I don't agree with the idea of risk in Minecraft, at least in the way it is commonly referred to in these forums. Usually, that is in terms of using the exploding IC2 machines or exploding engines or dangerous mobs. But to me the only risk in Minecraft is in accidentally downloading a dodgy/unnoficial/malware mod or game. If it doesn't affect you in real life it is not a real risk. I do hate being blown up though and I don't find it fun. Just like I don't enjoy walking around at night in dodgy areas.
How can I figure out what is sucking the power out of my Redstone Energy Cell?
- Thread starter Nathan2055
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As far as machines go, the TE ones are more expensive across the board compared to IC2's, even in terms of energy cost, and even then - the only real valid comparison points are the Furnace/Pulverizer, any similarity begins and ends there.
With regards to the accumulator, it only pumps water, and the cost (in EMC) isn't far off from a BC pump + 4x RS engines. The only real difference is that it's a low latency solution that doesn't fail due to vanilla block update bugs. Given lava as a power source, the pump is a far more useful block in general.
It's not a question of making things better or easier - that would be trivial. It's simply a matter of making things work like the player expects them to work. You have liquid at point A and want it at point B? You run a liquiduct or a tesseract. There's no reason for that to lag the server, and there's also no reason for that process to be very difficult or punishing.
If I were shooting for popularity, yeah, I could lower energy costs or make things less onerous to make. When the REC came out, a large number of people were complaining about the steps required to craft one. Same with the conduits. I've obviously stuck to those recipes, however.
So, I'm sorry if you don't agree with TE's idea of balance, but the vast majority of people actually do, and it's not because they feel that TE is super easy. I mod for me; there have only been a couple of occasions where I have changed something due to external factors, and it's basically been rebalances to not screw Forestry or RailCraft. I think it's easy to point at TE and say that it's popular because it's not ball-crushingly cruel or obtuse, but I could jack the resource cost on everything (which, see the optional configs for this), and I bet it'd still get used lots, since it works.
My point ws to argue that TE didn't increase costs to offset the rewards, not that TE is not 'balanced' overall. Maybe TE is ideal, and IC2 is annoying? As i said, i think ssp vs smp players will have different ideas on balance. Some like crafting, others don't. There is no real balance. Enigmius made some wild claims though, and i was pointing out that an Accumulator is better than a pump. If it wasn't, you would see people Pumping water... but no one does. the AA is clearly superior. Ideally id love to see an AA require power of some sort, but thats just me. But to say that popular opinion means your idea of balance is wrong too. People will love better items, its human nature.
Ill quote this comment I saw on reddit though, thsi guy says it better than I do, it was a thread about 'tips and tricks' to basically... do more. Get more resrouces, go faster, etc.:
Now look at what MigukNamja pointed out. there really is no mid game, and getting a quarry basically signals the beginning of 'End Game'. As the guy in the quote said, when has anyone used an IC2 miner recently? Of course some people will say they used some of his examples, but those are people with 100 worlds under their belt and are just trying to do something new.
Anyway, I just want to point out again that I was arguing that Enigmius was wrong that TE was balanced because it increased costs if it added rewards. The EMC cost of a pump and redstone engines is not a fair comparison to an AA. The pump requires more space, more crafting and as i found out... can suck up a 3 x 3 infinite pool. The advantages of an AA are clear... which is why everyone uses them. Anyone who posts here about having a question with BC conductive pipes is ALWAYS told to just use redstone conduits.
Also the idea of a pulverizer costing more than a macerator... due to the gold? Again as MigukNamja pointed out... quarries make a few added gold a negligible cost. The first 11 diamonds I get go to building a quarry, so at that point the cost difference of something like a pulverizer vs a macerator is not a factor. So basically... day 2 of a person playing in a world, the cost of a pulverizer or a macerator are both basically zero. So people will run the one that is easier (auto eject) and maybe gives you a bit more in the long run (bonus dusts). Then again, the bonus dusts dont really matter once you get quarries up and running I guess. IMO the conduits and AA are better examples of clearly superior items that made other mods' offerings obsolete. Not that it is really wrong, as i said.
Oh well, to each his own i guess. Ill be using your steel recipes in my next world though.
