RockSolid

A mod for RockBottom that adds more machines, ore and gameplay.

Getting Started

A guide to help you progress with RockSolid.

After Vanilla

Almost all the content in RockSolid comes in after you already have a Smelter, Separator and at least a Copper Pickaxe from the base game. You will need your Copper Pickaxe to obtain Tin Ore, which is the first available resource from the mod.

Tin Ore can be processed in a Separator to produce Tin Clusters, much like the vanilla Copper Ore. You must then smelt the clusters to obtain Tin Ingots. These are used to construct an Alloy Smelter, which is the first item you should work towards obtaining.

Bronze Age

With your new Alloy Smelter, you are now able to produce Bronze Ingots. Simply place Tin Ingots in the first slot of your Alloy Smelter, and Copper Ingots in the second. Add coal to the fuel slot and wait a little for the metal to fuse together. The output slot will contain four Bronze Ingots per every three Copper and one Tin.

Bronze is used to craft many different machines and tools later in the game, but for now all you will need is a Bronze Pickaxe. You can use this to obtain Iron Ore, which can then be processed the same way that Copper and Tin are. Collect a couple Iron Ingots to progress forwards.

Steel Production

Now that you have access to Iron Ingots, you can construct a Blast Furnace using many of your collected supplies. This machine is used to convert Coal into a refined mixture infused with extra carbon - Coal Coke. It has other uses later on but for now this is all you will need it for.

Put Coal into your Blast Furnace and let it run for a couple minutes. It is very slow, but dosen’t require any fuel to run, making it easier to keep multiple Blast Furnaces refining Coke at once. You will need a lot of Coal Coke later on, and it can be used as a fuel with twice the efficiency of regular Coal, so it won’t hurt to get some extra.

Once you have a supply of Coal Coke, use the Alloy Smelter you made earlier and combine Iron Ingots with your Coal Coke. Once it has successfully combined the two items you will receive a single Steel Ingot. This strong, valuable metal has many important uses throughout the game.

Industrial Revolution

With Steel readily available to you now, you can begin to produce Electricity. You will need to start by compressing your steel into Steel Construction Blocks, using your Construction Table. These Construction Blocks are the basis of most advanced machines in the game, and you will need to use them to create various structures.

To get some basic infrastructure set up, you will need a Solid-Fueled Boiler, a Turbine and a Battery. You can go without the battery at the start but it is very important to prevent wasting excess power. You will also need a Bucket in order to carry some water to your Boiler before you have access to pumps to automate the process.

In order to operate your Boiler, you will need a water source. If you haven’t already found water in your world, go looking for some. It’s blue and spawns in pools on the surface as well as in caves. For now, right-click it with your bucket to collect a liter of water at a time. You can then right-click the filled bucket onto a boiler in the world to add the water to the internal storage.

Solid-Fueled Boilers require a solid fuel and water. They operate by heating the water using the fuel to produce steam. You will need Gas Conduits to move the steam out of the Boiler. Construct some Gas, Energy and Fluid conduits as you will need them all soon. You can then also put some Coal, Coal Coke, or any other fuel into the Boiler to begin producing Steam.

In order to use Conduits, you will need a wrench. Construct one and right-click a conduit that you have placed in the world to configure it. You can set the priority and operation mode on all four sides of the conduit simply by selecting the side in the GUI and changing the settings. Read the tooltips for more information on what each operation mode does (Input, Output and Disabled). Setup your Boiler, Gas Conduits and Turbine similar to the picture below, ensuring that the gas is being extracted from the boiler and pumped into the turbine.

Once you have this set up, you can begin to work on either automating the system you already have, or using the electricity you have generated to power some more advanced machines. Electricity travels through Energy Conduits, as you might except. Make some if you don’t already have them, and connect them to the Turbine, as that is what is producing your power. The Boiler simply makes steam for use in the Turbine. Set the conduit that is touching the Turbine to Input mode on the correct side, and connect the cable up to a Battery or directly to an electric machine. At the moment, the only electricity-powered machines that you can make use of are the Electric Separator, Electric Smelter, Electric Blast Furnace and Electric Alloy Smelter.

