[1.7.10] Material Energy^4

[Qcor]

1) yes, 4 quests are 'bugged' as in there is no reputation reward so u cant complete them. "Placing space" Space and space" Energy distributor" and "Player interface". It lets you progress anyway so no big deal.

@parcel31u
2) I just reached Idea Machine (working on torcherino now) and up until now I'd say that almost all is well balanced except one thing: big reactors - let me explain why.

In the beginning my thinking was like "oh nice, I'll redesign this reactor and use it to power all AND THEN I'll switch to some renewable power generation to save yellorium which will probably be hard to get"
Then I saw how much power is required to run fusion reactor and was like "oookkk.. so I'll need that backup power generation sooner then later" but at that time I rly didn't have much of anything so decided to just wait and see how fast I'll run out of yellorium.
And guess what ! - I never did run out. In fact up until now (which is 100%/55% bake/85% all up to Idea Machine, so quite far into the game) I used 35 yellorium ingots... with ZERO power generation beside reactor (with automated shutdown system ofc).​

There are like 100 ways to generate power in this pack... tons of generators and fuel sources... and all I needed was half of yellorium stack. Oh and btw it's just a simple reactor.. without turbine which would make it even more efficient.. so yea, I call that OP.​

3) torcherino quest - a) cobble b)cookies.

a)Cobble is less of a problem because you can set up quite efficient cobble gen using transfer nodes and ME interfaces. YES, it still takes forever but once set it doesn't require your help. Another important thing - you don't rly need it for anything else.

b) cookies - my true nemesis. cocoa beans are afaik very hard to fully automate... but they are cheap to synthesize so I'd say it's OK. Wheat on the other hand.. geeeeez. It's damn expensive to synthesize and it takes FOREVER to grow (medium farm with sprinklers). Yes, you can make a bigger farm (tbh it will not help much) and yes - you can use this fancy soil which is again - expensive like hell, and still will not help much.
Bottom line is - it's slow and/or expensive when compared to some kill quests. It's 100 times faster and cheaper to just make some simple concussion creeper spawner and VOILA - you just got 230.000ish cookies... that's equivalent of about 230 STACKS of wheat.. what in fact makes any farm look like a joke.
AND THAT IS OK imo - why? - because you probably already progressed thru about 50% of game content or more and I see that as a 'tech progression' of sorts.. you start with a farm and at some point it just becomes obsolete.
WHAT IS NOT OK imo is that as your only viable option it forces you to grind.. BIG TIME. Swing 30 times, complete quest, wait 30sec, repeat. Lets be honest - it's boring as hell, and afaik it cannot be automated.​

Solution is quite simple - make a kill quest involving several different types of mobs and multiply the reward - less grind, more infrastructure needed. Preferably mobs requiring different approaches to force new(different) designs of traps. I mean instead of "Kill 100 of mob X and u get 10 cookies" let it be "Kill 33ofX, 33ofY, 33ofZ and u get 30cookies" - same amount of sword swinging but you had to make 3 different spawners so reward is greater... just an idea.
​

 

[ZayneCK]

I don't understand what a "Soul Fragment" does. I got 3 from a legendary reward bag so they must be good?

 

[adamich]

Wheat on the other hand.. geeeeez. It's damn expensive to synthesize and it takes FOREVER to grow (medium farm with sprinklers). Yes, you can make a bigger farm (tbh it will not help much) and yes - you can use this fancy soil which is again - expensive like hell, and still will not help much.

not "fancy soil", but "fertilized dirt" from extra utils.

 

[MacAisling]

b) cookies - my true nemesis. cocoa beans are afaik very hard to fully automate... but they are cheap to synthesize so I'd say it's OK. Wheat on the other hand.. geeeeez. It's damn expensive to synthesize and it takes FOREVER to grow (medium farm with sprinklers). Yes, you can make a bigger farm (tbh it will not help much) and yes - you can use this fancy soil which is again - expensive like hell, and still will not help much.
​

I got 1 each of the extra utils tools in a reward bag, including a reinforced watering can, so wheat is no longer a bottleneck for me. Waiting until you are nearing end game to tell you you need octuple compressed anything is a problem, because then you wind up having to afk for a month to finish instead of actually playing.

 

[5il3nc3r]

Is the orange lapis caelestis hidden in Endside with all the others? I had hoped I was finished with that area.

I don't think Orange is in that zone, but it does contain multiple colors. I personally just crafted all the colors out. Simpler, cheaper, easier, and doesn't require any of the community zones.

