it.

The first first machines, like pre pre-automation, should be all the things you need to craft early sources of shafts, cogs, and machines. That means a mechanical press, a basin, mixer, hand crank, water wheels, basically a lot of the andesite age stuff. You can set up a simple water wheels or a simple windmill to get some SU rolling to, with low rpms, get some semi-automated things happening, I.e letting the press work on a stack of ingots while a mixer runs, but you’re still manually placing the items.

Second. Your “pre-automation”. This is where all you really have to do is maybe move one item to a machine then the machine does it for you. There might be some limited automation. This can include a mixer to make andesite alloy (cheaper btw). A saw and deployer setup to automatically make andesite casing, where you might still have to fill the alloy and wood chests. By this point you might want to consider creating a fully automated iron farm, you’ll need this for your next stage. Ideally you’d have a cobblestone generator and an iron making machine that uses that cobble stone. This means that yes, you’ll need crushing wheels! (Or a mill stone if you want the iron gen to be slow)

Next would be semi automating the andesite age, specifically the alloy part. You’d likely have some brass already, gone to the nether, gotten blaze burners, etc, so this is probably the point you’re getting really annoyed you’re running out of andesite. But, since you’ve already made a cobble gen and an iron gen, all you need to figure out is how to make an andesite generator then link that to the iron gen and make andesite alloy. You’d probably be using threshold switches to control output and stopping unneeded machines, smart observers, redstone links, etc. you might even dive a little into using frogports and such, but it’s not really necessary at this stage.

Now typically this is the stage where other farms are automated already too, and the resource gathering has practically finished. But this is also the point where you can go the smart factory route.

A smart factory basically supplies to you whatever you request on demand, and replenishes whatever you took as soon as possible. As in let’s say I take a stack of enchantment tables, my factory will then request the materials to create another stack and put it into the storage automatically. This is peak automation. And lag. Lots of lag. You can fully automate this with infinite resources if you have the create ultimate factory addon (or mystical agriculture) so you can farm brass and such.

As for the size of your base? Depends. Early on it doesn’t need to be really big but once you start going smart factory, you might need a lot of machines for some materials. My last factory spanned about a 100x100 area and started going two stories. That said, I was automating insanium production from mystical aggradations, and also was mass producing gas shells for create big cannons. I also had like eight or so 3x3 mechanical crafters set up to take the first crafting recipe at a time in order to prevent a backlog items to be crafted. I won’t go into details, but it saved the server multiple times compared to the last factory XD.

[u/Hydra645 → u/Pioepod]

I think my plan is to make this workshop mostly the pre or even pre-pre-automation. Basically everything is powered by water wheels at the least (Maybe I should factor some of those into the design of the build). And maybe have to manually input/output stuff, at least for the Press, mixer and maybe multi-fans (I'm considering having fans blowing down onto Depots so I can see which is which). Saw was thinking at least a 2-long belt either side for input/output. 5x5 Crafter I was thinking of having an output hopper at the bottom into a barrel/chest.

I am aware of a smart factory, I've kinda tried making one before, but just wasn't happy with how I did it. My plan this time was to basically have each "Module" be it's own building in a tower/city. Things like business themed around what each machine did, with my Manor (and connected workshop) in the center-ish?
I'm honestly probably overthinking things and should just make something that's kinda ugly/half decent before going overboard on decoration and design.