Mod Feedback [By Request] RotaryCraft Suggestions
- Thread starter Reika
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If you are doing something where the primary investment is time, and someone comes along with something that eliminates the investment of time, they will be able to make something that you cannot.
This is true whether you are talking about 7 foot sand molds, a large doublechest of things from creative mode; an MMO where someone with lots of time and no money can trade "playtime" value with someone who does not have lots of time but does have lots of money (see PLEX from EVE; Doubloons from Puzzle Pirates; probably others); etc.
Equally, if you are going to make the comparison of someone who has less time but more resources, how about a different type of comparison -- progression in Agrarian Skies by someone who has a life and other things to do compared to someone with no life and all the time in life to put into it. In such an environment, you can't really compare progress.
Vanilla minecraft has a certain level of "time of play" to "resources available to build". Many mods want to make that ratio different, so you get more resources in less time; a person with more time per day can build the same creation in the same number of days as someone with less time per day but with a mod to speed up what they can do.
If you had a mod that quarried 70 levels of stuff, in an area marked out by a fence, and did that instantly, then yes; most people would consider it "cheap resources". If it took 30 days? Most people would ignore it. If it took 3 or 4 days?
What if it took half an hour to run, but days and days to set up?
What if it wasn't even limited to quarring 70 levels down to bedrock, and stopping; what if you could shoot it into the void, and it would keep mining forever? Or turned it on it's side, and had it mining horizontally forever instead of vertically forever?
Ender Quarry; Mining laser; Boring machine; Creative supply chests (or heck, nowadays, command blocks that give out stacks of stuff by stepping on a plate) on a server that does not give out creative mode but does give out all the supplies you need as a builder. All of these are real things, that are appropriate in some cases.
And I have a friend that, with no life and nothing to do but minecraft, has completed everything but a few "bragging rights" quests in AgSkies in about 2.5 months; meanwhile, I never seem to have enough time to do the things I want to do in minecraft. Am I far behind him? Yep.
Does balance matter? Yes. What is the proper balance point? Depends on who you talk to.
Do you have a goal for yourself in minecraft? Maybe. If you do, will you get a sense of pride in completing it? Maybe. Was it a work, an investment of your time, of your design skills, was it something that you look back on and say, "Hey, I want to show off what I did"? If so, good.
But if you can get that completed really, really quick? Quick enough that anyone could do it without effort?
** Would you still feel proud to show off what you did, and the effort you went through to do it, to someone else if they had access to the same shortcuts you had? **
Is the mod you are looking at so much of a shortcut that your work of pride is ... lacking? Unfulfilling? Would you no longer feel proud to show it off?
Do you only feel OK to show it off because someone didn't know what was involved -- and if they did, you wouldn't bother?
Does the child with a plastic pail and shovel make a different type of castle than the one with the 7 foot molds? Can the one with the plastic pail still say "Hey, look what I did" to a 3 foot castle involving 10 uses of that pail and time spent sculpting with a stick? Does the 7 foot molder feel as proud with a single-cast castle that looks big but was all done by the mold?
Maybe; what if that mold represented two months of wood working, cutting, sanding, etc?
How much effort do you put in; how much of you, of your time, does your work represent?
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RotaryCraft has, at the extreme end, massive resource generation. But it takes a long time to get there.
What do you want to build? How much work do you want to spend on resource gathering? On using the resources that you have gathered? Do you want to show off what you can do -- if so, are you showing off the gobs of stuff you have collected, or your machines for collecting those gobs?
In vanilla, showing off large amounts of stuff means you put a lot of time into getting stuff. Making giant sandstone structures means a lot of time assembling the materials.
In modded, showing off large amounts of stuff might mean nothing more than running chunkloaders (or letting your single player game run overnight while you sleep) and a basic automatic gatherer. Or, it might be showing off your massive "gaslamp"-style machine that practically leaks steam out the side and might explode if your pumps run dry. Or you might have a massive high-tech refinery, or a major magical system based on taming witches that are constantly attacking each other. (Or, a simple case of golems wearing fezes inside a regeneration zone, all standing still doing nothing.)
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What makes a game "less fun"? Either too easy, or too hard. If it's so time consuming that, with a glance at the giant underground map of Ultima, you realize that the time needed to make enough teleportation potions to be able to explore it, and the time needed for mapping it out, will consume all your free time for the next year -- suddenly, it goes from "I want to play" to "ick, it's just drudgework". On the other side, if you have a "I'm finished" button, then why bother?
