Overview
FAQ for all those multiple posts asking the same questions
What Biomes are there?
In order of height.
At what levels do I get ore?
Ore has a starting level, which means at any point past that level the ore can spawn.
At what level do I get crystals?
The rule of thumb with crystals is every 75 meters. There is a “soft” variance. What this means is in the example of diamonds, the spawn zone is 0 to -75, but there is a drastically decreased chance of finding them at +75 to +1 and-76 to -150. This soft variance is always +/- 75 from the min and max points.
I am stuck in a bubble and I can’t do anything RAWWWRR THIS GAME SUCKS
That is the tutorial, if you look around there are little floating bubbles above some of the machines telling you what to do. By the end of the tutorial the bubble will be gone and you will have all the features of the game.
The smelter (and how hoppers work)
Let me preface this, at this time the smelter is not broken. You are most likly not setting it up correctly.
The smelter takes in raw ore and produces ingots. It requires a fair amount of energy to do so. The best and easiest setup requires some fundemental understanding of hoppers.
[ed – LD] The smelter can be moved but only after you find the build gun V2 recipe and build it and keep it in your inventory. [ed – LD]
There are settings on the hopper to set it to “Add/Remove”, “Add”, and “Remove”. What this means is that the hopper can Add and/or Remove materials from an adjacent machine. This does not include conveyers. If a conveyer is next to a hopper and its not pointing at the hopper, the hopper will automatically start off loading on to the conveyer.
So what this means for smelters. A standard setup for smelters has one hopper set to “Remove Only” which takes in ore, and another hopper set to “Add Only” which will remove ingots from the smelter.
[ed – LD] There is a basic smelter that uses organic rocks as part of it’s recipe. Organic rocks can be found in caverns a short distance below the surface and in caverns a long distance from the surface and in the caverns in between. Those organic rocks are also used in recipes for minecart items so using a lot of them for basic smelters might not be a good idea unless you want to explore a lot to find more. This basic smelter cannot be upgraded and is slower than the regular smelter and uses more energy and requires more ore per bar. These are usually only used in the beginning of the game to get more bars faster and are abandoned as soon as regular smelters are made to replace them. Some people don’t use them in order to save resources and don’t mind the game taking longer to get farther. [ed – LD]
As of the time of this guide, if there are ingots in the hopper the smelter is trying to get ore from, it can glitch and stop pulling ore.
This thing is sitting on my conveyer and eating my ore
Thats called a mynock. You can craft turrets to automatically kill them. To stop them from spawning automatically if you bring up the holobase (press K) you will see a purple block, that is called the hive. It might be surronded by resin which you cannot mine or destroy. To destroy the resin and hive create explosives and blast them to kingdom come.
Mynocks as of now (2015-10-02), only spawn at -70 meters and down. Some early on defense will require making turrets to guard conveyer belts until you can aquire T2 conveyers. Trying to block the top of the conveyer with another block will not stop a mynock from spawning on it.
As a note, you will need crystal to make the explosives, what I personally do is I put a lot of hoppers on the ore extractors till I can make explosives or T2 conveyers (mynocks don’t spawn on T2 Conveyers).
[ed – LD] When you destroy a hive mind, they now drop items for you to collect and use in recipes. The more that a hive mind has eaten, the more it drops. A cute trick might be to place a hopper down low and place a loop of conveyors going from the hopper and around back into the hopper. Making it large enough will place more Mynocks feeding from the circle. You can always place trash in the hopper to feed to the Mynocks/hive mind thereby giving more drops when you finally destroy it. Just remember to fill the hopper every now and again as long as the hive mind isn’t in danger of growing into your base. [ed – LD]
Here is a hive that has had resin grow around it
Here is that evil thing eating your ore
The stuff I built above my base suddenly disappeared!
There is currently an invisible (do not build) zone above your central hub. This prevents players from blocking the hub fromm being attacked. for the first 2 levels above the hub you cannot build in a 3×3 grid, above that to infinity you cannot build in a 5×5 grid.
Things to know about the cold cavern
It is cold, and by cold I mean it will kill you quickly without the suit heater upgrade. In this area you will find crystal pillars, lots of blue stone, plenty of new plants to gain research poionts from and camobots, I don’t care if thats not what you want to call them DJ, the name is there forever now ;).
Conveyer belts and the cold:
Currently if you build T1 conveyer belts they will freeze in this layer and either slow down or stop moving completly. T2 conveyers (the tubes) operate fine in this layer. You can also use T1 again once you are below the cold cavern.
Notice the belt turns blue to show that it is not working (sorry for the mynock, reusing an image)
Experimental Pods and their parts:
To make experimental pods and their parts,you will need several machines to do this. Only the Assembler needs power to run. You need a stamper to make the plates, you will need 6 plates for each pod that you wish to make. Place a hopper then the stamper and finally another hopper to take the bars of ore and stamp them into plates and the finished plates go into the last hopper.
To make the PCBs, you will need an extruder, a coiler and a PCB machine in that order with hoppers at each end. Place the bars of ore in the first hopper and the extruder will turn them into wire. The extruder then feeds the wire into the coiler which turns it into a coil. The coiler feeds the coil into the PCB machine which turns the coil into the PCB which is then placed into the final hopper. You only need 1 PCB to make a pod of a certain type.
