Ascension of the Technomancer - a chronicle

[Ieldra]

Finally, I can fly at a reasonably fast speed!

Also, fully automated ore processing with a RotaryCraft extractor at minimum power using four steam engines. I don't think I've done that before. The jet fuel production also runs on four steam engines. Ore processing is excrutiatingly slow, but the extractor, as opposed to the grinder, can process GregTech limonite and a few other common GT ores. Still not much to look at, my facility, but highly functional

Spoiler

It should be noted that I can't make redstone alloy yet. These redstone conduits are made from ingots I found in chests while exploring.

I can make many metals from just cobblestone with the transmutation flame, so I needed more of it, especially since my main pickaxe is silk-touched. So, here's cobblegen ChromatiCraft style - I had to put the Coalescence Orchid far enough away from the infinite water pool, else it would occasionally draw from its corners. So I needed yet another pump. I don't think I ever used that many RoC pumps before either. Cobble-pickup is done by a Hungry Chest (TC) since the EnderIO vacuum chest needs a GT autoclave to make the pulsating gem and the vacuum hopper's range is too long.

Spoiler

Finally, I can explore with a lot less danger... and my HSLA steel armor pieces, thanks to the ChromatiCraft enchanter and the transmutation flame which made me more Zambarau crystals, are so heavily enchanted that they ooze magic.

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@Pyure :
I found that option at the same time as you, and I'm experimenting with it.

 

[Ieldra]

@Pyure
If in the GregTech unification config, you set the entry

B:gemMagnetite_false=true

then the lodestone can be crafted from the magnetite gem and it won't turn back in the inventory. Problem solved. I have no idea what exactly here is supposed to be false or true, but it works

 

[Pyure]

I thought that was the line I linked you to but opening in my phone doesn’t seem to scroll you there, lame. Glad you got it going

 

[Ieldra]

I'm fighting with the pack again.....RotaryCraft Aluminum Alloy is unobtainable because all aluminium unifies to GT aluminium, but RotaryCraft's alloy recipe accepts all aluminium variants except the GT one. I changed the config and now for some odd reason everything unifies to libVulpes aluminium. That does not appear to affect progression in any other way since it's obtainable by recipe at this point anyway. Also, I had several world loads with loss of all ChromatiCraft progression - most of the time loads of a copy of the world with the same timestamp succeeded, so I didn't lose all that much. I really wish Reika would find a way to fix this. It's sometimes rare, sometimes frequent, but I haven't played a game where this didn't happen at least once. Something about writing player NBT data and I suspect.

Apart from that, since I can now fly I could complete some ChromatiCraft achievements in fairly short order:
-A Second Layer: reach the Nether roof. Here BOP raised its ugly head again, making the chutes through the Nether roof rarer than they should be. I flipped through the roof with Ender Pearls, and did find one chute, but there should've been more.
-Ominous Constructions: find the loot chest in one of the large structures on the Nether roof.
-The Alien Realm: reach the End
-Aerial Predator: kill the Ender Dragon. With Hardcore Ender Expansion, the dragon is significantly harder than usual, but my tools were up to it - see below.
-Eldritch Nightmare: kill the Wither. With the Repossession enchantment, acquiring Wither Skeleton skulls is not the chore it used to be. Also, it gave me 6 Nether Stars from two Withers, LOL.
-Lumen Harnessing: draw lumen energy from a pylon. The standard method to do that is by using a relay source.
-Lumen Overload: make your experimental lumen repeaters explode. This happens after a while anyway, but it was sooner than I thought and I didn't get done what I wanted. Well, I have progression enough for the next task, but it is a gargantuan one.
-Lumen Storage: make a Nula storage crystal.
-Lumen Storage II: Make a crystal charger and pull some lumen energy into your storage crystal.
-Broadcasting: Make a crystal repeater

Also, I found that Advent of Ascension's Sapphire makes great swords. AoA bows are excellent as well but they require special arrows I can't make because I haven't found the required plant seeds. My pick and my shovel were made from AoA jade which is almost as good for tools, but significantly less so for weapons. Here's what I'm walking arouind with:

Spoiler

The enchantments are impressive. Final Strike (no idea which mod adds that) gives you a chance at a one-hit kill, Repossession (ChromatiCraft) dramatically increases the chances for rare drops and some enchantment go to higher levels (also CrC). They are expensive in XP, but then XP aren't really a limiting factor, not for enchantments anyway.

