GregTech Debate Thread

[Bluehorazon]

What is "unbalanced" and why it is bad? Is iron pickaxe unbalansed, because it lasts much longer than wooden one and digs faster? Iron and diamond drills fits nicely in tool progression, between iron/copper pickaxe and enchanted diamond pickaxe.

Well... the normal drill is as fast as the diamond-pick and has 200 Uses. So 7,5 Drill charges is a Diamond-Pick. Thats 75.000 EU or 19 pieces of charcoal. So instead of a diamond-pick you could just use a Drill, a Generator and 19 pieces of charcoal to do everything a diamond-Pick can do besides mining obsidian (something that you normally don't need to do very often, never in FTB). Even if you don't have a Batpack you can just take the Generator with you place it down, put the charcoal and the drill inside and refill it. After that you can just remove the Generator and put it back in your inventory. But well a Batpack is not really expensive too.

I donno, im kinda actually going to ignore most of this thread (I'm sure a lot of it is whining any way) and just voice what i think as i have been playing around with GT a bit.

::tries to find something nice to say about it::
I like how it uses steel for the drill and chainsaw. I like mods that create bridges between major mods like that. More then just linking power, cause well that's Totally over done now.
However, I feel upping the recipe for solar panels was a bit too... time consuming. I dunno if it was just me but I found the industrial Centerfuge moved too slowly, to the point i found i wasn't getting ANY thing accomplished by even having it hooked up in the first place. Just to get the stupid silicon cell.. (Maybe i was using it wrong i donno). Also kinda doing the math, the work it would take to make a solar panel that way, it would take days for that solar panel to make it back. If it takes me that long to gain profit off of it's production there's no point in making it in the first place. When I would make a Geothremal set up from out of the nether. (Yea I did set one DW20s geo thermal set ups in the amount of time it took me to get the stuff needed to make the silicon cell.)

Personalty in that situation i find the mod... laking creativity. If it's going to make me take the long route home, it better make sure its the F*ing pretty route home. Sucking up currency, and time spent. Is a cheap way of getting something balanced.

Minecraft is about putting things together to make something awesome. not watching progress bars and numbers on an MFSU, at least not for me.

Hmm the thing about GregTech is that it tries to resemble industry. So if you feel one Centrifuge is too slow just build two... or three, or why not four?

Also check several recipies for Silicon-Dust, there should be one involving Flint or Flint-Dust which is pretty fast. The 1.4.5 Version of Gregs improved a lot of things. If you use Clay Dust inside an Industrial Electrolyzer it will only need 10 Seconds to produce 2 Silicon-Cells on 50EU/t or 1 every 50 Seconds by using Flint-Dust on 5EU/t. After you have the initial-setup Silicon-Cells can be produced very constantly. And often give you some Cells that could be used as fuel to power the process. But at this point Greg suffers from very few tin enabled in FTB, since it uses tons of cells (although you can get cells you don't want back in the extractor).

It should be around 10.000 EU to produce two silicon-cells, so a solarpanel would repay itself within a day. Also Greg plans on adding a Multiblock-Earlygame-Generator that works similar to factorization mirrors to replace Solars in early-game.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Point of order: IC2 farming can be automated with Forestry and the right Plugin.. Maybe not the breeding, but at least the harvesting.

IC2 has gear. The drill, the chainsaw, nano armor. Okay sure, there's quantum armor (and gravisute suite, with that addon), which I never bother with, but is something not replicated by any other mod. There's also the jet pack and the gravisuite which provides flight (EE3 might eventually do that, but for now, it isn't around).

Honestly, if there were a way to get iridium without UU matter, I'd just disable it entirely.

However, GregTech, as I said earlier, is just punitive rather than progressive. The increased difficulty is just Pointless Grind. If it had made it harder by involving more steps that didn't require obnoxious things (as a perfect example: Railcraft and how it builds rails), that would have been better. But arbitrarily bumping up basic Tier 1 machines and tools up to Tier 2+ just by requiring diamonds or the blast furnace is just... arbitrary.

Granted, I like the idea of synergy with Railcraft by making steel tools, but I think he picked the wrong tier of tech to make cross-compatible. If it had used iron plates, it would have probably been a bit more balanced (requiring the rolling machine, which doesn't require nether access). If it had required a TE alloy blend metal, that would have been good. But he put it on the wrong tier. Basically, GregTech just makes people want to ignore IC2, because there's just no point to it anymore.

 

[FMan_0000]

Point of order: IC2 farming can be automated with Forestry and the right Plugin.. Maybe not the breeding, but at least the harvesting.

