As for @
Reika (yes, it's time to summon him ;-)), he is brilliant and hard-working and his mods are among the best out there. But, he does seem to have a strict view on how his mod - his work - and how it should and shouldn't be used / abused, which means it's awesome if you're in agreement, but not so nice when trying to include it in other packs. Like GT, you don't make RoC/ReC fit into *your* pack, you make your pack *around* RoC/ReC.
I have 60+ approved packs, plus of course the FTB packs, which say otherwise, and I do not engage in GT-style "cross-mod balance enforcement" that earned GT that reputation.
The only reason people say that "packs must be designed around RC" is because they look at how powerful it can be and assume that it will then make the other mods obsolete without interference.
This is simply wrong. For one, you can look at the packs that
do include RC alongside the other major mods. Aside from comparatively few RotaryCraft "enthusiasts", most users completely ignore the mod, as they deem it too much work or too difficult to be worth the end result, however powerful it may be. Just look at how many users were relying on "place and use, no need to think" pre-v16 magnetostatics and then the rather large drama that came when I nerfed them in v16 and v20, with many,
many people saying I was going to completely eliminate my userbase.
Also, there is the simple fact about how it is balanced completely differently. Most mods "tier" content by making them progressively more expensive, often
stupidly so.
This has a triple disadvantage:
One, it makes the content completely unappealing to those not willing to spend the cost of a fusion reactor on a chestplate. Even though I functionally have infinite resources in my world, I am not going to spend massive amounts of material (or especially time) making something whose power is matched by something far cheaper or whose abilities are to me useless.
Two, it means that someone with functionally infinite resources can skip immediately to the highest tier, as they are not being barred by other means.
Three, it makes the mod
extremely vulnerable to cross-mod balance issues. Make your thing require 2000 diamonds to create? Instantly halved in cost by ore doublers (and reduced far more by higher duplicators). Make it require an ore only found in one block per ten chunks? Digital miner skips right past that. Extremely rare plant byproduct? Farm it. The list goes on. To me,
those are the mods that require the entire pack tiptoe around them.
RotaryCraft, on the other hand, does
not require ludicrous amounts of resources; a bedrock breaker is not significantly more costly to make than a fermenter, as long as it is attempted at the appropriate point in the techtree. It does, however, require tungsten, making it functionally require microturbine-level infrastructure, meaning it is essentially impossible to obtain on the first day. Remove that ingot, and all of a sudden you have bedrock dust being easier to obtain than most ores.
One of the "what NOT to do" posts on my thread is a user who did exactly this. They looked at the bedrock tools and products, and failed to grasp the required progression obtaining it normally requires. In an effort to make it more expensive, bedrock ingots/dust were replaced with triple compressed cobblestone (729 cobble). Needless to say, that makes the bedrock products much
easier, and I can only imagine the resulting effect on their server's economy.
The reverse is also true. Innocently trying to make a machine more expensive runs the large risk of making it actually impossible to obtain via a dependency loop. For example, say you, unaware of the techtree and power costs, decided that the Extractor (5x ore multiplcation) was too cheap for what it did and decided to make it require bedrock dust in its recipe. That sounds fine until you work it through and realize that bedrock dust can only be obtained with a bedrock breaker and 2MW of power, the former of which requires tungsten. Tungsten in turn, requires a similar power level and a functioning Extractor. So to make the extractor require bedrock actually makes it impossible to obtain. And if you try to make the bedrock breaker cheaper to solve this problem, you immediately run into problem #1.
Furthermore, because of this same dependency tiering, making one machine impossible to obtain will make everything else that depends on it also impossible to obtain, and the problem quickly spirals out of control.
Additionally, the techtree design of RotaryCraft goes beyond balance. It is explicitly and specifically designed such that progression is done through learning the various mechanics and processes. Furthermore, every tier is designed with the assumption that you have "legitimately" progressed through the previous tiers and now know and understand everything that was required, be it torque/speed manipulation, extreme heat generation, or anything else.
If the recipes are modified and a player gets to a machine without learning its prerequisites, one or both of the following will happen. If they are lucky, they will lack the understanding of how to run/manage the machine and it will simply fail to work, and they will become frustrated. If they are less lucky, they will succeed in activating the machine but not setting it up properly, and it will soon fail, usually violently.
Furthermore, as I have said time and time again, the reason I maintain a lock on things like minetweaker is because for every pack creator/server owner who wants to make a "legitimate" modification, there are ten or fifty users who go "let's ban machine X" or "let's make machine X for donators only" or "machine X is OP!" and who often make the decision before even installing the mod, let alone getting to know it well enough that the aforementioned RC techtree is even apparent. Additionally, as explained in #2, banning a machine has the side effect of indirectly functionally banning several others.
You may ask why I even care what happens to individual players or on individual servers.
The altruistic answer is that I do want my content to be enjoyed by the users; I want them to have fun playing RC and not spend time getting upset because of a problem that should have never happened.
The second, more personal answer, is that these things spread. More often than not, when a player has a machine fail to work, I am the first to hear about it, in the form of a "bug" report whose solution is something like "the machine must be at temperature X". This is depressingly common and wastes a great deal of my time, and makes it harder to identify legitimate bugs. It also leads to exasperation which more than once has manifested itself as responses that are less than polite.
It gets worse than that, too; if enough of the problems listed above start to happen, word soon starts to spread about how a machine is "bugged" or how "RotaryCraft is broken"/"way too hard"/"way too OP", or so on, and that manifests itself as a general negative attitude towards the mod, something I have seen before and wish never to repeat.
Leave Reika alone, he's porting to 1.7.
Aside from bugfixes, that was completed two weeks ago.