The following pods are made of the following materials:
These are the pods you will need for the research lab. If for some reason in your laboratory you do not see the different research subjects, see if you are on analyze mode. If the lab is in analyze mode, change it to research mode. You will need a hopper next to the lab that will hold the pods that are needed to do the research. The lab will also need to be powered, the more power you put into the lab, the faster it will research.
Some of the PCBs will be needed to make turrets and other equipment, just make them out of the ore bar that is shown above and place them in your inventory when you want to craft whichever turret or piece of equipment you want.
Here are some images on a very simple automatic pod creation setup.
I want to do X with conveyers
How to “overload” a conveyer from a single hopper.
When using a single hopper as a central storage point before ore or whatever it stores goes off somewhere, often times you might see items going in to the hopper faster than it is coming out. This is because the hopper will put items on nearby conveyers on a per hopper tick basis. Meaning its output is not as quick as the conveyers can be.
Here is an example without overloading a conveyer line
Here is how to overload it (note a conveyer only has to not be pointing at the hopper to get items from it, so it does not have to be pointing directly away from hopper).
I want to change the height of my conveyers
This is actually a bit easier than most thing as conveyers work on floors, walls and ceilings. The biggest thing to remember is that as long as the conveyer is pointed directly at another conveyer it is touching, it will transfer the material. A conveyer will also lay flush against whatever you are pointing at, so if its the ground it’ll be horizonal, if its a wall it will be vertical. As of a recent patch there are even more options when it comes to changing the height of a belt, the new blocks are called the up slope and down slope. They will transfer items up or down one level
Here is a simply loop around a wall,, notice that the conveyer doesn’t appear to be touching going to the bottom, but since its directly pointed at it, and block adjacent, it still works.
Here is the stairs approach, for when you just need to bump the conveyer up a level or more.
A note on slopes, they output diagonalbut do not receive diagonal. Meaning while the output can be on up and over,, the input must be on the same level or another slope.
Here is the up slope block, note that the bottom where the block is built needs to be touching the conveyor it is receiving from
This is the down slope block, like the up slope the receiving end needs to be level with the conveyor it is receiving from.
Why is this stupid conveyer ignoring my hopper settings?
Conveyers simply do not care if the hopper is “Add”, “Remove” or “Add/Remove”, only machines care. This is so that a machine can have a hopper that it only pulls things from, and the conveyer can still input in to the hopper.
Here is a hopper set to remove, notice it still takes ore in.
Here is a machine set to add, also still works.
Using robot arms to filter items
The huge thing to remember, there are tons of ways to sort items in Fortress Craft Evolved. The momst misunderstood way is the Robot Arm Mk1. This arm can be set to grab a specific ore off a conveyer belt and put it on another, this is massivly useful for sorting coal out before it hits the smelter.
As a preface to this, there has been some discussion on if spacing robot arms one block apart helps or not. Until I get a definitive answer I won’t put it in this guide.
Below is a simple layout, by default the direction the robot arm is facing is the direction that it will pick up items from, it will then put that item directly behind itself. You will need mulitple arms to keep up with the conveyer speed.
The arm itself can be programmed through the interface, just cycle through until you get the desired ore you wish for it to pick up.
The end result is that ore is moved from one belt to another
Research Tree
As of 2015-08-30, these links are up to date with the current tech tree. The first link gives the details of each research item, the second is just a visual indicator.
Details of Research[docs.google.com]
Pretty Picture Tree[docs.google.com]
Minecarts
Minecarts are a near end game setup, they can be a bit tedious at first but they do have a higher output than tubes when done correctly. It is worth noting you can have multiple loaders, unloaders, and cart loaders, also that the carts themselves will not collide with each other. For fun you can also ride the carts by pointing at a cart and pressing U. At the time of writing this document (2016-01-10) there are no boosters, brakes, switches etc, so there is very little logistical control and carts will slow down going up and speed up going down. There is also the occasional problem with gaining to much speed and a cart skipping a loader/unloader or even jumping track. As a personal recommendation, do not use vanilla minecarts, either use the speed boosted ones or the increase capacity ones, they are worth it.
When putting a minecart loader, it works like conveyors, whichever direction you are facing when they are placed is the starting direction for the minecarts movement. It is also to be noted that the hopper must be attached to the block in order to load minecarts in, there can be a slight delay between putting carts in the hopper and the minecarts spawning.
Loaders and unloaders are fairly straight forward, if a cart has something to unload it does so, otherwise it keeps going, if there is something to load than one cart stops to load. If a cart is currently loading other carts will skip stopping at that block. As always hoppers are needed to transfer materials.
Overall there are straight, curve and sloped blocks. As of this time (2016-01-10) they only work on horizontal surfaces and will not go up walls or ceilings.
There are a few tricks to not making round trip tracks (you only need one track). One method is to terminate a track in to thin air so the mminecart falls off, then a nearby hopper with vacuum on sucks it up and puts it back on the track going in the other direction. The second trick (I have not tested this) is to make a u turn back on to the same track and make a T intersection, the cart will go in whatever direction is forward on the intersecting track (like conveyors).
