Before FTB, I played a lot of Tekkit. First on my own server with 3 other friends. Then later, on 2 different public servers. One public server banned all of EE because they said it was too powerful. The other server allowed it and had different restrictions based on rank and donations, etc. On the server which allowed EE, you could warp to a "richworld" dimension with a redmatter hammer and an alchemical bag, then go down to diamond level and collect absolutely ridiculous amounts of material. I collected 1100 diamonds worth of goods in about an hour one time. That was the last time I played, because it really gave me a strong sense of "WTF is the point".
When we played on my server (before we tried the public ones), we had no restrictions or anything because it was just the 4 of us. We quickly discovered the Energy Condenser and our playstyle entirely changed. No more were the endless walls of chests full of cobblestone or other too-common items. When we played Vanilla minecraft, we had a ridiculous amount of overflow chests. I even made a whole storeroom in the nether to manage it.
But once we played with mods that included EE, suddenly storage consisted of maybe 1-3 stacks of a particular type of item. Whenever we needed anything in quantity, the usual method was to go to the Energy Condenser, drop the item in the upper left slot, and chuck a couple diamonds or whatever into the "Magic Box" as we called it, and poof suddenly we had plenty of whatever we need. I built a whole huge house out of Nether Brick just by going to the nether and bringing home 1 brick from a fortress as a template.
Another major change in our playstyle was that we noticed a complete lack of necessity to farm. When you can turn stone and wood into cooked beef instantly, suddenly all agricultural requirements go away. Mining also became just an EMC-hunt. No more did we look for anything specific underground or get excited upon finding something rare. Just scoop it all up, toss it in the Magic Box, and store everything in the form of Redmatter. We'd set up quarrys and pump the output into an enderchest, which teleports everything back to the base where the Magic Box would sit there and abosrb it all. No longer were any complex tubes or creative sorting and processing techniques necessary. The game was reduced to one and only one goal: The acquisition of EMC.
We quickly discovered that just from this one item, about 85% of the rest of the game became redundant and inefficient. And it wasn't long after that when the game became fairly boring, and we stopped playing. We used to go on adventures together, venturing off into far away unexplored areas, and wandering around the labyrinth of caves fighting off monsters and risking falling into lava, on the quest to find more diamonds or other goodies. But all of that stopped dead in its tracks once we had a Magic Box.
So what's this? The Energy Condenser wrecked the game? Yeah, I think it did. For us, anyway. I know this is a much beloved machine for a lot of people, and when I heard EE3 was getting rid of it, I was fairly ambivalent about it. I really enjoy the convenience of the Condenser. You can't beat its ease of use and how amazingly abundant ALL your building needs become. But at what cost? I think it comes with the cost of adventure, as in it kills the adventure of the game.
After getting bored with the public server, I switched back to a single player game, and I had to decide whether I would allow myself to use the condenser or not. What I came up with was a rule for myself where I would only use it to convert lower EMC things into higher EMC things. That means if I need a whole lot of bricks, I can't just chuck a diamond in and get a castle's worth of bricks instantly. Gotta go collect dirt cobble etc, then convert it up. Likewise, if I need a diamond, I can sacrifice some metal ingots for it, but that usually comes at a high cost in metal supply then. But maintaining this discipline is hard. When you need something, and a machine is right there that can give it to you, its very hard to not take advantage of that. So I think its probably best that it won't be included in EE3.
One thing I'd like to mention though, and its a tough situation that the Condenser solves readily: Many items in the game are unusually rare. Like ink sacs (I don't know why but sometimes I can search the ocean for ages and not find one squid). Or Blaze Rods, Ender Pearls, etc. Yet these are now ingredients in quite a few recipes. With a condenser handy, you only need to discover an item once, and then you have an endless supply. Even Glowstone can be very tough to get once you've harvested all the easy clusters in the nether. Without the ability to convert common items into these rare items, I've noticed that it pushes the search beyond the "adventure" point, where its no longer a fun search but a tedious one because you really want that writing desk darn it, and where are the dang squids? lol.