My main exploration task today was to map the pylons. Here's what I found:

Spoiler

It is actually rather nice. Pylons of all 16 colors are on one screenshot and none too far east or west, which means no pylon is more than 900m away from my casting structure. That's quite a bit better than I expected. It is rather common for one outlier to be at 1.5km range.

I did progress in RotaryCraft as I made some gasoline engines and used them to make aluminum alloy for a performance engine - whereby I ran into the aforementioned difficulties. The next task: build a compactor. This is actually *way* more difficult than I expected it to be, because making a compactor requires bedrock dust. So I'll need two microturbines to run a bedrock breaker, for which I need material made by the pulse jet furnace, and a great deal of time to actually get the bedrock dust. To think that after all that work, I'll be running only steam engines for a very long while... The plan is, after all, to create passive powergen for EU and RF before I get into those mods.

 

[lucariomaster2]

You should really think about using some of your ethanol to upgrade to gasoline engines.

 

[TomeWyrm]

Ah Gregtech, how much of a pain you make everything unless the pack author is right on top of things (or has an army of alpha/beta testers).

I wonder if Biomes O' Plenty is actually integrated into progression in any notable way, because frankly I despise the biome mods. Add biomes for function AND aesthetics or GTFO of my Minecraft, in my opinion. Because there's too much in MC that's biome limited, adding even 10 more biomes for "da pretty" can make finding an ice spikes biome, mesa, mega taiga, jungle, desert, savanna, or any other single biome you need for this next thing you want to do into a chore of hours!

Also, the supposition that RTG makes the Ocean Temple more rare is quite correct. Reika designed his structure code around vanilla worldgen, and even relatively minor tweaks to terrain can TANK the generation chance for certain CrC structures.

I am looking at the mod list, and then I'm going to tear into the configs. I might play this pack, in a modified version (because quite frankly I can do so very effectively, and hate changes/"features" that are simply there as annoyances, like that Stone Brick change). Though I still have to decide if GT is worth the pain.

Pyure, I would definitely suggest biting the bullet and playing through a pack designed heavily around Reika's mods (I wish someone would publish the DragonRealm pack, as much as I personally had gripes about it when I played on the server, it does a good job of weaving the progression of a rather large kitchen sink pack mod list into a surprisingly cohesive whole), CrC alone is worth experiencing at least once — so long as you're willing to ask questions to someone that's been through it. CrC's progression is very much a quirk of Reika's mind and history. He did a very good job most of the time of providing enough hints, but just about everyone gets stuck at least once.

 

[Ieldra]

You should really think about using some of your ethanol to upgrade to gasoline engines.

I am running some gasoline engines, their power is required to make aluminum alloy. However, since ethanol production requires some resources not infinitely available at this point and some logistics are currently unavailable as well, I won't use the gasoline engines for machines that I keep running all the time at this point.

Ah Gregtech, how much of a pain you make everything unless the pack author is right on top of things (or has an army of alpha/beta testers).

Indeed so. I generally find GT intrusive, but playing InfiTech2 (which I abandoned for reasons unrelated to GT) was a smoother experience.

I wonder if Biomes O' Plenty is actually integrated into progression in any notable way, because frankly I despise the biome mods. Add biomes for function AND aesthetics or GTFO of my Minecraft, in my opinion. Because there's too much in MC that's biome limited, adding even 10 more biomes for "da pretty" can make finding an ice spikes biome, mesa, mega taiga, jungle, desert, savanna, or any other single biome you need for this next thing you want to do into a chore of hours!

If a pack is designed well, biome weights for vanilla biomes are increased when adding biome mods, and in general AoTT does this well it appears - no vanilla biome I need for ChromatiCraft progression is more than 2km away from my base. It's just that the BoP world type and ChromatiCraft do some things in incompatible ways (I don't know the details), so that in a past version CrC's void reed didn't spawn in regular swamp biomes in BoP worlds (it does now), and most notably, CrC's Luminous Cliffs don't spawn in BoP Worlds at all. I don't know where that's progression-relevant since I haven't played this version of CrC before, and since Lazerous42 went to extreme pains to circumvent it I expect it to be on the critical path, but his original rationale (luma lotus doesn't spawn anywhere else) does not apply to the version I'm playing. Luma lotus spawns fine in ice plains.