IC2 has gear. The drill, the chainsaw, nano armor. Okay sure, there's quantum armor (and gravisute suite, with that addon), which I never bother with, but is something not replicated by any other mod. There's also the jet pack and the gravisuite which provides flight (EE3 might eventually do that, but for now, it isn't around).

Honestly, if there were a way to get iridium without UU matter, I'd just disable it entirely.

However, GregTech, as I said earlier, is just punitive rather than progressive. The increased difficulty is just Pointless Grind. If it had made it harder by involving more steps that didn't require obnoxious things (as a perfect example: Railcraft and how it builds rails), that would have been better. But arbitrarily bumping up basic Tier 1 machines and tools up to Tier 2+ just by requiring diamonds or the blast furnace is just... arbitrary.

Granted, I like the idea of synergy with Railcraft by making steel tools, but I think he picked the wrong tier of tech to make cross-compatible. If it had used iron plates, it would have probably been a bit more balanced (requiring the rolling machine, which doesn't require nether access). If it had required a TE alloy blend metal, that would have been good. But he put it on the wrong tier. Basically, GregTech just makes people want to ignore IC2, because there's just no point to it anymore.

Actually , the updated version of GregTech is much better becouse it has got the industrial blast furnance. That means no need for nether.

 

[makeshiftwings]

Point of order: IC2 farming can be automated with Forestry and the right Plugin.. Maybe not the breeding, but at least the harvesting.

IC2 has gear. The drill, the chainsaw, nano armor. Okay sure, there's quantum armor (and gravisute suite, with that addon), which I never bother with, but is something not replicated by any other mod. There's also the jet pack and the gravisuite which provides flight (EE3 might eventually do that, but for now, it isn't around).

Honestly, if there were a way to get iridium without UU matter, I'd just disable it entirely.

However, GregTech, as I said earlier, is just punitive rather than progressive. The increased difficulty is just Pointless Grind. If it had made it harder by involving more steps that didn't require obnoxious things (as a perfect example: Railcraft and how it builds rails), that would have been better. But arbitrarily bumping up basic Tier 1 machines and tools up to Tier 2+ just by requiring diamonds or the blast furnace is just... arbitrary.

Granted, I like the idea of synergy with Railcraft by making steel tools, but I think he picked the wrong tier of tech to make cross-compatible. If it had used iron plates, it would have probably been a bit more balanced (requiring the rolling machine, which doesn't require nether access). If it had required a TE alloy blend metal, that would have been good. But he put it on the wrong tier. Basically, GregTech just makes people want to ignore IC2, because there's just no point to it anymore.

I agree. Though I don't really love the idea of FTB leaving the balance of one popular mod in the hands of a totally unrelated dev who is making knee-jerk nerfs to every part of it daily based on forum rants of the day, I think it would be less annoying if he at least only messed with the upper-tier stuff. Nerfing every intro item in someone else's mod in a modpack full of mods is just going to make people not want to use that mod. Even all the people defending the IC nerfs and saying they like the "challenge" usually post about how they are using the other mods for everything instead now. A lot of these people also say that they like it because it lengthens the time they have to play vanilla before "beating" the game, which makes me think they hardly even play once they get all the IC equipment, which is a very different playstyle from those of us who actually use all the IC machines to, you know, build stuff. Playing minecraft for gear grind seems really strange... MMO's are for gear grind; Minecraft is for building stuff.

 

[Meara]

hmm so many things to reply too... so little space to type in with out creating a giant wall o'text.
First off I mean no disrespect or meaning to insult GT in any manner. Honestly I figured it could be me messing up with the centerfuge witch is why it was going to slow.

I don't find GT making any thing Harder.. or any thing making any thing Easier... and I'm never one to say anything is OP or UP. diamonds for example really are easy to get. If i did every thing right i have my first diamond pickaxe by the end of the first night.

@ICountfrom0
I thought about this a lot last night, since i really couldn't get back on the forums to reply as they where down by the time i checked your message, and to be honest... still thinking. This actually has my mind baffald. You would have to come up with values of all items. for example.
an electric circuit. What would be equivalent to that in forestry? I actually think a Iron Electron Tube, but why would you possibly go make a Carpenter get some kind of water soruce, just to make for example a drill. when i can stand in front of a furnace. Is it harder? Not really. More expensive? Nop. Its just more steps that are required, however what it dose do, is take peoples attention off of IC2, and make them want to go towards forestry a bit. Besides that carpenter can always be used later.
As I see it people will always say the path with least resistance is easy, and the path the most resistance is too hard. What the item is made of really has nothing to do with balance as long as its not too over the top. For example, Electric Circuit vrs Diamante(The Diamond one) Electron Tube. No diamonds vrs. 5.
Now note I'm talking starting up! Not any thing else. Frankly 5 diamonds by the time you have 8 quarries going doesn't really mean much by any thing. But balancing for that would mean you'd brake starting up.

