Was ethanol nerfed?

[MigukNamja]

Omicron,

Many thanks for taking the time to explain. I'm grokking 99% of what you said and have done most of it, but it's the last and absolutely critical 1% that still has me flummoxed.

...(discounting the "Who cares about breeding I just overwrite everything with my serums" approach of Binnie's Mods).

*points finger at self* Guilty as charged.

Of course, there's the thing with dominant and recessive, but that works exactly the same as it does with bees.

And there's the problem. I never learned to breed traits in bees the proper/"old" way before ExtraBees. I tried, but failed. I spent 2 hours reading up on the rules of Mendelian inheritence and scouring the forums looking for advice, but that didn't help much. Was still flummoxed. If it wasn't for ExtraBees machines, I would have given up on bees a long ago.

...the apple oak species trait is recessive and the willow isn't

Whoa. Very good info. Where can I find this ? My tree breeding endeavors in the past have been an exercise in blind dice rolling.

... sapling drop chance of the apple oak, size of the willow, sappiness of the willow.

I'm with you so far. In fact, I'm with you for 99% of what you've very nicely explained. However...

You only need to watch for these three traits.

Yeah, I've tried that. I've looked at maybe hundreds of saplings, have known exactly what traits to look for, but I don't know where to look for them at. In other words, I don't know how to compare two saplings that have the same traits, but one of them has them in red, the other blue, one of them has the trait I want in the left column, the other in the right column. This is and has always been the mystery to me.

Many thanks for taking the time to explain this.

 

[Omicron]

Oh, okay.

Basically, the two trait lines are active (left side) and inactive (right side). Active traits govern everything about your tree when you plant it (or your bee when you use it). Inactive traits don't impact that at all, but they can be passed on through breeding. There's just one exception to this rule (as far as I understood it):

If the active trait is recessive, and the inactive trait is dominant, then the inactive trait counts as active for the purposes of how the bee or tree works. Basically, dominant overwrites recessive where applicable. Dominant traits are listed in red in the analyzer interface. Recessive traits are listed as blue.

Active Dominant + Inactive Dominant = Active wins
Active Dominant + Inactive Recessive = Active wins
Active Recessive + Inactive Dominant = Inactive wins <--- attention!
Active Recessive + Inactive Recessive = Active wins

In the case of crossing the apple oak and white willow trees, you can have two possible hybrids: either an active willow / inactive oak, in which case the willow is active and stays active; or an active oak / inactive willow, in which case the willow wins anyway because it's dominant and totally whips that bitch oak's ass. You're welcome for the mental image.

However, that's on a per-trait basis. Just because a dominant inactive species trait overwrites a recessive active one, it doesn't mean that any other inactive traits are ported along. Each trait decides individually whether active remains active or if it gets overwritten by a more dominant inactive gene.



So the TL;DR is: If a trait is red, only look at the left column and ignore the right (unless you care about it for breeding). If an entry is blue, compare both columns. If the right one is also blue, you can again ignore it. But if the left is blue and the right is red, then for this trait only, the right side counts.

 

[MigukNamja]

*plants a big smooch on Omicron's cheek*

Rosetta stone is now complete ! Many, many, many thanks, sir. Too bad I can only "Like" this reply once ;-)

Omicron's excellent explanation of active vs. passive and dominant vs. recessive with examples should seriously be a stickied post. It's booked marked and copy/pasted on my PC and on my DropBox. Best bit of MC knowledge I've read in a long time !

 

[Omicron]

Sadly I can only have three links in my signature at any given time.

 

[schyman]

I'd venture to say that the older mods are becoming very insulated and niche. The changes are catering to a play style that I absolutely do not possess.

I don't see how it's that "niche" when still a large group of people are playing like that and prefer it, and it's arguably more major mods going in the "nerf" direction than the "buff" direction. To the mods going in a more manual and a bit slower tech pace way, I'd add in Thaumcraft and to some degree TiC. I'm reluctant to include Railcraft however, not because it's high-powered but because it has always been low-powered (and earlier was far more low-powered than BC, IC2 etc).

Just because it's not your preferred playstyle doesn't mean it's more "niche" than the more high-powered mods like Dartcraft.

 

[snooder]

See, this right there is the typical prevailing attitude about Forestry that causes people to completely misunderstand the mod. The moment you are talking about ethanol treefarms with apple oaks, you're just plain doing it wrong. The biomass output of apple oaks is bad. They're absolutely unsuited for the task. Even vanilla spruce does significantly better, and that's without any tree breeding at all. Oh, and for charcoal there's also a better vanilla tree choice... two, in fact. The one thing apple oaks have going for them is the fact that they produce mulch. But people keep building apple oak treefarms for output anyway, because they act on autopilot and just repeat what they've been doing since Minecraft 1.2 or earlier without stopping to think.

