Welcome to Part 1 of the Building Roads series! Here you will learn how to create tarmac, or other types of Road Block. You’ll need these blocks before you can start really making roads!
Before we get started, you’ll need to gather some materials, as listed below. Please be aware that this is the Simple guide series, which will use coal-based machines and very little automation. If you’re experienced with modded Minecraft, you might want to check the Advanced version of this guide.
For this guide, we are creating Standard Tarmac Roads. If you’d rather make a different type of road, look up the recipes in JEI or check the table on the Road Factory page; you may not need the Crusher.
Required Resources:
127x Iron Ingot
18x Glass Pane
9x Glass Block
24x Redstone Dust
16x Cobblestone
12x Wooden Planks
2x Slime Ball
5x Furnace
Stacks of Cobblestone or Gravel and Coal to turn into roads
Buckets of Lava
Coal for fuel
Iron, Gold, or Diamonds for Tarmac Cutter Blades to preference.
Stage 1: The Basics
The first stage is to get your machines crafted and placed. You will need three essential machines: A Crusher, a Tar Distiller, and a Road Factory. Check their relevant pages or use JEI to find the recipes.
Next, you’ll want to clear a bit of space in your world, ideally not where the road will be, and set up the machines. The Crusher location isn’t too important, but make sure the Tar Distiller is directly to the left of the Road Factory. This will let your tar move directly from the Tar Distiller into the Road Factory automatically, and save you a lot of time with buckets!
You’re now ready to start crafting full-height roads! Assuming you’re going with the Standard Tarmac, you’ll need Crushed Rock. This can be made from Gravel in the Crusher – if you don’t have Gravel, you can put Cobblestone in the Crusher to make some. The Crusher GUI is very straightforward; place the material to be crushed on the left, fuel on the right, and your output will appear in the middle.
While the Crusher is processing, you can get started on producing tar with a Tar Distiller. Tar is the primary fluid of Fureniku’s Roads and is used to make all roads, so it’s pretty important! There are a number of ways to make Tar depending on the mods you have available, but for the sake of simplicity we’ll just use coal. Open the Tar Distiller, put some coal in the top-left slot, and a bucket of Lava in the Fuel slot. Tar production requires a lot of heat, so other fuels won’t work! Assuming you’ve set everything up correctly, you’ll see Dried Coal start to produce, and Tar will be quickly draining after being made. The Tar is automatically moving over to the Road Factory and will keep doing so until the Factory is full; don’t worry, that’s exactly where you want it! Alternatively, you can place a bucket in the centre slot with the < icon to extract tar into buckets instead.
You’ll probably need to wait a small amount of time to build up some resources now. You’ll want a few stacks of Crushed Rock and at least 100 tar per 8 Crushed Rock. Naturally if you’re making another type of road, the same applies with whatever material you are using.
Once you’re ready, head to the Road Factory. Hopefully, you’ll see there’s already a lot of tar in the tank. The Road Factory has a slightly strange optimization which means the more roads you craft, the faster it will go. Split your materials equally across the four top-left slots, making sure each slot has at least 8 blocks. If you’re creating coloured roads, add your dye to the central slot now. Finally, add some fuel; any fuel works again in this machine don’t worry! The machine will now start to produce Road Blocks in the right slots.
Stage 2: Fine Tuning
Great, you’ve made some Road Blocks! You could just run out and start building roads now, but they’d look very… flat. The blocks you’ve made are full-height, and the beauty of Fureniku’s Roads is the variable height of road blocks!
Now, you could just make yourself a Pneumatic Drill and go and cut every block down to size, but that would be tedious. Trust me, there’s a reason I made the Tarmac Cutter! Craft yourself one, and while you’re at it make a Compactor too. Finally, make four Tarmac Cutter Blades from iron, gold or diamond – the only difference is their durability so just use whatever you prefer. You can also make more or less depending on your preferred road height – we’re going for a 3/4 block height in this guide. Place your two new machines, you’ll want them relatively close together if you aren’t automating things.
Now, take your Tarmac Cutter Blades. You have four with a thickness of 1 each, but really you want one with a thickness of four. Open a crafting menu, and place two blades together. This will make a blade with thickness of two – repeat for the other two blades. Now, craft the two blades with thickness 2 together, and you’ll have a blade of thickness 4. Easy!
Next, grab some Road Blocks and head over to the Tarmac Cutter. Place a stack of blocks, your new blade, and some fuel into the machine. You’ll start to get cut Road Blocks, and Tarmac Fragments – you should get fragments equal to the blade’s thickness, so in this case four fragments per road block.
These Fragments will fill up the slot pretty quickly, so grab them out frequently. The whole machine will stop when any slot is full! Also, you’ll notice the Tarmac Cutter Blade has a green bar now, this is durability just like any other tool. They will need replacing once broken.
Now, don’t throw those fragments away! We’re a green road company and everything has a use, we’re going to recycle them! Head over to the Compactor. You’ll see a number with -/+ buttons – adjust this to 12, or if you used a different height just go with 16-blade thickness.}
Put the fragments in the left slot, and fuel in the right, and voila! you have some extra blocks made up of the scraps from cutting blocks. We’ve saved storage space, saved the planet, and given you a nice reward as a bonus, how great!
And that’s it! You’ve now made some Road Blocks and cut them to a reasonable size. If you need to make adjustments to a few individual blocks, maybe for a slope or a pothole (why would you want a pothole…), you can use the Pneumatic Drill to decrease road block height, or the Tarmac Rammer and some spare Fragments to increase it. Good luck with your road crafting, and when you’re ready, head over to Road Painting! For now, here’s a sense of roughly how much road you can build with two stacks of blocks. You’ll probably want to go check out the Advanced Guide and get some automation going too!