I think i need more time to think.

@makeshiftwings
Dude, you sound like you play wow, or did at least. I haven't herd Nerf, and Gear Grind in years.

@ShneekeyTheLost
So, are you saying going to the nether makes it harder? I mean really... really now.. how is the nether hard? some one explain that to me... I do that with iron gear (if at all), if you have ee3 installed you only need one blaze rod.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

@ShneekeyTheLost
So, are you saying going to the nether makes it harder? I mean really... really now.. how is the nether hard? some one explain that to me... I do that with iron gear (if at all), if you have ee3 installed you only need one blaze rod.

First off, EE3 isn't out yet, so that is an entirely moot point. Second off, the Nether is lagbomb central. It's not a matter of difficulty, it's a matter of the server seizing up and crashing. Third off, it requires finding and establishing a base in a nether fortress, which can be hours of painstaking exploration in the nether, depending on how lucky or unlucky you get with spawn locations.

It isn't difficulty I have a problem with. It's tedium and lagbombs. Many servers flat out ban Nether exploration due to lagbombs. Honestly, if it wasn't for Glowstone, I'd never even bother with the Nether.

 

[Meara]

First off, EE3 isn't out yet, so that is an entirely moot point. Second off, the Nether is lagbomb central. It's not a matter of difficulty, it's a matter of the server seizing up and crashing. Third off, it requires finding and establishing a base in a nether fortress, which can be hours of painstaking exploration in the nether, depending on how lucky or unlucky you get with spawn locations.
It isn't difficulty I have a problem with. It's tedium and lagbombs. Many servers flat out ban Nether exploration due to lagbombs. Honestly, if it wasn't for Glowstone, I'd never even bother with the Nether.

EE3 is out.. not final release but is out. As long as it's public it isn't moot. Sounds like to me there's more of a problem with servers then any mods problem, and it isn't something you should get on GT about. Now mind you I dont mean servers as in the owners or the Hardware, just mindcrafts servers. AS there is nothing wrong with The nether in single player.
Your 3rd Point is Moot however, as exploration is in fact part of playing mindcraft. If you don't like doing it then why play this game?
Personally, I don't play servers. Cause of the constant need of server owners to BAN Things for balance and or for reasons that to me don't sound like reasons. I remember one banning macerators, RM and DM furnaces cause it was "Duping". My thought on the matter was "Well Duh!" Besides the fact I live in Mexico witch also dictates that I will get such horrible lag, or need to play on a server that speaks spanish.. witch I can't play with either.

 

[Bluehorazon]

First off, EE3 isn't out yet, so that is an entirely moot point. Second off, the Nether is lagbomb central. It's not a matter of difficulty, it's a matter of the server seizing up and crashing. Third off, it requires finding and establishing a base in a nether fortress, which can be hours of painstaking exploration in the nether, depending on how lucky or unlucky you get with spawn locations.

It isn't difficulty I have a problem with. It's tedium and lagbombs. Many servers flat out ban Nether exploration due to lagbombs. Honestly, if it wasn't for Glowstone, I'd never even bother with the Nether.

Well... even with IC2 you only need 2 blaze-rods, not a big deal. And Lag + Nether is a thing from the past. Most Servers even run more than 2 dimensions and the nether is very lag-friendly. And last you are talking about a temporary solution. Using the Railcraft Blastfurnace is the alternative road, the primary way to get steel for the mining-drill is using the industrial blast-furnace, which is avaible in 1.4.5. Actually the 1.4.2 version of Gregs is a bit unfinished, which might be because of the frequent updates, since normally a version that fixes some issues is released directly after that one. But in that case the following version that implemented the Industrial Blast-Furnace is for 1.4.5, and without FTB most people would not even noticed it, since they would have just updated to 1.4.5.

But it is not that much a problem to just turn the config-option off to require refined Iron for the Drill and such. And on a server it should be really easy to get two blazerods for a community-blastfurnace, since it is one of things that is not required for every player individually.

I agree. Though I don't really love the idea of FTB leaving the balance of one popular mod in the hands of a totally unrelated dev who is making knee-jerk nerfs to every part of it daily based on forum rants of the day, I think it would be less annoying if he at least only messed with the upper-tier stuff. Nerfing every intro item in someone else's mod in a modpack full of mods is just going to make people not want to use that mod. Even all the people defending the IC nerfs and saying they like the "challenge" usually post about how they are using the other mods for everything instead now.