It's that balance of effort needed versus time available; the lack of repetition of grind potions, teleport around, find the hidden path; the lack of dig, dig, dig, search for vein, dig dig dig, etc.
It's the balance of effort versus time versus repetition versus freshness. If all the terrain is the same, why spend time on the surface? If the landscape is new and different, why not explore more? (Aside: my favorite biome controller in mystcraft is Tiny; it makes the noise factor of the biomes larger, giving more landscape variety. I also like ATG.)
RoC gives you the ability to gather more resources in less time, yes; that may not be the bad thing that people make it out to be.
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For all the people that say "That's cheating", how do you feel about these things:
1. Standing around, AFK, letting machines run for you?
1b: That same thing, in a modpack with Hunger Overhaul, so that sitting around AFK costs you food, and eventually kills you -- limiting what your machines can do if you are not around.
2. Chunkloaders letting those same machines run for you when you're not even on?
Whether it's a mining laser on a frame with computers controlling it; a quarry; a mining laser pointed into the void; a boring machine; etc.: It only generates resources while you are online, right? You could spend time mining, and generate X resource per hour, or your can run this machine and generate n*X resource per hour. But if you log off, it stops, right?
So why not have a big hew and cry against chunkloaders for letting this all generate for days when you don't even have the chance to play -- come back and you've gone from a few chests of storage to a massive AE system that is only 25% full?
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A massive resource generator isn't that big of a deal. Not compared to other things.
Letting it run for massive amounts of time, maybe.
Having something that can store massive amounts of materials in just a few square meters without any real effort? Maybe.
Something that can load a "build pattern" into memory and automatically plop down blocks to the design with no effort so your massive resources collected over the weekend in your massive storage are turned into your massive castle just by walking around? Maybe.
But the PvP game you play with your friend in that castle, hunting each other and bow-sniping each other while you chat smack in skype? Priceless.
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Balance? Yes. But what game are you playing? What is the balance of that game, and what are just tools to get you to that game?
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The TL;DR:
Is a massive resource gathering machine really imbalanced? Or is the imbalance in having something stronger than a hopper to put it into a double chest? Why not consider the storage of AE to be the real imbalance?
Is the ability to generate resources while you are on and playing really imbalanced? Why not say that chunkloaders are the imbalance -- you log out with a few things, and come back with instantly chests and chests worth of stuff
Is the goal of the game to show off your resource machine? Or is it what you have built with your resources? Or is the build itself just taken from a schematic somewhere, and what you do with it the important point (maybe you are importing an arena into your world and what you are doing in that arena is more important than how you built it)?
Do you have pride in what you have done in game? Would you be happy showing it off, along with explaining what tools were given to you to do so?
How much time per week do you have to play? How many weeks are you going to spend on your project? What parts of the resource gathering, design, construction, etc., do you enjoy and want to show off?
You used to be among my "balance police", often the most vocal critic of automation and powerful machinery. I am very pleased with this sudden change.
I would like to add a few suggestions:
(1) One thing that's continuously bothering me in RotaryCraft is that so many setups require a number of horizontally-aligned components: engine, gearbox(es), dynamometer (for some setups this is indispensable), machine, target machine. You can route things around corners and up but that requires additional space. It would be nice to be able to make more horizontally compact builds with things like vertically-oriented gearboxes, combined gearbox/bevel gear blocks (these two are my no 1 wish), CVTs with integrated dynamometers (there's space enough for that on the CVT I think) and suchlike. To be able to vertically-align some of the engines would also be nice.
Note that I don't mind the space requirements for highly specialized tasks, but this is a huge factor for standardized tasks like pulverizing or smelting, which so many other mods do more space-efficiently, and where the RotaryCraft version just means I can't integrate them into my workshop with all the other machines. This is all the more odd if you consider the other extreme, namely the Extractor, which does in one block what I'd expect to require a Mekanism-like setup.
(1a) In the same vein: Reactorcraft fuel rod blocks output their neutrons only horizontally (at least that's my current infromation). Since a reactor's efficiency depends on interaction between different components, that means I'm forced to extend my reactor components horizontally where I'd rather stack them, resulting in a flat expanse of components with one layer of piping above and below. Aesthetically, that's as unappealing as it comes. I'd like to see neutrons being emitted on all sides (which is realistic, I think) or if that's not feasible, I'd like to be able to rotate the reactor component blocks.
(2) Would you consider making some of the machine input/output sides configurable? Obviously for some it doesn't make sense, but the fermenter is a primary candidate.
