FTB Continuum Thoughts

[Nuclear_Creeper0]

No, not playing it. The inclusive of Tech Reborn is questionable at best. @GamerwithnoGame made this clear in @Closet Gamer's discord. Its a bug filled mod that doesn't work sometimes.
As for recipe changes, I do not approve of things like 1 log into 2 planks and 2 planks into 2 sticks. This is what I was worried about, difficulty is not tedium. They're different in a few major ways, difficulty is making a pack more challenging through recipe manipulation and more importantly CHANGING MOD MECHANICS, the best packs do this well, such as in Forever Stranded: Lost Souls, to make a Mana Pool, you need a luminous crafting table from Astral Sorcery. TEDIUM is something you want to avoid, Divine Journey, which is one of the most challenging 1.7.10 packs, has 1 log - 4 planks, same thing with Modern Skyblock 3, and Age of Engineering.

 

[Drbretto]

Curious. What's TechReborn do and what's buggy about it? Is there a viable alternative to it?

As for the planks/sticks thing, I'm not terribly worried about that. To me that's usually about limiting the yields on a tree farm to make it harder to make wood completely brainless. I don't know if that's the only way to do that or not, but it's not a big problem for me. I don't mind the grind. I think that's part of it. It just can't be the only thing.

 

[Pyure]

TechReborn is a spiritual successor for IndustrialCraft and early versions of GT.

Its great in theory but has a major flaw: boring RF-like power. IC2 and GT have multi-dimensional power, which require you to figure out ways to transport energy efficiently from A-B (e.g. uptransforming to higher voltage to avoid packet-loss, etc)

Also, as NC points out, its known to be a bit buggy.

Stuff like reducing wood -> planks: this is completely fun and legitimate if done correctly. See how GregTech did it. This sort of grind is an excellent game mechanic when used properly, e.g. "Just make a damn saw or cutting machine and stop whining". The alternative can be even more silly: making everything cost more wood.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

Chipping in about TechReborn; it still has things exploding though. Confusing and/or contradictory power indications, and daft stuff like not being able to be tiered to a higher voltage and yet taking too much power to keep supplied at the tier it IS at, non-upgradeable machines, and bugs like getting the wrong machine back when you wrench things sometimes, and the fusion reactor being unable to supply more power than it takes in, despite being designed to do so. Closet Gamer knows a lot about these issues having played with TR in Age of Engineering.

I'm not going to lie, horrified is not an understatement of the feeling I had when I saw TechReborn was in Continuum. Unless its had a LOT of improvements, I cannot fathom the thinking behind putting it in there, when there are quite a few other mods that could work in its place. Unless, of course, its mainly in there for the world gen. But I doubt that.

 

[Drbretto]

Well, @GamerwithnoGame is pretty rarely negative about anything, so that means something, lol

 

[LordPINE]

Haven't seen much of the pack yet, but I do know the 1 log to 2 planks thing is a bit stupid. It just draws out the earlygame, but by the time you have a tree farm, which is generally your go-to option for wood gathering, you'll still have more wood, planks and sticks than you could ever need.

 

[Nuclear_Creeper0]

Watched a couple youtube videos on it. No, this stupid EFab is so dumb, omg. HALF AN HOUR TO MAKE THE SMELTERY controller. HALF an hour. Nobody has time to wait for such things. @McJty, what have you done?

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

Watched a couple youtube videos on it. No, this stupid EFab is so dumb, omg. HALF AN HOUR TO MAKE THE SMELTERY controller. HALF an hour. Nobody has time to wait for such things. @McJty, what have you done?

Now, here I’ll disagree; while the decision for how long things take may be questionable, that’s not McJty’s fault. The EFab itself is bloody brilliant - it’s designed around allowing you to gate crafting in expert packs around all sorts of things, and I also really like its aesthetic too

 

[Drbretto]

What does the Environmental Financial Advisory Board have to do with minecraft?

Or a better question might be, what's EFAB mean in this context?

Edit: I can't sit through an LP waiting for this answer. I need someone who has that kind of attention span to translate.

 

[LordPINE]

Efab is basically fancy crafting table, which can accept fluids and power, and requires upgrades for certain recipes. That's about as short and simple as I can put it.

 

[Drbretto]

@GamerwithnoGame gave me a pretty decent description in the chat, too. Thank you!

 

[Golrith]

I use the wood to 2 planks in my mod pack, and it's not a grind at all. I have things even "worse", you can't make sticks directly, first sticks you can craft enmass is with tinkers tool rods, and to top it off, crafting torches only gives you 2 torches instead of 4. But I've also made it that some certain types of wood gives you 4 planks, you just gotta explore.

