Back to Modded Minecraft!
I’ve wanted to come back to the Technic Pack for a while.. but I had put it off because of messing around updates and .bin files.. I was still playing with VoxelSniper on an old server build and was avoiding updating my client. However, two things happened: I discovered the rather awesome Technic Launcher, which lets you switch between vanilla and a few Minecraft mods from a nice drop down list.. and a friend decided that he wanted to try out the Technic Pack too, and replaced our regular Minecraft server with a Tekkit server.
The Oil Blue
The Oil Blue is an indie action sim by chubigans of Vertigo Games, where you drill for oil and sell it on the world market in order to remain profitable, as well as completing missions for your employer, the United Oil of Oceana Company. I picked this one up in the Indie Royale’s Xmas Bundle, along with a few other games.. they’ve now added greenTech+, an earlier game by Vertigo Games which has you save the world from global warming using a hurricane!
The tutorial shows you how to use your first drilling machines: the Groundwell and the Oil Derrick. Keeping the Groundwell running seemed easy enough.. strike a balance between speed and power consumption, and keep an eye out for flat batteries. The Oil Derrick was a bit more complex..
While the drill is working, you get oil signatures coming up on the right hand side.. these are revealed as either pockets of air or oil. When you see oil, you have to slow the drill down, move it left or right to position it above the oil, pump the oil, then re-start the drill until the next pocket of oil appears. You also need to watch the Pressure and Stress gauges. Pressure can be vented at regular intervals, and increases more quickly while the drill is slowed down, while Stress accumulates through use, until it reaches critical levels, where you have to shut down the machine and go for repairs. Pressure also increases Stress. Not venting pressure leads to the machine breaking down..
Repairing the machines involves mini-games. In the tutorial I saw two types, one to keep a laser within a moving red circle, and another to make a set of four target lights come on simultaneously by turning on different adapters and switching between different levels of lights until you hit the correct combination.
Once in the game itself, “Rotary Misfire” came up as my repair mini-game three times; I managed to complete the puzzle by chance on my first two attempts, but I couldn’t get it the third time. This puzzle requires you to hit the spacebar just before the lights complete a full circle.
I had to actually come back to the tutorial and have this puzzle appear in the set of three to see the instructions.. whether they were obscured by previous messages on the right.. or whether they just don’t appear all the time, I don’t know.
The next two machines, the Pumpjack and Drill Rig, were unlocked as I played, with brief tutorials showing how to use them. The Pumpjack requires less interaction than the Oil Derrick, with plenty of time during setup or calibration, where you can check on the other machines and the market. The Drill Rig follows a path you plot for it onscreen, and will gather oil as it travels over it. To get all the oil from a bubble, the path has to be set to go back and forth over it: two options here, then.. to be efficient with a short path over a bubble to maximise oil collection, but have to watch the machine while it does it, or plot longer paths and be able to flick back over the other machines. As the Drill Rig is a rare machine, it doesn’t appear on every island.
On the islands I played, my set up was a Groundwell, an Oil Derrick and a Pumpjack. I started up all the machines, then parked myself over the Oil Derrick because of the pressure release requirement, as well as needing to catch the oil pockets as they were revealed. This was also the machine I found most likely to blow up, as the pressure led to stress if I wasn’t fast enough in venting it. In fact, I found the Oil Derrick needed so much prodding that I kept missing the Pumpjack’s window of drilling opportunity!
I can see it getting even harder to adequately manage when there are more machines,.. although they level up with use. When a machine levels up, parts are added or replaced, improving performance.. an example being the Groundwell’s additional batteries which allows you to go faster. The improvements are only effective per mission.. you leave the machines behind when you move to the next island.
You do keep your own rank though, which increases as you sell oil and unlocks more machines and different challenges.. You also get some funny titles as you increase too: eg the Rank 40 title: “Useful Bum”! 🙂
Technics Pack – Industrial Craft
After selling the villagers plenty of wood and a few bricks, it seems I’m a bit more welcome: my status is now “Regular Visitor”.
The village is growing nicely too..
I had to check.. but the Town Hall has even had an upgrade, with the walls of the central part now being made from the smoother-looking cooked brick, rather than the mud bricks it began with. The bricks take rather a long time to make, though, and I wanted to move on..
I decided to leave the villagers to do the rest, while I finally started on the Industrial Craft part of the Technics Pack! I did have to resort to a tutorial from the Industrial Craft wiki though, as I just didn’t know where to start..
The first task is to find a Rubber Tree, and extract the rubber using a simple Treetap.
The tutorial said the trees were rare, but I found one without too much trouble. After taking the rubber from the one Sticky Resin hole on it, I ripped the tree down, hoping for saplings.. and with the help of a little bonemeal, I soon had a Rubber Tree farm!
So now I can start on the long-winded stuff..
Gather resin, turn it into rubber, combine it with copper to create cables.. which are then combined with more and more stuff to create machines, such as an extractor which will increase the efficiency of rubber production. However, the machines require electricity.. which means building a generator. The generator requires rechargeable batteries (cable, tin, redstone), refined iron, and an iron furnace (more iron and a regular furnace)..
Hmm. I’m building things to build other things, to do a job I was already doing, albeit slightly more efficiently. Long term gains, I guess..
Fortunately, I found a lot of resources while looking for redstone, so it’s now just a matter of following instructions.
Out in the rest of the game world, I managed to tame and ride my first horse.. though I had to check the internet again to find out how to dismount X)
As well as horses, there’s a Unicorn and a Pegasus, which have lower spawn chances, and the Pack Horse, Nightmare (black unicorn) and Black Pegasus, which are only available through breeding. Like the crazy friend who got me into this mess, I will probably attempt to collect them all.. collect ALL the ponies.. 😉