I am looking at the mod list, and then I'm going to tear into the configs. I might play this pack, in a modified version (because quite frankly I can do so very effectively, and hate changes/"features" that are simply there as annoyances, like that Stone Brick change). Though I still have to decide if GT is worth the pain.

If you get around to it, I'd be interest in any changes you make and how you make them. I'm not as knowledgeable about the inner workings of modpacks, but I want to learn since I'm thinking of putting together a pack of my own.

 

[Pyure]

Pyure, I would definitely suggest biting the bullet and playing through a pack designed heavily around Reika's mods (I wish someone would publish the DragonRealm pack, as much as I personally had gripes about it when I played on the server, it does a good job of weaving the progression of a rather large kitchen sink pack mod list into a surprisingly cohesive whole), CrC alone is worth experiencing at least once — so long as you're willing to ask questions to someone that's been through it. CrC's progression is very much a quirk of Reika's mind and history. He did a very good job most of the time of providing enough hints, but just about everyone gets stuck at least once.

Yeah maybe. I mean,I've done RoC and ReC-centric packs a dozen times, but it makes sense to kinda find another example with CrC in it. But I'm not convinced this particular pack is the right fit for me (the load time alone is annoying, even for someone accustomed to booting up Infitech2).

Also it sounds like it still has some rough edges. Hopefully @Ieldra submits all the tweak's he's making to the pack dev because for the most part they sound pretty crucial.

 

[Ieldra]

Also it sounds like it still has some rough edges. Hopefully @Ieldra submits all the tweak's he's making to the pack dev because for the most part they sound pretty crucial.

I am doing that, indeed. Unfortunately, the pack creator hasn't been present on his github repository for a few weeks. I hope that's not a sign of things to come. There's also the problem of updating Reika's mods. You wouldn't have an idea about what's causing that? The symptom: as soon as I update Reika's mods some dust smelting recipes (for iron, gold, copper etc.) disappear.

Also, how would I go about creating a modpack? I've acquired some pretty in-depth knowledge of some mods, but I can't know them all. My goal would be to make a pack centered around Reika's mods, a little like Dragon Realm, only with more mod interaction and some expert mode elements.

 

[Ieldra]

Yay, I have bedrock technology!

Spoiler

This little facility is designed to both break bedrock (with the bedrock breaker down there) and to process the dust - there will be a blast furnace there instead of the furnace, which I used to make the tungsten for the bedrock breaker which also requires the 4MW from the microturbines. Since every time you move the microturbines you lose up to 240 buckets of jet fuel, they have to remain here until the jet fuel is spent. You can bucket the fuel out, but not pump it out, and who wants that?
BTW, the bedrock breaker is pretty easy to run, but picking up the dust is more tricky. You need to right-click the breaker, so I used an Autonomous Activator to do that, and a vacuum hopper to pick it up since the activator for some reason doesn't do that. For that I made my first RF power in this game - 5 RF/t from a survivalist generator is quite enough for the task.

Here's what RotaryCraft difficulty 3 means: you get one bedrock dust (instead of two) per 16 operation cycles of the bedrock breaker (a 18 seconds), which means it'll take 7-8 hours to extract enough bedrock to make the ingots for a set of armor. While I'm at it, I wish I could finetune RotaryCraft difficulty. I appreciate the higher difficulty if it presents me with an engineering challenge, such as how the 3x lower lubricant production efficiency affects hydrokinetic power plants (basically, you'll have to wait for bedrock tech for that to become feasible), but reducing jet fuel production efficiency by a factor of 9 (that's what I get from the code) is a bit much, and it's also resulting in a grind, not in anything interesting.

In any case, what do you NOT see on this screenshot?

Spoiler

Yeah, torches or any other sort of lantern, and it seems this is well-lit, right? Indeed so. Look at the glowing block you see behind the gearbox. That's ChromatiCraft's Subterranean Illuminator. It looks for caves and places light sources there, and it has a very long range - I think a radius of 128. Meanwhile, the light effects on the right are made by the Subterranean Route Finder (also CrC), which is in my estimation one of ChromatiCraft's most useful low-level tools.

Since making my bedrock dust will take a while, I've decided to explore for the time. After all there are still two ChromatiCraft exploration goals I haven't completed. No idea of one of them is connected to the mysterious "Luminous Cliffs" which I'll need Advanced Rocketry to find (the result of a BoP incompatibility and a workaround by the pack creator), but the other one should be reachable? Well, I didn't find anything of the sort, but I explored one of the Ocean Temples I knew about - and found several full (!) dungeon chests. Tons of fragments, a sojourner's sash (which I can't use since making mana tablets requires Blood Magic progression) and two TE machine frames which I couldn't make at this point because that requires the BC assembly table.

