FTBUnleashed. First Impressions.

And I can agree with the idea that the 2nd-teir is a bit to easy. But this should matter little in SSP as you can opt to just not use them until you feel you is right.

But there are also other ways to as you put throw your production through the roof. Off hand turtles being the most obvus cheap and easy setup that you having running before you got to teir 2.

Found items as a gating system for tiers IMHO is the worst way to do things. Random is Random and it can screw over players. What would be better is cost for either the teir 2 patterns or tier 2 table to go up. but sadly those rarely are ture gating systems and more just added grind.

The best balnce for many mods you feel are OP is self control. Unless we are talking about infinate loops or the such.

 

Maybe it would be good to nerf the tool mechanics themselves. For the hammer, would it be unreasonable to make the 3x3 effect work only on stone blocks, making it so you have to mine ores individually? Still an upgrade, but not so much of a game-breaker

 

Is it a gamebreaker though? It is still more labour intensive than automatic mining/tunneling and they do take up a considerable amount of resources/effort to make (especially if you want to do it out of manyullyn/cobalt/ardite). It makes life easier (or increases the speed of effort --> reward) for manual miners which is probably fair considering the collection of mechanics available in modded minecraft when played competitively have in the past selected heavily against manual mining. If you aren't playing competitively on a server, the best way of controlling balance is, as Saice correctly said, is choose what to use and what to ignore according to your preferences and stick to that. If you are playing competitively then there are still probably better ways of mining than the hammer.

I have a silly idea that you could take on if you wanted to use Tinker's tools but wanted to artificially increase the cost of them to whatever level of balance that you feel is appropriate. When casting a tool you could make a material sacrifice to the god Hephaestus to let you use the tool. You could have a redstone door into your forge that you need to drop an expensive item (of a predefined type) into a nearby system that detects the item and emits redstone, opening the door.

 

Heh, I like your spirit, that kind of self discipline is hard though.

 

You're right! It is hard. That's why I suggested the redstone gate. You won't find me doing that though... well actually I would enjoy setting up the door but I would probably make the sacrifice a stick or something. Maybe raw meat (only after I have set up one of my mega farms though).

 

Self Discipline is never easy. But it is something someone builds up over time.

Point in case. Look at my project 90%+ of that is all hand mined and after I made the mining laser drill I actually ended up turning it off becuase it was messing with my playstyle to much. I avoided much of the automation people do. Was it harder then say quarring everything up and building a huge AE atuomatic build everything on command sort of thing? Sure. But it is what I enjoy so I just choice what to and not to use or do.

 

I have 1 thing to say... Adding mapwriter

 

I can attest to the fact that this is true. Still crazy.

 

The Unleashed pack password appears to still be broken. Does everyone here know something I don't, or are we just getting impressions from the mod lineup?

 

I'd do this if I didn't have RSI on my right hand. It has gotten to a point where I play MC with my left hand using the mouse. So anything that results in clicking, the better for me. This just happens to be automation. I'm still trying to figure out how to bind left and right clicks to keyboard keys (or at least right click). I remember trying it once and it didn't work.

 

Just remember that Tinkers' Construct is mainly balanced around Vanilla.

 

You're using a whole stack of materials instead of three ingots and a stick. The resulting tool better be amazing, no matter how many resources you have thanks to your quarries.
Unless you believe mining is an exploit.

 

Not only that, but if you want a half decent tool you have to dump a lot of resources into it for the upgrades. What was it, 50 blocks of lapis to guarantee fortune 3, 50 redstone for speed, a diamond and gold block for one extra modifier, a nether star for another. And unless you add electric to it you're looking at resources cost to repair it AND repairs cost more over time. For electric on a hammer you also need something to recharge the tools (MPS with energy generation works well) since without on-the-fly recharges you're only breaking roughly 20 sets of 9 blocks (plus or minus a few if reinforced) until it needs to be recharged.

So yes, they're good, but if you don't build it properly and have the infrastructure to properly support it it gets expensive quick.

 

There are two problems with TC right now:

1. Getting Luck with Mining. Putting 1 Piece of Lapis on a Hammer and Grind it up to Fortune III is very easy.
2. Netherrack. It destroys the whole purpose of the cool NetherOres because it is so cheap and incredible at mining. Get a ToolStation and a Stack of Netherrack in your inventory and you have a neverending Netherrack-Hammer, that can mine all Overworld-Ores.

Also I think the ArmorPiercing ability from the Rapier should be moved to one of the HighTier Weapons. Because it is a very nice effect, which is quite strong for a cheap weapon like the rapier, while the cleaver on the other hand is lacking a bit in terms of power. Also the new XP-Bushes are a bit too common.

The problem with TC is not so much the highend stuff. My Hammer did cost me 24 Netherrack, 3 Steel and 1 Lapis and I only repair it up to about 70% to never lose all of the stonebound-bonus and it also keeps a nice mining-speed. You could use Manyullyn instead of Steel for even more Durability, but reinforced is nice and I found the steel in a chest anyway. Also Repaircosts only increase if you add more modifiers. More modifiers mean less durability-gain per Item put in. But even after getting Full Fortune III on the Hammer it only took about 20 Netherrack to repair it fully, so I did about 4 Repairs, which is quite a long time. I tried Repair, but with another modifier I already needed about 30 Netherrack for a full repair and repair is too slow for Hammers.

But well TC is not as bad as Dartcrafts Fortune and Looting IV.

 

Repair costs don't only go up from adding upgrades. If you repair a tool enough you'll eventually start to see it cost double the amount it took to repair it before, and it can go even higher. For my starter hammer, for example, it can be repaired to full with about 4-5 cobble, yet after a while it starts taking 10+ cobble, and this is without upgrades.

 

That's kinda scary if you're using a manyullyn tool without auto-repair. D:

 

right now I noticed there's a bug with TiC and it's electric upgrade. if you apply an electric upgrade, you'll have infinite durability
because for some reason, the electric upgrade doesn't drain any EU, heck, you can even use a tool with an electric upgrade without even charging it.

 

Unless it was introduced again in the version in Unleashed that bug should've been fixed already. Are you wearing any MPS armor? If you are it will refill the tools.

Also, Many tools will take massive amounts of time to actually break if built right, so the repairs wouldn't be too bad. Just look at the early hammers (stone head, 2 flint plates, wood handle) and notice that it has less than 2k dur yet can break tons of blocks before needing repairs. Now make it 20k+ dur with reinforced 3 and you'll see repairs aren't too horrible if you have the proper stuff setup. Hopefully mDiyo will add a higher tier electric upgrade for the higher tier tools though, since as mentioned above a single charge only lasts about 20 hammer uses (when i's not borked of course).

 

What? No, it isn't. Even if you put one little piece of Lapis in your tool and it starts saying "Luck", no effect will be added to it until it starts saying "Fortune n" as well. And if you don't cheese everything by abusing Twilight Forest hollow hills, getting those 450 pieces of Lapis can and most likely will take a while.

Speaking of the electric modifier, for some reason I've never cared about it. Maybe I'll put it on my stonebound/spiny stuff once they reach 1 durability.

 

This map looks horrible.