Well that is true for the macerator. Making the Macerator more expensive does not fit with TE. So the recipe is reverted in FTB, which makes sense. But getting an indestructible diamond-pick that cannot mine obsidian literally at the point you manage to mine down to bedrock? The Mining-Drill is comparable to DM/RM-Tools in EE... now look where they are placed on the techtree.

And actually without Redpower (Gem-Tools are cool) GregsTech made me use items in IC2 I never used before. Mainly the bronze-tools and armor. Normally at the time you can build a bronze-tool (well... at least if you disable the forestry-bronze-recipe) you already have a mining-drill and a chainsaw. Now I use them a lot since I can switch from Iron to Bronze depending on what material I have more.

And since GregTech is completly configurable you can disable stuff like the macerator-change which does not fit with other FTB-Items like the pulverizer (although you could also enable the expensive pulverizer/smelter recipe to achieve the same effect), while still having other options enabled that are not aimed at IC2-Only gameplay.

 

[noskk]

No need to debate anymore, this is a quote from RichardG (one of IC2 dev) that he posted in IC2 forum


I should find a way to inform Etho that the server is actually running a mod which makes stuff harder.

Slowpoke has been trying to contact Guude to get GregTech disabled, and inform him of the possibility of the beta map even being incompatible with the final modpack.

 

[kevinthedude2000]

If gregtech leaves, I wont play FTB.

 

[FMan_0000]

If gregtech leaves, I wont play FTB.

Same.

 

[CrafterOfMines57]

Same.

I'll either leave, or just stick it in myself, although it would be disappointing to not be able to use it on pretty much every FTB server out there.

 

[ebrentjones]

FTB pack is great for people new to modded minecraft because it's just click and play. But GregTech just isn't. It changes up all the recipes and makes many of them harder. When I first saw it, I figured that this was deliberately and maliciously done to troll newbies , and that the creator was laughing up his sleeve over it.

I just want to make a couple of small points concerning GregTech. Your logic in this particular quoted paragraph astounds me. How is the fact that GregTech changes recipes relevant to those new to modded Minecraft? Those people wouldn't even know what the original recipes were, hence them being new to modded Minecraft. I see no reason why GregTech can be thought of as trolling such newbies when they don't have any experience with the original in the first place.

In addition, ad hominem attacks against Greg do not form a valid argument.

I'll reserve my opinion on other aspects of GregTech, but the complaints about how long it takes for things like the industrial centrifuge to work baffle me. In particular, Meara saying "Minecraft is about putting things together to make something awesome. not watching progress bars and numbers on an MFSU, at least not for me." No one expects you to sit around watching progress bars, it's not like there isn't a whole world around you to explore, go mining in, fight mobs in, develop complex apparatus, craft components, build in, etc, while waiting for your items to process... Not to mention that a huge number of the slowest recipes from the industrial centrifuge have been transferred to the much quicker industrial electrolyzer added in a later version of GregTech than the one currently contained in the pack.

One last question to those disabling the mod because they feel it doesn't add useful or relevant content - do you keep Obsidian Plates enabled?

There are some terrible logical fallacies throughout this thread on both sides.

 

[Narcisism]

Obsidian Plates ARE useful. Put one outside your iron door on a Hard server. Easy access into and out of a house without having to worry about zombies doing the same. Also, the Obsidian Plates don't change things about other mods.

 

[darkrage000]

Personally, I dont mind GT in itself. it adds a few useful machines.
the problem that I DO have, however, is that it altered the other recipes directly. I dont care if there are config files to change things back around, as thats not the issue.
If you make a mod, you do NOT make it so that it changes other peoples mods/recipes.
Most mods that i play are now shapeless recipes and dont HAVE to use item X. you can use either item X from mod1, or item F from mod4, or item A from mod3...
you do NOT forcibly change the recipes and require people to go down YOUR path to an end result over what the other mod maker had created.

Personally, I consider what GT did in its forced changes of the recipes was 'code alteration' whether it was in memory, or in the mod files themselves. it all amounts to the same thing... he is placing HIS judgement above the original Author's

Not saying that your opinion doesnt matter here in any way, but those that say its not realistic enough... Folks, its a GAME. its not realistic to think think that you can haul 20x60 diamond blocks around either....
Not insulting here, but if you want more realism, check out TerraFirma Craft; you might find it enjoyable.

