Entry #5 January 17th-18th, 2021
Did a whole lot yesterday, and a lot of very satisfying work. I'm starting to see some things I put in prep work to be functional later are able to start to click and work together.
[URL=https://i.imgur.com/zk2Z7E4.jpg]
[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/zk2Z7E4h.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
This is a mudwashing set up. You pump up viscous muddy water from the seafloor, and send that through these buildings which are all Washing Plants. There are several different levels of viscosity of muddy water, from Viscous to Thin Mud Water. You get a couple things out of it, first off, each conversion of one level of viscosity produces, you guessed it, Mud. With Heavy Mud Water you can extract Clay, Light Mud Water you can get Limestone, and Thin Mud Water you can get Sand.
With Clay we will end up making Clay Bricks, as well as Reinforced Clay Bricks, which are used for higher tiers of buildings (reminder that I'm still building out of God Mode so this isn't totally relevant right now).
The reason I set it up now was mainly for Limestone, which is a reagent used in a variety of things. We'll get to that in a moment!
The main use for Sand is to mix it into Concrete, although it's also used for a few other things, like part of a more complex and efficient recipe for glass mixture.
Now for something really fun, because it's finally time for actually USING that ore I have been producing all this time...
[URL=https://i.imgur.com/F8TV90J.jpg]
[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/F8TV90Jh.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
Iron Ore Smelting! This takes Iron Ore and turns it into Iron Ingots. It's a mostly horizontally mirrored setup, which I thought was fun and an economical use of space.
[URL=https://i.imgur.com/vwQ4tzm.jpg]
[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/vwQ4tzmh.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
**Red:** Iron Ore comes down in from either side.
**Blue:** First step is turning it into Processed Iron. How is the Iron Processed? It is Processed in an Ore Processor. It becomes Processed. Convenient! Even comes with its own little minecart tray thing.
**Green:** A Pellet Press turns the Processed Iron into Iron Pellets.
**Yellow:** Blast Furnaces melt the Pellets down into Iron Ingots.
**Purple:** To melt down Iron Pellets specifically, the Blast Furnace needs both Limestone (there it is!) and Coke as reagents. It's pretty efficient with this so we don't need much, and we don't have to worry about throughput all that much, so I just have one belt of each running underground underneath each Furnace, splitting to accept input from a miniloader, and then going back underground again, which is in the lower Purple square.. Basically weaving belts of Coke and Limestone through the line of Furnaces. Blast Furnaces also need a solid fuel to operate, but conveniently, Coke is a great fuel for smelting, so they use Coke as both a fuel and a Reagant, much like the furnaces creating the Coke in the first place.
Another fun thing about this is that to create Steel Ingots, I mostly just copy and pasted the Iron Ingot set up and added a few extra components, since Steel is a) heavier than feathers b) just Iron with some extra steps.
[URL=https://i.imgur.com/ws5tWX6.jpg]
[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/ws5tWX6h.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
**Red:** Just like from other setups, an Air Filter compresses air...
**Blue:** A Chemical Plant separates that air into Oxygen and Nitrogen...
**Yellow:** ... a Flare Vent, which has been in my setups before but I haven't explained them before, takes that Nitrogen that we have no use for here and burns it away...
**Orange:** ...and instead of the Iron Ingots going up to the train station, they're put through another Blast Furnace, and fed Oxygen from the Chemical Plant, to create Steel Ingots.
In comparison to Ore Rinsing and Crystallizing and whatnot from before, creating Ingots out of it is wildly efficient, at least in terms of space needed. That gargantuan 5 x 12 Grid set up, where at least half of the types of base ores that I've been processing will result in Iron Ore, I've been producing about 1k-2k Ore per minute, steadily and more or less consistently, but it's never gotten too far above 2k. The Iron Ore to Iron Ingot fits into one Grid Square, and the Steel one I put on to two squares since it's a less efficient process. The Steel one as I'm watching it right now seems to be operating at max capacity (after some trouble shooting I did off screen, I forgot to route an output for the second Blast Furnace on the right side of the setup, and overall it wasn't getting enough Compressed Air so I added more supplementary Air Filters) is consuming Iron Ore at a rate of 10k per minute! I am going to have to throttle it a bit for now and limit the buffer of Ingots by limited the storage space for completed Ingots so I don't eat through all of my Iron Ore! Iron Ore is one of the few ore types that are needed for recipes other than the Plate equivalent (for instance but Gold Ore is used to make, well, the prerequisites for Gold Plates and not much else) so even if that is going to be a minimal usage for Iron Ore, I don't want it to be using all of it all at once.
Finally, this is what a lot of this has been leading up to... finally, we're making Iron Plates, which is the base for a ton of things we are actually going to be BUILDING eventually.
[URL=https://i.imgur.com/s6uLQaB.jpg]
[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/s6uLQaBh.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
**Red:** Iron Ingots coming in from the train station offscreen.
**Green:** Induction Furnaces melt the Iron Ingots down into Molten Iron. There are a lot of options for how to get Molten Iron, most of which result in cutting it with Ingots of other metals to double or triple the efficiency of your target Molten Metal at the expense of the other metal. For instance, you can melt down 12 Iron Ingots into 120 Units of Molten Iron, or you can melt down 12 Iron Ingots and 12 Silicon Ingots to get 240 Molten Iron. I am probably going to do this at some point to limit the consumption of Iron but not until I've done a lot more other set up.
**Yellow:** Strand Casting Machines take the Molten Iron and rapidly cool it down with Coolant, to create Iron Sheet Coils. They also output Used Coolant as a byproduct, which we can pipe away and process into more Coolant, but I haven't set that up yet... I need Iron Plates and Steel Plates for that!
**Purple:** Regular assembly machines take the Iron Sheet Coils and make Iron Plates out of them.
73 Hours of play later and I've created something you can create within minutes of the base game!
It's worth mentioning that even in this heavily modded play, it is possible to just melt down Iron Ore directly into Iron Plates which you can start using immediately. By introducing extra complications, you either make the end result faster, you make more interesting or useful byproducts (or in some cases eliminate pesky ones), or more efficiently, getting more of the end result out of the same base materials than with a simple process.
For example, by taking 3 Saphirite Ore, crushing it with an Ore Crusher or by hand to get 3 Crushed Saphirite, and then chucking it into the first tier of Furnace, I can have 2 Iron Plates in about 8 seconds.
Or, if I take Saphirite Ore, crush it in an Ore Crusher, treat that crushed ore in a Flotation Cell to make Saphirite Chunks, treat that in a Leaching Plant to get Saphirite Crystals, treat those in an Ore Refinery to get Purified Saphirite Crystals, sort that through an Ore sorting facility to get Iron Ore, Process that Ore to get Processed Iron, press it into Iron Pellets, melt it down into Ingots, melt Iron Ingots into Molten Iron, turn it into Sheet Coil with a Strand Casting Machine, and then turn that into 2 Plates, the amount of Saphirite Ore I've used to get the same amount of plates is... 2.7!!!! But also, I've created 5 other kinds of Ore at the same time, a few other interesting byproducts, and with the right set up I can do that thousands of times a minute. Also, dang, this is really making me come around on cutting my Molten Iron with either Silicon or something else, I really gotta get my other Ingots set up ASAP!