(3) Sorry if this is already possible, but I haven't found a way to get liquid fuel out of engines. It is somewhat annoying to lose a few hundred buckets of jet fuel every time you move a microturbine or gas turbine. Alternative: implement a "pick up with the wrench" mechanic that lets the blocks retain fuel, settings etc..
(4) I've noticed a disabled feature "CCTV camera" in the handbook. Is there a reason why this is disabled? This was actually one of the features that made me install RotaryCraft, and it was disappointing to see it gone. I wanted to be able to monitor several parts of my base from a central location. It would be really nice to see this re-realized.
(1) One thing that's continuously bothering me in RotaryCraft is that so many setups require a number of horizontally-aligned components: engine, gearbox(es), dynamometer (for some setups this is indispensable), machine, target machine. You can route things around corners and up but that requires additional space. It would be nice to be able to make more horizontally compact builds with things like vertically-oriented gearboxes, combined gearbox/bevel gear blocks (these two are my no 1 wish), CVTs with integrated dynamometers (there's space enough for that on the CVT I think) and suchlike. To be able to vertically-align some of the engines would also be nice.
Note that I don't mind the space requirements for highly specialized tasks, but this is a huge factor for standardized tasks like pulverizing or smelting, which so many other mods do more space-efficiently, and where the RotaryCraft version just means I can't integrate them into my workshop with all the other machines. This is all the more odd if you consider the other extreme, namely the Extractor, which does in one block what I'd expect to require a Mekanism-like setup.
(1a) In the same vein: Reactorcraft fuel rod blocks output their neutrons only horizontally (at least that's my current infromation). Since a reactor's efficiency depends on interaction between different components, that means I'm forced to extend my reactor components horizontally where I'd rather stack them, resulting in a flat expanse of components with one layer of piping above and below. Aesthetically, that's as unappealing as it comes. I'd like to see neutrons being emitted on all sides (which is realistic, I think) or if that's not feasible, I'd like to be able to rotate the reactor component blocks.
(2) Would you consider making some of the machine input/output sides configurable? Obviously for some it doesn't make sense, but the fermenter is a primary candidate.
(3) Sorry if this is already possible, but I haven't found a way to get liquid fuel out of engines. It is somewhat annoying to lose a few hundred buckets of jet fuel every time you move a microturbine or gas turbine. Alternative: implement a "pick up with the wrench" mechanic that lets the blocks retain fuel, settings etc..
(4) I've noticed a disabled feature "CCTV camera" in the handbook. Is there a reason why this is disabled? This was actually one of the features that made me install RotaryCraft, and it was disappointing to see it gone. I wanted to be able to monitor several parts of my base from a central location. It would be really nice to see this re-realized.
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About the bedrock gear, balance and overpoweredness: There is no such thing as a correct balance in a game like Minecraft. As already mentioned, every player sets their own goals, and we play these games to have fun. For some that means a survival challenge, for some that means building cool and beautiful things. Consequently, it is absolutely legitimate to use "overpowered things" in order to avoid having to deal with things which aren't fun for you.
Yes, it is (usually) more satisfying if you have to work for your advantages, but that's an unrelated issue since as someone mentioned, it doesn't matter much how hard something is to achieve if its presence, once achieved, breaks a balance considered important by someone. Now the only "someone" that matters in SP games is you which means "OP-ness" is an intrinsically meaningless concept in SP sandbox games.
I think that "balance" and "OP" is all too often invoked by players who can't get out of a competitive mindset when they play games, and hate to see others play by different rules. To those, I can only answer: how I play is not your concern. Some people also appear to have a tendency to inappropriately invoke Protestant work ethics in the context of playing games. To those I say: no, hard work as such is not a virtue. In fact, is there is some easy way to achieve things, doing it the hard way is stupid. All of humanity's technological progress is based on this simple fact. Things are different only if by doing things the hard way, we learn something significant, but we usually learn that by doing things the hard way once, and then move on. The same people often think in terms of "you haven't earned that privilege", but who is the judge of that? You? Again it comes down to people trying to force others to play by their rules. Politics, in other words. I'd rather have people cultivate a "live and let live" attitude: it's nice these options are all there, and if I don't like them I don't have to use them.
Yes, it is (usually) more satisfying if you have to work for your advantages, but that's an unrelated issue since as someone mentioned, it doesn't matter much how hard something is to achieve if its presence, once achieved, breaks a balance considered important by someone. Now the only "someone" that matters in SP games is you which means "OP-ness" is an intrinsically meaningless concept in SP sandbox games.
