SevTech: Ages - Age 4 | The Modern Age

Modernization

Age 4 - The Modern Age. Looking at JEI, it looks like we’ve got quite a few things on our menu.

1. The End

2. Immersive Engineering

3. Galacticraft

4. Refined Storage/Applied Energistics

Of course, the moment we unlocked Age 4, we did the most important thing first.

Modern Kitchen

I tore out the antique bookshelves and Engineer’s Workbench to make space for the most wonderful and amazing kitchen on the planet.

Master Chef

The world-reknowned Master Chef TehPiyoNoob demonstrates his prudential culinary skill by preparing his award-winning crispy roast chicken - right out of the oven. Tasty!

The End

Once we got our morale back up, it was time to get to business. I was told to make a Solid Eye of Ender to bring us to the Stronghold. I forgot to bring a boat, though.

Shipwrecked

At least I got a cool screenshot in exchange for being stupid.

Big Bad Cliffs

My Solid Eye of Ender brought me to this insane mountain range. I had to dig down from there.

Overgrown

The End Portal room was overgrown with mossy cobblestone and oak trees. Looks quite cool!

Black Portal

Obligatory End Portal screenshot.

Dragon Slayer

R.I.P. SevTech Ender Dragon. 2019 - 2019.

Outer Islands

To our disappointment, there was nothing at the outer islands. End City chests were empty and we just snagged the Elytra. We did mine out a crap load of End Stone and Obsidian though,

The Between

Instead of making progress in the main Advancements page, we decided to start knocking off some Advancements in the other pages. We started off with the Betweenlands!

I found the Spirit Tree and the Wight Fortress, while TehPiyoNoob worked on killing Betweenlands mobs with their respective weapons. He also found a Cragrock Tower.

I gathered a lot of scenic screenshots which portray how insanely beautiful the dimension is. ZeZePiyo and TehPiyoNoob took on Herblore. They experimented unethically on geckos. Unfortunately, I was caught up working on the base and destroying the Twilight Forest for ores and Advancements so I didn’t get to dabble with this unethical business. What a shame.

The Midnight Jungle

Being an environmentalist from the Overworld, I was against stealing so many materials from its lands, so I did it in the Twilight Forest instead. Well, actually it’s because the ores are easier to find there. In the meantime, I blasted down structure after structure in the Twilight to get more loot.

Honestly, despite what I have said before, the Twilight Forest is a great mod, which has only gotten old over time. While exploring the icy caverns of the Alpha Yeti and the glaciers of the Snow Queen, I’m starting to see parts of the mod which I’m less familiar with. The ideas behind the Twilight Forest are great, but perhaps it will be the most enjoyable experience if it is complete.

The Labyrinth offers a good lot of Steeleaf for me to repair my tools with. I discovered that using blocks of Steeleaf will repair Steeleaf Tinkers Construct tools as well, and at a much faster pace. It became my goal to gather one stack of Steeleaf Blocks, which I obviously didn’t complete. I wonder if there’s a way to quarry out a maze…

Unfortunately Not (Yet)

Instead of feeling sorry for being unable to repair my tools at a faster pace, I decided to do some building. This amazing staircase connects the ground to the Starlight Infuser.

Starlight Power

While on the topic of Astral Sorcery, I also attuned myself to Discidia which provides me with extra damage. The process was painless and made me feel awesome.

Woohoo!

I am one with the stars!

Astral Sorcery has an interesting skill tree system which allows me to specialize in certain powers that make me stronger. My attunement to violent constellation of Discidia allows me to gain experience from attacking poor little mobs in order to make me stronger. I feel like a bully but I think it’s worth it.

Starlight Power

By clicking on certain parts of this cool book after hitting things a couple of times, I can get stronger!

Illegal Parking

I decided to build a plastic factory to automate the production of plastic so I can breeze through Pneumaticraft, but a dumb wooden car made by TehPiyoNoob some time ago was blocking the way. Although I can instantly obliterate thousands of cubic metres of extremely hard igneous rock, I am unable to move this dinky wooden car. Luckily, TehPiyoNoob was around to move his car. He gave me a ride before almost crashing into the river.