@parcel31u

b) cookies - my true nemesis. cocoa beans are afaik very hard to fully automate... but they are cheap to synthesize so I'd say it's OK. Wheat on the other hand.. geeeeez. It's damn expensive to synthesize and it takes FOREVER to grow (medium farm with sprinklers). Yes, you can make a bigger farm (tbh it will not help much) and yes - you can use this fancy soil which is again - expensive like hell, and still will not help much.
Bottom line is - it's slow and/or expensive when compared to some kill quests. It's 100 times faster and cheaper to just make some simple concussion creeper spawner and VOILA - you just got 230.000ish cookies... that's equivalent of about 230 STACKS of wheat.. what in fact makes any farm look like a joke.
AND THAT IS OK imo - why? - because you probably already progressed thru about 50% of game content or more and I see that as a 'tech progression' of sorts.. you start with a farm and at some point it just becomes obsolete.
WHAT IS NOT OK imo is that as your only viable option it forces you to grind.. BIG TIME. Swing 30 times, complete quest, wait 30sec, repeat. Lets be honest - it's boring as hell, and afaik it cannot be automated.​

Solution is quite simple - make a kill quest involving several different types of mobs and multiply the reward - less grind, more infrastructure needed. Preferably mobs requiring different approaches to force new(different) designs of traps. I mean instead of "Kill 100 of mob X and u get 10 cookies" let it be "Kill 33ofX, 33ofY, 33ofZ and u get 30cookies" - same amount of sword swinging but you had to make 3 different spawners so reward is greater... just an idea.
​

I got a stack and a half of "Fertilized Dirt" from Biosphere^4 (multiplies growth ticks by 3) with Ender IO's Farm. Give it a Metallurgy Hoe so it lasts longer and you'll get stacks of wheat very quickly.

I'm still working on finding a way to automate Cocoa, other than "automating" making UUx in the Fusion Reactor. Some people say they can automate it with Ender IO's farmer, but it might only be in a newer version of the mod. Mind you I haven't tried yet.
​

I don't understand what a "Soul Fragment" does. I got 3 from a legendary reward bag so they must be good?

Well, according to the description on the item itself, you "eat it" to fully heal. Since, with heart canisters, you can have a max of 40 hearts, that item becomes very valuable later on.

 

[Qcor]

I don't understand what a "Soul Fragment" does. I got 3 from a legendary reward bag so they must be good?

Yup, they are good. The concept is that u can PERMANENTLY trade 1/2 of a heart (as in your max hp is 9.5 instead of 10) for 1 soul fragment (using etheral sword iirc)
For now it is only used in making reinforced watering can (which can be automated, using autonomous activator for example).

I got 1 each of the extra utils tools in a reward bag, including a reinforced watering can, so wheat is no longer a bottleneck for me

Well.. it speeds it up for sure but honestly you still will not even get close to cookies/minute ratio of kill quests (it's literary about 150 times slower)
I just did some math and testing on it out of pure curiosity - here it is:
I get about 100 wheat per minute (medium farm+2 sprinklers + 1 reinforced watering can).
For octuple cookie u need about 43.000.000 cookies so it's about 10.700.000 wheat.. so yea.. now I'll just go afk for about 75 DAYS and all done.
Lets say I'd like to do it in more reasonable time.. like 2 days (48h of play is still a lot but oh well.. 2 days not 2 months).
So all I'd have to do is to speed whole process about 37times. I can make few more farms.. few more cans... but cmon.. not 37 of them. Even with fertilized soil (which will just obliterate your resources) u are still facing 25 days of waiting.

ooor maybe my farm setup just sux.. or maybe I'm missing something.

EDIT: just done more testing and it turns out that using fertilized dirt is absolutely pointless in this setup (I mean farming station + reinforced watering can). It gives only 12-13% increase in wheat per minute compared to normal dirt.

EDIT 2: more testing! garden soil sux.. big time. Taking regular old dirt as a point of reference it goes like this: garden soil(53) < dirt(100) < fertilized soil (113).
Bottom line is - avoid garden soil and don't waste resources on fertilized soil.

 

[5il3nc3r]

Well.. it speeds it up for sure but honestly you still will not even get close to cookies/minute ratio of kill quests (it's literary about 150 times slower)
I just did some math and testing on it out of pure curiosity - here it is:
I get about 100 wheat per minute (medium farm+2 sprinklers + 1 reinforced watering can).
For octuple cookie u need about 43.000.000 cookies so it's about 10.700.000 wheat.. so yea.. now I'll just go afk for about 75 DAYS and all done.
Lets say I'd like to do it in more reasonable time.. like 2 days (48h of play is still a lot but oh well.. 2 days not 2 months).
So all I'd have to do is to speed whole process about 37times. I can make few more farms.. few more cans... but cmon.. not 37 of them. Even with fertilized soil (which will just obliterate your resources) u are still facing 25 days of waiting.

ooor maybe my farm setup just sux.. or maybe I'm missing something.

