If you have a good supply of clay you can just rely on the grout recipe and ignore this...it is a useful technique if you want to enlarge the smeltery.

Its possible to make seared bricks and blocks in the smeltery. I believe the ratio in DW20 is 2 cobble to 1 brick and 8 cobble to 1 block. I haven't looked up the seared cobblestone recipe yet. You can use compressed and double compressed cobblestone. If making glass you can use single-compressed sand but not double.

The compressed cobble method generates a lot of liquid stone fast, so you really will want to automate the casting process. Just use a fluid mover such as waterproof wooden pipe or a fluiduct with servo from the drain to the casting table, and an item mover from the table to a chest (even a hopper will do).

You can operate the seared faucet from a redstone clock, but you shouldn't, it is tedious and pipes are just better.

Incidentally if you get an incomplete cast through having insufficient material it is possible to suck the liquid back into the smeltery by reversing the pipe. You can also store excess liquid metal in tanks.

look into ender IO mod as well boris. Can help with some of the functions there. apart from that, very informative. Thank you.

I agree with draze Ender IO pipes are the way to go.. if nothing else, it's better for the server to use them..
also using a cyclic assembler or a liquicrafter (it works as an auto crafting bench too, but needs a rstone pulse to work, so a timer would work well) would be much faster to get the compressed cobble out..

u could also use a sludge boiler from MFR to get tones of clay to make grout
for anyone who doesn't know, harvester generates sludge (tree farms should give the best output)

Thanks for reminding me of the sludge boiler, I'd forgotten, I used to call it the trollkettle though because if you stand near it when it activates you get poisoned, and because of how MFR operates it goes off unexpectedly.

The liquicrafter is potentially fast, but I'm told that fast redstone clocks are rough on the server. I really like the Cyclic Assembler.

yeah that's why I always keep sludge boilers underground and far away lol (use a few of em to get a lot of crap plus clay)
as for timer, u could use redstone clock (as one block, can't remember what mod it's from..) which is not too fast or projectred timer and set it to some medium speed (it will still go faster then auto crafting bench).. alternatively if u have power, use the cyclic assembler

ps Sludge boilers also give u heat sand and tainted soil which you can use with nether wart to create that other version of smeltery (the brownish one)

FWIW I haven't really explored Ender IO but thermal expansion now has a good item duct, it works similarly to fluiducts e.g. needs a redstone signal to pull items, configured with a crescent hammer etc.

u can also add a pneumatic servo to itemducts for redstone signal and more control like filtering etc

but ender IO pipes go both ways, u can have items flowing in 2 directions at the same time and u can setup color sistems and filtering.. and can also cover them in facades that can be painted to look like any block.. they are just the superior option

OK I am totally won over by the cyclic assembler!! I might just use a liquicrafter if:

1 I have to use more than one liquid
2 I really really can't route power to it

Also the transport node cobblegen is ludicrously fast.

Incidentally if you put cobble in the basin you get seared cobblestone, in terms of smeltery output it doubles your output and it has a nice high contrast "cobblestone of doom" look about it.

Another cool thing about the basin: It seems to be quite clever about accepting and processing items, if you feed it cobblestone from a hopper it consistently accepts a block, adds seared stone, then allows a pipe to pull out the seared cobble. It won't output the unprocessed stone. Presumably brownstone works the same way, which would make it fairly easy to make in bulk.