Journal Update: Blasting Off Again!
Wow, that was one of the most boring times of my life. I had to carefully juggle my steam production vs my steam consumption while making and stamping all that bronze. Those two boilers were insufficient for any kind of consistent tempo, but I'm just as glad I didn't make more, because sure enough, now that I am officially in the steel age, I have better options.
While waiting, I realized that I could also make brass in the alloy smelter, and so between bronze batches, I made up a bit of brass and made myself a Thaumonomicon, and a copper-tipped wooden wand, and an arcane workbench, and a Cauldron. And played our
favorite game: Scan All The Things. And that STILL wasn't enough time spent doing productive things. However, I really didn't have any other realistic options. Sure, I could've just hand-crafted the dust recipe and accepted the 25% loss of production, but that seemed... excessively painful. Besides, the Tetrahedrite would've needed to have been macerated, then hammered, then smelted,
then macerated AGAIN to do that, and the time spent macerating the copper ingots back into dust would've blown any time savings by not using the smelter for no good effect.
And now that I have the Blast Furnace up and running? Ugh. This thing. This thing right here. TAKES... FOR... EVER..TO...WORK. It makes Ents seem hasty. It literally is slower than grass growing. Fortunately, I had already found a small store of steel ingots from a chest found in a zombie spawner dungeon, which did help, but relying on this thing for main steel production is just not going to be an option. Not in the least. It is just too slow to produce steel in the quantity I will need at any point before the next ice age. Perhaps I should brush up in my Thaumonomicon and see if there are any arcane alternatives, because the blast furnace seriously blows.
End Of Bronze Age Comments from the Player:
The start of the age was really good, in fact I'd say it is the best start of any Expert mode pack I've ever played, including AoE. Yes, you get hit with the reduction in planks from logs and sticks from planks, but unlike Continuum, a) you aren't required to have a metric ton of it (wooden gears for every damn thing, really?), and b) you have almost immediate access to the Flint Axe which has psudo-treecapitator capability, making harvesting less of a pain. So yes, there is a resource tightness, but you aren't replacing it with grind, you are replacing it with viable and interesting alternatives that plays to that shortage. I was thoroughly enjoying the game and the challenges and hazards it presented.
This came to a screeching halt when I came to the Macerator. Part of this is me the player needing to think differently about the problem, but part of this is worldgen in general, and something to take note of. I never found a Graphite/Diamond deposit. Not one. Still haven't. I had to old-school branch mine to glean Small Diamond Ore, which appear to simply randomly spawn in singletons much like vanilla oregen but with a guaranteed singleton instead of possibly more, just about as rare as vanilla spawning (roughly one per chunk), and they don't always generate the type of diamond you need (my experience was 13 small diamond ore needed to obtain 2 actual Diamonds, the rest provided either the poor diamond shown in screenshot above, or more frequently, either impure diamond dust or crushed diamond ore. This was *PAINFUL*. Fortunately, there were other aspects to the game that I could go into, such as base-building and exploring for tin and copper deposits, to distract me from this, so that when I came back to it I could get the thing done. I may simply be a victim of really bad RNG here, or it may simply be expected for GregTech living up to the nickname GregNerf.
I honestly enjoyed the earliest part of the early game GregTech changes, but even now I find the ore generation to be pants-on-head silly. To date, I've found a single tin and single tetrahedrite deposit. I have yet to find the other type of Copper deposit found down around Y20, so I still haven't finished the ores quest. And I'm not doing traditional branch mining for that one either. I'm going out every ten blocks for a branch at Y20, and still coming up empty. And yet I have found almost twenty Magnetite deposits, which are nearly useless to me at the moment, other than for the iron ore mixed in the middle of the deposit on a two y-level slice.
I would advise a bit more direction on this matter. Gregorious has never done feature documentation well. In fact, he considers the lack of feature documentation to BE a feature of GregTech, and a 'not holding your hand, so git gud' sort of attitude that is sure to chase off people new to the experience. If you are going to significantly change ore generation, you need to significantly document these changes, and make sure the player actually knows about them. The GT manual is by no means sufficient.
Also, if Thaumcraft is going to be a dual-progression tree thing, you probably need to start hinting to the player a bit more firmly that they might want to get started down that road a bit sooner... oh wait, they can't, because of the brass required for the book. Which means they need an alloy smelter before they can begin that progress. And this was actually one of the frustrating things about the experience with the diamonds... I
was trying to think outside the box and be innovative. I looked into created diamonds, even before the quest came up, I looked into trying to progress in Thaumcraft... but I was stymied at each turn. Every time I tried to find some way to either get a Tier 3 pick so I could mine obsidian or Diamond Ore found in the Abyssal Nodes at the bottom of the ocean, I was shut down. I felt like there was something I just Wasn't Getting, that was the frustrating part, more than the time investment. After I had gone through several small diamond ores and didn't come up with an actual usable Diamond, I began to doubt that I would find one in them and I needed to think of doing something else. Partly, this is RNG pulling an X-COM on me, but partly because it wasn't spelled out clearly how I was expected to get over this hurdle. Or rather, alternatives were presented that were not permitted at that time, which was exceedingly frustrating... to see something and be unable to do it.
