Computer Craft

[gattsuru]

Or you could just use MFR. Which is what everyone does on all the RR testing servers. Cheaper, more reliable, easier, more options. It is not that big a deal. There is ONE outstanding issue with Dartcraft, but BlueDart is gonna clear that up and PowerCrystals is routing around it anyways.

The Grinder requires not-trivial amounts of power, and with a trivially-designed system will almost always cost more (gold, redstone, and iron, in the default recipe) in addition to infrastructure requirements. On versions without tool durability, a Melee Turtle can swing away until the server closes.

((And MFR's got a number of good points, but machine cost balance really isn't the mod's focus. It's there so you don't have to think about any of the mechanics it interacts with. Most of the balancing concepts, as far as I can tell, emphasize having to deal with all the piping, energy concerns, and logistical matters.))

Except to write the code, make sure its fed, etc.

If you want it to do /well/, and do it yourself, yes. The systems complexity actually outstrips the code complexity for a good miner, defined by a miner that can self-feed, automatically return to base/a charging station, and carefully keeps itself to a square boundary or focus on specific layers, and handles server restarts, and so on. That is a fun challenge, and honestly the reward is a little underwhelming for what you put into it compared to a Quarry.

A bad miner doesn't need to do that. Stripping a small area to bedrock and climbing back up is trivial from a coding perspective, after which you can manually trade items and feed the turtle easily. Putting a bunch of turtles side-by-side, telling them to mine in one direction, and then coming back later, is a very, very simple thing, but simultaneously opens a lot of gameplay space that are pretty questionable.

((And tend to be server unfriendly when it goes wrong, between the fountains of loose items and the potentially wasted material, but that's a concern in most automated mines.))

No, it's not the sort of broken that can cause the game to collapse into infinite diamonds, or anything like that. And there's a lot of really good things that Computers can do, and probably /shouldn't/ be attempted using vanilla. It's more the question of uncomfortable design space, which can negate a number of things in other mods.

 

[KirinDave]

The Grinder requires not-trivial amounts of power, and with a trivially-designed system will almost always cost more (gold, redstone, and iron, in the default recipe) in addition to infrastructure requirements. On versions without tool durability, a Melee Turtle can swing away until the server closes.

The grinder is superior in all aspects. There's 0 reasons not to go with the grinder. It's not like you're not going to be setting up power ever. The CC version of this farm is awkward and ineffective compared to most other options, by my reading. The MFR stuff is not "cheap" in the sense that it runs on nothing, but it also works a heck of a lot better and the power requirements are "modest." You can easily run it off solar power even from the MJ world.

If you want it to do /well/, and do it yourself, yes. The systems complexity actually outstrips the code complexity for a good miner, defined by a miner that can self-feed, automatically return to base/a charging station, and carefully keeps itself to a square boundary or focus on specific layers, and handles server restarts, and so on. That is a fun challenge, and honestly the reward is a little underwhelming for what you put into it compared to a Quarry.

I've got designs that'll outperform the quarry I am hoping to show off. DireWolf20's design does have one key insight that I've been harping on for awhile, "Turtles don't intercommunicate enough."

A bad miner doesn't need to do that. Stripping a small area to bedrock and climbing back up is trivial from a coding perspective, after which you can manually trade items and feed the turtle easily. Putting a bunch of turtles side-by-side, telling them to mine in one direction, and then coming back later, is a very, very simple thing, but simultaneously opens a lot of gameplay space that are pretty questionable.

Again, underwhelming compared to the quarry or the mining laser.

No, it's not the sort of broken that can cause the game to collapse into infinite diamonds, or anything like that. And there's a lot of really good things that Computers can do, and probably /shouldn't/ be attempted using vanilla. It's more the question of uncomfortable design space, which can negate a number of things in other mods.

The point I really wanna make: This is a fundamental problem with mixed modpack play. It's not specific to ComputerCraft. The only "balanced" modpacks in a real sense are usually very uninteresting, and are like, "Forestry, Buildcraft, and don't add Natura because uh oh!" Or "IC2, Buildcraft, and Gregtech". Basically everything else blows up.

All you can do is try and keep all the options interesting for some sub-segment of the population and not make anyone feel stupid for not doing something. One of the reasons I pulled Ars Magica from RR is because it was just increasingly clear that everyone felt obligated to set up fabricator networks. I hoped that wouldn't happen, but in the end the space began to collapse as everyone realized how much more stuff they could have to build their cool castles, per unit time.

ComputerCraft is nowhere near that and people who say it's OP usually don't realize how good other options are. CC builds are, by and large, showoff/challenge builds. And I love the idea. And there are types of automation only CC can do. But let's face it, that's a very small segment of the things.