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Educational Challenge - My First Tech Mod: Thermal

My First Tech Mod!

Tech mods in Minecraft come in all shapes and sizes with varying levels of complexity and entry requirements. I'm calling the various Thermal mods (Thermal Foundation / Thermal Dynamics / Thermal Expansion / Thermal Innovation) 'My First Tech Mod' because together they provide a well rounded suite of concepts, machines, and items that can greatly increase your efficiency, have a moderate degree of complexity, low entry requirements, and it serves as a natural gateway to more complex tech mods that expand on the infrastructure and concepts that you learn in Thermal.

This educational challenge will introduce you to the basics of Thermal and walk you through key milestones that, upon reaching, will be a reward in and of themselves. I'm not going to go over everything all the things that they do but by the time you reach the end you'll understand enough to be able to look at the documentation yourself and figure the rest out.

And just what is it, you are probably asking, that these mods can do for you? Here's a noncomprehensive overview:

  • More Efficient Furnaces
  • Ore Doubling
  • Item & Fluid Transportation
  • Machine Automation
  • Auto Crafting
  • Automatic Item Storage According to Filters
  • More Storage Options
  • Power Tools

What Do I Need to Start?

First of all, you're going to need to enter the right mindset. Large mods like this take a while to figure out. Be prepared to think, look up documentation, explore, experiment, troubleshoot, hunt down guides on YouTube maybe... hopefully not because I suck at writing these, but rather because once you understand how to use the basics your creativity (or needs) will press you to go beyond what you've learned.

Second, you'll need at least iron level pickaxes to get some of the resources required.

Third, you'll need a supply of resources. Go mining and bring up what you can find. Coal, Iron, Copper, Tin, Quartz, Redstone, Gold, Silver, Lead, Diamond, Nickel... anything you can find. Some minerals only appear when you dig deep.

Fourth, you'll need a safe place with space to build and storage to keep your inventory straight.

Understanding Thermal Theory

Thermal is comprised of several mods. Each having to do with a specific part of the Thermal suite.

Thermal Foundation, as the name implies provides the foundation that the other mods need in order to work. Things like extra ores (lead, copper, tin, silver, aluminum, platinum, electrum, signalum, bronze, and several others). It adds a host of new fluids (oil, resonant ender, unstable redstone, resin, gasoline, and several others). It also adds ore dusts, nuggets, gears, plates, coins, and a host of other items and utility tools for use in building and operating items and blocks in the other Thermal mods (crescent wrench, casings, coils, drill heads, in game manuals, and many others).

Thermal Dynamics is all about transferring things. Fluxducts transfer power from generators to the storage cells or machines that need it. Fluiducts transfer fluids. Itemducts transfer items. Think of each of these as 'cables' or 'pipes' that connect one thing to another. Thermal Dynamics also includes attachments that you can put on these pipes to push and pull items / fluids / power to specific places within your network. Servos push items out of an inventory, retrievers pull items toward themselves out of other inventories, and filters restrict what items and fluids can pass through.

Thermal Expansion is all about Machines (blocks that use power to affect the world around them or take an input of resources and process them into something else), Dynamos that generate power (Redstone Flux) by burning some sort of fuel, and augmentations that can be applied to the machines and dynamos to change how they work.

Thermal Innovation includes a handful of useful tools that need to be powered up in order to run. They are powerful tools that will make vanilla pickaxes, shovels, shears, axes, ect a thing of the past and allow you to work at industrial speed.

Step 1 - Basic Ore Processing

The first thing you're going to build in Thermal is a basic ore processing line of machines that take ores in one end and spit out two ingots on the other end... as long as you have some coal and water to power them. Neat right?!

I'm going to tell you what machines and tools need to be built. You are going to go to a crafting table, right click on it, and then use the item search to find the machines listed to see how to build them.

Special Note 1 - If you do this while using a crafting table then a little plus icon should appear in the corner of the recipe when you look it up. If you have all the resources in your inventory then pressing the plus button will automatically complete the recipe, and shift clicking the plus icon will automatically make as many of that item as you have resources available to make.

Special Note 2 - The effect from Special Note 1 is amplified if you use a Crafting Station with a chest next to it as the Crafting Station includes the inventory of the chest plus your personal inventory when crafting items.