Uber Ride

It was a bumpy ride but at least the car is out of the way. The Ultimate Car Mod is quite cool.

Crash by the River

We sorta ran out of fuel at the wrong time. Luckily it didn’t go into the river.

Plastics and Pneumatics

With the stupid car out of the way, I can finally get my plastic factory going. I had to craft up some extra Modular Machinery controllers and casings and input valves and output valves, among other things, so that I can get the three machines required to process molten naphtha and steam into molten plastic. Oh wait… steam.

View fullsize

I begged TehPiyoNoob to whack together three more of those solar reflector thingies so that we can have our steam production cranked up to maximum speed. We manually feed water to the system using one of those ugly tanks which can somehow contain more than 1 cubic meter of water in 1 cubic meter of space.

Honestly, I’m pretty proud of the outcome. With a good production of plastic, I can finally get into Pneumaticraft! Being a high achiever, the first thing I did was to construct this huge pressure chamber.

Under Pressure

Using some of those Air Compressors which eventually blew up, we got a simple Pressure Chamber running to do stuff in.

I fumbled with the thing for a while since I couldn’t input the items into the Pressure Chamber through the ports. I eventually realized you need to use an automated item input instead. Oh well, that was a good use of 45 minutes of my time.

Apologies for the streak of glass, the raindrop, and the darkness of this screenshot, but you can see how I tried to mass-produce transistors, capacitors, and PCBs. I discovered that the items in the Pressure Chamber don’t update properly visually and I was feeling sad about my items being stuck in there when there weren’t actually items stuck in there.

I also spent quite some effort setting up an assembly. It looks cool but it’s painfully slow. After a thousand years, I finally managed to get my Advanced Pressure Tubes which are used to make Flux Compressors. Finally, a renewable source of gas!

Base Upgrades

Danger!

Using this dangerous pylon crashes the server sometimes. Don’t use it!!!

“The Smeltery can be any size from 3×3 to 11×11.”

— Materials and You

11×11

Well, they said I could, so I did.

Biofuel

We casually used a crap load of Immersive Engineering Garden Cloches to grow lots of strange crops to feed a Industrial Foregoing Bioreactor.

More variety of plants means better yield. Well, they said I could, so I did. It doesn’t show in the screenshot, but we eventually automated 9 different items to maximize this Bioreactor:

1. Potato

2. Carrot

3. Beetroot Seeds

4. Wheat Seeds

5. Nether Wart

6. Pumpkin Seeds

7. Melon Seeds

8. Brown Mushroom

9. Red Mushroom

These are easy to grow and produce and the farms also look pretty amazing, so I see it as an absolute win.

Villager extortion

My New Victim

Say hello to Villager #18! He’s my scam victim for today. A round of applause, please!

In today’s edition of stupid trades, we see a guy who converts 1 fleece into 9 string which can be directly crafted into 2.25 fleece. With a little bit of convincing and just a small flair of charisma, I managed to squeeze quite a good bit of string off this poor testificate. Tough luck!

“This has been the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, maybe ever.”

— Villager #18

Poor Man’s Storage Network

As I peered hopelessly at the expensive crafting recipes for the Refined Storage and Applied Energistics items, I felt overwhelmed with a pang of sadness. I had to resort to using the Simple Storage Network mod, which is although amazing to use and seems cool, is also extremely laggy when used in large-scale.

Simple

It looks nice and clean on the surface…

Storage

…but beneath, it’s a monstrosity of Actually Additions Large Crates.

Network

And it’s laggy! It takes a while for items to go in and out of the network.

But at least everything is in one place now! That should facilitate some rapid progress…

Rocket Science

Double Distillation

Boom! ZeZe casually gave me another set of materials to build another Distillation Tower to get kerosene.

Rockin’ Rocket

Pow! ZeZe used the annoying Galacticraft Compressor to make a rocket.

Woolly Spacesuit

Bam! ZeZe also made me a spacesuit out of lots and lots of wool. I suppose the villager extortion was for a good cause…

I volunteered my life for this mission. Hopefully I don’t forget to bring anything… As I took off, TehPiyoNoob sarcastically waved at me to bid me goodbye. I suspect he’s secretly glad I’m gone.