Forestry has changed, more than most people realize. And it sucks for them because they do not understand how to play with it anymore. Where's the curiosity, the drive to experiment and find the best setups that engages people tp play tech mods in the first place? You'll find plenty of posts discussing how to optimize a setup in MFR, a mod that requires so little mental capacity to generate gigantic amounts of fuel and energy that a slot machine in Vegas could pass for "complex game mechanics" alongside it. But Forestry trees and multifarms? Nothing but moaning about how the mod sucks by people who haven't built a treefarm with anything other than vanilla apple oaks in their entire minecraft career.

The thing is, people don't dislike Forestry tree-breeding and multifarms because it's "too hard". They dislike it because it's "unnecessarily complex". Your comment about people deriving a lot of thought and complexity out of MFR highlights exactly what is wrong with the current direction of Forestry. See, MFR is a really simple mod at the base. Anyone can, with very little effort, get it to simply work. But, it also has hidden depth, and with some thought and ingenuity you can get it to do really interesting and innovative things. So everyone can at least appreciate the basics, while someone who CHOOSES to do so can get satisfaction and pleasure out of delving even further to master it. Everyone wins; new players can have fun while experienced players have things that they can focus on now that the basic stuff is no longer novel.

Forestry on the hand seems to be going down the path of breaking that initial and simple base. So that in order to get any use out of it at all, you HAVE to sink the time and effort to master it. Which takes away any choice and thereby removes a lot of the fun and pleasure that people had from the mod. It's one thing to design a complex system because you chose to optimize, it's another thing entirely to design a system because you have to. For me, and for a lot of other people, the former is a source of pleasure and entertainment, the other is simply frustrating. This hurts both the new player who gets thrown into a complex system and the experienced player who has to go back and re-do all the same crap all over again instead of moving on and focusing on different new projects. It's annoying to have to redesign a fuel system for the umpteenth time. I've done it before, and doing it again, just with extra bullshit, is not interesting to me. What's interesting to me is finding something new and interesting to do with the power I have.

And it's especially irritating when there WAS a simpler and more pleasurable way of doing things, but that gets taken away without warning or explanation. And gets replaced with a less intuitive system just for the sake of complicating stuff that shouldn't be complicated. Or, in the case of multifarms, an useful early/mid game system gets replaced with a system that REQUIRES mid to end game levels of material resources.

 

[zorn]

The thing is, people don't dislike Forestry tree-breeding and multifarms because it's "too hard". They dislike it because it's "unnecessarily complex". Your comment about people deriving a lot of thought and complexity out of MFR highlights exactly what is wrong with the current direction of Forestry. See, MFR is a really simple mod at the base. Anyone can, with very little effort, get it to simply work. But, it also has hidden depth, and with some thought and ingenuity you can get it to do really interesting and innovative things. So everyone can at least appreciate the basics, while someone who CHOOSES to do so can get satisfaction and pleasure out of delving even further to master it. Everyone wins; new players can have fun while experienced players have things that they can focus on now that the basic stuff is no longer novel.

Forestry on the hand seems to be going down the path of breaking that initial and simple base. So that in order to get any use out of it at all, you HAVE to sink the time and effort to master it. Which takes away any choice and thereby removes a lot of the fun and pleasure that people had from the mod. It's one thing to design a complex system because you chose to optimize, it's another thing entirely to design a system because you have to. For me, and for a lot of other people, the former is a source of pleasure and entertainment, the other is simply frustrating. This hurts both the new player who gets thrown into a complex system and the experienced player who has to go back and re-do all the same crap all over again instead of moving on and focusing on different new projects. It's annoying to have to redesign a fuel system for the umpteenth time. I've done it before, and doing it again, just with extra bullshit, is not interesting to me. What's interesting to me is finding something new and interesting to do with the power I have.

And it's especially irritating when there WAS a simpler and more pleasurable way of doing things, but that gets taken away without warning or explanation. And gets replaced with a less intuitive system just for the sake of complicating stuff that shouldn't be complicated. Or, in the case of multifarms, an useful early/mid game system gets replaced with a system that REQUIRES mid to end game levels of material resources.

Honest question: what is an example of creative things you have done with MFR? NOt being snide, I hear arguments like this tossed around all the time, and I'm curious to hear real world (kind of) examples showing why MFR is better. would you humor me to give an example of what you are saying?

To me it sounds like older players are just bored. much of minecraft is grinding/tedium, so older players want to remove that, as they feel they have already done it.