Anyway, I thought I'd share my story on how one machine almost ruined the whole game for me. Since not using it recently, I find a whole host of other tools and contraptions suddenly coming back into validity.
When we played on my server (before we tried the public ones), we had no restrictions or anything because it was just the 4 of us. We quickly discovered the Energy Condenser and our playstyle entirely changed. No more were the endless walls of chests full of cobblestone or other too-common items. When we played Vanilla minecraft, we had a ridiculous amount of overflow chests. I even made a whole storeroom in the nether to manage it.
But once we played with mods that included EE, suddenly storage consisted of maybe 1-3 stacks of a particular type of item. Whenever we needed anything in quantity, the usual method was to go to the Energy Condenser, drop the item in the upper left slot, and chuck a couple diamonds or whatever into the "Magic Box" as we called it, and poof suddenly we had plenty of whatever we need. I built a whole huge house out of Nether Brick just by going to the nether and bringing home 1 brick from a fortress as a template.
Another major change in our playstyle was that we noticed a complete lack of necessity to farm. When you can turn stone and wood into cooked beef instantly, suddenly all agricultural requirements go away. Mining also became just an EMC-hunt. No more did we look for anything specific underground or get excited upon finding something rare. Just scoop it all up, toss it in the Magic Box, and store everything in the form of Redmatter. We'd set up quarrys and pump the output into an enderchest, which teleports everything back to the base where the Magic Box would sit there and abosrb it all. No longer were any complex tubes or creative sorting and processing techniques necessary. The game was reduced to one and only one goal: The acquisition of EMC.
We quickly discovered that just from this one item, about 85% of the rest of the game became redundant and inefficient. And it wasn't long after that when the game became fairly boring, and we stopped playing. We used to go on adventures together, venturing off into far away unexplored areas, and wandering around the labyrinth of caves fighting off monsters and risking falling into lava, on the quest to find more diamonds or other goodies. But all of that stopped dead in its tracks once we had a Magic Box.
So what's this? The Energy Condenser wrecked the game? Yeah, I think it did. For us, anyway. I know this is a much beloved machine for a lot of people, and when I heard EE3 was getting rid of it, I was fairly ambivalent about it. I really enjoy the convenience of the Condenser. You can't beat its ease of use and how amazingly abundant ALL your building needs become. But at what cost? I think it comes with the cost of adventure, as in it kills the adventure of the game.
After getting bored with the public server, I switched back to a single player game, and I had to decide whether I would allow myself to use the condenser or not. What I came up with was a rule for myself where I would only use it to convert lower EMC things into higher EMC things. That means if I need a whole lot of bricks, I can't just chuck a diamond in and get a castle's worth of bricks instantly. Gotta go collect dirt cobble etc, then convert it up. Likewise, if I need a diamond, I can sacrifice some metal ingots for it, but that usually comes at a high cost in metal supply then. But maintaining this discipline is hard. When you need something, and a machine is right there that can give it to you, its very hard to not take advantage of that. So I think its probably best that it won't be included in EE3.
One thing I'd like to mention though, and its a tough situation that the Condenser solves readily: Many items in the game are unusually rare. Like ink sacs (I don't know why but sometimes I can search the ocean for ages and not find one squid). Or Blaze Rods, Ender Pearls, etc. Yet these are now ingredients in quite a few recipes. With a condenser handy, you only need to discover an item once, and then you have an endless supply. Even Glowstone can be very tough to get once you've harvested all the easy clusters in the nether. Without the ability to convert common items into these rare items, I've noticed that it pushes the search beyond the "adventure" point, where its no longer a fun search but a tedious one because you really want that writing desk darn it, and where are the dang squids? lol.
Anyway, I thought I'd share my story on how one machine almost ruined the whole game for me. Since not using it recently, I find a whole host of other tools and contraptions suddenly coming back into validity.
