Is it me?

I've dug up a bunch of stuff, built a farm, I'm collecting materials and now I kind of want to build something cool,something from Industrialcraft maybe?
I'm just not getting the wiki, there's just so much stuff that I don't know where to start.

Industrialcraft is always a good place to start.
Midway into the mod it will give you the advantage of being able to double the ingots made from ores.
Buildcraft and Railcraft are two mods i see as complementary to industrialcraft, so i advice you to put those on hold for a bit.

I think this link should be sufficient in teaching you the slightly confusing art of using industrialcraft.

Yeah that looks like what I need, unfortunately I've wasted a bunch of iron already, time to get digging again I guess.

Incidentally is Tekkit based on an earlier build of minecraft than the regular one, a few things seem to point to an older revision:
Smelting doesn't drop experience
Crafting a sign gives you one not three
Using a lava bucket as fuel doesn't return the bucket

Yes, tekkit is currently based on minecraft 1.2.5. Since it contains a whole bunch of mods it might take quite a while to get them all 1.3 compatible.

I know that that most of the major mods (ic2, builcraft, mffs and some others) are already updated

Yeah, it's the smaller mods inbetween that are taking time. I'm not sure about Broonies server but my own test server pre CFUK beta had around 50+ mods. So it will take some time to update and compile before broonie can get it.

FWIW I'm finding it a pain that so much of the content needs glowstone. Burned through a bunch of gold dust so far, and actually mining some glowstone is looking more and more impossible right now.

I had a promising looking portal too, then it seems to have got trashed by ghasts I think, though I thought cobble was ghast-proof.

Sorry, just venting.

Yeah I wondered what could have caused that damage...

Then I took a mining laser with me and did a bit of "mining"...Now I get it.

Incidentally I've closed my portal but the return path is still a bit "off". Unfortunately the spawn portal tends to pop up at the bottom of a burning hole at the moment.

Oh BTW Its interesting that the guide is for "vanilla" IC2, so it leaves out some stuff that's relevant to Tekkit.

One observation I'd add is that if you find nearly a full stack of redstone before you find enough iron then you could build the generator last. You waste quite a bit of redstone powering the extractor and macerator though.

Also though this might be obvious: If you have access to a machine already (public machine room maybe) then you can defer building that and go straight to power tools.

The mining drill is great, plus you can upgrade it to diamond and it doesn't wear out.

Given a choice between the mining laser and electric jetpack I would totally recommend building the jetpack first. The mining laser makes an impressive mess when fired but oddly enough I find I leave it behind most of the time.

Rubber:
The Industrialcraft rubber tree is uncommon but it will drop saplings sometimes. Be careful not to destroy the sap points. As far as I know the trunk won't grow new points, though empty points will refill in time. The Redpower Rubberwood tree is a ludicrously big thing with a 3x3 trunk. One tree easily yields at least four stacks of wood, though I'd recommend a chainsaw and jetpack (LOL). I'd advise allowing some space between the tree and your base, it takes a lot of work to clear.

Automatic mining.
I wouldn't recomend upgrading the OD-scanner to an OV-scanner, you can craft the OV directly using a re-battery instead, and keep the OD scanner as well.

Bear in mind that the miner can draw a lot of power. In the early stages I'd recommend geothermal energy. Mining from the surface to bedrock with a diamond drill and OV scanner takes around 500,000EU. My early mining runs were powered using two geothermal generators and a lot of lava buckets.

Solar arrays
These don't seem to be in the base IC2. Given enough iron I think you can get to a MV array relatively easily, you need to think in terms of crafting whole stacks e.g. One whole stack of machine blocks, one whole stack of furnaces, two stacks of circuits etc.

Electric wrench in lossless mode.
Dismantling one breakable machine discharges the wrench. Fortunately only a limited number of machines are breakable that way, the ones that aren't will not drain the wrench. If you are dismantling a generator array you could use the last generator to recharge the wrench prior to dismantling. Advanced machines don't seem to break, except for the mass fabricator. Transformers don't seem to break. The miner and pump don't seem to.

Charging bench.
These change the rules by allowing you to charge advanced devices even if you only have LV power. A bench MK.2 is relatively cheap and allows you to charge level2 devices without needing a MFE. They also give an easy way to get HV power since a bench MK.3 can be made to output HV by applying redstone. A bench MK1 will accept power from the highest level devices if you add two transformer upgrades, making it an invaluable portable power source.

Geothermal power plant.
This requires an IC2, buildcraft mix. You'll need a shaft leading down to a lava lake. For this you could:
1: Dig manually
2:Use your miner without a scanner
3:Use the buildcraft "mining well"
You'll need an energy link, which among other things requires two advanced alloy (compressor required) and two gold gears.
You'll need a buildcraft pump. To make this you first make a mining well, then craft it into a pump. The requirements aren't too bad, mostly iron and glass.
Plant construction basic: place the energy link next to the borehole. Place the BC pump next to the link so its over the borehole. Place an IC2 geothermal gen next to the pump so its near the link and join the gen to the link with copper cable.
Put a few lava buckets into the generator to "boot" it, the pump will extend down to the lava and start pumping it into the generator. A decent size lava lake should be good for a few million EU. You can add more generators, and I'm told you can use BC waterproof pipes to carry the lava to generators (I haven't tried this).

Getting the power back to your base:
Assuming you don't just want to build your base next to the geo plant you need to transport the power somehow.

My approach was to manually charge lapotron crystals. Provided you don't run a mass fab this works rather well.
It should be possible to pipe the lava to a generator located at your base.
Copper cable is probably not advisable, the loss mounts up quickly unless you can put batboxes after every 4 cables.

