Exploits in mindcrack?

[tyler f]

A friend of mine is starting a mindcrack server soon and I am trying to figure out any exploit I should mention to him to try to fix so we can get the most balanced play experience possible. Also taking any suggestions to better balance it so each option for power is appealing.

Just share anything gamebreaking/abusable in SMP here so we can try to fix it.

 

[Guswut]

The biggest exploit I can think of involves RedPower 2, and I'm not sure it can be disabled unless you have an addon to disable certain items from being used, or by disabling RedPower 2 entirely.

That is the only one I can think of offhand. I am sure there are likely more, though. Maybe review the Mod Pack Bugs forum (http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/forums/the-mod-pack-bugs.26/)?

 

[trunksbomb]

As far as "fixing" exploits so you get the most balanced experience.. why not refrain from exploiting things in the first place? They might be there but you don't have to use them (lava power in some of the first editions of the pack).

The modpack itself is pretty balanced, especially with Gregtech in there. You'll be hard pressed to find anything extremely unbalanced.

The biggest exploit I can think of involves RedPower 2, and I'm not sure it can be disabled unless you have an addon to disable certain items from being used, or by disabling RedPower 2 entirely.

That is the only one I can think of offhand. I am sure there are likely more, though. Maybe review the Mod Pack Bugs forum (http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/forums/the-mod-pack-bugs.26/)?

If you're talking about the canvas bag dupe, I've never replicated that in normal play. I don't know the steps for it but I feel like it's something you have to do intentionally.
I believe there is a recipe blacklist somewhere, isn't there?

 

[Lambert2191]

blockbreaker vs autocrafting bench mk2 doubles whatever is in it

 

[b0bst3r]

There's a few dupes in recent packs and no I'm not listing them all so others have easy access to them, go search

 

[Antice]

I believe that the traincraft steel recipe is still available.
this gives you 4x the amount of steel as the iron input at the cost of a a little clay.
using that steel to make tracks allow you to get the iron out by recycling them in the alloy furnace.

Since refined iron and the other steels are able to stand in for Railcraft steel in all railcraft recipes, i recommend disabling the railcraft steel in the configs.

 

[trunksbomb]

Traincraft steel has been made to only allow making one recipe at a time in the Mindcrack pack, to prevent this exploit.

 

[Antice]

Traincraft steel has been made to only allow making one recipe at a time in the Mindcrack pack, to prevent this exploit.

That is not a fix.
The recipe itself allows you to make steel, and quite a lot of it on your first day without requiring any of the normal prerequisites.
Al it takes is some coal,clay and iron and you are good to go. the only "hard" item to get is the redstone for the pistons used in the traincraft crafting bench.
Didn't prevent me from having a full suit of steel armor and tools before the second night on a test map. with some luck on the copper and rubber, you can be fully decked with power-tools too within 2 days.
The whole point of gregtech hard mode was to slow the starting phase down some. the traincraft steel almost completely nullifies this effect. the fact that the mindcrackers have TE on easy kinda nullifies the rest of the hard part of Gregtech as well, making the standard config rather broken imho.

 

[Zjarek_S]

There is almost infinite number of exploits for fast XP, which can't be simply disabled. Redpower tweaks should take care of canvas bad duplication.

 

[jumpfight5]

Traincraft steel has been made to only allow making one recipe at a time in the Mindcrack pack, to prevent this exploit.

I hate that. I mean, I'm not gonna dupe, I just want some steel! (Yeah, I guess I can use my Industrial Blast furnace, but that requires more infrastructure by only using a certain amount of the iron instead of just dumping it in like I'd want to.

 

[tyler f]

As far as "fixing" exploits so you get the most balanced experience.. why not refrain from exploiting things in the first place? They might be there but you don't have to use them (lava power in some of the first editions of the pack).

The modpack itself is pretty balanced, especially with Gregtech in there. You'll be hard pressed to find anything extremely unbalanced.