Took a while, but… aha, I hit the Moon! Amazing. Oh, look! Age 5.

A stupid challenge awaits me…

SevTech: Ages - Age 3 | A Scoop of Engineering

After having some good fun with decorating the base, it's time to work on some progress. There are some monsters that I had to take down, some of which I hadn't looked up yet:

1. Energy Generation (Water Wheels?)

2. Energy Transfer (LV Wire?)

3. Arc Furnace

4. Pumpjack

5. Distillation Tower

6. Solar Tower

7. Modular Machinery Mod

8. Astral Sorcery Starlight Infuser

9. Astral Sorcery Attunement Altar

I built another two sets of Immersive Engineering Water Wheels which were definitely insufficient, but would have to do as those are extremely space-consuming.

Triple Triple Wheel

I expanded to the other side of the base. I decided to build up a steampunk-style environment for our area since separate buildings are easier to build than one gigantic one.

It looked like my block palette has already been settled, but I am an adventurous builder and prepared a huge sample of my favorite Treated Wood Planks from Immersive Engineering and Red Rock Bricks from Traverse, which I thought looked quite good and steampunk-ish.

I built up the frame and now TehPiyoNoob has space to build the Arc Furnace! He is fast and builds it quickly. The screenshots after the first two are actually from quite long after it was built, but it's the same building so I'll include them. I like the depth which I was able to add, all thanks to the wonderful Chisels & Bits mod. The steampunk is shaping up nicely!

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Now that the Arc Furnace exists, we can use it... right? Nah, we actually need Graphite Electrodes. Oh well, no biggie, just gotta build another machine for that - another simple 3x3 Industrial Squeezer. Not much to see, I just nicely asked TehPiyoNoob to settle that part.

Energy Gobbler

Well, it takes 512 IF/t to run and we make about 250. Maybe that's why this is so, so, so slow.

Having had enough of technology, I decided it was time to do a little bit of magic. Well, more like I wanted this modpack to last a little longer than the others that we have played so I decided to procrastinate on the main progress a little and work on "other progress".

A bit of a rainy mood, but I managed to build one of the most annoying structures in Astral Sorcery - The Starlight Infuser! I was even more annoyed when I found out that the Liquid Starlight on the floor gets consumed when I perform operations using the Starlight Infuser, AND it invalidates the structure so I need to replace the Liquid Starlight once it gets depleted. Dang. I heard there's a future solution to this, though, so I'm hopeful.

Finally, we have "easy" Stardust! Now, onto the Attunement Altar:

Turns out it's just a bunch of flashy particles... Still super pretty to look at, though. Reminds me of the Arcane Infusion from Thaumcraft 4, which was the first mod I ever played with in survival. Using the Attunement Altar, we can attune ourselves to a particular constellation and try to grow a Skill Tree. TehPiyoNoob and ZeZe have already done that, but I was too busy dealing with other things so didn't find time to do it.

After this well-deserved break from Immersive Engineering, it's time to attack the long crafting and processing sequence which will get us plastic for the next age!

Indoors Oil Pump

Well, not really. ZeZe actually made the Pumpjack quite long ago but found out that we had no way to process the oil. As you can see, it's placed on some strange position since it's supposed to be temporary.

We got the oil from the Pumpjack (which has a really good operation animation) and got stumped when we saw this:

Well, they told me it's my job to build this thing. Dang.

All is well. I proceeded to prepare the materials, which were thankfully not too terrible due to the amazing infrastructure we came up with for making steel in a non-automated way because hoppers are too annoying to get.

Project Chest

This is the biggest multi-block machine I have made from Immersive Engineering, ever.

Using the Immersive Engineering Projector for the first time since the machine is so huge, I quickly built up the monster.

To power it, I used Thermoelectric Generators from Immersive Engineering. I think the concept is quite cool for a passive power generation, but I suppose it's kinda annoying to set up. Also, wires are annoying.

Next: either a Solar Tower or a Boiler for some steam. We chose to do the Solar Tower since it's passive. TehPiyoNoob quickly got the thing running.

Solar Steam

It's a pretty-looking multi-block which has a really good steampunk feel to it. Well, I suppose it creates steam, so it's steampunk.

