Playing through the mod, there are a few things I had ideas for. I quite like the overall theme of putting together smaller components into a large factory, and these are ideas meant to provide more in that regard.

• Add a new Friction Heater block, which requires resources from the Nether and a LOT of energy, and applies heat to blocks in front of it rather then on item entities.
• Blaze Powder can be inserted into the Friction Heater to significantly reduce its energy requirements
• Heating cobblestone will make first stone, then lava.
• Possibly, if the heater is actively applying heat to the 'active' block of a stone generator, it produces a block of Granite instead of the stone? If it is applying heat to a cobble gen, it produces something else, maybe Diorite?
• Add a way to break obsidian, maybe a diamond and/or obsidian upgrade to the Mechanical Drill?
• Obsidian can be combined with between 8-64 coal or charcoal (I'm not sure what would be an appropriate number for the balance for this, though I feel like it should be at least 8) to produce one Diamond. I don't think there is currently a machine that 'combines' things, so it would probably either need a new machine for that, or an added mechanic for an existing machine. Personally, I like the idea of it being a Crusher recipe, though I feel there should be some form of more 'advanced' component to the recipe. Given the above process, though, even just adding it as a Crusher recipe I think would be fine.
• Redstone could be made from Nether Quartz somehow, probably by combining it with something else. Personally I really like the idea of combining it with Netherrack in the Crusher, in the same manner as the Diamond recipe above. Nether Wart would also work.
• Lapis Lazuli could be made through crushing Ender Pearls, and/or by combining them with water in some way. Washing seems a bit too easy, though.

Hi, thanks for your suggestions!

• For creating lava and other stone variants automatically, we already have a different approach in mind, it'll allow you to do the same thing but won't require adding a secondary smelting mechanism.
• If drills cannot break obsidian, then that is a bug.
• And indeed, we're adding plenty of new processing options in the next version. Then you can use them how you like and make all your recipe ideas into your personal datapack.
• For building/copying structures easily, check out the Schematic tools Create already provides, maybe they already have what you want.
  Cheers!

Something that will craft stuff is planned already. I think, in general that we try to stay away from the idea of energy, though if @simibubi has a different idea about this since the consumption is more akin to a furnace rather than piping in things like FE.

Can you explain, from a player's perspective, what new benefits you'll see for using a in-place block smelter over the pre-existing methods?

As for tiers of drill, we try to stay away from tiered systems so we can focus on creating systems that bring new gameplay experiences.

As far as I understand, the crusher only works on a homogeneous input and can provide heterogenous output, aka, it's made for breaking stuff down, not crafting them together. Though we do have a crafter planned ,and in light of that, I recommend adding recipes to a datapack for the obsidian+coal/charcoal=diamond, redstone, and Lapis recipes if you want.

By "Energy" I meant the mods rotational force. I assumed that would be implied, tbh.

The friction heater is meant less to be an in-place block smelter, and more to be a way to make things that are more interesting or can't be made easily in item form, such as lava. In-world smelting can be useful in some cases of automation, though that does remind me that there was an additional suggestion I forgot to post about;

• The Block/Build Compressor, which takes a designated 2d area (up to a certain limit) of blocks, and turns those blocks into an item which, when right-clicked, places them back down in the same arrangement that they were when the Compressor was activated.
  This could make for a very interesting factory to make common 'blocks' of building blocks, such as a large wall of stone. The factory aspect could be improved much more by adding ways to craft many common building blocks in-world, such as stone bricks, without needing to break them into items then deploy them back into the world.

Oh okay. Yeah, sorry, we have a lot of people who suggest FE/RF compat. ^__^