If all costs are zero, what is your suggestion? Make liquiducts out of End Stone? Some kind of summonable boss that you have to defeat to make a Redstone Reception Coil?
By the time you have a quarry, you should not be worried about pulverizer vs. macerator balance. Indeed, to craft a quarry, you probably have 1 or more Pulverizer/Macerators already ! Both are trivial at that point. Rather, I think KL's point was early game when one is deciding between IC2 generator + macerator or MJ engine + pulverizer. Balance is important there.
...and they are indeed balanced.
Macerator is 9 refined iron (i.e. 9 smelted iron), 2 redstone, 3 copper, 3 flint, 6 rubber, and 1 cobble.
Pulverizer is 5 iron, 1 gold, 3 redstone, 2 copper, 2 flint, 4 glass, 4 cobble, and 3 wood planks
That seems pretty balanced to me and you have those resources *way* before 11 diamonds or the power or the power and Tesseracts/Ender Tanks/Ender Chests/ME disks/etc. to make full use of a quarry.
I think you missed the subtlety of my rant. I was railing against the EE3 ender pearl and diamond recipes that, if abused, would effectively bypass mid-game and trivialize quarries and tesseracts, among other things.
The thing is though, it's not a fair comparison to compare the AA to a pump though. Because they don't actually do the same things. A pump pumps liquid. Any liquid that can be placed in the world, which pretty much means all them these days. Not only that, it also removes the liquid from the world so it can not only be used to transport liquid, but also to reclaim land. An AA just creates water. Only water. It doesn't do anything for oil, lava, glowstone, liquid ender, liquid redstone, milk, sludge, sewage, pink slime, liquid meat, mob essence... and the list goes on. It also doesn't help at all when you build an underwater base and need to remove the water already there. In terms of overall utility, you can actually argue that the pump is "better" than the AA.
Maybe we just have widely different definitions of "end-game". A single quarry run overnight won't get you a quantum suit. It won't get you an ultimate hybrid solar panel. It won't fill out a single piece of thaumcraft research, or get you any alvearies, it won't breed either trees or bees for you. It won't build your tree farm, or setup a oil refining system or lava pumps. It won't create any mystcraft worlds.
Keep in mind, those aren't things that define end-game to me, those are "mid-game" for me. Just having a single alveary is mid-game to the end-game goal of having every single bee species and trait. Having a single mystcraft notebook is mid-game to the end-game goal of multiple dedicated worlds with a nexus linking them with a labelled and centrally controlled portal system. Having a tree farm is mid-game to the also mid-game goal of having automated frame production for bees and power for mid-game engines and machinery. A quantum suit is itself a late mid-game to the end-game goal of getting a gravisuit for flight and invulnerability. The single ultimate hybrid itself is also just a stepping stone to getting a field of ultimate hybrids that power a constantly running set of mass fabs and recyclers that replaces the need to use quarries.
And that's just scratching the surface of the infrastructure needed for a true end-game base. We still haven't touched building a fully automated AE system with several pages of crafting patterns, automated ore-processing, automatic creation of steel and refined iron, autocrafting of items like glass, frames, stone bricks, fertilizer. Nor have we talked about setting up mob farms, or automated enchanting. Or even the most important end-game goal of all, building a massive multi-thousand block Tower/Castle/Monument to your own glory with skulls dripping lava, or 100 block high fountains of liquid diamond, or a 1:1 scale replica of Superdimensional Fortress Macross. Now THAT is end-goal.
No, that is only the beginning of WORLD DOMINATION! Muahahahahahahaha!
Back to the actual topic of this thread:
I put Iron gates on the pipe directly connected to my constant-drain machines, and make it emit [red pipe wire signal] when the machines [have work]. I then have that whole subsystem buffered by a Redstone Energy Cell set to [High redstone signal], and on the wooden pipe that connects it to the subsystem, an Iron gate with [emit redstone] when it sees [red pipe wire signal].
In this way, the whole subsystem gets the 32/t that a wooden pipe allows (sure, there are ways to increase that), while only draining my whole grid during and after use. I also throttle the input of that REC so that it stays fully charged most of the time, but doesn't shut down the rest of my machine line when it needs juice.
Edit: I meant Work Scheduled, not Has Work.