In a typical game that involves grinding, you don't often reboot your character or game, and start at the beginning again. So crafting your first fusion reactor is very exciting, but the 10th time spent crafting it... kind of boring. I was suprised when i first made one, i thought the crafting time would be much much worse, the way people talked. It appears the problem is that those 'tedious' elements are NOT really tedious at all the first couple times around, but only later on do they become a chore. When you first craft a fusion reactor, you feel you did the Grind to get the Reward. The Reward is something new. But the 10th time you craft one... the reward isn't very shiny at all, it's just the same Reward you got 10 worlds ago. Not really exciting.

In a more professional game, grinding often changes or you at least feel you are progressing further. So in an MMORPG you might draw out some mobs in a castle at level 1, killthem, then enter again to draw them out and repeat it over and over (so boring!) looking for a rare drop. At level 50, you are grinding differnet mobs, different dungeons - different content. And the XP you get, no matter how boring it is, is added to what you have accumulated, and you will likely not restart at level 1. Other than to use a new class or something... which is essentially making a lot of the content new again.

With minecraft there is no new class, and people reboot and start at level 1 pretty frequently, so setting up a forestry system or breeding trees the 15th time around is probably pretty boring AND you don't feel it is really gaining you anything. The WoW player (admittedly, never played that game) is grinding away at boring stuff 1 year into teh game and feels that grind/tedium is worth it - because it is adding something like resources or xp or whatever, to his pile of loot. He has gained *something* from it that puts him ahead of where he was 6 months ago. Not so when rebooting minecraft worlds for the 50th time, you don't feel any satisfaction just dong the same exact thing again.

 

[Hoff]

-snip-

Ironically this feels like it opposes your normal views. Though I do agree. Mods haven't yet figured out how to re-invent the wheel for not only players that have "done it all" but themselves as well. It might not even be possible to make a mod that is able to cater to both players that have done it and hit home with people that haven't done anything. Until a mod is able to re-invent the wheel then the only to get around this is to try other mods which is why people so frequently suggest it.

 

[Grydian2]

Zorn I think you have a two fold problem here. First your definition of creative is very narrow and based solely on your view of what is creative. Second your experience of minecraft is not what everyone's is. You equate your experience as fact. Did I find my first fusion reactor tedious? Yes actually. Not because it was hard but because its pointless. The end game is to be OP? Why? How very ungreg like. There is nothing to do with it but UU. And that is not creative to me. Was I able to build the reactor without a problem? Yes. Its not my lack of understanding or capability that leads me to find these tasks tedious. Its the ridiculousness of someones making my end game for me and it being lame. Minecraft is a sandbox game. Its what you make of it. So trying to place your values and experiences on others is going to fail. Try to keep an open mind and not try to define others based on your experience of MC.

 

[MigukNamja]

Sadly I can only have three links in my signature at any given time.

Good point !

I hope you don't mind, I used one of mine as a hat tip to this excellent bit of knowledge.

 

[zorn]

Zorn I think you have a two fold problem here. First your definition of creative is very narrow and based solely on your view of what is creative. Second your experience of minecraft is not what everyone's is. You equate your experience as fact. Did I find my first fusion reactor tedious? Yes actually. Not because it was hard but because its pointless. The end game is to be OP? Why? How very ungreg like. There is nothing to do with it but UU. And that is not creative to me. Was I able to build the reactor without a problem? Yes. Its not my lack of understanding or capability that leads me to find these tasks tedious. Its the ridiculousness of someones making my end game for me and it being lame. Minecraft is a sandbox game. Its what you make of it. So trying to place your values and experiences on others is going to fail. Try to keep an open mind and not try to define others based on your experience of MC.

I assume if someone actually goes through all the time and effort to craft one, they know what they are getting into and are likely to enjoy it.

You're telling me you learned how to make THE most expensive machine there is, and didn't know it would give you 64k eu/t? And you didn't look on a wiki to see if any machine could even scratch that power supply? I would think most anyone knew that.

So yeah I made an assumption that someone crafting an item that hard would at least have an idea of what they were getting into. It just amazes me that AFTER you made it, THEN you realized someone else was making your end game and it would only make uu matter, which you felt was lame.

What did you think you would do with it? Run 3000 induction furnaces? I will admit I had NO idea anyone would do all that work and then be surprised at the outcome. Shame on me.

 

[Hoff]

-snip-

Enough of this talking down shit. I haven't seen someone act this childish in quite some time.

Not everyone researches every little thing about something and just play with it till it works. Maybe they just asked someone the design it had to be in and made it? What's so bad about that? Some people build things just to see what they do rather than be told what they do or reading about it. Most people equate something taking a lot of effort with something that will be immensely rewarding, entertaining, or have some sense of accomplishment.