  • 1 Crescent Hammer
  • 1 Steam Dynamo
  • 1 Basic Energy Cell*
  • 1 Pulverizer
  • 1 Redstone Furnace
  • 6-12 Leadstone Fluxducts
  • 1 Bucket
  • 2 Chests

* Special Note 3 - To create the Basic Energy Cell you will require Electrum, which is a gold-silver alloy. There are two quick ways to craft Electrum:

  1. Attach the Steam Dynamo directly to the Pulverizer, power it up with coal and water, and then use the Pulverizer on gold and then silver and then craft the crushed gold and silver dusts together to make Electrum Blend and then smelt it into ingots.
  2. Or, if you have a Tinker's Smeltery, put some gold and silver into the smeltery, they will melt and combine into molten electrum, and then you can pour them out into ingots.


Special Note 4 - While using the Crescent Hammer you can Right Click on most Tech blocks (machines, pipes, etc) to change their direction or which sides connect to other blocks. You can also Shift-Right Click on most Tech blocks to immediately break them to go into your inventory.

Here is the big picture of how those things will fit together.
  1. If you need to remove any of the Thermal items, try using the Crescent Hammer before your regular tools.
  2. The Steam Dynamo produces power when it has both coal and water in its inventory, which you need to provide manually at this point.
  3. Blue = Input // Orange = Output
    That power needs to travel along via FluxDucts to the Input side of the Leadstone Energy Cell (right clicking on the energy cell will let you configure which side(s) are inputs and which side(s) are outputs.


  4. The power needs to travel from an output side of the Leadstone Energy Cell to the Pulverizer and Redstone Furnace via more FluxDucts.
  5. If powered the Pulverizer will take ores and crush them into two dusts which can be smelted into ingots.
  6. If powered the Redstone Furnace will act like a regular furnace except quicker and requiring less coal to provide the power it needs to do its job.
  7. If you place a chest above the Pulverizer and fill it full of ores then you can configure the Pulverizer's top side to be an input and it will automatically pull ores from the chest into its inventory.
  8. If you place the Redstone Furnace beside the Pulverizer and set the Pulverizer's adjacent side as an export side and the Redstone Furnance's adjacent side as an import side then the Redstone Furnace will take the dusts from the Pulverizer and start smelting them automatically.
  9. If you place a chest next to the Redstone Furnace and set that side of the Redstone Furnace as an export then the ingots will automatically land in the chest.
Direwolf20 sets this up in episode 2 of his YouTube series - https://youtu.be/1iXgGR_AswU?si=WNhC3SLr1lR8heot&t=1762


If are able to build this and get the automation working then congratulations! This setup will save you time, double your ores, and it's way more efficient on coal than just standard furnaces. You can claim the title of Novice Thermal Mechanic!


Step 2 - Automatic Water Retrieval

Constantly filling up the steam dynamo with buckets of water maybe isn't the worst thing in the world... especially if you've created an eternal water supply nearby... but did you know that you can automate that task?

What you're going to need is an Aqueous Accumulator, some Fluiduct pipes, and a 3x3 hole filled with water near the Steam Dynamo.

  1. Dig a 3x3 hole near the Steam Dynamo and fill it with water.
  2. Place the Aqueous Accumulator in the middle block so that it is surrounded by water on all side (except the top and bottom)
  3. Place Fluiducts in a path from the Aqueous Accumulator to the Steam Dynamo.
Your Steam Dynamo should now have an eternal source of water constantly pumping into it!



Step 3 - Routing Items

Ore doubling and more efficient furnaces and automatic water intake are all good. The next step is to teach you how to route items from one inventory to another inventory. Why learn this? It has all sorts of applications... automating processes, filtering and sorting items, pulling items out of other Tech mod machines that need to be emptied or they stop working, etc.

Item Routing Theory

Here are the concepts you will need to understand item routing:

  1. 'Inventories' refer to any block that holds items (chests, machines, etc)
  2. Items travel through Itemducts from the Thermal Dynamics mod, which you will use to connect the inventories that you want the items to travel between.
    1. Items traveling through Itemducts will move toward the first inventory that can retrieve them.
    2. An Itemduct will not accept items if they have nowhere to go.
    3. Dense Itemducts increase the 'calculated length' of a route and so encourage items to find somewhere else to go before going that direction while Vacuum Itemducts decrease the 'calculated length'.
    4. Using a Crescent Hammer on Itemducts allows you to quickly break them or fine tune which directions they connect to.
    5. Itemducts can get a little technical, you can find all the documentation you need here - https://teamcofh.com/docs/1.12/thermal-dynamics/itemduct/
  3. In order for items to travel through the Itemducts they must either be 'pushed' or 'pulled'.
    1. Servos 'push' items out of an inventory
    2. Retrievers 'pull' items towards an inventory
    3. Both Servos and Retrievers must be placed on the point where the Itemduct connects to an Inventory.
    4. The Tier of Servos and Retrievers helps determine how many items enter the Itemduct at once.
    5. Servos and Retrievers have configuration settings around when they 'turn on' according to Redstone signal. Setting this to 'ignore' will make the Servo or Retriever always on.
    6. Some machines can be configured so that certain sides are considered outputs, these naturally 'push' items without requiring a servo (Pulverizer and Redstone Furnace as examples).
  4. Filters allow you to specify which items are allowed or not allowed to continue down an Itemduct.
    1. Depending on the filter Tier (Basic, Hardened, Reinforced, Signalum, Resonant) may have more filter slots, more filter options, and an inventory of its own.
    2. Filters can become a bit technical, you can find all the documentation you need here - https://teamcofh.com/docs/1.12/thermal-dynamics/filters/