Spoiler

I also found Reika's head. I'll keep that one, as opposed to most others Too bad I lost GregoriusT's head in my abandoned buggy world #1.

Now I have to wait until my magnetite is processed. This will take up most of today and tomorrow (real-time days). In the meantime, I'll make my lumen network, easily the biggest task in ChromatiCraft apart from the dimension structure puzzles.

 

[Pyure]

Also, how would I go about creating a modpack? I've acquired some pretty in-depth knowledge of some mods, but I can't know them all. My goal would be to make a pack centered around Reika's mods, a little like Dragon Realm, only with more mod interaction and some expert mode elements.

I'd check that out for certain.

Fortunately its pretty mindlessly simple to get started on a new pack these days. I don't yet know the last steps (hosting it publicly), but I can get you started.

I'll assume you don't even have the Twitch app yet, so you may be able to skip steps.

Download and install Twitch (Desktop)
Click Mods
Enable Minecraft if necessary
Click Create Custom Profile
Enter meta information about your pack (Name, MC Version, Forge Version)
Wait a few seconds while it builds your empty pack
Add mods via the Mods tab or by dropping them into the folder. (They'll get auto-discovered if you just drop them into the folder)

You can then share your pack during its development at any time by using the ... -> Export Profile option, which will generate a zip which can be sent to and Imported by others.

 

[TomeWyrm]

The real trick to doing an "expert" or integrated pack (so, not-a-kitchen-sink) is having an in-depth knowledge of mods (and their configs), knowing someone that does, or having a lot of person-hours to devote to testing and tweaking.

I was aware of the BoP worldtype problems, I was active on Reika's dev server when he was introducing the void reeds and the like. It's one of the many MANY reasons I dislike BoP/EBXL/Highlands et al.

As for the dust smelting recipes disappearing... I would honestly have to check the configs, but I would assume that it has something to do with minetweaker and gregtech, and the update to Reika's mods probably shifted something so that whatever solution was being used to smelt dusts broke. Or you might just need to regenerate the AOBD configs... I really don't know

 

[Ieldra]

So...it appears chapter 1 of my chronicle is coming to a close. Chapter 1 was defined by function over design, no resources to spend for aesthetics, and consequently nothing much to really showcase except said functionality. If I can now branch out, the reason is that my considerable efforts over the last days, all of this...

Spoiler

...and this... (the garlands on the crystalline stone columns are Christmas textures, not anything I'm responsible for)

Spoiler

Spoiler

...was all done in order to make this...

Spoiler

...and this:

Spoiler

The items in the first screenshot are a RotaryCraft Electrical Generator and a RotaryCraft Rotational Dynamo, which make EU and RF, respectively, from shaft power and have extra-difficult recipes in this pack (that difficulty is configurable), which is the reason why I had to progress all the way to bedrock technology in RotaryCraft. Fortunately, the difficulty effect which says "Compactor output is 1 (for difficulty 3)" only applies to making diamonds, not to making permanent magnets, else the number of lodestones required would've increased by a factor of 2^6. In any case, four steam engines can now make 126 RF/t and 31.5 EU/t, respectively, which is good enough for now since I won't do much, if any, permanent processing with RF and EU-based mods. These generators scale nicely up to 16 MW, which equals 32kRF/t and 8kEU/t, respectively, once I have a hydrokinetic power plant. That's a way off, though, not because I couldn't make it right now, but because I don't need it right now.

The items in the second screenshot are ChromatiCraft World Rifts, which enable me to send the power generated by the converter engines to any place in the world.

This means I now have low-level passive powergen for shaft power, EU and RF, and I also can set up any facility powered by shaft power, RF or EU anywhere in the world with no additional power-gen, with only ChromatiCraft facilities bound to the proximity of a multi-aura repeater. I'm afraid I'll have to set up a set of low-level GT machines, which I'm not at all motivated to doing, but which are required to make some items I want. I'll also have to set up a Buildcraft assembly table, which likewise I'm not motivated to do, but will have to do for the same reason. I'll also need a new base, which I am very much motivated to do, but may have to defer until I have a lumen tree, for which I still lack the recipe. I'm going to build in a style inspired by ChromatiCraft, which means I'll need to progress some more eventually, but perhaps not right now.