Edit 2: It appears Work Scheduled is for the assembly table, and Has Work is for machines like the forestry machines; no idea why it should be different.
I put Iron gates on the pipe directly connected to my constant-drain machines, and make it emit [red pipe wire signal] when the machines [have work]. I then have that whole subsystem buffered by a Redstone Energy Cell set to [High redstone signal], and on the wooden pipe that connects it to the subsystem, an Iron gate with [emit redstone] when it sees [red pipe wire signal].
In this way, the whole subsystem gets the 32/t that a wooden pipe allows (sure, there are ways to increase that), while only draining my whole grid during and after use. I also throttle the input of that REC so that it stays fully charged most of the time, but doesn't shut down the rest of my machine line when it needs juice.
Edit: I meant Work Scheduled, not Has Work.
Edit 2: It appears Work Scheduled is for the assembly table, and Has Work is for machines like the forestry machines; no idea why it should be different.
Can you set up a system to collect dyes from the dyed bees? I haven't tried that yet, but I'm thinking of doing so now that I have a project planned with construction foam that will need to be colored in.[DOUBLEPOST=1380748070][/DOUBLEPOST]
Interesting. why not connect the REC to the subnet with conduits, but use structure pipes to deliver the gate conditional from the machine? With the full 100 MJ/t output of the REC (or even multiple RECs on the same subnet) you can place multiple machines in the subnet and turn the output on whenever any of them needs power.
Conductive pipes are lossless/explode-proof now, and conduits don't carry gates and pipe wires.
The tradeoff seems to be: Additional space around my redstone cell for more wooden conductive pipes, or additional space along the length of my whole conduit for structure pipes.
But also, when troubleshooting, seeing the MJ flow through the conductive pipe helps.
The tradeoff seems to be: Additional space around my redstone cell for more wooden conductive pipes, or additional space along the length of my whole conduit for structure pipes.
But also, when troubleshooting, seeing the MJ flow through the conductive pipe helps.
4 iron for an ender pearl is pretty reasonable. Ender Pearls are becoming the overused status quo progression brake. And in that role they are absolutely terrible. I don't take anyone seriously who says, "Oh, you just set up an endermen farm" or "oh, you just go to the End and bring a linking book." Apologist excuses for crappy mechanics. Ender pearls, their availability and drop rate, are tuned for a vanilla game, not modded MC demanding 32 pearls for one upgrade to a piece of gear. I think EE3 is a tragedy, not because minium stones are out of balance but because it's boring as hell compared to EE2 and it's been that way for a year. It was a great mod with useful utilities that could be extremely helpful and entirely balanced for people who are mature enough to moderate their own decisions and behavior, but the people who punch themselves in the face and blame it on television violence cried foul so the mod gets gutted and now it's just dull.
That's not what I said. You're not understanding the key points on the topic. The point is that for every cost there must be a reward. Period.
PERIOD.
Stop trying to fill in blanks that aren't there.
The BC system of power drain on idle machines is a cost without a reward.
PERIOD.
It's bloody amazing how easy it is to start figuring things out when you interpret them correctly from the beginning. Give it a shot some time.
I don't use bees. Not knocking them, but per my play style they are not fun.
BC power has always been lossy. They moved the loss from pipes to machines. You want some qpq for that change? Pipes no longer explode. Tell me, what was the reward for pipe loss? What was the reward for conduit loss? What is the reward for EU loss? What is the reward for hunger loss?
Not that I like this system, but why is "you get to use the machine" not a reward?
I think the problem is that the loss occurs when you are not using the machine. You can set up a system to disconnect the power when it's not being used, and there's no down side to doing so, so the loss is gaining you nothing. At least with the Thermionic Fabricator, the constant drain is giving you the benefit of the machine being available for work instantly without having to wait for it to melt the glass, similarly with the other machines that keep themselves hot for fast processing. However, I just see it as an artefact of how BC has implemented a system that is intended to be lossy and that is intended to have engines constantly running for optimal performance. It's an implementation artefact, sometimes you just have to put up with these things in games. A game will always be a simplified version of the "realilty" that it is trying to represent, and those simplifications can always be picked apart if you want to focus on them. I try to focus beyond them and see the reality that they are attempting to portray.
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