Guide: Earlygame

Now we can start with the factorial stuff. Following the creation of the assembly machine, plus some circuits you're ready to assemble - where you'll face nothing but machines, walls of steel, and metallurgy. Consider this a 'dip your toes in the water' moment, 'cause you're just getting started.

Striking the First Arc

Main page: Arc Welder

Before proceeding into oil refinement, power shortages may be apparent. For that, a generator which uses welded plates is needed. The arc welder is an important machine, being needed for building other key machines - required for the welded plates in the progression of the mod.

It can be made in a steel (Tier 2) anvil with the following recipe:

Anvil (Steel or above)
4 8 2

Usage

The arc welder has three item slots and one fluid slot. All recipes have item inputs, and some (notably welded plates) use fluids. Each recipe has a specific power consumption, measured in HE/t and amount of time required, measured in ticks.

For I/O, the arc welder is more special. Each of the three item slots are color-coded (red, yellow and green respectively), which correspond to those of the welder's ports (4 red, 4 green and 2 yellow). The fluid input can be done on any of the welder's ports.

Working with Fluids

Note: The different type of fluid ducts are purely cosmetic, there is no functional difference between them.

Fluids are an essential component to a variety of recipes and whole processing chains in NTM, and as the player advances further into the electrical age, a clear understanding of their function will become more and more necessary. Unlike most other mods, fluid transferring pipes in NTM do not actually hold fluid but instead define connections between machines or containers, meaning that transfer is instantaneous. To contrast this significant increase in simplicity of use, each fluid pipe must have the exact type of fluid it will carry designated manually by a fluid ID. They will designate any fluid transfer pipe right clicked with them as a valid route for a fluid to travel. As well as this, fluid IDs can be used to designate storage tanks, machines, and certain buffers inside of machines as accepting a specific type of fluid.

Crafting Table

Power Shortages

Before proceeding to oil refinement, acquiring more efficient power sources is necessary, as the machinery involved carries a high power drain. The wood-burning generator and stirling engine are likely insufficient for these requirements; the following option provides the necessary output.

Solar Power

The steam engine and the solar tower boiler are effective power sources but require specific configurations. This setup introduces the use of a cooling loop to allow for continuous power generation. A primary limitation is that functionality is restricted to daytime hours. The solar tower boiler heats water using sunlight reflected from heliostat mirrors to generate steam, which is then converted into electricity.

Required Materials:

1 Steam Engine
1 Solar Tower Boiler
Support blocks (to raise the boiler 10 blocks)
Fluid Ducts and Cables
Steel Barrel
1 Steam Condenser
Mirror Adjustment Tool
16 Heliostat Mirrors

Construction Procedure:

Identify a large, flat area, as the solar tower boiler occupies a 3x3 space.
Elevate the solar tower boiler on a 10-block tall tower and surround the base with Heliostat mirrors on the ground.
Align the mirrors by right-clicking the boiler and then right-clicking each mirror with the mirror adjustment tool to ensure sunlight reflects toward the boiler.
Place the steel barrel on the ground and connect it to the boiler using fluid ducts set to the water ID. The boiler contains two fluid duct slots located at the top and bottom.
Position the steam engine and connect them to the boiler via fluid ducts set to steam.
Place the steam condensers next to a port on the steam engine to condense the low-pressure steam back into water.
Route the condenser back to the barrel using fluid ducts set to water. The input/output switch in the barrel GUI must be set to green.
Fill the barrel with water to initiate power generation. Power is extracted from any port on the steam engine.

Batteries & Capacitors

Main Page: BAC

Batteries

Batteries come in many tiers, from simple redstone batteries, all the way up to quantum batteries. As mentioned before, the discharge rates of batteries are generally quite poor for their tier, but they store a good deal of charge. Redstone and lead-acid batteries are craftable in early-game.

Redstone Battery

**Battery Stats**
Capacity	1.8MHE
Charge rate	1.0kHE/t
Discharge rate	100HE/t

Crafting Table

Lead-Acid Battery

**Battery Stats**
Capacity	18.0MHE
Charge rate	10.0kHE/t
Discharge rate	1.0kHE/t

Chemical Plant
8,000mB 4 4

Capacitors

Capacitors are the workhorse power storage option, capable of discharging a lot of power rapidly, making them vital for power banks for high-power operations. They also come in many tiers. Copper and gold capacitors can be crafted in early-game.

Copper Capacitor

**Capacitor Stats**
Capacity	600.0kHE
Charge rate	1.0kHE/t
Discharge rate	1.0kHE/t

Crafting Table

Gold Capacitor

Capacitor Stats
Capacity	6.0MHE
Charge rate	10.0kHE/t
Discharge rate	10.0kHE/t

Assembly Machine
8 16

Oil Processing

Oil processing is a large feature in this mod and a very crucial part of progression. Currently, only a basic oil refinery is needed, which will then be upgraded into an intermediate one later on. Detailed information needed can be found here.