My lumen network has become a little bigger than expected... (though still less extensive than necessary in most games I've player, Argia is just two chunks north of the map border)

Spoiler

...since some of the pylons I had selected were depleted and they're very slow to recharge before you have power crystals - and power crystals for 16 pylons require 6144 purification powder to make, which is significantly harder to acquire than, say, 6144 copper, iron or tin. I may have to get into crystal bees, which are incredibly powerful but finicky in their requirements in accord with said power, in ways with which even Gendustry doesn't help much.

In any case, if my Elemental Lamp (from ChromatiCraft, prevents spawning in up to 128 radius) really prevents spawing (Lycanite mobs have been observed to break spawning rules, and AoA mobs spawn during the day) I can now start building my house on the cliff above the rainbow forest.

Also, may I mention that I hate trees. Most of my repeater lines are above their crowns, but I had to fell some really big oaks and redwoods when building my repeater lines. That took more time than building the lines themselves, or at least it feels as if it took more time. In that dense forest near the Portokali pylon, I couldn't even tell where one tree ended and the next began.

 

[Ieldra]

I'd check that out for certain.

Fortunately its pretty mindlessly simple to get started on a new pack these days. I don't yet know the last steps (hosting it publicly), but I can get you started.

I'll assume you don't even have the Twitch app yet, so you may be able to skip steps.

Download and install Twitch (Desktop)
Click Mods
Enable Minecraft if necessary
Click Create Custom Profile
Enter meta information about your pack (Name, MC Version, Forge Version)
Wait a few seconds while it builds your empty pack
Add mods via the Mods tab or by dropping them into the folder. (They'll get auto-discovered if you just drop them into the folder)

You can then share your pack during its development at any time by using the ... -> Export Profile option, which will generate a zip which can be sent to and Imported by others.

Hmm...thanks. Sounds easy enough. That's the easy part though. I can put mods together in a pack, I can also script, and I have an idea where I'd want to go with the scripting. However, things get difficult when it comes to bugs caused by mod interactions and performance problems, such as the aforementioned problem when updating Reika's mod in this pack.

 

[Pyure]

Hmm...thanks. Sounds easy enough. That's the easy part though. I can put mods together in a pack, I can also script, and I have an idea where I'd want to go with the scripting. However, things get difficult when it comes to bugs caused by mod interactions and performance problems, such as the aforementioned problem when updating Reika's mod in this pack.

For the most part that is simply where your mod experience comes into play. You need to have your own idea of which mods don't play well together, whether for performance, balance or integrity purposes.

 

[TomeWyrm]

Most successful pack devs are inherent tinkerers with a line to someone really in the trenches of how modding works (or they're that someone). I'm not a coder, but I think a lot like one. So I can *usually* ask pertinent questions of devs and Google to do some research... and barring that, I can debug/test pretty well. So when I have problems, I see if there's an easy solution that someone's already come up with, or try to find one myself. In the end, it's experience, connections/resources, and persistence that make a pack dev good at the task.

Edit: I was looking through the MineTweaker scripts, and remembered the Foul Fume bug. I think it might be caused by the "## Allow powered furnace to create charcoal" section in 1-InitialScripts.zs

Which... I thought the Powered Furnace could do anyway, so I'm confused. Unless Greg broke it. In any case, I'm currently playing through All The Mods Expert Mode (just "upgraded" to Remastered wherin I'm doing the pack with cheats allowed until I get to the equivalent progression) and not being able to smelt charcoal normally isn't really a big problem for me. Though knowing how HSLA is, I think I'll look into the configs more once I boot the pack up.

Edit2: Also, unless I'm missing some cross-mod integration, it looks like the only minetweaker scripts affecting BoP add its diamond scythe to the Jungle Temple Chest loot table; its logs into the powered furnace charcoal tweak; oreDicts the berries to work for Pam's (as listAllBerry so only for non-specific recipes that use berries), removed the 5 duplicate gem ores (Ruby, Sapphire, Amber, Peridot, and Topaz); a conversion recipe from MC Glass Bottles to BoP Empty Jars and back as the only method of crafting them; alternate recipes for the Dart Blower, Darts, and Diamond Scythe; and finally a conversion for 9 cattails to a wool block. So... it looks perfectly removable from a progression/integration standpoint, though I bet I'm missing something. At the moment it just looks like the pack dev really likes BoP (which is pretty common in the modded community, I'm quite an odd duck for actively disliking them).