If you're talking about the canvas bag dupe, I've never replicated that in normal play. I don't know the steps for it but I feel like it's something you have to do intentionally.
I believe there is a recipe blacklist somewhere, isn't there?

It will be a public server so there will obviously be people willing to exploit it. That is why I have to prevent things like this. Thanks for the info so far guys, but don't bother mentioning it if you don't want to post the details because I have to know what it is to be able to stop it.

 

[Abdiel]

Completely disable the uncrafting table of TF. I will not go listing all the exploits and dupes with it for you, suffice to say there are many.

I don't know if the Forge Lexicon comes in whitelist mode by default nowadays, but definitely switch it into this mode. Only explicitly allow ingots and dusts to be converted, nothing else has any business being there.

Disable burning scrap in generators. Since burning it gives you more power than is needed (on average) to create scrap, this is essentially an EU duping machine.

Not really an exploit, but if you want a more diverse and interesting experience, tune down the output of all IC2 solars and geothermal generators. At the default setting pretty much everyone and their mother will be using one of these. TC steel has been talked about already.

 

[Vixation]

i don't know if it's intended or not, but you can craft XY-Craft bricks into 4 of their respective color 'ingots', thus quadruple-ing your Xycorium ingots
also i heard something about reverse-crafting slimeballs into propolis?

 

[tyler f]

Completely disable the uncrafting table of TF. I will not go listing all the exploits and dupes with it for you, suffice to say there are many.

I don't know if the Forge Lexicon comes in whitelist mode by default nowadays, but definitely switch it into this mode. Only explicitly allow ingots and dusts to be converted, nothing else has any business being there.

Disable burning scrap in generators. Since burning it gives you more power than is needed (on average) to create scrap, this is essentially an EU duping machine.

Not really an exploit, but if you want a more diverse and interesting experience, tune down the output of all IC2 solars and geothermal generators. At the default setting pretty much everyone and their mother will be using one of these. TC steel has been talked about already.

Thanks for this, exactly the kind of thing I need to hear. If there's more, please share if you guys know.

 

[Dravarden]

Arcane workbench: place something that has an output, break the table, you get the output and the items used to craft it.

 

[tyler f]

Arcane workbench: place something that has an output, break the table, you get the output and the items used to craft it.

Thanks. Any good idea to solve this?

 

[Guswut]

Thanks. Any good idea to solve this?

The majority of exploits are not things you can "solve" as a server owner. They are things that you have to either accept, or build around. A way to solve it would be to disable ThaumCraft. Besides that, I doubt you'll be able to fix it, as it isn't as if they have an entry in the config file that says "allowExploitOfArcaneWorkbench=TRUE".

 

[Dravarden]

Azanor said is a known bug and he will fix it in the next version

(I posted the same thing earlier today but maybe it didn't got posted...)

 

[Abdiel]

A very roundabout way of doing it would be to disable crafting of the workbench, and give everyone who wants to start TC an infusion altar for free.

However, regardless of what you do, you can't always patch up all the holes without ruining legit people's experience. In my opinion the right way to run a server is (in addition to, not instead of patching exploits) monitor how people are doing, and when someone suddenly starts building with diamond blocks or something, find out what's up, and ban on first strike if your logs show something fishy. (You do keep logs and regular backups, right?)

 

[tyler f]

A very roundabout way of doing it would be to disable crafting of the workbench, and give everyone who wants to start TC an infusion altar for free.

However, regardless of what you do, you can't always patch up all the holes without ruining legit people's experience. In my opinion the right way to run a server is (in addition to, not instead of patching exploits) monitor how people are doing, and when someone suddenly starts building with diamond blocks or something, find out what's up, and ban on first strike if your logs show something fishy. (You do keep logs and regular backups, right?)

It is a lot of manual labor and more importantly, uncertainty, and the last thing I would want to happen is for someone innocent to be banned.