I sort of see Tekkit as being like minecraft, but more. That seems like an obvious statement so I shall explain what I mean.

Different people find different things in minecraft. Some people like making beautiful buildings. Others make railway networks. Others farms. Others automated stuff like mobtracks. Others complex redstone circuits. For each of those things and more, tekkit adds a little more room for you to expand into.

Recently, I have been feeling like I have discovered everything I am going to discover in minecraft. Even with redstone, which has kept me entertained for some time, I feel like I have explored more or less all of what it can do. It seems like there are no new possibilities for me to explore. Most of the reason I still play minecraft is the community here at CFUK.

With tekkit, there is suddenly a whole new game to play. Not like a normal minecraft update where a couple new things get added. Tekkit adds an order of magnitude more stuff to play with. I haven't yet started playing with the new redpower circuits in tekkit as I have been working on getting my house built, but I can see already that when I do it will be a whole new challenge and it will bring a whole new lease of life into what I get from playing minecraft.

Perhaps if you are relatively new to minecraft (I have been playing over two years now) then tekkit might seem like just unnecessary extra, but for me it has brought the fun and wonder back and I'm sure there will be others that feel the same.

So, in short, don't try and 'get tekkit'. There is no single point to tekkit any more than there is to minecraft. You know by now what you find fun in this game. Just keep doing that in tekkit and I'm sure it will start to make sense.

I'm pretty much of the same fram of mind as Discharge on this one. I like minecraft because of all that you can do in it, but was starting to get to a point where it was getting bit samey.

When I saw / heard what you could do with tekkit I was like "Ohhhh - extra stuff to play with".

When I FINALLY got tekkit to work on my PC, built a starter home, claimed a plot of land, and then started to play with the "extra" stuff, it set new goals for what I could do with my vanilla knowledge (i.e. like build a cactus farm, now you need them for water / lava-proof pipes).

I've got so much I am planning to do now - and that's just to get myself set-up in tekkit

Personally, I think tekkit is brilliant as it adds loads of extra stuff, without the hassle of installing mods yourself, meaning that you can now make better looking builds / devices / etc.

I agree with both soul and Discharge. After building the skyscraper, the store, what i wanted for a vanilla home etc it started to get a little low on new things to keep me interested. I would continue playing but it would be mostly to chat with all of you and just mess around. Tekkit just makes me feel like it's back to normal again. doing good isnt what keeps you interested, it's fucking up and trying to figure out how to fix it and get it working

So, in short, don't try and 'get tekkit'. There is no single point to tekkit any more than there is to minecraft. You know by now what you find fun in this game. Just keep doing that in tekkit and I'm sure it will start to make sense.

Discharge

Yeah I kind of get that, but what I mean by getting it is there's kind of an entry point to each mod without which you're just looking at wierd crafting recipies that call for stuff you've never heard of.

IMO the entry for industrialcraft is building the generator-extractor-macerator combination and securing a supply of rubber. Without these the reast of the content will remain inaccessable unless buddies will trade you some of the components. It seems to have a "goal" of building a reactor and/or quantum armor I think.

The entry for railcraft is probably the rolling machine, as without this you just can't make rails. Also boarding rails appear essential as you can't "drive" the minecart the way you can in vanilla. Thankfully the coke oven is optional as clay seems hard to find. Railbeds are tedious to craft but not difficult, you just need lots of wood and a bit of coal. There's a second tier of railcraft that depends on nether items for crafting. I want to try out high speed rails, but I'd need a supply of blaze rods I think.

The entry for EE (banned?) appears to be the Philosopher's stone.

The entry for buildcraft is probably the redstone engine as the most basic power source but if you follow the industrialcraft route you'll probably move sideways into buildcraft via the energy link.

Redpower 2 doesn't seem to have an entry in the same way, though for pneumatic tubes you need at least clay to make the alloy furnace (to make brass), and you're likely to need the transposer and the timer, but for the most part you just need wood, stone and redstone in modest quantities.

I found reading random wiki pages helped a lot, as well as looking at the things other people had put together on the server.

You know, I'm personally not sure what to think of Tekkit as a whole. I like IndustrialCraft, and have played it since quite some time before IC2. I recently, on a creative server, tried to test out some Buildcraft things, and... it just felt tedious. Getting anything big working in BC required more work and resources than in IC2, I felt.

Yes you're right, some of it is tedious. To be honest though that's perfect for keeping you occupied instead of standing around going "amma bored" so many little projects.
I have about 20 things going at the same time and stand there instead of saying "bored" i'm going "Crap.... what was i gonna do next" *checks the list*

To be fair to buildcraft the pipes seem fairly accessable, the ingredients seem quite basic and the redstone engine is like "hey free energy" even if it is weak.

Yeah, to get any decent amount of power from them i had to use 60 RS engings

LOL yeah that's kind of like IC2 wind power though.

Right now I'm having trouble getting 1eu/t of wind power reliably for a "crop matron". Wind just isn't working out, its either maxed or running dry. I'm wondering whether to go with 2 solar panels in the hope that day/night averages out, or try a redstone engine and engine generator, or just give up and link it to my base's supply.

Right now I'm having trouble getting 1eu/t reliably for a "crop matron". Wind just isn't working out. I'm wondering whether to go with 2 solar panels in the hope it averages out, or try a redstone engine and engine generator, or give up and link it to my base's supply.

boriseng

I power some of my crop-matrons with solar power. I have recently discovered an excellent way is to use water mills. It's far more cost efficient energy. I would be happy to show you the setup if ever we are on at the same time.

Yeah I guess mills would be consistent but don't you need quite large clusters for useful output? then again 1eu/t is pretty minimal. I think 4 optimally spaced or a 5 cluster would do it?