I think that "balance" and "OP" is all too often invoked by players who can't get out of a competitive mindset when they play games, and hate to see others play by different rules. To those, I can only answer: how I play is not your concern. Some people also appear to have a tendency to inappropriately invoke Protestant work ethics in the context of playing games. To those I say: no, hard work as such is not a virtue. In fact, is there is some easy way to achieve things, doing it the hard way is stupid. All of humanity's technological progress is based on this simple fact. Things are different only if by doing things the hard way, we learn something significant, but we usually learn that by doing things the hard way once, and then move on. The same people often think in terms of "you haven't earned that privilege", but who is the judge of that? You? Again it comes down to people trying to force others to play by their rules. Politics, in other words. I'd rather have people cultivate a "live and let live" attitude: it's nice these options are all there, and if I don't like them I don't have to use them.
I tried this early on. The models just look wrong when oriented vertically.
They are also an implementation nightmare, and the fact even the 1:1 version has "gear" in the name will lead to endless people confusing them with the gearboxes.
I am not against this idea in theory, but I doubt there is enough space, as the text takes up the entirety of the side of the dynamometer model.
This is not going to happen. Not only does it suffer from the same problems as the vertical gearboxes, but it also overturns all the sided rules like "fuel in bottom, water in back", which were specified by the appearances of the model.
You already can stack reactors, and heat conduction is done vertically, so there is an advantage to multilayer setups. Additionally, having to manage neutrons in three dimensions is going to dramatically increase the complexity and difficulty of building reactors that actually work, as it means you now have to be able to account for neutrons escaping upwards and downwards, the majority of which are going to be lost, even with reflectors. As I see it, hot reactors will run even hotter, and others will run colder. Noone wins. Additionally, since you will only be able to usefully stack the same types of components on top of each other - a boiler with a fuel core above or below is useless, as is a fuel core with a boiler above or below - you gain less design complexity than I think you are assuming.
They already have internal logic to only accept valid input items and only output from the output slots. I do not see why you would want to lose the choice of which side to use to pump items in or out of, forcing the designs you build to work around some arbitrary rule. Additionally, the Fermenter has a redstone signal control for the selection of what it allows to be pumped in.
Right-click with an empty bucket.
It never worked as intended, and corrupted more than one world.
One, it allowed you to act "through" the camera, placing/breaking blocks and attacking mobs remotely.
Two, your movement controls were still active when looking through the camera, meaning that it effectively turned into a camera teleporter.
Three, if for any reason you left the game while having this "out of body experience" - which the game itself often ensured, kicking players for "Illegal Stance" - the world was permanently unloadable, even in vanilla minecraft and after deleting the player data.
Aesthetics are a consideration. Too bad.
I didn't know that. I guess I'll have to experiment when I get to building my reactors. Shouldn't be that long now. Point taken about the "vertical neutrons".
Umm....I was about to make an extended reply about how much better TE machines do this, but then I realized that if the fermenter worked like TE machines, I couldn't extract yeast from the same side I pump the water in. Anyway, an ethanol factory is a piping nightmare. Just consider that the fermenter that makes the sludge will have connections on all sides and the one that makes the yeast at least five sides. With EnderIO and AE the thing looks reasonably neat, but my previous design was aesthetically unsatisfying. I keep wondering if changes in the i/o configuration could make it easier to build a neat-looking ethanol factory.
You expect people to take 240 buckets of jet fuel out of an engine with a bucket?
That's just too bad. I recall that earlier versions of Portal Gun had see-through portals and that worked quite well back in the MC beta days. The feature has been removed since then, so it's probably something not so easy to get around.
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See it as encouragement to think about the placement of your engines rather than placing them, dumping a ton of fuel in for a few operations, and then moving them.
No, I expect people to try and realize that I set one ethanol bucket to be worth 4000mB and one jet fuel bucket to be worth 8000mB specifically to avoid that need, and have endless "bug" reports about it.
Do you realize just how untuitive that fact is? Let me tell you a story.
