Thaum 4... a dichotomy.

[DREVL]

Once again... thaum realistically is entirely predicated on your ability to have someone do a series of spoilers for you to "cheat" from, while the it's purposed for you to discover things naturally. The problem is you have no idea what your researching or what their is to research. "Easy, you research everything." Except you can't in 4 unless you previously knew what to research in what order or you have the exact mindset of the modder. As annoying as it was to merely blow resources to figure stuff out, minecraft can provide theoretically infinite resources. You are not given infinite research points. I just think thaum 4 would be realistically more practical if say manuscripts or something were placed in dungeons, or protected by bosses or something. It sounds slightly more predictable or "been done before", but I don't think anyone naturally figures it out on their own.

oh and one more thing... Do world items/blocks carry the same thaum makeups as they did in Thaum3? That started to be my issue last night. Scanned as much as I could and I would like to know what has what so I can begin searching out for things.

 

[BeastFeeder]

I agree. I think 4 added a lot of cool stuff, but made the research so difficult that cheating to see what to research is the only reasonable way to make any progress.

In my limited experience, most items have the same components that they did in 3, but there are also a few more added in.

 

[Marconos]

I enjoyed my 1st walk through in figuring things out. The problem is it takes so long that I doubt I will ever want to do it again.

I don't feel it's too hard, just need to start with a book so you know where to start. there is enough info in the book to get you going IMO.

 

[Zexks]

You do 'essentially' have infinite research points in that you can continue to explore outward to find more nodes. The problem is when going without any kind of cheat sheets you're going to have to explore A LOT, A WHOLE LOT, to get enough research points to loose some to experimentation. And in the beginning without the research mastery (which takes some significantly difficult aspects to find) you're going to spend A LOT of points turning things on and off and playing with the doodle god aspect of it all. He could conceivably fix all that by making the deconstruction table a default recipe, so if you do start running out of research points, you could at least throw resources at it.

 

[Maldroth]

I think the only thing that would help is add some sort of teaser description for an idea of research (i.e. when you hover over the greyed out research topic a small tooltip comes up giving a brief blurb about the research idea.) That way you can get a small hint of what research point to use to unlock the research paper and then begin the mini game.

Otherwise I think Thaumcraft 4's system is the best yet.

 

[DrowElf]

I agree with Maldroth. So far this is the best research system in the progression of the mod. All previous incarnations involved luck and chewed through massive amounts of resources (less in 3 than 2, but still a large amount). Comparatively this system is excellent.

 

[abculatter_2]

There are two ways to get truly infinite research points, without having to find more nodes. (Although, finding nodes is far more effective then either)

One involves specific conditions to be present while researching. Maybe you could try crafting some shards and see if anything starts glowing?

The other is unlocked with research, probably after some incredibly useful research aimed at improving your research efficiency.

 

[Succubism]

As the one handing out the cheat sheets, I say that's the most bull I've seen since I left the farm.

I didn't have a cheat sheet when I made mine, nor did the likes of Direwolf when he made his videos before TC4 was released.

How hard is it to know that Wand Foci use Praecantatio and a primal aspect respective of the name? Or that a Silverwood Wand Core uses Praecantatio, Arbor and Instrumentum?

 

[DREVL]

How would you know what praectantatio was if you hadn't played thuam3? how would you know what foci even was?How would you even know what instrumentum was or if it even existed?

 

[Succubism]

How would you know what praectantatio was if you hadn't played thuam3? how would you know what foci even was?How would you even know what instrumentum was or if it even existed?

The same way you know the recipe for a crafting bench.
The same way you'd get to the warp zone in super mario brothers.
The same way you know crouching in castlevania would make that tornado appear to take you to the next level.
The same way you know how to defeat the boss in Crash Bandicoot.

Three ways.

Trial and error, committing to memory, or the internet.

Welcome to the world of Current Gaming.

 

[DREVL]

or the internet.

exactly. you wouldn't know how to do anything without the wiki.
Exactly why I've been riding your good work like a horse and been watching dire youtubes...

