If you’ve played Seablock: Rustic Waters, you’ll know how annoying it is to get metal ingots early game. Whether it’s iron, copper, gold, or lead, having to manually get and smelt the ore chunks each time can get quite annoying.
A bit later on you can get the ember ore factory and other things to make this process a lot less tedious, but if you’re not far enough to do so, this guide will help you make a setup to automate ore generation
There are 4 main components to automating ore generation: the Strainers, the Sluice Boxes, the Furnaces, and the Rats.
This guide was written by DTD#7109.
STRAINERS
In order to get the various ore chunks, you’re going to need dirt, gravel, and sand, and the easiest way to do so is via Strainers. Here’s my setup as reference:
You’ll want strainer bases with the strainer of your choice below water, and using hoppers or embers item pipes, you can pump the items generated from the strainers into drawers. I’d recommend using a drawer controller since you’ll need fewer materials in the long run.
SLUICE BOXES
Once you have your dirt, gravel, and sand, you’ll need to insert these materials into the sluice boxes themselves. This is honestly the hardest part of the setup as you need a lot more tweaking to get everything working correctly. Here’s my example:
Next to the sluice box, you’re going to want 2 automated users, made by combining dispensers and winding gears. 1 of the users will be for water, and the other for the sluicing material. The water one will have a water bucket in input with a tick delay of 100 or more
Going into the user there’ll be a fluid funnel transporting water into it, with a tank on top and a cyclic water pump directly next to it being powered by a lever.
If everything works correctly, the user’s water bucket will never get used up, being refilled before going into output.
If something isn’t working make sure that:
A) The Water Pump’s active and working.
B) The funnel is going into one of the user’s sides or on top of it.
C) The funnel, pump, and tank aren’t near any kind of embers pipe or lever. For some reason that might affect it.
Once the water is set up, you can move on to the user handling the sluicing materials, which are thankfully much simpler.
You don’t really need any setup for them, simply make sure you have a staircase or something in order for your rats to be able to reach the user in case they can’t normally. If you have a flight upgrade, however, you’ll be able to skip this entirely! More on that later.
Lastly, there’s the storage for the drops. Here’s my example:
This might be the most annoying part of all this, as the only real way of transporting items early on is either with hoppers or embers’ item pipes.
Depending on how many resources and space you have to work with, that’ll be easier or harder to do, but the main way is to have a hopper below the sluice box’s latter part, and then either more hoppers or embers item pipes to go into the drawers.
– If you’re using hoppers, make sure all the items wind up where you want them to be, and if you need to move them back up, you can use uppers which are just a hopper but upside down.
– If you’re using embers pipes, make sure that you use item extractors if you need to remove items from a hopper or inventory in general, and make sure to power those item extractors with caminite levers. (Normal levers might work too) You also need to make sure that no pipes are steaming, as it means that the items have gotten stuck there for some reason, and are in need of troubleshooting. If you need to sever any unwanted connections, you’ll need to use a tinker’s hammer and right-click the connection. Embers pipes might be useful as early game item pipes, but they don’t really work as you might want them to and will need a lot of tweaking.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any real way to know what resources you have or how big you can make this system, but if need be, you can copy the example which I provided above, and if you’re still unsure, feel free to ping or dm me so I can help you plan things out.
Once you have everything set up, you might want to redo the setup 2 more times as there are 3 different materials you can sluice, those being Dirt, Gravel, and Sand. It might be annoying to set up, but certain ores like lead, silver, and tin are only from certain materials, so it’s good to have it there.
One last thing to keep in mind is to once again make sure your rats will be able to access these drawers, as you can only access the items from the front of the drawer.
FURNACES
This is the simplest part of the setup, as all you really need are furnaces (preferably gold, diamond, or prismarine) that your rats can access.
Once again, my example:
You might need a lot of ingots to get your furnaces up to a high level, but the extra efficiency will be worth it.
In order to power the furnaces, I’d recommend you use the coal you get from sluicing and straining and turning it into mini coal. Mini coal is like coal, but instead of smelting 8 times it’ll only smelt 1. It helps make sure you don’t waste as much coal on only 2 or 3 ore chunks.
There’s not much else to say, as usual, make sure your rats can access the top and side of the furnaces, as the top is the input for the ores and the side is the output for the ingots.
Last but not least are:
RATS!
This might be the most important part of everything, as they are what combines all the different modules into the full contraption.
If you didn’t know, rats can be commanded using a cheese staff to take and deposit items into different containers, as well as many other actions we won’t be needing.
The number of rats may vary depending on your setup, but if you’re using this guide’s, you’re going to need 22 rats.
3 are going to take the dirt, sand, and gravel from their drawers and into the automated user tasked with placing them in their sluice box,
11 are going to take the ore chunks from their different drawers and take them to their respective furnace,
and 8 are going to take the ingots from the furnace’s outputs and take them to another little drawer system where they’ll be stored.
There’s a whole questline about some basic management of rats in the introduction tab of your quest book, which you can follow to learn how to tame and upgrade your rats. Simply put, however, you’ll need to craft blocks of cheese made by curdling milk in a cauldron or curdling station along with turds to get rat spawn eggs from the resulting fromunda cheese.
I’d recommend giving the ore and ingot rats platter upgrades so they can carry more items, giving the 11 ore rats whitelist upgrades so you can use 2×2 drawers without worrying about what the rats will take, and giving the 3 material rats flight upgrades so you don’t need to make them little stairs to the users in case they’re out of reach.
Platter upgrades let your rats hold a stack of items at a time, whitelist upgrades let you choose which items to take from containers, and flight upgrades give your rats wings, allowing them to reach places without any kind of stairs or slabs or anything, with the only drawback being that you’ll need emeralds to make a market so you can get the chicken spawn eggs for the feathers you’ll need for the recipe:
Finally, in order to let your rats carry more than one upgrade at a time, you’ll need the combined rat upgrade:
Using a rat upgrade station and gems of ratlantis, you’ll be able to add upgrades onto the combined upgrade to let your rats carry more than one at a time. Just make sure you know what each whitelist upgrade has before you add them, however, as you can no longer see or modify the items inside when they’re combined.
CONCLUSION
If you’ve made it to the end, then congrats! You should have an automated ore generation now! However, this system isn’t perfect, and might take a lot of fiddling around to get it working. Everyone’s base and systems might be different, and there are definitely better ways to do all this.
Because of that, if you ever need any help setting everything up or have any questions, please, feel free to ping or dm me about it and I’ll do my best to help.
Lastly, if you ever need to know what any of the recipes are, you can check JEI for all of them, or ask me directly.
I hope this helps! Yet again, feel free to ask me any questions you may have!
This guide was written by DTD#7109, and uploaded by Rubbertjuh. Want to add a wiki article as well? Contact staff on Discord!
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