Ieldra is about to start up the fractionization unit for the first time. Input logistics? Check. Power? check. *Pulls lever, machine starts working*. Nice. *Shuts machine off* Now that I have some jet fuel (there are 2 buckets in the machine), I can make a bucket to configure my logistics. *Takes bucket, clicks on fractionization unit. Nothing happens.* Drat, don't tell me that's bugged. Well, let's see if I can get around that. *Places fluid import bus. Jet fuel goes into the only unformatted fluid storage unit.* OK, let's head over to the fluid terminal. *Selects jet fuel, places bucket in the terminal. Nothing happens*. Mentally addresses mod maker: "You can't be serious." *Tries other fluid containers. None of them work*. *Pumps the jet fuel out of a fluid interface into a BC tank, because I haven't seen any fluid that doesn't work with those. Clicks on tank with bucket. Nothing happens.* Thinks of screaming at the mod maker *Checks NEI* Ok, jet fuel buckets do exist, but I can't find a way to make one. Let's see if it's at all possible. *Cheats a jet fuel drum in, clicks with bucket. Jet fuel bucket appears in inventory. Throws drum away because after all, this is cheating*. So you can create the damned things. But what now? I can't believe things are supposed not to work that way. I guess I'll keep this bucket until that bug is fixed.
This was several weeks ago, and I've been taking very good care of that single jet fuel bucket because I knew there was no non-cheating way I could create another.
Note that this was after installing Rotarycraft broke my Forestry ethanol logistics (LP liquid suppliers and providers stopped working with Forestry ethanol), so I already expected strange things to happen with RoC fluids.
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Have you tried a fluid transposer?
Once you have the fluid into another container (BC tank or AE Fluid storage), have you tried putting into another logistics-friendly 1000mb container? (cells or cans or what have you)
I tried cans and capsules. They didn't work. If you check NEI you'll notice there are no 1000mB containers of jet fuel, and you'll see that all jet fuel containers tell you how much is in them - except for the bucket. I guess that's because after all, everyone knows that a bucket is a bucket.
Then it seems to me...For cross-mod friendliness, Reika should consider undoing the unconventional 4000/8000 bucket thing, which is a rather clever attempt to make people happy but has unintended consequences.
Too many "standard fluid" mechanisms just seem to get lost in the wake. If he's feeling really generous he might even add a native RoC "Fuel Drum" which lets you pull larger amounts out at a time, and doesn't conflict with the generally-understood workings of a smaller 1000mb container.
Reika, I don't really have a massive amount of patience for a snippy "your idea is stupid" argument to this, so I'll just apologize in advance if there are really good reasons that this is problematic and quietly withdraw the suggestion.
Too many "standard fluid" mechanisms just seem to get lost in the wake. If he's feeling really generous he might even add a native RoC "Fuel Drum" which lets you pull larger amounts out at a time, and doesn't conflict with the generally-understood workings of a smaller 1000mb container.
Reika, I don't really have a massive amount of patience for a snippy "your idea is stupid" argument to this, so I'll just apologize in advance if there are really good reasons that this is problematic and quietly withdraw the suggestion.
Stupid, no. Unnecessary, yes, as the fluid transposer is more than capable of multi-bucket recipes. That said, I probably have to add it manually. I will do that.
That is what this is for:
I realize that some of these last responses have been rather blunt, but I rather do not appreciate aggressive proclamations that I am doing something horribly wrongly and/or stupidly when evidence is given that something that to me is obvious was not even tried.
Except that this, too, wouldn've have worked since there wasn't enough jet fuel in the machine to fill a 8000mB bucket. I might actually have tried it, I don't recall that frustrating hour that well.Stupid, no. Unnecessary, yes, as the fluid transposer is more than capable of multi-bucket recipes. That said, I probably have to add it manually. I will do that.
That is what this is for:
I realize that some of these last responses have been rather blunt, but I rather do not appreciate aggressive proclamations that I am doing something horribly wrongly and/or stupidly when evidence is given that something that to me is obvious was not even tried.
If you had less than 8 buckets of jet fuel in the engine and the fractionator total, then you had less than five minutes of runtime off of that fuel in a Microturbine and less than 60 seconds in a Gas Turbine. That amount is small enough that when combined with the multiple-bucket-per-cycle output of the Fractionator you should not be as upset about its loss as you appear to be.
I think he's saying it was not intuitive. That isn't enough fuel to accomplish anything is also a good argument.
Perhaps using a custom fuel can instead of a bucket would remove the confusion. The issue appears to be that a bucket has prior expectations as to what it does or how much it holds. I'd be fine using a steel fuel can for adding and removing fuel, especially if it can do fractions of an unit of fuel.
Perhaps using a custom fuel can instead of a bucket would remove the confusion. The issue appears to be that a bucket has prior expectations as to what it does or how much it holds. I'd be fine using a steel fuel can for adding and removing fuel, especially if it can do fractions of an unit of fuel.