You could also use this time to automate your water collection. Make a Fluid Pump and place it above a water reservoir. You will need to supply Electricity to the Fluid Pump, so run an Energy Conduit from your battery or directly from the Turbine, into the Fluid Pump. You can then connect Fluid Conduits to the Fluid Pump, set them to Input mode on the side that is touching the pump, and either directly connect the Fluid Conduits into the Solid-Fueled Boiler, or store a backup supply of water in a Fluid Tank and then pump that into the Boiler. The image below shows an example setup with automatic Water collection and power storage in the battery.

You can now use Electric machines to your advantage, as they process recipes five times faster than their coal powered variants. They also are far more fuel efficient, producing almost three times as much per piece of coal, although requiring a more complex setup in order to produce and distribute the electricity. The first Electric machines you will want are Electric Blast Furnaces and Electric Alloy Smelters, in order to produce steel faster to make the rest of the machines. After you have a sufficient supply of Steel, you can easily make the rest of the basic Electric machines as they will make everything else a lot faster.

At this point, you can also use Item Conduits to automate tedious processes such as producing steel. They are configured similar to the other conduits, but also have a Whitelist/Blacklist option as well as a slot to put a filter item. If no item is placed in the Filter slot, anything will be allowed to pass through the conduit, and with an item there it will either only allow that item (on Whitelist mode), or allow anything that isn’t that item (on Blacklist mode). Item Conduits can be used to transport items into machines, chests and any other inventories including those from other mods.

If you find an Oil deposit near you, you can alternatively produce Electricity by pumping Oil into a Combustion Engine, producing a lot of power for a low cost while your Oil lasts.

Advanced Metallurgy

Now that you have access to Steel and Electricity, you can easily forge a Steel Pickaxe using your Construction Table. This can then be used to mine Magnesium and Rutile Ore, found much deeper in your world than Tin and Iron. These two ores are required to produce Titanium, which is the next step in the progression through RockSolid.

Magnesium Ore can be mined to obtain Magnesium Clusters, which are then processed like any other ore so far to eventually produce Magnesium Ingots. However, Rutile Ore is different. When mined, it only drops the ore itself. You will then need to put the ore in an Electric Blast Furnace and let it process for a short period. Once the progress bar reaches the end, you will have Impure Titanium Ingots. These are then alloyed with Magnesium Ingots in an alloy smelter.

Simply place the Impure Titanium Ingots in one slot of your Electric Alloy Smelter, and the Magnesium Ingots in the other. Wait some time, and you will receive a single Titanium Ingot. This precious material is used to make Titanium Construction Blocks, a reinforced alternative to Steel Construction Blocks which are required for more advanced machines. Titanium Ingots can also be used to make Titanium Pickaxes and Axes, the fastest tools currently available in the game.

Now that you have Titanium Construction Blocks, you can upgrade your electricity production to Nuclear Reactors, which generate power using Uranium Pellets. To make these pellets, you will need to mine Uranium Ore with a Titanium Pickaxe, process the clusters into Ingots and then put the ingots in a Compressor, which is a new machine that you will have to construct using some steel. The Compressor can also be used to produce Hardened Stone much faster than using the vanilla Stamper, which can be tedious at times. You can extract energy from a Nuclear Reactor using an Energy Conduit directly attached to the Reactor, as it produces Electricity directly and not just steam.

With so much power, you can now afford a Quarry to mine out a large area without much effort. Construct the Quarry using Titanium Construction Blocks, and supply power through any side using Energy Conduits. You can manually take the items your Quarry collects from the output slot in the GUI, or use an Item Conduit set to Input mode and pipe the items wherever you want them to go.

At this point, you can now mine Wolframite Ore using your Titanium Pickaxe. This is the rarest ore found on Earth, but there are other resources to be found on different planets throughout the solar system. Wolframite is processed the same way as any other normal Ore in the game, however it produces Tungsten Ingots instead of Wolframite. You may have also noticed that, when separating Iron Clusters in the Separator, you never receive Slag as the output product. Instead, you have a small chance of obtaining Nickel Grit. You can smelt this to produce Nickel Ingots, as there is no Nickel Ore found on Earth and you will need Nickel to progress further.

