Regarding WASD controls in the lexicon: I, for one, never would've thought to try that without learning about it here. I managed to read through all the info fragments by pulling them out of the Creative book three at a time, placing them into an empty book, opening it, reading them, then deleting the book, replacing it with a fresh-spawned empty book, and repeating the process with the next three fragments in the creative book. It worked, but it was very slow and painful, not to mention out of order.
Possible solutions: Either detect when the player tries to click and drag and pop up a little WASD graphic as a clue, or add scroll buttons to the GUI. The latter could take the form of a button with an arrow on each edge of the interface, and clicking them would scroll in that direction. Or just put a video on your website and/or forum thread that explains how to use the darned book. Or, if you'd rather keep all the documentation within the mod itself and don't mind breaking the fourth wall a little on just one thing, you could make the lexicon start off with a single page entitled "How to Use the Chromic Lexicon" or something.
Other lexicon gripes (and forgive me if these have been fixed since the first version of v3, which is what I'm running):
- The cooldown on clicking buttons. It's especially annoying in the 2D layouts of multiblock structures in general, and the Lumen Tree in particular, because it's hard to tell how many identical layers of crystalline stone you clicked through when there's no indication that a click was skipped because it was too soon after you clicked the last time. Also, paging through the recipes just seems to take forever. Much longer than in the RoC/ReC books.
- Whenever you click on something in the lexicon, the cursor jumps to some random place on the screen. Granted, it was usually closer to where I was going to click next than where the cursor was before, but that may only be because the three pages that I only ever put into the book at a time usually only appeared at the bottom of the interface.
- I find it annoying that hitting Escape while looking at any part of the lexicon closes the interface entirely. I may just be used to using that key to back out of a page in the Thaumonomicon, but I really don't like having to hit that X button all the time. Especially when my cursor keeps jumping around.
- Also, I don't see the point in the two tabs. There's rarely more than one page of information in the first tab, so why not just move the crafting recipes and rune placements and such to the second, third, and fourth pages?
- The 3D layouts are nearly useless, especially for things like the casting multiblocks. It's impossible to tell whether those holes in the line of quartz blocks are due to vertical pillars, or horizontal beams, or anything else that you can't really see. Most obvious fix (to me, at least) would be to render the most distant blocks first, then the nearer ones on top of them. Then you could actually see which blocks are in front of which other blocks.
- Wait, you can rotate the 3D layouts? If so, make that more obvious by either providing some kind of visual cue or explaining it in a video.
- The lumen tree is hardly explained at all. There's a recipe for the "controller" blocks, and there's a layout of the multiblock structure, and there's a thing that says something bad/good/weird might happen if you break the leaves, but nowhere does it say what the tree actually does, or how to use it. I set one up away from my other ChromatiCraft stuff and clicked all over it with the wand thing wondering what I was doing wrong.
Other gripes (again, I'm using an outdated version, FYI):
The main thing is the black-screen bug with Thaumcraft warp, but I see that's already going to be fixed sometime.
Also, the thing where your maximum charge triples or quadruples when you max out all sixteen colors, while a cool mechanic, is maddening. It makes it impossible to be fully charged, which really bugs my OCD. The first time, flying around to the different pylons (the compass thing helped a lot) was kind of fun, then when I realized I had to do it again, I set up teleporters to all the different pylons; by the time I finished going through it the third time and found that there STILL wasn't an upper limit, I gave up because it felt too grindy. I just want to have all sixteen colors maxed out.
I guess this isn't a very big problem, but a ritual that would increase your max capacity that only works if all sixteen colors are already at the current maximum level would fix it nicely. Doesn't have to be much, just as long as it doesn't happen the moment I thought I was finished.
Now on to less gripey suggestions:
Some way to tell what blocks each repeater is actually connected to would be nice. If the repeaters just shot a particle at all the other blocks they're connected to (i.e. all pylons, casting tables, and (most importantly) repeaters of the same color within range) when you place them on top of a rune, that would do quite nicely. It only needs to happen once- if I know that any given repeater was connected to the next repeater when I placed it, I can assume that it'll stay that way. If it turns out to be easier to add some sort of magical Angular Transducer, that might even be better, because it would help debug my network if a tree grows in the way of a repeater somewhere or something.
Also, some sort of in-world multiblock building guide, similar to the one for the ReC fusion reactor, would be nice, especially for the casting multiblocks. It's just so annoying when you have to click through five or six pages to make sure you put a block or pillar in the right place, especially when you have to wait half a second between each click.