 

[Tylor]

Well... the normal drill is as fast as the diamond-pick and has 200 Uses. So 7,5 Drill charges is a Diamond-Pick. Thats 75.000 EU or 19 pieces of charcoal. So instead of a diamond-pick you could just use a Drill, a Generator and 19 pieces of charcoal to do everything a diamond-Pick can do besides mining obsidian (something that you normally don't need to do very often, never in FTB).

You forgot that diamond pickaxe can (and should) be enchanted and drill can't.

As fot GT as a whole, I think it should be two separate mods. One is just GT stuff, balanced with other mods as they are. And other is rebalancing "hard mode" mod, that changes recipes across the board.

 

[Bagman817]

Why is this a debate? More options = good thing, does it not? Don't like the mod? Disable it. Like the mod, but not some of the choices it makes? Edit the config file, as I did. And no, I'm not buying the idea that the config is difficult to edit. Changing "ElectricSteelTools=True" to "ElectricSteelTools=False" doesn't require a background in coding. On the other hand, adding a mod to an existing pack can be challenging when you run up against block IDs and whatnot. This is why I truly hope the "Ultimate Pack", when it arrives, is essentially everything, giving us the freedom to make our modded world as expansive (or restrictive) as we like.

Essentially, my point is that arguing for the removal of a mod that can be easily disabled/edited is equivalent to saying "I don't like this, so no one should have it."

 

[gjrud]

I will skip over my opinion about gregtech because in all honesty nobody cares, what I will say is that I find mind blowing that someone wants a mod to be officially "removed"(can still be installed manually) from a pack: at the moment you can disable it with few clicks and never hear about it again, while if it would be removed everyone that wants it will have to manually install it (few clicks and download, ok) and manually check for updates, all amplified if a server is using it (version and cfg matching and all this jazz). We are not talking about a crappy mod that adds a blue dirt block, gregtech seems to be liked by quite a few so it would be more logical (imo) if included in the packs. Every once in a while try thinking about everyone else.
I apologize for my English.

 

[Phicksur]

I made it a point of signing up for an account merely to add in my two cents on Gregtech. I shall start with a brief history.

I played Technic for a while, casually, and never progressed beyond nano armor and rotary macerators. I am not an expert on any of this and barely have time to try to make tech trees for myself.

EE completely broke my sense of fun with those solar collectors, meaning I had no reason to go out and mine any more with Energy Condensers (so, I stopped making them and destroyed the ones I made). I really enjoyed Thaumcraft and its 'magical items' and especially requiring research in order to make anything higher tiered.

In any event, with Technic being stuck in 1.2.5 land I tried to find another modpack that had updated to the latest-ist version and found FTB. I have tried it out and enjoyed it so far, with a couple annoyances:

1. Recipe changes SUCK. It took me quite a while to figure out how to get back to a rotary macerator because of all the recipe changes. The FTB wiki isn't updated with recipes and there is no tech tree I can find. As a result I had to muddle my way through getting a rolling machine and that carpenter thing and all these other machines I have never used and didn't understand what they needed to operate without some major Internet surfing. This is my greatest annoyance: wanting to make something and having no idea how the hell to get to it, or how to get it to work without pausing the game to search the Internet. Even the vanilla Ender Chest is different.
2. No Mo' Creatures. I can deal with it, but I actually liked all the added critters running around, making the world seem more alive. Ogres were particularly challenging. Alligators in a swamp seemed natural. Bunnies in the forests and plains, yes please. Now it all seems so barren by comparison. When I can find a way to add it, I shall. It probably isn't added due to some permissions thing, but I still miss it.
3. No Thaumcraft. I liked the idea of taint altering the landscape and fighting against it. I have tried the Magic Pack but it lacks turtles, which are my most favorite toy I have ever played with and don't want to play without now.

Thus, my major issue with GregTech is how it changed recipes, and I cannot find how the hell to adjust for all these changes without just muddling through it all and making a lot of mistakes along the way. Maybe if we had to research the various machines before we could make them, we could be 'led' through the process through research and use THAT as a means of 'extending' the game, as some seem to wish to have.
Thank you for your time.

 

[CrafterOfMines57]

Recipe changes SUCK. It took me quite a while to figure out how to get back to a rotary macerator because of all the recipe changes. The FTB wiki isn't updated with recipes and there is no tech tree I can find. As a result I had to muddle my way through getting a rolling machine and that carpenter thing and all these other machines I have never used and didn't understand what they needed to operate without some major Internet surfing. This is my greatest annoyance: wanting to make something and having no idea how the hell to get to it, or how to get it to work without pausing the game to search the Internet. Even the vanilla Ender Chest is different

FTB comes with NEI, just press R on an item to see its recipe.

I cannot find how the hell to adjust for all these changes

Have you even looked at the config file?