Finding Black Gold

Before extracting oil, you must first find a deposit of oil that you can extract it from. The only device in the early game that can detect oil deposits is the oil reservoir detector, a cheap device which can be used to scan for oil in a thin column below you by right clicking anywhere. The range it scans in is small (approximately 8 blocks) so your best bet for finding oil is to move through every chunk in an area, scanning for oil constantly until you either see the message "Oil detected nearby." or "Oil deposit directly below!". If the former shows up, scan in the nearby area until the latter displays. You may have noticed patches of oily dirt or sand around your world that seem like they'd point to a deposit, but those only indicate bedrock deposits which require other methods of extraction than standard oil. Keep their locations in mind.

Refining

Note: Charts presented from this point on are just one way to process oil. There are many possible ways to process oil in this mod and you should experiment with your own ideal setup once you have a grasp of the basic mechanics

First, make an oil derrick to extract the oil.

Oil Derrick

Main Page: Oil Derrick

Assembly Machine
3 16 4 12 8 3

After you place the oil derrick and start extracting, you should heat up the crude oil with a boiler. After you process oil you can make an industrial boiler, which can never explode unlike the normal boiler.

Oil Refinery
1,000mB 500mB 250mB 150mB 100mB

Fractioning Tower

Main Page: Fractioning Tower

Fractioning tower turns oil products inside of it into more refined products without the need for power or any other input fluid. It can have its operation accelerated by stacking multiple fractioning towers on top of each other which is particularly useful for more complex setups.

Early game oil refining can be done solely with these 3 components to decent success, permitting a much stronger form of power generation in addition to the creation of new materials such as polymers and oil tar. In particular, polymer is the most important product that early processing can yield because it is used to construct the catalytic cracking tower which vastly increases the degree to which crude oil and its products can be refined as well as unlocking a totally new chain to refine oil through.

Your primary goal during this stage of refining should be to stockpile petroleum gas and obtain decent quantities of useful materials such as oil tar and polymer for later use in expanding your petrochemical refinery.

Chemical Plant
1,000mB 2 4

Centrifuge

The centrifuge is the next tier of ore processing after the shredder, useful for refining ores and crystals. This machine will draw 4.0k HE/s of power during operation, taking 10 seconds to complete one operation. It has a power buffer of 100.0k HE.

It requires polymer bars and an analog circuit board to assemble.

Assembly Machine
44 8 4

Its most important use right now is centrifuging redstone ore, which yields a drop of mercury. You will need mercury to make desh, next step of progression.

Centrifuge
3 3

You can also use redstone crystals after you make an ore acidizer, which yields more drops of mercury.

Centrifuge
3 3 3 3

Desh

Main Page: Desh

After acquiring light oil, we can finally make desh. It is a superalloy and the first exotic material. Desh has very high blast, heat and corrosion resistance. It has an extremely high durability, it's overall an excellent material. Desh tools and shredder blades are unbreakable.

Production

Desh blend can be obtained by shredding rare earth crystals. It can also be made by combining rare earth powders, which is very expensive for now.

Chemical Plant
200mB 200mB

Compound Plate

Desh cannot be stamped, so it has to be made into a compound plate instead in one of the anvils:

Anvil (Desh or above)
4 22 4

Uses

It's primarily used in ingot and compound plate form, but its powder and unrefined blend form can also be used.

Desh tools only have the harvest level of iron, but they are unbreakable. They can be upgraded into schrabidium tools which gives them numerous abilities, at the cost of them being no longer indestructible.

It's also used in various mid to late-game machines.

Niobium

To make many of the vital circuits (and in the future, tantalum) needed to go further, you must get niobium.

Rare earth ore can also be used to produce niobium, but there are better ways.

While it may seem hard at first when looking through NEI recipes, getting niobium only needs hydrogen peroxide, water, a chemical plant, and coltan powder.

Coltan

Luckily for us, coltan spawns in a specific 1000x1000 radius. While it’s not exactly a huge vein, nor is it easy to find, crafting a coltass will help you locate the center of the radius to start.

Crafting Table

You can make niobium powder using the aforementioned ingredients:

Chemical Plant
250mB 500mB 2 500mB

Now that you’ve got your hands on some niobium, it’s time to get to ‘’cracking’’. You should really keep the purified tantalite for the future too.

We will use desh and niobium to make a catalytic cracking tower.

Cracking

You can now make a catalytic cracking tower to process oil further, as it is essential for the next step in progression.

Assembly Machine
16 6 12 4

Usage

The cracking tower has no GUI, unlike the oil refinery. Instead, when you look at it, information shows up on what's inside it.

It consumes steam in order to crack, that is it breaks down a more complex oil product into two simpler ones, such as unsaturated hydrocarbons.

The cracking tower processes in batches of 100 mB, similar to the fractioning tower, but faster.

It also consumes 200 mB of steam for every batch. Therefore, it always makes a 2 mB byproduct of low-pressure steam which can be turned back into water.

The cracking tower has many recipes, with the default one being with bitumen, where:

Catalytic Cracking Tower
100mB 200mB 80mB 20mB 2mB

Rubber Bar

You must get unsaturated hydrocarbons and make rubber as you will need it to make ZIRNOX.

Chemical Plant
500mB

Bakelite Bar

With aromatic hydrocarbons and petroleum gas, you can make bakelite. Which interchangeable with polymer.

Chemical Plant
500mB 500mB

Next Step

Now that you're ready to process oil, make cooler stuff - and live the American Dream - move on and do it.