EDIT: just done more testing and it turns out that using fertilized dirt is absolutely pointless in this setup (I mean farming station + reinforced watering can). It gives only 12-13% increase in wheat per minute compared to normal dirt.

EDIT 2: more testing! garden soil sux.. big time. Taking regular old dirt as a point of reference it goes like this: garden soil(53) < dirt(100) < fertilized soil (113).
Bottom line is - avoid garden soil and don't waste resources on fertilized soil.

Well, I'd think you're supposed to set it up so it runs by itself while you continue exploring/clearing the dungeons. Yes it takes a long time if you're just sitting there staring at crops grow, but if you let it go while you're completing the other quests, that's a different story. It will still take a long time, but it won't seem as long since you're keeping yourself busy.

 

[Delerium]

Well, I'd think you're supposed to set it up so it runs by itself while you continue exploring/clearing the dungeons. Yes it takes a long time if you're just sitting there staring at crops grow, but if you let it go while you're completing the other quests, that's a different story. It will still take a long time, but it won't seem as long since you're keeping yourself busy.

You did read the part where he said 25 REAL days before it finishes, right? No amount of "doing other things" will make this go any faster, and you'd most likely be done with every other objective in the mod pack long before you ever hit 25 real days. The point he is making is that late game, farming wheat and making cookies isn't worth the setup or wait time compared to mob farms.

 

[Qcor]

It will still take a long time, but it won't seem as long since you're keeping yourself busy.

Yes and No. It's certainly true that if u automate this u can do sth else in that time but..

As Delirium said above - you will be loooong done with all quest and still have to wait for DAYS only for cookies.

Look at a time frame here:
I'm definitely not a hardcore minecraft player so some things just take me longer (reading WIKIs, testing etc) and according to ingame statistics it took me 4.3 days to get to this point (and by "this point" I mean 100% lost in space, 55% bake to win, 84% lost in time)
Now the problem is there is not much else to do at this point. I've got only Idea Machine and Redstone meltdown to go. I suspect that it may take, lets say even full day.
So I'll be done with all spatial areas and their side quests in something like 5-6.. maybe 7 days of total gameplay.

Up until now I collected equivalent of about 2 septuple cookies.. so I'm 2/9th of the way - that is about 9500000 more cookies to go.
As I said above my current farm setup yields about 100 wheat per minute so at this rate I'd have to wait for next 66 DAYS. Even if I make 10 farms it would still take 6.6 DAYS of waiting. Math on this one is just brutal and there is not much u can do about it.

Now lets take a look at kill quest - concussion creepers (4x quintuple cookie). Spawner (with best capacitor) is so fast that it can (almost) keep up with the cooldown of the quest.. so u can kill/complete/wait for cd/repeat with no additional breaks.
I just tested it and the single iteration of this process took me about 1min 15sec.
What this means is that I can get almost 189.000 cookies per minute - equivalent of about 47.000 wheat per minute.

So there you have it - FARMs will give u what? 100.. 200? maybe even 1000 wheat per minute. Compare it to 47.000 per minute from kill quest.
And like I said - that is just fine. Farms will get you thru most of initial quest from 'bake to win' and let you unlock community spatial areas and then become obsolete as you progress.

Problem is that I still need 7 septuple cookies and farms are no longer a valid option which means that I'd have to repeat that kill quest 142 times. Ofc it can be done.. and would take only 3h of non-stop grinding but come on.. rly?


btw - anyone got torcherino in a LEGIT way? if so then pls pls pls share how u dealt with this cookies problem.

 

[Delerium]

ok, seriously, what's with all of the barrels in the legendary reward bags? It's like the anti-reward, and it really blows considering how rare legendary bags are...

 

[5il3nc3r]

ok, seriously, what's with all of the barrels in the legendary reward bags? It's like the anti-reward, and it really blows considering how rare legendary bags are...

I'm personally pretty happy with my Liquid XP and Emerald Bedrockium Drums. However I'll agree that a lot of the drums have stuff that nobody really cares about, or can't do anything about (I had to ask the Minechem devs to implement a way to pump the liquid minechem chemicals into the decomposer to make it usable).

There should be a better balance of what is in those legendary rewards to have actually Legendary rewards (of lesser or greater value). As it stands most of those drums are basically Troll Legendary Rewards.

