Ore Automation

Tier

This document is relevant for the LV tier and later.

As your factory grows larger, mining ores by hand from the world becomes significantly less feasible; large multiblocks require a large amount of metals to build the individual casings and even individual machines require eight of their tier’s ingots to build.

Orestone Synthesis

The first option available for mass automation of ores is from the Create-based orestones. In the base Create mod these can be crushed to get crushed ores and nuggets, but BI expands them to produce crushed GTCEu ores at a much higher percentage.

To buff up your mining in the early game you can simply mine the large veins in the overworld and crush them in Create Millstones or Crushing Wheels, then smelt the resultant ores. Orestone veins are usually a bit denser than GTCEu ore veins, but come at a cost of only having a chance of outputting ores.

Orestone Automation

You can automate the synthesis of orestones themselves by finding a Molten Vent in the overworld. These are tall pillars of orestone blocks that exit at the surface, containing a central tube of lava capped off by a dormant vent block. Using an explosive on the dormant block turns it into an active vent block that can produce ores.

Note

Dormant vents can be moved using Create contraptions. The vents have a bad habit of spawning right on the corners of a chunk making it difficult or impossible to build a rock synthesiser on top without crossing a chunk border. This also makes it easier to build an outpost when there are multiple vents clustered together without needing to load a lot of chunks.

Warning

Active vents cannot be moved, and neither the dormant or the active vent block will drop anything when mined. If you break a vent, you cannot get it back.

Once a vent block is active, you can place down lava on it which will be cooled and frozen instantly into the respective orestone block. With six available faces to place, this means you can create six blocks at once and then break them with a drill.

Rock Synthesis

An orestone outpost with three rock synthesisers.

The better way to create orestones is with the Rock Synthesiser (and the Hyperscalar Rock Forge). These multiblock machines incorporate the molten vent directly into their frames, and can produce any type of orestone from any type of vent. One rock synthesiser can produce 288 orestones every 72 seconds (or, 4 orestones a second) in exchange for a hundred buckets of lava (or about 1.338 buckets a second).

As you already have to ship in lava for the rock synthesisers themselves, the best way to power them is by using large boilers. A large bronze boiler can power two rock synthesisers, and a large steel boiler can power four.

Warning

The base Rock Synthesiser cannot overclock. They will always run at Medium Voltage, and adding higher tier energy hatches will not improve their speed.

The only way to get more orestones before the Rock Forge is to build more Rock Synthesisers.

Obtainable Ores

This is a table of the obtainable ores from orestones. The chances refer to the chance of producing that specific ore in a Create crusher; as well as the average percentage (+/- 10%) out of a full stack of crushed ore you would get in the Ball Bearing Grinding Mill.

Orestone	70% Chance	40% Chance	Nugget
Asurine	Cassiterite	Garnierite	Tin
Crimsite	Redstone	Sphalerite	Redstone Dust
Ochrum	Hematite	Hematite	Iron
Scorchia	Galena	Arsenopyrite	Silver
Scoria	Bauxite	Silver	Silver
Veridium	Tetrahedrite	Chromite	Copper