This is more of an enhancement than anything else, however it would be neat to possibly get the dust block as a block instead of an item, without disrupting existing recipes. It's annoying holding it in your hand just to see the pixelated fake block texture. Same could go for the pulsating iron wire as well.

Dust block could probably be done but we'd need to come up with a suitable model texture for it. Basic blocks can be registered with ContentTweaker's VanillaFactory.

Pulsating iron wire, not as simple. We'd probably have to get it registered as a GTCE material for it to render the same as the other wires, and I don't know if that's possible purely with scripts. Would have to look into it.

Dust block is based off the Ex Nihilo dust block. Its texture can be found here.

As for Pulsating Iron Wire, an imitation of GTCE wires could probably be made, using Contenttweaker and funky models, but that would require more effort than registering its cable.

We need to respect intellectual property and licensing requirements at all times.

Ex Nihilo appears to be under an MIT license which permits any use so long as "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software." I'm not sure exactly how that applies to the texture, as it is an asset not software. I believe we would need to ask them for express permission to use the texture.

Alternately, if someone wants to contribute a custom block texture for Omnifactory, we would be able to use that without issue.

Given the nature of the MIT license as a permissive license, and the small portion of assets used (not a "substantial portion"), I don't think there would be licensing issues. We are under GPL license, which MIT is compatible with.

Of course, it's better to be safe than sorry, so I'll prepare an alternate texture for dust blocks, and an implementation for it.

Is anyone still in need of a dust block texture?

Eutro put a couple texture options in the discord on March 3:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/564247906991996930/684576041317957664/dust.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/564247906991996930/684578773966127124/dust.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/564247906991996930/684576467031425044/dust.png

How close to copyright infringement would it be if it were paler, if copyright infringement were in fact a problem?
For example:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/19265810/76690496-bd69f780-6640-11ea-8f3f-74bf0283a493.png

Infringement of whose work? Paler relative to what?

The texture I provided has a more whitish pallor than the textures suggested in the discord.
It's also 32x32 px instead of 16x16 or 8x8, because dust is a finer particulate than sand and smaller rendered pixels on a block with the same surface area should provide the optical illusion that the dust particles are smaller than the sand grains in a sand block.

As for copyright infringement, I created this using a Perlin noise generator on a 32x32 px canvas of very light grey in paint.net. To the untrained eye it looks very much like Ex Nihilo's Dust block, and I don't want to get you guys in any possible legal trouble.

Should be fine as far as copyright goes. As for the 32x vs 16x texture, it might look out of place with the default texture set, but I guess it would be worth throwing it in game and seeing how it actually looks.