The point of the thread is that TC is purposed to be instructed in game. The irony is that you couldn't get anywhere if you hadn't already experted a previous version of tc to the point of memorization, or you heavily relied on the internet from someone who had already gone through that work.

 

[Succubism]

exactly. you wouldn't know how to do anything without the wiki.
Exactly why I've been riding your good work like a horse and been watching dire youtubes...

The point of the thread is that TC is purposed to be instructed in game. The irony is that you couldn't get anywhere if you hadn't already experted a previous version of tc to the point of memorization, or you heavily relied on the internet from someone who had already gone through that work.

As I recall, you're instructed to create the thaumonomicon, the wand and the thaumometer right off the bat through TC4's mod download post.
If you can't follow the thaumonomicon after that, that's your own fault.

Citation: The download post tells you how to make the wand and the thaumonomicon. The thaumometer not so much, but that's in the nomicon, so... Yeah.

 

[mrbaggins]

You know you need praecantio because the thing you're trying to make is magical in nature.

I've not played through TC4 yet, so the following is nearly blind, but if I'm making a furnace, I'm going to be looking at fire, metal, stone, and the permutatio.

If I'm making wands, I'm looking arbor, magic, permutatio, maybe some other weird ones. Some of the crafty aspect, or the tool one.

Bee stuff? Bestia and the insect one. Maybe flight. If it's something like an oblivion frame, the death / corpus / flesh aspect.

I've yet to hit a research that I need to google for.

 

[Succubism]

You know you need praecantio because the thing you're trying to make is magical in nature.

I've not played through TC4 yet, so the following is nearly blind, but if I'm making a furnace, I'm going to be looking at fire, metal, stone, and the permutatio.

If I'm making wands, I'm looking arbor, magic, permutatio, maybe some other weird ones. Some of the crafty aspect, or the tool one.

Bee stuff? Bestia and the insect one. Maybe flight. If it's something like an oblivion frame, the death / corpus / flesh aspect.

I've yet to hit a research that I need to google for.

You're not far off, with that logic you could easily figure out thaumcraft without using the internet.

 

[Democretes]

Playing through TC4's research several times, the only time I've ever used the internet was to look up aspect combinations I couldn't remember. Hell, some of the ones you find you dont' even need and half the time, if you just scan everything and it's mother, you get nearly every aspect in the book. Literally. Aspects really aren't hard to gather either. You can put a few crystals up by the research table (Cited in the book itself) and obtain infinite points over time along with all the other things you scan. Nodes are infinite, each one gives 5 of each aspect in the node.

The only reasons you should use the internet is if you run across an impossible research and you're not sure if it is actually impossible, or if you've done it once and don't want to do it again.

 

[BeastFeeder]

Yeah. Try playing with Thaumcraft and no other mods. See how many aspects you can get by scanning everything without having to run around for hours. Its not many early in the game.

Then try having NO prior knowlege or cheat sheets about how to do the research needed for a thaumometer....or crystals...or a deconstruction table.

It takes so much time and so much trial and effort that I consider it a waste of time. Can it be done? Sure, of course it can. My stance is that doing that much trial and error, spending hours running around looking for nodes (and making my world way bigger than it would otherwise need to be), and then waiting for aspects to recharge whether I have a lot of the item in my inventory or not, is NOT FUN unless you read/watch what other people have done first to maximize the limited aspects you do have in the early game.

Thaumcraft 4 might as well be called waitcraft if you ask me.[DOUBLEPOST=1389024682][/DOUBLEPOST]That said, I'll give it another chance in a game where I have a lot of other mods. Maybe I'll get enough aspects to actually research anything valuable in a reasonable amount of time.