Edit3:
So far, I've disabled Biomes O' Plenty, and Chance Cubes. Taken out references to them in the CraftTweaker scripts, disabled via config the "Default World Generator" mod, Epic Siege Mod because I'm not dealing with mob griefing thank you very much, Dynamic Sword Skills because 1.7 combat was fine, EiraMoticons and Emotes because I'm playing SSP, Hardcore Darkness because frustrating ≠ difficult, I neutered HardCore Wither for the same reason, I'm strongly hoping HEE and ChromatiCraft have started playing nicely... I remember when HEE+CrC was more trouble than it was (IMHO) worth (Draconic Evolution too IIRC... it's been a long time so that memory's fuzzy), MachineMuse's Modular PowerSuits is getting axed because I refuse to use it (it's inherently broken in a OP/Useless with no middle ground kind of way), ObsCore and ObsTrophies because to me that's useless inventory/NEI clutter, the storage drawers alternate wood addons add more decorative overhead and clutter that I will never use...

I disabled ChocoCraft, and am contemplating disabling Lycanites Mobs and not installing MoCreatures. I don't like the art style of the Chocobo mod, and the lag caused by creature mods is... nasty. Also if I do disable Lycanite/Mo? I'm killing the spawner mods, those things have caused SO many problems in the past. It's absurd. Fossils and Archeology Revival is also on the path to the chopping block. Special Mobs is too for the same reason as Hardcore Darkness: to me it is merely obnoxious rather than difficult. Lycanites and Mo get a stay of execution for now because they actually manage to be mostly atmospheric and usually difficult without being "lawl health sponge" or frustrating random abilities; The Gaia Guardian is a nearly perfect example of both, It has a lot of health, a damage cap, and other than the mob rain at low health? It's abilities are a random chance to trigger with random amounts of pixies and random locations to teleport and a random chance to drop a pink wither fog trap. It's in no way difficult, it's simply tedious. The Special/Infernal mobs are much the same way for me, the random prefixes from Infernal tend to result in a lot of "screw you" when you encounter them or they've got INSANE difficulty swings (go from being impossible to kill to little wimpy mooks with tiny upgrades in player capabilities), and special mobs while also having the same kind of random abilities as the Infernal prefixes/suffixes introduces aggravations like creeper jockies... because making an exploding spider is totes the bestest idea evar!!11!one!! (Was that sarcastic enough? )

Oh hey, that's neat. the Twilight Forest Portal Catalyst mod (never heard of it before), and the catalyst drops from the Aether slider boss. Neat! That's going to slow down my usual accelerated semi-cheaty progression into ChromatiCraft (seriously the Twilight Highlands or whatever the cave biome with the magic beans inside is called? Positively obscene for cave crystal generation), but still neat.

Edit4: What kind of crazy created the button configs for this pack?! I'd prefer 100% defaults to the unintuitive mess I got when I booted this thing up! Q is open inventory, "/" is chat, E is drop item, pick block and sprint are disabled, draw weapons is a button my mouse doesn't even have (Button 5 is also usually a really obnoxious one to press on mice that I've had with one)... *sigh* I'm going to have to do MORE digging and rip into the defaults mod that I can't remember the name for... ugh!

 

[Ieldra]

Oh hey, that's neat. the Twilight Forest Portal Catalyst mod (never heard of it before), and the catalyst drops from the Aether slider boss. Neat! That's going to slow down my usual accelerated semi-cheaty progression into ChromatiCraft (seriously the Twilight Highlands or whatever the cave biome with the magic beans inside is called? Positively obscene for cave crystal generation), but still neat.

Oh, by Loot++. It took me a while to find how that was done. It won't be much of a slowdown, though: once you have the transformation flame and access to a rainbow forest, you have basically unlimited cave crystals - and getting to multiblock casting isn't that expensive in crystals. It's after that where things get expensive.

Edit4: What kind of crazy created the button configs for this pack?! I'd prefer 100% defaults to the unintuitive mess I got when I booted this thing up! Q is open inventory, "/" is chat, E is drop item, pick block and sprint are disabled, draw weapons is a button my mouse doesn't even have (Button 5 is also usually a really obnoxious one to press on mice that I've had with one)... *sigh* I'm going to have to do MORE digging and rip into the defaults mod that I can't remember the name for... ugh!

