So, Dire just released his AE2 Spotlight:
Well, there's good stuff, bad stuff, interesting stuff, and OH GOD WHY stuff. My thoughts are as follows:
Well, what are your thoughts?
- There's not really that much new content, but a lot of changes to how things work. Some are fairly interesting, some are "meh" and one in particular is extremely bad for SMP in its current state. I'll go into all of these in detail, of course.
- In regards to actual new content, there's now meteors that randomly spawn throughout the world. They're made of a new material called Skystone that's necessary for the creation of ME Controllers and can easily be found via a compass item (do note that the compass can't detect whether a meteor has been mined). Skystone itself also looks pretty nice and comes in all of the main brick patterns. A few other decorative blocks were added, notably a small light (which I'm pretty sure can be placed on ceilings, unlike torches). There's also a new variant of Certus called Charged Certus, used in some recipes. In addition, Certus Dust doesn't drop anymore when a block is mined, instead you have to grind up crystals.
- We now have channels for networks. If you need a short explanation to what this is, it's basically just a slightly veiled nerf to network sizes, which ends up forcing large controllers, mass P2P tunnels and tiered cables. It does mean that you can set up small networks of less than 8 channels without a controller, though. I will say, it does balance out AE1's massive networks well. The real question here is whether it needed to be balanced in the first place.
- There are two new mechanics for creating key crafting items. The first revolves around throwing Certus "seeds" into water and letting them grow. Effectively, given time you can double Certus. And by "time", I mean several hours by default. Luckily, you can create machines that drastically increase this growth rate. In addition, you also now make Fluix Crystals by throwing Certus into water with Redstone and Nether Quartz, which takes a few seconds. Only issue with these processes, namely the latter, is that they're nigh impossible to automate fully, even assuming the existence of mods that haven't been ported like TE3.
- The second new mechanic is easily the most heavily flamed aspect of AE2: presses. In short, to create the old Processering Units (of which there's a new type made of Purified Certus Quartz, only created via the doubling mechanic), you need to combine the base material with a press in a new machine. The bad part? The presses are only found in Skystone Meteors and only 1-3 of the four (determined by RNG) can be obtained per meteor. As the presses have no durability and can be cloned, duplicates are useless. Thanks to Murphey's Law, this will inevitably lead to absolute hell in almost any SMP environment (much like Soul Shards 2 did) and in SSP are considered by many to be annoying.
- Spacial Storage can now be made more energy-efficient. It's still a cool concept, but the rule that mod authors must manually whitelist their blocks to work with spacial storage will unfortunately probably limit it from ever being truly useful. On the bright side, we still have the Pokeball Dimension!
- P2P tunnels are more effective overall. The new ME P2P in particular helps with dealing with channel limitations, although that's kinda just solving a problem created by AE2 itself.
- ME Controller mechanics have changed drastically. The old controller GUI is now accessed with a handheld device and controllers are now multiblocks. Every side of a controller can handle 32 channels total, so even 1 controller is pretty powerful honestly. On an unrelated note, they look absolutely badass.
- All of the old buses and terminals, as well as the Interface, are now "parts". This means they're placed onto cables directly and up to 5 can be placed on 1 cable (assuming one connection is used for power). The Interface can swap between being a block and a part, which I really wish was true for all of the other parts as well. There's also AE facades, which are basically just FMP covers that can be removed with a wrench. A bit pointless, but neat nonetheless.
- One of the parts, a quartz ring, essentially blocks communication with the main network but keeps power transfer. In other words, it's literally a subnetwork creator. Combined with P2P, this is INSANE.
- AE has its own equivalent of a solid fuel generator. Also, external power can only be entered in via Power Relays (not controllers) and power can be directly stored in cells. Nothing too important.
- Crafting isn't included yet! I'm a bit disappointing, really, considering that's practically half the mod, but it's understandable considering this is a full rewrite. Let's just hope it's out by the end of the 1.7 jump, otherwise people like me are going to be royally screwed lol.
Good: A fairly interesting process for processing Certus Quartz, pretty-looking new stone that's basically Abyssal Stone on land, in-mod power generation, subnetwork buffs, cable parts. Sweet stuff here.
So-So: Increased complexity in creation of certain items with the addition of a new machine. Well, at least it's fast, unlike the Metal Former. Controller is now a multiblock, though honestly having more than 2 or 3 seems basically useless. Random meteor spawns, which could lead to server issues, although the meteors are pretty large so this might be negated.
Bad: Moderate nerfs to cables (now heavily tiered, which means CHAIN CRAFTING). EDIT: Channels aren't as bad with the buffs to P2P tunnels, which can transfer channels through them.
Irredeemably Godawful: Circuit Boards, required for almost every useful object in the mod, can only be found in RNG chests within meteors. This isn't even funny. Not only are all 4 needed, but repeats are useless and they spawn via FRICKIN' RNG CHESTS IN FRICKIN' RNG METEORS. This could SINGLEHANDEDLY kill this mod in SMP, and even in SSP it will be incredibly painful. This feature is so bad, I'm actually hoping it's an error or something because there's no way someone should think this is a good idea. It's like the equivalent of TE making Machine Frames require an item only found in dungeon chests.[/rant]
So-So: Increased complexity in creation of certain items with the addition of a new machine. Well, at least it's fast, unlike the Metal Former. Controller is now a multiblock, though honestly having more than 2 or 3 seems basically useless. Random meteor spawns, which could lead to server issues, although the meteors are pretty large so this might be negated.
Bad: Moderate nerfs to cables (now heavily tiered, which means CHAIN CRAFTING). EDIT: Channels aren't as bad with the buffs to P2P tunnels, which can transfer channels through them.
Irredeemably Godawful: Circuit Boards, required for almost every useful object in the mod, can only be found in RNG chests within meteors. This isn't even funny. Not only are all 4 needed, but repeats are useless and they spawn via FRICKIN' RNG CHESTS IN FRICKIN' RNG METEORS. This could SINGLEHANDEDLY kill this mod in SMP, and even in SSP it will be incredibly painful. This feature is so bad, I'm actually hoping it's an error or something because there's no way someone should think this is a good idea. It's like the equivalent of TE making Machine Frames require an item only found in dungeon chests.[/rant]
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