You can now use Tungsten and Nickel ingots to produce some advanced alloys. Using your Electric Alloy Smelter, combine one Tungsten Ingot with one Nickel Ingot to produce Nickel-Tungsten Alloy. Now, take the Nickel-Tungsten Alloy and combine it with some Coal Coke. Infusing it with Tungsten creates Nickel-Tungsten Carbide. This is an incredibly strong and heat-resistant material used to create Rockets and other advanced items.

Rocket Science

With all the technology you have constructed so far, you can now begin to work towards Rockets. They are used to send Drills and Satellites into space, to collect information and mine Asteroids for Resources. Rockets are very complex, and require many things to start using them.

To get your first Rocket launched and into Space, you will need to start with a Refinery. Construct the Refinery in a Construction Table, and pump Oil into the bottom left side using a Fluid Conduit set to Output mode. You can supply Energy from any side of the machine with an Energy Conduit on Output mode, and use another Fluid Conduit to extract the produced Refined Fuel from the bottom right side. The Refined Fuel can be stored in buckets or a Fluid Tank.

Next, you will need a Tank, a Rocket Engine and a Rocket Fairing. Construct all three using a Construction Table. The parts can then be assembled into a full Rocket, again in the Construction Table. The Rocket can be placed into the world, taking up an area of 1x4 meters. Pump Refined Fuel into the Rocket using some Fluid Conduits set to Output mode, but don’t launch it yet. When you do need to launch it, however, simply right-click the Rocket to open the GUI, and press the big Launch button.

Before launch, you will need to tell the Rocket what you want it to do. Sending an empty rocket is going to be pretty useless. Construct a Satelite Core as well as an Asteroid Data Chip. Put the Satelite Core in the top left slot of the Rocket, and the Asteroid Data Chip in the slot next to it, like in the image below. If everything is in the correct place and you have plenty of fuel in the Rocket, press Launch and watch it travel into space.

You will get notified when your rocket leaves the atmosphere, and when it begins to come back. Don’t walk too far away from the launch site until it returns, or you might leave it in an unloaded chunk where it will not come back until you return to the area. When your rocket does eventually return, it should land right back where you launched it. If it falls out of the sky, it has ran out of fuel. In this case you will not get anything back except the Rocket itself.

Your recovered Rocket should contain the Satellite Core like when you sent it off, but now when you hover over the Asteroid Data Chip, it should contain an identification number. In order to learn more about the discovered Asteroid, construct an Analyzer and place the Data Chip into the input slot of the GUI. It will take a short moment to research your data chip, and eventually give you back a more informative Asteroid Data Chip with the Size and Primary Resource of your Asteroid now visible.

Now you can actually obtain resources from the Asteroid. Construct a Drill Core and replace the Satelite Core in your rocket with it. Put the analyzed Asteroid Data Chip in the Data Chip slot, ensure the rocket has enough fuel, and launch it back into space. It will take a little longer this time, and when it eventually returns it should be full of ore from the Asteroid.

Note that this ore is in its raw form, and therefore you would normally have to place it in the world and break it with a Pickaxe to obtain the Clusters, in order to produce Ingots. However, you can now construct a Rock Crusher to do this for you, and additionally double the cluster output as a bonus since it requires Energy to run and is far more precise than a crude Pickaxe. Your Asteroid Data Chip will be missing when the rocket returns with ore, but it is easy to create a new one, send it in a satellite and then in a mining rocket again to get more resources. The only limit at this point is your supply of Asteroid Data Chips and Refined Fuel.

You might notice that your Rocket returned with not just the Ore that you were able to obtain from Earth, but also potentially some Cobalt, Nickel and Aluminum ore. This will prove very useful later, but for now you can just use the Nickel to get Nickel Ingots much easier than separating Iron Clusters like you had to earlier.