 

[Qcor]

However I'll agree that a lot of the drums have stuff that nobody really cares about

Agreed. Out of 20 drums I got from rewards I used ZERO. Even XP and liquid emeralds and nickel just came too late to be of any use.

There should be a better balance of what is in those legendary rewards to have actually Legendary rewards (of lesser or greater value). As it stands most of those drums are basically Troll Legendary Rewards.

Also agreed. Septuple cookie for something completely useless? seems a bit harsh

 

[jakimfett]

Minechem is more the problem since it is not validating the input it is receiving and then aborting with the null pointer exception.

Good code would trap the exception and handle it appropriately. From reading the java code, it seems Minechem is using the arguments passed to the render function without making sure the results are valid for use later on in the code.

Well...we do accept pull requests if you have a fix for it. Or, if you report the bug, we'll fix it, normally within a day or three. But clearly you're an expert on this, so I look forward to receiving your pull request with the changes.

I don't have the time or inclination to sign up for yet another FOTM code tracking system...

I'd like to point out that github isn't "flavor of the month", it's been around since 2008 (which, if you do the math, is 3 times as long as Feed the Beast). Github is also the world's largest code host. Over 7 million people use github, which is about the same as the population of Iceland, Ireland, and Latvia added all together.

...to report it once again providing I am a good little boy and follow your reporting guidelines.

I ask for specific things for bug reports because without those specific things, it's *not possible* to fix things in a statistically significant portion of the cases. Can't follow a few little instructions? It's clearly not that important to you.

The bug is reported centrally. Right here on the page for the modpack I am playing.

Reporting bugs to a modpack creator is great. Sometimes, they can help out. Other times, like this one right here, it's completely out of their control, so @parcel31u (and myself) asked you to escalate it to the official bugtracker for Minechem.

This forum thread isn't central to Minechem. I stop by here every couple of days, and I sometimes read the multiple pages of new posts...or, sometimes I don't. But the bugtracker on github gets checked every day, and stuff reported there doesn't get lost in sixty posts about how many cookies you need for an angel ring.

 

[MacAisling]

The like isn't just for the statements, but for continuing to provide support & development for a mod that is both really complicated & interesting. There is a current trend in tech mods to make things more & more complicated just to slow down game progression. I loved TE in 1.6.4, but the changes in 1.7.10 have moved it into the what can I drop next column, with EnderIO becoming my tech mod of choice.

For the equivalent exchange type mechanic, I'd pick the more complicated Minechem over what I have seen of project E, or where it looks like EE3 is headed.

 

[jakimfett]

The like isn't just for the statements, but for continuing to provide support & development for a mod that is both really complicated & interesting.

Hehehehehe...just wait until you see what we're doing for v6...

 

[hanky21]

I updated everything including the spatial areas to the last update that came out but i can't find any of the hidden boxes in the places i know they should be from starting a new game. Is there a way to fix this?

 

[ShadowmanZ92]

Oh dang, jakimfett said what we all were thinking.

 

[MacAisling]

I updated everything including the spatial areas to the last update that came out but i can't find any of the hidden boxes in the places i know they should be from starting a new game. Is there a way to fix this?

You need to update the End, where you have been making a home for yourself. So 1st, pack everything you don't want to loose into 1 of the spatial areas, save it to the disc, put all the discs in your inventory, then update the dim1 file the same way you did the others. This should reset the base area while letting you keep your inventory & any progress you've made in the quest book. I chose to start over instead of trying this, so I make no promises.

 

[Delerium]

ok, just got to keeby's idea machine. I really hope it's a work in progress/placeholder, because the spawn rate is so harsh it lags my computer into non-existence... to be honest, I really liked the first half of the mod pack better than the second. I'm starting to feel like every level is a zerg fest over and over, and that gets exhausting.

 

[5il3nc3r]

ok, just got to keeby's idea machine. I really hope it's a work in progress/placeholder, because the spawn rate is so harsh it lags my computer into non-existence... to be honest, I really liked the first half of the mod pack better than the second. I'm starting to feel like every level is a zerg fest over and over, and that gets exhausting.

Yea, it's still a work in progress. Actually, you can't even hand in the wool you get in that zone for the quest. And I will agree that the amount of mobs that spawn make it ridiculous. It still requires tweaking (along with the second half of the "^4" zones)

Plus he still has 3-4 more zones to add, since the VM will still have room even after that one.

Random question:
In the VM, the armor stands and pedestals. Are those meant for all the Metallurgy sets, or are they meant to include the vanilla stuff too? (Wood, Iron, Gold, Diamond, Chainmail, etc.)

Also, which is the better armor in this pack? Tartarite? Or is Dark Steel Armor better (even before its upgrades, or only after?)