 

[DREVL]

I'm interested in it... There is alot of good stuff to utilize from TC. The default DW20 pack is more difficult to move through with just tech progressions than I expected. I can see many ways in which TC wand range attacks would help so much with all the mob surges. I did fall into a similar trap like I did in tc3 in that I wouldn't know what is required for other research. Take for example, I know there is a infusion table setup. There is nothing that said I needed to have Research master and expertise before I could unlock it. Took me forever while researching ALOT of stuff I'm pretty sure I'm not going to use even with the Succ's wiki. Finally, I decided to just go ahead and get Research master and expertise and then I was able to get the infusion table research unlocked. Some may say achieving the Research mastering is fairly expected to be done early on. I didn't see a real advantage of having them yet. They mainly reduce the number of times I use up ink sacks for scripting which I can get infinite amounts of. I am seeing the advantage of tc4 in that exploring an aspect, so far, will always begin a legit research topic. In tc3 you had no idea what you were even doing, if you were even doing something, until you'd expended numerous items already. It is not a plug and play tech mod. It does slow the game down. To a point, thats fine with me.

 

[snooder]

Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of the Thaumcraft 4 research. It has all the bad parts of the Thaumcraft 3 system (randomness, inability to see where your research progress is going) but now coupled with an even less intuitive system AND with finite resource generation.

For example, I was playing around with Thaumcraft 4 without checking out any wikis and I ended up using all my research points activating and deactivating runes before I figured out how the research system works. Now, I don't have any more research points so I can't finish the research. I don't have any more un-researched blocks close by, so Ill have to go node hunting to get more. Compare that to being able to use a couple stacks of coal and redstone in Thaumcraft 3 for the same research. If I waste a few while learning, there's more in my storage.

 

[CodaPDX]

Thaumcraft 4 has done a lot of things right, and overall is a significant improvement over 3, especially in its crafting and golemancy systems. I love it to death. Seriously, scrambling around trying to balance things out and keep the infusion going while crafting my Osmotic Enchanter and nearly dying in the process was some of the most fun I've had in 1.6.4. That said, TC4 does have problems, and the problems it has are far, far more frustrating than the problems that 3 had.

- The process of discovering aspects is not intuitive. A lot of people make a thaumometer, scan everything they can, but realize that 90% of the stuff in the world can't be scanned, get frustrated, and give up. Not being able to scan supposedly simple things like wood and grass early on is a problem.

- Impossible research. It's rare, but if you don't know that sometimes you'll get a page that just can't be done you can end up wasting a huge amount of time and research points. If someone doesn't know that you can scan nodes for large amounts of aspects, this can essentially stop their progress in the mod for good.

- Alchemy doesn't have a good way to use precise amounts of essentia, leading to gobs of flux everywhere for the recipes without even costs or convenient reagents. This wasn't an issue in TC3, since a little flux was no big deal. But in TC4, you're rewarded with ugly purple goo that you can't get rid of, and gas that only goes away if you let it escape into the sky.

- Nodes are a bit too rare, leading to frustrating hunts around the world looking for a node with that one particular aspect that you need. The problem is compounded by the fact that nodes only recharge when their chunk is loaded, so that one node you found 400 blocks away that had the aspect you needed will still be drained dry when you come back for seconds.

Thankfully, the fixes for these are relatively straightforward.

- Give a couple of pre-discovered "freebie" compound aspects to the player from the start, like Victus, so players won't be raging about not being able to scan trees and grass.

- Balance difficult researches more towards having large amounts of useless runes cluttering up the page than towards having only just enough active runes to complete. Not only are tighter pages more difficult even when you know what you're doing, they also reward finding red herring aspects much more.

- Allow crucibles to be hooked up to an essentia piping system. Or make a tier 2 crucible that hooks up to piping. Or make an alchemy golem that goes and fetches precise amounts of essentia for you. Something. Also make flux gas dissipate on its own like flux goo, so you won't have to hack chunks out of your ceiling every so often.

- Increase the spawn rate of nodes by 25-50%, do some kind of timestamp checking so that nodes can recharge when the chunk isn't loaded, or make moving nodes around something you can accomplish with a greatwood wand.

 

[DREVL]

yeah, the chasing down the unloaded auras might be annoying very soon for me I imagine as I begin to infuse craft tonight. Hoping to resolve that problem in 2 ways. Solve the distance problem with myst craft same dimension linking books to the various nodes, and solve the chunk loading problem with chest/hopper/chest loaders (as it seems, vanilla hoppers very cheaply self load chunks.)or if I start to feel that's too cheap, I'll go with chicken chunk loaders until I can move those nodes into my base I guess...