ATM10: How I do things, a (long) outline.

I know there's no "right" way to play ATM. I started playing ATM at version 6 and have started a new game in each new version that has come, but I always follow the same basic pattern that seemed logical, to me. It has only ever been altered slightly due to things I've learned that are demonstrably "better", and to accommodate version differences, but it remains, in principle, the same.

I'm wondering if I should be doing something basic very differently. Because people talk ALL THE TIME about their AE2 setups and I've literally never touched the pack except for the one-off machines I need to make the ATM Star.

Here's the general outline:

  • New world, punch a tree, build basic tools, find some inferium, iron, and coal.
  • Set up basic inferium and food fields, 9x9 with water source in middle, manual at first.
  • Set up up tier 1 Mekanism heat generators with lava surrounding them to power basic smelting.
  • Using drawers at this point for storage.
  • Find a few diamonds. Standard mining operation, dig down, gather.
  • Expand MA seeds to encompass all basic ores and generic essences.
  • Build garden cloches with potatoes in them to feed a Mekanism Crusher, and Ethylene production feeding two gas-powered generators.
  • Using newfound energy and mineral wealth, build Mekanism Thermal Evaporation Towers (x3, two brine, one lithium), with Resistive Heaters attached.
  • It is at this point (with lithium) that you can build a Mekanism QIO storage system with basic storage cards. I build 64 of them, which ends up being the ingredients needed to combine them later for the single end-game stage storage card.
  • Scrap ALL my other storage for the effectively infinite storage that QIO provides that I can access from anywhere.
  • Automate and expand MA farms with Pylons for auto-harvest into QIO
  • Take every opportunity to install extra layers of MA accelerators under your farms, starting with the Inferium so it gets exponentially faster to upgrade.
  • Build Mekanism Fission Plant in 9x9 area but as tall as you can (giving you 7x7x16 tall fuel rod assemblies). Also build Induction Maxtrix (again 9x9x9) but you can leave it mostly empty and upgrade capacity and speed as time goes on and you have need to.
  • Build Mekanism Thermoelectric Boiler (9x9x11) and Steam Turbine (9x9x16).
  • Set up Sulfuric Acid and Fission Fuel assembly lines. Use Automated Assemblicator and QIO exporter to constantly supply system with Sulfur (with MA sulfur seeds) and Uranium.
  • Now you have to wait a bit, while still upgrading your farms and your energy storage, while your (slowly generating) fissile material is converted into waste so you can get Polonium and Plutonium.
    • It should be noted that until this point, I've very rarely left my base at all. I've built almost no armor whatsoever. Except for Drawers, Backpacks, MA, Mekanism, and Pylons I've barely touched any other mods.
    • Now that I have time I usually set up the Apotheosis stuff, both gear and enchanting and make netherite level gear and enchant it to go searching for Allthemodium.
      • Apoth takes a LOT of xp, build two mobs farms and an "Ages" sword to exploit the hell out of one of them.
      • The other farm is automated through Industrial Foregoing, which I take the time to upgrade to Ether Gas level while I'm working on it.
    • Build a Mekanism armored jetpack.
    • I also take this opportunity to follow the Immersive Engineering questline until I have a crusher and Arc Furnace
    • Might as well defeat the ender dragon while I wait.
    • Now is a good time to also set up Bees. They have a few resources for the more esoteric packs that MA lacks so you're sort of forced into it. My focus, because of my limited scope, is on Draconic Bees to advance the pack and Diamond Bees with gene samplers so I can stockpile Diamond Bee spawn eggs because they are oddly necessary to make every other kind of weird bee that you can't breed for. Otherwise I focus solely on the Allthemodium ore generation questline as the MA Seeds for Allthemodium SUCK.
    • This is also the time to build a witherproof room and start farming them with a Hostile Networks model until you have a couple basic ones. I throw these into an array of simulators and loot fabricators for an infinite supply of Netherstars (the prediction matrix is provides by MA seeds making everything and assemblicators doing the prep work). By the time I'm ready for the ATM star, I have more than enough stars to make the 3x compressed blocks.
  • OK, I have enough Pt and Po to build a Mekanism Fusion reactor. Water - Deuterium and Water - Brine - Lithium - Tritium assembly lines created.
  • Go searching for Vibranium and Unobtainium. No, except to gather a small supply of some necessary items (to build their corresponding MA seeds) I've barely spent any time in the Nether or the End until this point.
  • By the time you use the compasses to find all the places, smithing upgrades, and materials, you should have all the materials ready to build the Supercritial Phase Shifter to start making Antimatter in Mekanism. This takes even longer as 1 anti-matter = 10,000,000mb fissile fuel. You can shut down the Plutonium line and use all waste to make Polonium gas to make it go a little quicker.
    • Focus on upgrading your farms, especially sulfur and uranium, to max MA accelerators and enough surface area to keep up with all your machines' max output.
  • Then I sort of just sit there, building cosmetic buildings and adventuring for random loot that I store in my (again effectively infinite, no channels necessary, now at 4xT3 cards) QIO system in case they're important for one mod or another that I haven't even really touched.
    • In ATMs past I used this time to make a Max Morgan....sadly ATM10 caps the damage at 60 now so I don't bother.
    • You can also take this time to progress Powah! You'll need the energizer setup and the max level energy transmitter (with a dimensional card) is necessary.
  • Antimatter chunk 1 - upgrade QIO to 1xT4 card. 16,000,000,000,000 items storage. That is not a typo. This is why I've never touched AE2. I don't NEED to for any reason I can discern.
  • Antimatter chunks 2 through 5 - build a Mekasuit.
  • Upgrade Mekasuit with all mods. I'm now immortal and invulnerable with infinite resources. Building the Star is just a matter of taking each item step by step.

And that's it.