 

[QKninja]

So, I'm really glad I read this thread, and figure I might as well add my two cents. As someone who doesn't have a ton of time to play, maybe a couple hours each week, I tend to go for the "easy" path, the "easy" configs, and the "cheaty" power gen methods. I really just don't have the time to set up systems that require a ton of work for a little bit of power as a reward. However, because of this, I tend to have lots of power available to me, that I can use on projects I'm interested in without having to worry about barely having enough resources. I much prefer to figure out how to design my base with no cables showing at all than worry about if I have enough obsidian to make the conduits I need to do it. Slightly more on topic, because of this limited time mentality, I highly doubt I would've even looked at trying to do any tree breeding prior to reading this. Now, I'm convinced it's something I want to do. But the way Omicron explained it, it doesn't seem like some random chance game (And I think MigukNamja will agree with me on this point), it's just Mendelian genetics. That's something that I understand, is applicable beyond the scope of the game, and would be a challenge to complete, while remaining entirely doable. Personally, I love systems or designs that make me think. Unfortunately, systems like these tend to be the more time-consuming option, so I often forgo them in exchange for the simpler alternative. So, despite my claimed mentality, I find myself using mfr farms and mechanics, which are simple and highly effective. Every once in a while, I need a thread like this to remind me why exactly I should forgo the simple option and instead put the time into something that requires me to think, even if the thinking is sometimes frustrating punnet squares.

 

[Grydian2]

I assume if someone actually goes through all the time and effort to craft one, they know what they are getting into and are likely to enjoy it.

You're telling me you learned how to make THE most expensive machine there is, and didn't know it would give you 64k eu/t? And you didn't look on a wiki to see if any machine could even scratch that power supply? I would think most anyone knew that.

So yeah I made an assumption that someone crafting an item that hard would at least have an idea of what they were getting into. It just amazes me that AFTER you made it, THEN you realized someone else was making your end game and it would only make uu matter, which you felt was lame.

What did you think you would do with it? Run 3000 induction furnaces? I will admit I had NO idea anyone would do all that work and then be surprised at the outcome. Shame on me.

Lol dude you didnt read what I said. I knew uu matter was the end result. I didnt realize how boring and unrewarding that would be for me. But anyways Hoff is right time to let this rest.

 

[Omicron]

Wow, this thread sure changed topics since I went to bed last night! I just wanted to add something to the earlier tree breeding suggestion that I made, with the apple willow:

I forgot for a moment that I am always playing Forestry with heavily customized configs. I have both the fermenter and the squeezer nerfed (as I haven't yet updated to the versions with the nerfed ethanol burn values), but they're not equally nerfed. As such, my statement that the apple willow produces enough juice for all of its own saplings may or may not be false. It's difficult for me to predict how it would behave with standard configs. I should probably have run a test before making my post.

However I am still confident that it can provide juice for the majority of its saplings even in the worst-case scenario. In case of lack of juice, a papaya orchard can help. If you fancy drowning in the stuff in short order, that is

 

[MigukNamja]

Thanks as always, Omicron.

I'm addicted to bees, so honey as the Fermenter multiplier is usually not a problem and if there's at least a small amount of apples or other squeezer-stuff, mulch is usually not a problem, either. Getting enough (quantity) of Mahoe saplings, however, has always been my achilles heel. Sapling for sapling, Mahoe and vanilla Apple Oak aren't even in the same ballpark. Now that I have the knowledge to make Mahoes produce *more* saplings or otherwise make a willow have Mahoe-strength sappiness with Apple Oak sapling quantity, I'll be set

 

[b0bst3r]

It makes me chuckle every time when someone says GO MFR it's way OP and by far the best output (tree farm), those of us who are prepared to invest time in Forestry know MFR doesn't even scratch Forestry in full flight.

I spent time to grow *THE* tree (Mahoe/Elm/Sequoia) and it is just .... well it took me 2-3 hrs to stop laughing at how really OP it was, 5,000 saplings in like an hr and my god the biomass....

My tip: stop short cutting stuff just cos it's quicker and relax, take your time and just look at how to do it properly.

 

[Loufmier]

It makes me chuckle every time when someone says GO MFR it's way OP and by far the best output (tree farm), those of us who are prepared to invest time in Forestry know MFR doesn't even scratch Forestry in full flight.

I spent time to grow *THE* tree (Mahoe/Elm/Sequoia) and it is just .... well it took me 2-3 hrs to stop laughing at how really OP it was, 5,000 saplings in like an hr and my god the biomass....

My tip: stop short cutting stuff just cos it's quicker and relax, take your time and just look at how to do it properly.

well... when it comes to wood farm MFR is probably indeed better.

 

[MigukNamja]

...it took me 2-3 hrs to stop laughing...

*pictures Gandalf laughing for 2 to 3 hours straight*

 

[b0bst3r]

*pictures Gandalf laughing for 2 to 3 hours straight*

Let me help you with that http://i.minus.com/i2Y5pl6a6Ggwj.gif