Now let's talk about after the Macerator. Once I got that machine, I was pretty much happy, after I figured out what I was doing wrong (using copper instead of bronze pipes and not having enough throughput for the machines). While I didn't exactly have direct pointing, I was able to figure it out in fairly short order by experimentation. And actually, I did enjoy that... you didn't hold my hand when it came to steam. I made a few mistakes, I learned from said mistakes, I corrected said mistakes, and got a deeper understanding of how the game mechanic worked. I figured out pretty soon that the Alloy Smelter was a steam hog that needed its own dedicated line, so I built a bigger 'main' pipe and have two side pipes coming from it, one feeding to the Alloy Smelter, and the other going to Everything Else. You might've wanted to maybe hint that 'hey, this thing is going to need a bit more than the rest' for people who aren't as
stubborn determined as me, but I actually enjoyed the fact that I figured out this faced on my own without hints.
Idea: Have a 'hint book', with the caveat 'this contains some content which may be seen as spoilers and is intended for players new to expert packs or these mods to go over things you might miss' or perhaps 'this contains spoilers, but if you get stuck on trying to figure something out, this will probably have your answer'. This lets people who want to do it by themselves to do it by themselves, and gives the casual players trying expert mode packs for the first time the training wheels they need to get going.
Then I hit the next brick wall... steam production vs steam consumption, and the long and excessively boring wait to make bronze and turn it into plates. Could I have simply hammered everything out by hand? Sure, I could've done that. It would've been a hell of a lot faster making a half dozen hammers than waiting for the steam hammerer. But the Alloy Furnace's 25% production boost (actually... now that I think about it... 33% boost) (4x instead of 3x bronze per craft) is just TOO good to pass up. However, the Alloy Smelter consumes more steam than both of my boilers produced combined, which meant there was significant periods of downtime between alloy smeltings, and because this is coming at the end of an age, there wasn't anything else to do in the chapter that I felt I could actually accomplish. Which meant I pretty much brought up my inventory, tabbed out to watch Youtube, and came back every ten minutes or so to sleep so I didn't get mobs in my manufactory. And waited. And I did this pretty much all day long.
Crafting the blast furnace was bad enough, waiting for it to get done was, in many ways, even worse. Yes, I know, you're supposed to have stupidly-slow production now so you can be thankful for the slightly-faster-but-still-slower-than-RC's improved Blast Furnace that comes later, or at least that I assume comes later, from what I've seen in NEI and based on the tiering logic presented to me so far. But give me something to do while it is doing that, please! I can't even go exploring because I get more than four chunks away and it unloads because I don't have a chunkloader and it completely seizes up and halts production, so I can't even go exploring for ore deposits. I did as much out of Thaumcraft as I was going to do. I have pretty much all the aspects except the taint aspect unlocked already. I've got a Cauldron down, although I haven't crafted the nitor yet because I don't have the netherrack to light under the cauldron to heat it up for the actual production OF said nitor. Because I still have no way of mining Obsidian yet (trying to make a vanilla diamond pickaxe is not going to happen).
The problem I had with diamonds was at least partially my fault, partly RNG's fault, partly worldgen's fault, and partly lack of clear direction on how to obtain diamonds. Someone more familiar with GregTech (this is actually legitimately the first time I've ever played a pack with GT, by the way) and a more in-depth knowledge of oregen mechanics in GT would've probably had far fewer problems than me. But that end-of-age bronze grind? That's a boring grind that needs to get looked at how to improve. Maybe spawn several side-quest things at that time to give you other things to do while waiting for the bronze to cook? Maybe hint a bit more strongly "Hey, now that your alloy smelter is up, I bet you could make Brass for your Thaumonomicon..." so that they can go play Scan All The Things while waiting for the bronze to cook/hammer up. But because it consumes more steam than you can produce with the two boilers you were required to make, you probably need to either hint 'hey, either make more boilers or micro-manage your production, 'cause running out is going to stall production indefinitely and that will suck'.
This would make a perfect introductory period for other side mods that will be important going forward, and if I were doing this in 1.12.2 this is probably where I'd introduce Astral Sorcery, which has some grindy parts that require nighttime so you can't just sleep the nights away for max efficiency on the solar boiler, I probably wouldn't even unlock the Thaumcraft chapter until the Alloy Smelter quest and I'd really point out 'hey, might want to check that out now' or at least have it show up flashing on the quest menu or something. Modern questing mods are a lot better at being able to do that these days than you had back in 1.7.10. Give me something to do while the bronze is cooking, and especially when the blast furnace is cooking. I had already exhausted most of my options on the diamond phase while trying to get here, maybe someone more familiar with GT might've held off of some of the side quests until now, I don't know. But good lord, if you're going to have me wait literal hours for production to finish, at least distract me with Shiny Things(tm) that I can play with in the meantime.
You set the hook just fine in the early game. One of the bumps in the road might've been mitigated with more experience with GT oregen. But the other... yea, it comes right after you've pretty much already done everything else in the questbook, amounting to little more than a time gate for your next age to unlock. This could stand some looking at.
Some machines (like solar boilers) are really just dirt cheap and its worthwhile on the medium/long term to invest in them.