The mod is "default options". I looked it up because I was as annoyed as you by the defaults.

In any case, I'm putting this playthrough on hold, maybe I'll abandon it altogether, in favor of making my own pack. Several factors go into my decision:

(1) GT's dust smelting bug that appears if DragonAPI v19c is present. I really want to play the newest version of ChromatiCraft.
(2) I read up about Advent of Ascension. Bosses with thousands of life points that prevent you from legimately-acquired flying ability while you're fighting them? That's a bit much.
(3) The load time of this pack is crazy.

So, since I found out how easy it is to put a simple pack together (thanks for the info, @Pyure ), I've been starting from scratch. The pack will be for my personal use for now, but maybe I'll do more with it later. I'll have to look what kind of progression I want, I'll have to play through half a dozen exploration/adventure mods I don't know that looked interesting enough to just add them, and see about scripting. I wonder what people would like in a pack centered as much on Reika's mods as InfiTech2 is centered on GT. GT won't be in it, that's for sure, and neither will Botania (I may have even less appreciation for the Gaia Guardian than you). Also, do people really use Railcraft? It's pretty much in every pack, but I haven't watched a LP video where someone does more with it than generating steam power and using its decorative blocks for years.

 

[Pyure]

So, since I found out how easy it is to put a simple pack together (thanks for the info, @Pyure ), I've been starting from scratch. The pack will be for my personal use for now, but maybe I'll do more with it later. I'll have to look what kind of progression I want, I'll have to play through half a dozen exploration/adventure mods I don't know that looked interesting enough to just add them, and see about scripting. I wonder what people would like in a pack centered as much on Reika's mods as InfiTech2 is centered on GT. GT won't be in it, that's for sure, and neither will Botania (I may have even less appreciation for the Gaia Guardian than you). Also, do people really use Railcraft? It's pretty much in every pack, but I haven't watched a LP video where someone does more with it than generating steam power and using its decorative blocks for years.

Good idea. I also agree with the idea of ditching GT, for two simple reasons:
1) Load times
2) Having a mod-centric pack is awesome, and GT and RoC sorta fight for attention.

I'd personally probably keep Botania because its such a techy magic mod, and then get rid of any Guardian gates (craft-tweak different solutions for stuff as necessary). But there's also a lot to be said for just focusing on chromaticcraft as your magic mod.

For Railcraft: I agree. Most people don't use it for its original intent at all. It would be great if there was a transportation incentive to use rails, but chunkloading makes it iffy, and the existence of so many piping/logistics mods makes it kinda pointless.

 

[TomeWyrm]

The Gravel Gun is seriously stupid for cheesing the crap out of Nevermine/AoA. If I recall correctly, one of the original design triggers for the gun was something along the lines of those AoA bosses in a "Why the @^&$# does this thing have Infinity+1 health?!" kind of way, also the whole "motor control issues" thing.

The Railcraft machines can be used pretty well to tech-gate some stuff. Also if you provide an easy source of Ender Pearls, the Anchor Cart is very nice (IIRC you can load it with automation). If you make cables and pipes later tier, and item/fluid teleportation REALLY late tier, you could probably incentivize rail networks.

I concur with Pyure. Ditch the GT. It doesn't provide many real benefits for its MASSIVE downsides. There are other mods to provide interesting oregen, ore progressions, and the like. Just look at All The Mods Expert Mode (and Remastered). They did a pretty decent job of making ores more interesting... at least in the processing. The mining is pretty much "baseline and 5 types of iron-that-aren't-iron".

Was there anything about GT you *did* like with its inclusion in the pack? Because I know a lot of alternatives for its functions.

 

[Pyure]

I concur with Pyure. Ditch the GT. It doesn't provide many real benefits for its MASSIVE downsides. There are other mods to provide interesting oregen, ore progressions, and the like. Just look at All The Mods Expert Mode (and Remastered). They did a pretty decent job of making ores more interesting... at least in the processing. The mining is pretty much "baseline and 5 types of iron-that-aren't-iron".

Was there anything about GT you *did* like with its inclusion in the pack? Because I know a lot of alternatives for its functions.

Hey now, this wasn't my point at all

GT is an amazing mod. Just like RoC, it comes with huge benefits and huge stupidities. I like both mods a lot for their various technical challenges, but I don't really feel like they play nicely together for a tech-centric pack.