The concepts are simple but the application can become complicated depending on what you are trying to do and how much space you have to do it in.

Item Routing Challenges

To assist with a practical understanding of these concepts, you have been provided a number of challenges.

Challenge 1

Set up two chests with an Itemduct line between them. Place a servo on the connection to one chest and see if you can get the items to transfer to the other chest.

Challenge 2

Set up three chests. See if you can make items in Chest 1 be routed such that Cobblestone ends up in Chest 2 and all other items end up in Chest 3 (hint, use a filter on the Itemduct connection to Chest 2).

Challenge 3

Set up three chests. See if you can make items in Chest 1 be routed such that items from the Thaumcraft mod and Pam's Harvestcraft go into Chest 2 while items from Thermal Foundation and Thermal Dynamics go into Chest 3 while all other items stay in Chest 1. (hint, use a filter tier that includes the 'By ModOwner' filter option).

Challenge 4

Set up three chests. Place Chest 1 and Chest 2 close together and place Chest 3 several blocks away past Chest 2. See if you can make it so that items in Chest 1 skip over Chest 2 and go into Chest 3 without using filters (hint, use dense or vacuum Itemducts).

Challenge 5

Set up a line of Itemducts 6 blocks long and then set up a second line of Itemducts 6 blocks long right beside it so the lines connect to each other along all 6 blocks of length. See if you can get them to NOT connect to each other. (hint, use a Crescent Hammer).

Challenge 6

Set up three chests. See if you can make it so that Chest 1 pulls Wood Planks and Sticks from Chests 2 and 3 (hint, use a retriever).


Step 4 - Coal Processing for Efficient Power

The the next step we're going to walk you through a solid coal processing line that will drastically boost the amount of juice you get out of coal... literally even! We're going to process coal into liquid refined fuel that burns at 2 Million RF per 100 ml!

This setup is going to require the following machines:
  • 1 Pulverizer
  • 1 Magma Crucible
  • 2 Fractionating Stills
  • 1 Combustion Dynamo
Special Note - In order to build the Magma Crucible you will need process Netherrack in a furnace to get Netherbricks and you will also need some sort of 'Hardened Glass'. The most accessible way to make Hardened Glass for you will probably be through another Thermal Machine, the Induction Smelter.

See if you can figure out how to set them up.

If not then this is covered in Lets Play Season 9 – 1.12 the last quarter of Episode 5.


Step 5 - Machine Upgrades and Augmentations

Thermal Machines, Dynamos, Energy Cells, and number of other blocks come in several different tiers with each tier making it better and faster and also opening it up to accept more augmentations. You can improve an item's tier by constructing Upgrade Kits and Conversion Kits and then applying them to the relevant block.

Augmentations alter the way a machine works, possibly making it more efficient or less efficient but much faster or specializing into doing a specific job. Augmentations need to be crafted and then placed within the relevant block's user interface to be applied.

In order to gain a practical understanding of how this works, craft and apply at least one 'Hardened' upgrade and use it on one of your power dynamos. Then also peruse the list of augmentations and pick and build one and apply it to the Dynamo you just upgraded.


Complete

If you have been able to complete all five steps of this guide then you should have all you need to strike off on your own and do whatever you like with the tools Thermal provides you. Your last challenge, if you choose to accept, is to browse through the documentation for all the different machines available to you to gain a fuller understanding of what they do and how they work because we did not cover them all here.

URL's for Reference

Also, it may interest you to know that the mod Industrial Forgoing is very compatible with Thermal and adds a whole new level of possibilities for you to explore... and you now have everything you need figure out and use what it has to offer.

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