Surviving with Mekanism: Ore Doubling and Early Automation

Welcome back to the Mekanism Survival Series! In this post, we’ll take the next big step in progression: Ore Doubling and Early Automation. If you’re tired of manually smelting ores and want to get more bang for your mining buck, this guide will set you up for early automated ore processing and energy-efficient workflows.

We’re stepping slowly into Mekanism to follow the normal progression from the start, so you can follow along step by step. At the end of this post, we’ll give you a preview of what’s next so you can skip ahead!

At this point, we’re going to assume you have silk touch on your pickaxe so you can gather ores instead of raw ores. At the very least, hopefully, you have some fortune on your pickaxe to help multiply your yields.

Fortune III provides ~2.2x yield on ores, which is better than this initial setup.

However, manual breaking wears down your tools, while automation, even at 2x, is more efficient and convenient.

Pro Tip #1: Some mod packs that have Quark in them get a free fortune II on gold tools. They don't last long, but if you use them just to break ores, you can save a lot of time!

Pro Tip #2: If your mod pack has Forbidden & Arcanus in it, you can make a Slimec pickaxe that has silk touch. Some mods also have drills that give you early silk touch, like Modern Industrialization's steam drill.

Look through the mods in your mod pack to see some non-vanilla ways to get Fortune and Silk Touch.

Watch the Video

Unlocking the Enrichment Chamber

The Enrichment Chamber is your next logical step in Mekanism. It saves resources and multiplies your outputs for key materials:

Enriched Coal/Redstone: Enhances efficiency in the Metallurgic Infuser, multiplying the value of each unit by 8x for coal and redstone. It also enriches other ores that we'll use later like tin, diamond, gold, and more.

Ore Multiplication:

• Gives 3 for 4 multiplication on raw ores.
• Doubles ores like iron, gold, and copper into 2 dust, which smelt into an ingot (2x).
• Doubles other ores directly like coal, diamonds, and ancient debris.
• Provides crazy 12x multiplication on ores like Redstone and Lapis Lazuli.
• For ancient debris, combining the Crusher and Enrichment Chamber increases yields to 3x, which is insane for ancient debris!

Other uses: The Enrichment Chamber has dozens of other uses, some you'd never guess, like converting flowers into dye, processing stone into other versions of stone (like stone into cracked bricks), unweathering copper blocks, and more. Scroll through JEI to see all the things that the Enrichment Chamber can do!

Crafting Recipe: Requires steel, glass, Redstone, osmium, and basic control circuits. The steel casing is more steel, osmium, and glass. No surprises here! Remember, to make the basic control circuits, infuse osmium with Redstone in a metallurgic infuser.

Setup Tips:

• Connect the Enrichment Chamber to your power network using Basic Universal Cables.
• Use it to pre-process coal, redstone, diamonds and other infusing materials before putting them in the Metallurgic infuser.

Basic Ore Doubling

With the Enrichment Chamber and Energized Smelter, you can set up a simple 2x ore processing system. The recipe for the Energized Smelter is almost identical to the Enrichment Chamber.

1. Enrichment Chamber: Converts ores into 2 dust.
2. Energized Smelter: Smelts dust into ingots.

Crafting Recipes:

• Enrichment Chamber: Requires redstone, steel, and basic control circuits.
• Energized Smelter: Similar recipe but includes glass.

How to Automate the Process:

• Place the Enrichment Chamber and Energized Smelter side by side.
• Configure the Enrichment chamber for Export On and to output on the side of the Smelter. Configure the Smelter to input from the side of the Enrichment chamber.
• Alternatively, you can run Logistical Transporters between the machines. You can also use logistical transporters to put items into the system and extract them so that you can automate many different ores at once. See below for more on Logistical Transporters.

Pro Tip: Automating ore doubling allows for continuous processing, even when you’re off exploring.

Pro Tip: You can use some basic logistical filters to make sure dusts go to the smelter and other outputs go to storage.

Using Logistical Transporters

Logistical Transporters are essential for automation:

Crafting Recipe: Requires steel and basic control circuits.

How They Work:

• Connect inventories and machines.
• Automatically move items between inputs and outputs.

Automation Walkthrough:

• Place a chest connected to the Crusher’s input with a Logistical Transporter.
• Connect the Crusher’s output to the Smelter’s input.
• Add a chest to the Smelter’s output for finished ingots.

Configurator Tip: Use a Configurator (crafted with enriched alloy and lapis) to:

• Configure pipes for push/pull.
• Adjust machine settings for proper input/output.
• The configurator must be charged. You can put it into the charging slot in any Mekanism power generator.
• Shift right click on the end of logistical transporters to make them push or pull into and out of chests and other storage.

Logistical Sorters

The logistical sorter allows you to pull from inventory and send items to one or more destinations based on tags or other rules. Initially, a great way to use this is to send the same items to multiple destinations in a round-robin fashion, so they are all filled with the same amount.

When you place a Logistical sorter, the big end which has a black square goes on the storage. The smaller end with the yellow square goes outward toward the destinations. You can only connect the sorter to inventory. It cannot go inline in pipes.

To configure the logistical sorter, right click on it.

It has a number of settings. For our initial purposes, we'll turn Single mode on, so it will send only a single item at a time. We'll set RR or Round Robin to on so it fills multiple destinations with the same amounts of items, and Auto to on, which means that it won't require items to have a filter to be pulled out.

We can use this to fill multiple two metallurgic infusers with the same enriched ore to make sure they're all filled and ready to go.

Practical Example

With all these things we can set up full automation of steel and alloys.

Here's a setup that processes redstone ore into redstone and then turns it into enriched redstone.

Then with the logistical sorter, it sends the enriched redstone to three metallurgic infusers dedicated to processing their own inputs and outputs. One to turn iron into infused alloy, one to turn osmium into basic control circuits, and a third to turn quartz into rose quartz.

What’s Next?

Congratulations on setting up your first automated ore-processing system and alloy crafting! In the next post, we’ll take automation further with:

• 3x ore processing using the Purification Chamber. This involves gas-based systems like oxygen production with the Electrolytic Separator and processing ores for higher yields.
• Advanced sorting and handling with logistical systems:
  • Using Logistical Sorters and filters to organize multiple ores and outputs.
  • Automating priority systems to ensure specific machines process key materials first.
  • Integrating storage systems for overflow management and better organization.
  • Expanding your setup to handle a variety of resources without manual intervention.

Stay tuned as we dive deeper into Mekanism’s capabilities, helping you create a seamless, automated base! Let us know how your Mekanism adventure is shaping up! Join the discord: Discord.gg/jangro