It adds a lot more demand to wood, which does get eliminated once you tech up (automated treefarm and a sawmill) which is the purpose of my pack. Early game processes are highly inefficient, tech solutions are the way to go. Get's me a lot, this is a game about building stuff & mining, and people complain about having to build & mine.

Tedium is easily avoided when there are multiple recipes for an item. The first recipe is the tedious version that you'll happily do once, the others should be a result of later technology making things "easier". If there's only the one recipe, then yes, sod that tedium!

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

The route @Golrith mentioned is very much what they did with Invasion - wood on a chopping block to start with, but later on you can build sawmills and such (I think they required the Advanced Rocketry one, which LOOKS the business ) to get it in an automated fashion.

I quite like that!

 

[McJty]

Watched a couple youtube videos on it. No, this stupid EFab is so dumb, omg. HALF AN HOUR TO MAKE THE SMELTERY controller. HALF an hour. Nobody has time to wait for such things. @McJty, what have you done?

EFab has ways to speed it up. And it isn't even that hard. Multiple gear boxes will considerably speed up the crafting

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

I knew there would be something like that

Also @McJty, am I right in thinking its aesthetic is to have a realistic brass-like colour? That's what I see when I look at it, but I'm not sure if I'm right on that.

 

[McJty]

I knew there would be something like that

Also @McJty, am I right in thinking its aesthetic is to have a realistic brass-like colour? That's what I see when I look at it, but I'm not sure if I'm right on that.

It is supposed to be brass like if that's what you mean?

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

It is supposed to be brass like if that's what you mean?

That's exactly what I meant, yeah It looks really good! Sometimes the texture colours people use are a bit over the top, whereas those actually look like the colour brass is - and the models are really nice too.

 

[Golrith]

The route @Golrith mentioned is very much what they did with Invasion - wood on a chopping block to start with, but later on you can build sawmills and such (I think they required the Advanced Rocketry one, which LOOKS the business ) to get it in an automated fashion.

I quite like that!

I liked that too. I'm always on the lookout to get crafting outside of the 2x2 or 3x3, even if it's something simple like a Forestry Carpenter recipe. Gets you as a player more involved in more mod content instead of crafting tables.

 

[Nedrith]

Chipping in about TechReborn; it still has things exploding though. Confusing and/or contradictory power indications, and daft stuff like not being able to be tiered to a higher voltage and yet taking too much power to keep supplied at the tier it IS at, non-upgradeable machines, and bugs like getting the wrong machine back when you wrench things sometimes, and the fusion reactor being unable to supply more power than it takes in, despite being designed to do so. Closet Gamer knows a lot about these issues having played with TR in Age of Engineering.

I'm not going to lie, horrified is not an understatement of the feeling I had when I saw TechReborn was in Continuum. Unless its had a LOT of improvements, I cannot fathom the thinking behind putting it in there, when there are quite a few other mods that could work in its place. Unless, of course, its mainly in there for the world gen. But I doubt that.

From what I've used in Age of Engineering Tech Reborn uses gregtech's power idea. Part of which is the idea that a machine can require 512 EU/T to operate but only accept 128 EU/T/P. The part your supposed to figure out is that it's 128 EU per tick per a packet it can accept. IC2's power system allows for unlimited packets to be sent through a cable. So if you have a transformer taking 512/EU/T it can down transform it to 4 128 EU/T packets so that the machine receives full power. Of course you have to take into account power loss.

IC2's power system has a lot of interesting features that makes it better IMO compared to RF which is basically at this point just connect the wires and everything works.

As for 1 wood to 2 planks it's a expert pack you are expected to find ways to get around restrictions like that. A bigger tree farm would be one way but quite boring, automating something like a TE sawmill would be another. Balancing a expert pack between making it just grindy instead of hard and still making it fun is hard. However it's even harder when people try to stay stuck with the old ways of doing things and don't look at the new methods. The problem with the 1 wood to 4 planks recipe is that it simply made other methods of making planks pointless.

 

[Pyure]

From what I've used in Age of Engineering Tech Reborn uses gregtech's power idea. Part of which is the idea that a machine can require 512 EU/T to operate but only accept 128 EU/T/P. The part your supposed to figure out is that it's 128 EU per tick per a packet it can accept. IC2's power system allows for unlimited packets to be sent through a cable. So if you have a transformer taking 512/EU/T it can down transform it to 4 128 EU/T packets so that the machine receives full power. Of course you have to take into account power loss.

Am I crazy here? My understanding is that TR couldn't do anything like GT because it has no concept of packets. Everything just gets transformed into Forge energy under the hood.

You might be able to sort-of-fake-it by restricting yourself to actual IC2 or GT cables to move your power around, but you could get around it by using RF or FE cables instead.

Disclaimer: I have no real significant testing done with TR.