Gregtech recipes = ridiculous?

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Recon

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Jul 29, 2019
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Friend of mine set up a server at home that I connect to and we are having some fun with. We've had it up for 2 days now. I set up a peat bog to make some fuel with for the buildcraft engines, and one thing I figured I'd do is run the turbary and peat bog with electric engines each connected to 1 simple solar panel.

Ordinarily, making the IC2 solar panel consists of the following steps:
Make a generator from a furnace, machine block and RE battery.
Make 2 electric circuits consisting of 12 copper cables, 4 redstone and 1 refined iron total.
Macerate 3 coal into dust.
Melt 3 sand into glass.
Toss the above into a recipe and you're done.

How's it done with the Gregtech changes?

Do the above steps to make a generator and 2 electric circuits.
Make 3 glass panes.
Macerate 8 coal into dust, then use a compressor to turn it into a carbon plate.
So now a compressor is required. Not too bad since they are fairly simple.
But wait. You also need two silicon cells.
How do you get these? Well, you need an industrial centrifuge.
There appears to be 7 different things you can spin which will yield silicon cells as a by-product. The most efficient one being using 64 Redstone, at which point you get 27 silicon cells. So you need an entire stack of redstone to make your solar panel. The machine also requires 110,000 EU, which in the early game is going to come from coal at 4000 EU per piece. So 28 pieces of coal. It also takes 1,100 seconds which is 18 minutes.

Since this is the early game, the centrifuge itself is likely not to be part of your machine set. So you'll need to consider its cost in order to acquire your solar panel. The recipe for a centrifuge requires an extractor. No biggie. It also requires two advanced machine blocks. This means 16 iron for the blocks, 32 coal for the carbon plates, and 6 refined iron, 6 bronze and 6 tin for the 4 advanced alloys. 4 more refined iron are required in the centrifuge recipe. Lastly, you'll need two advanced electric circuits! For this, you'll need two electric circuits, 4 Lapis, 8 Redstone and 4 Glowstone. So yes you'll need 4 glowstone from the Nether before you can make your very first solar panel.

Why, Gregtech? Why?
 

aanthony3

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Part of the mod authors goal was to make any renewable energy such as solar or watermill expensive and more of an end game goal rather then something you get early game. It's upposed to make IC2 power gen more balanced.
 

Recon

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Curious then: How would you recommend powering the various forestry farms without wasting fuel? Usually a forestry farm has a lot of time sitting around waiting for things to grow. Running an engine constantly isn't very efficient.
 

sciguyryan

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I've also expressed some concern that the configs for forced compression of resources is enabled by default (such as 9 diamond -> 1 diamond block) and then requiring a macerator to reverse that. Not because I find it problematic but mainly because new vanilla users are confused by changing a non-game changing mechanic with no apparent benefits.

Still. With most things in there you can disable and enable the features how you see fit. :)
 

aanthony3

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Curious then: How would you recommend powering the various forestry farms without wasting fuel? Usually a forestry farm has a lot of time sitting around waiting for things to grow. Running an engine constantly isn't very efficient.
I think the author wants you to waste fuel :p
 

Recon

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I'd disable a whole bunch of this if it was on my server, but now I'm gonna have to talk to someone else and get him to configure it on his end. I'm not even sure how this configuration is done.
 

aanthony3

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The configs are under the heading usefulRecipies, just set them all to false to disable gregtech's changing vanilla IC2 recipes.
 

sciguyryan

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I'd disable a whole bunch of this if it was on my server, but now I'm gonna have to talk to someone else and get him to configure it on his end. I'm not even sure how this configuration is done.

1. Stop the server from running.
2. Open the file called "GregTech.cfg" in the "Config" folder.
3. Locate the section called "usefullrecipes" and replace "true" with "false" on any items you want to turn off.
4. Save the file.
5. Restart the server.
6. Distribute the config file above to all users of the server and ask them to replace the ones in their mod pack (the same location format as above) with the modified one. Or of course give them the instructions on how to do it themselves.

If you do not perform step 6 then the NEI recipe stuff will be incorrect.
 

BanzaiBlitz

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People just want quick and easy. Don't be lazy.

I love the gregtech challenge boost. Makes you plan out parts much more. And yes, cheap solar panels is very OP so this makes it better holistically. Want free energy? Go earn it! :D
 

Recon

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There's a fine line between challenging and unnecessarily convoluted. If something is meant to make a process more involved, it ought to have a gameplay benefit. Complexity for complexity's sake is a poor reason to change the game. I don't think the old recipe was too easy considering it was ONE standard solar panel. It takes 512 of these things to make a HV array with Compact Solars. Making them using the centrifuge is crazy because it takes like 20 minutes to spin out the pair of silicon cells for one solar panel. I'd have more fun setting up a logistics pipes network to make solars than having a centrifuge running for 170 hours.
 

sciguyryan

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I have to agree that there is a distinct difference between difficulty and tediousness. A game should, reasonably, be difficult without massively affecting the level of tedium. Some features that are enabled add tedium without increasing the difficulty of the task. One example I can cite being the requirement of steel for an IC2 drill.