With the naphtha from distilling oil and steam from the Solar Tower, I can mix them up in a chemical mixer to obtain - get this - molten propene. If you look up this dang compound on Wikipedia, you see this:

And this thing looks like lava, and burns you. Cool! Okay, time to make it.

Modular Machinery

Found a good spot with a spare Windmill to power the Modular Machine.

As I understood the Modular Machinery mod, I realized it's the mother of all multi-block structures. Modpack creators can pull whatever dang machine they want out of their butt and it turns into a real thing. I was quite traumatized when crafting the components to make the machines since they are really annoying to make.

Magic GUI Mod

Turns out it's just an uninteresting bunch of user interfaces and doesn't even have a nice texture to go with it. Disappointing.

After the Chemical Mixer, it's the Liquid Processor - which is just another load of bull from this mod. As I walked into the base for some intense crafting, I realized I could just reuse the blocks from the Chemical Mixer. So I did.

More Magic GUI

Funny how the Liquid Processor looks and functions exactly like a Chemical Mixer.

Well, the next step was a Plastic Molder, which is just the same dang crap again. Oh well, time for the Liquid Processor to turn into something else.

Micro-Management

ZeZe and I are busy micro-managing the fluid inputs and item outputs of things.

Finally, we got it! The dang plastic.

I heard Age 5 is not fun so I'm going to stay in Age 4 for a good long time. We actually did quite a bunch of things in between, but I'll include that in a separate blog post instead.

SevTech: Ages - Age 2 | A Whole Old Land

I got a little sick of playing in Age 2 and wanted to upgrade to Age 3. Unfortunately, I discovered that the progression tree was actually quite long. I needed a few things.

View fullsize

The crafting recipe for a simple Coal Engine. I'm not very sure why it needs to be infused with starlight.

A Coal Engine, which required Fiery Gears, Steeleaf Rods, Ghast Tears, and a Carminite Reactor from the Twilight Forest, whose portal required a Starmetal Ingot, which required a Starmetal Ore made in a Starlight Crafting Altar using Stardust. I couldn't find any more Stardust since I couldn't find any more Rock Crystal Samples despite travelling great distances so I had to craft it. The Stardust had to be made in a Hellfire Forge which uses Demonic Will as catalyst. Unfortunately, the catalyst required a Tartaric Gem to store which I still did not have. I progressed through the Tartaric Gem upgrade tree and finally upgraded my Luminous Crafting Table to a Starlight Crafting Altar and then a Celestial Altar.

CONSOLATION Prize

Some nice scenery I found whilst searching for some Rock Crystal samples, unfortunately eventually to no avail.

Costly Portal

The Twilight Forest portal in this modpack is one of the most annoying ones I have made. When I threw the Starmetal Ingot into my puddle of water, I was momentarily jolted when I saw that no portal was created. Fortunately, it was just a lag spike.

I didn't take a lot of screenshots since it wasn't something very new to me. I did enjoy the huge FPS spikes from my shaders though. Provided a little extra challenge compared to normal. The Ur-Ghast tower looked really cool with shaders, though.

View fullsize

We didn't have a trophy room so we used our storage as a makeshift one. I've always felt that the Hydra Trophy doesn't look as good as the others.

Flex That Gear

I smeared some armor stands around the base to showcase the nice textures of Twilight Forest armor and tools.

After painstakingly stealing anvils from the Knight Dungeon, looting sticky pistons from the Ur-Ghast Tower, harvesting the Fiery Tears from the Ur-Ghast and Fiery Blood from the Hydra to make Fiery Ingots to make Molten Fiery to make Fiery Gears, and casting the Steeleaf Rods, I had finally prepared the materials for the Coal Engine! Perfect!

But when I placed the items into the dang altar, I couldn't craft it. Didn't have enough starlight. Dang it.

I had to come up with some Spectral Relays which needed Glass Lens which needed Aquamarine and Glass Panes which take a really long time to cast. Oh, and the Aquamarine is found in the Beneath, a strange dark place included in this modpack just to provide a place to get Black Quartz and Aquamarine.

I set up the Spectral Relays and ta-da - my Coal Engine was crafted!