This is not difficult. You can compress netherrack into nether brick and collect magma cream without massive difficulty. In the end its just adding tedium to a task without making it inherently more difficult. Something I really don't agree with.
 
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aanthony3

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I personally enjoy the changes gregtech makes but I know some people don't. He included an extensive config so people could customize his mod to there individual tastes. Everyone should be able to use as much or as little as grectech as they want. There are many FTB servers that have disabled these recipes so you could always play on one of those.
 

Jugg3rV

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Jul 29, 2019
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I do think that certain items should be not as easy to get. But considering normal solar panels and their power output there is no need for making those more difficult to attain. One panel gives you but 13050 EU/day. You'll need 3-4 days to fill one batbox. With the greg adjustment you'll need to get a complette assemblytable up and running plus the laser to fuel it and the centrifuge to obtain all materials.
 

GreenWolf13

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I dislike greg tech, not because of the unneeded changes to make thing complicated, but because it is very badly coded. The well known bug where greg tech client configs and server configs don't match up is because the author made the mod with the false assumption that Forge had ID resolver built in. That, plus a variety of other things, have built up my opinion that the author has no clue what the hell he is doing. That, and the fact that he has expressed that he would be perfectly willing to violate international law if he thought he could get away with it, make me consider him a complete and total moron.
 

WTFFFS

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Curious then: How would you recommend powering the various forestry farms without wasting fuel? Usually a forestry farm has a lot of time sitting around waiting for things to grow. Running an engine constantly isn't very efficient.

Use peat fired engines for your farms they may still burn fuel but they have a useful byproduct, a stack of peat burns for a stupid length of time and with a turbary\peat bog you'll be swimming in peat pretty quickly.
 

Vauthil

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Jul 29, 2019
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Curious then: How would you recommend powering the various forestry farms without wasting fuel? Usually a forestry farm has a lot of time sitting around waiting for things to grow. Running an engine constantly isn't very efficient.
Peat-fired engines are designed to burn low and long. A single peat farm, if maintained, will keep 8 peat fired engines running indefinitely. This is an important fact in planning Forestry-based systems. =)

The well known bug where greg tech client configs and server configs don't match up is because the author made the mod with the false assumption that Forge had ID resolver built in.
Um... not getting into "is it good?" or "is it bad?" because I think that dead horse has thoroughly been beaten into glue, but having been on ground zero trouble-shooting this one, this was completely not the case here. The configuration mismatch was entirely a result of the server pack being pushed out with a different configuration than the client pack and has nothing to do with anything GregTech, Forge, or anything else does or did. Human error.

There is no way a server and a client can reconcile this information without human intervention. They have to match on initialization and if they don't, you get quirks like what happened. This is because Minecraft checks all this stuff while the game is starting up (part of why running a modded Minecraft pack takes 5x-10x the time at the Mojang splash screen -- FML has a lot of minutiae it has to pick through and ensure at that stage and that increases with every mod you add) and there is no point of intervention after that. NEI recipes and Item IDs are set by the time you get to the starting menu for Minecraft, and there is currently no method that circumvents this.

There are many valid criticisms one can level at a mod author. This is not one of them.
 

GreenWolf13

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Peat-fired engines are designed to burn low and long. A single peat farm, if maintained, will keep 8 peat fired engines running indefinitely. This is an important fact in planning Forestry-based systems. =)


Um... not getting into "is it good?" or "is it bad?" because I think that dead horse has thoroughly been beaten into glue, but having been on ground zero trouble-shooting this one, this was completely not the case here. The configuration mismatch was entirely a result of the server pack being pushed out with a different configuration than the client pack and has nothing to do with anything GregTech, Forge, or anything else does or did. Human error.

There is no way a server and a client can reconcile this information without human intervention. They have to match on initialization and if they don't, you get quirks like what happened. This is because Minecraft checks all this stuff while the game is starting up (part of why running a modded Minecraft pack takes 5x-10x the time at the Mojang splash screen -- FML has a lot of minutiae it has to pick through and ensure at that stage and that increases with every mod you add) and there is no point of intervention after that. NEI recipes and Item IDs are set by the time you get to the starting menu for Minecraft, and there is currently no method that circumvents this.

There are many valid criticisms one can level at a mod author. This is not one of them.
It may not be the cause of the FTB server-cient config msimatch, but the fact that GregoriusT made the mod assuming that Forge had ID resolver built in. Which is stupid. I don't know if he's fixed it now, but the fact that he did it in the first place is stupid.
Edit: Fixed spelling errors caused by my phone's tiny keyboard.
 

Dravarden

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Jul 29, 2019
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There is suff that are ok, like steel for the drill, but need a compresor for ore blocks/glowstone? That is totally useless.
 
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