While I may not be the biggest proponent of Continuum, I feel that there was a lot of potential here, and so instead of venting spleen in a toxic or hostile manner, I want to give a point-by-point feedback to the developers on my personal experience and viewpoints on several design considerations in a reasoned and peaceful discourse.
I feel that there's a lot to be gained by exploring and examining what went right and what went wrong with Continuum, something which all pack developers everywhere can learn from, both the merits and the flaws.
So, without further ado, permit me to begin:
I believe I should start with the white elephant in the room: the timesinks. Specifically the half hour (later mitigated down to... what was it, fifteen or even ten minutes?) on a couple of the crafts, using that new mod. One that caused quite the kerfluffle amongst the community and had... plenty of negative things to say about it.
I won't try to defend it, but instead I will point out that it wasn't all bad. The multiblock was a phenomenal idea, and one I really enjoyed and encourage other pack developers take note of. It doesn't have to be used as a timed roadblock, but the fact that you can have multiple fluids in multiple tanks in the same block-by-block built multiblock structure means that you can have FAR more complex recipes than Continuum had using this method. Really, Continuum only scratched the surface of what this mod can do, and I feel that part of it was perhaps overused and caused much consternation which left the rest of the elegance largely ignored, which I find quite tragic.
I feel that this mod shouldn't have been early-game, I feel that it should have been mid-game, or perhaps even early-late game. Instead of being used as a harsh gate, it should have been used as a way of crafting very complex and involved recipes, something higher-tiered. For example, consider Enderium. To craft it requires resonant ender, plus tin, silver, and platinum dust. But it uses that klunky idea of needing the bucket of resonant ender. What if, instead, you created a recipe which required a bucket's worth of resonant ender in a tank, plus the required metal dusts? If Same goes with flux-infused stuff, which could be crafted in a similar manner, requiring a certain amount of liquid redstone in a tank for the craft to proceed.
Suddenly, instead of being used as a gate, it's being used as a crafting table plus, which I believe was its original intent. And machine operations that were there to require an energy investment can be replaced by the RF requirements already built into the mod. It could've gone a great deal towards being an all-in-one crafting system, a fantastic and complex multiblock that the player creates one block at a time, and constantly builds upon and improves upon as he progresses. That idea, that concept, is a fantastic one, and one I hope shows up again in other packs.
The next topic I want to broach is resource generation and acquisition. One of the things Continuum did was halve the amount of wood from each log and halve the amount of sticks from each two planks, right from the start, as a way to incentivise the early reach for the lumber mill. However, I feel that it wasn't very properly handled, because all that did was make people chop down twice to four times as many trees to perform the same early-game task. In other words, it wasn't something that really benefited the pack excessively, it was just an early-game grind, and one which doesn't really contribute to an interesting gameplay style, merely a grindy one.
Instead, I would do something similar to TFC's method of logs, chopping down a tree with an axe yields logs, which can be split with an axe to make Lumber, but you need the lumber mill to make planks. Lumber could be used for some things, like building structures or being chopped into sticks, but you need planks for constructing anything higher-tech.
Furthermore, to keep wood production relevant into the mid and late game, I'd bake in wood requirements into everything you do, so that you will always need a consumption of wood to get things made. An easy way to do this is to require charcoal, not coal or coal coke, to produce steel, or something similar to that effect. Maybe require two charcoal to fuel one iron ingot's transformation into a steel ingot in a blast furnace. Now for every piece of steel, you need two logs. This is a MUCH better way of mitigating excessive resource hoarding syndrome, instead of simply halving or quartering the amount of resources you get. This requires that you set up automated logging, automated smelting into charcoal, and automated charcoal getting to the blast furnace. Which is a system and a process which requires thought and infrastructure built to facilitate. And once it is done, you can move on to your next project.
Automating a resource should be something that might require planning, or even pre-planning how it will be upgraded in the future, but instead of trying to punish a player for doing it, make it required and expected, and make things expensive enough that it will be assumed that the resources will be automated to get things done in a timely manner.
By that same token, instead of making ores more rare, and requiring more boring and grindy branch mining to get, increase the costs involved in making higher tech items. This is, again, where Efab can come to the rescue. By requiring more complex crafting recipes, perhaps ones with more complex subcombines, you increase the amount of materials required to craft things, so that the user feels like he is accomplishing something instead of simply beating his head against a brick wall as he spends a half hour branch mining at a certain Y level to find a certain ore he needs to proceed. In fact, I could see some form of auto-mining be relatively early-access, much like Factorio does, but at a relatively slow but consistent rate. Maybe have different auto-miners for different ores or resources. Make automation the key thing the player is doing instead of crafting. And if you can set up Efab to do sub-combines, that would be a real boon.
You don't want your player either grinding resources or staring at a crafting grid as the vast majority of the gameplay, because that gets boring (digging pun unintentional) and repetitive. You want the player *engaged* in doing something. You want him building, or planning, or expanding, or seeking... something that keeps him not just playing but actively engaged and enjoying themselves. Which is why, even as you increase the cost and the subcombines, you should also give automation options early on so that he can simply keep the subcombines going so the recipes themselves don't take him particularly long to accomplish. You want him to be able to set up a stockpile of components, so that the actual crafting of the item itself won't take too long. If the player is saying something like "Once I got the automation infrastructure down, these things were a breeze to make!", then you're doing something very right.
In fact, you can set up 'soft' progression tiers based on resource consumption, instead of 'hard' progression locks that require specific items to unlock. If it's going to take you a half a stack of iron, a stack of wood, a half a stack of redstone, and eight or so gold to produce this thingy... well, now you know what you need to set up as automation in order to get going with that. And automating the iron, gold, and redstone is going to be needed for *other* things as well, so best have it set up in a modular manner, because you're *going* to want more throughput later. I mean, sure you might be able to make *one* item manually, eventually, but the mod pack will assume that you will automate a given task as soon as you are able to, so making a single item is going to be less useful than being able to crank out a given item every half a minute or so in order to be able to make the next thing. Think Factorio.
In conclusion, Continuum, as it stands, fell victim to the common 'expert' trope of 'make it grindy'. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that it was 'bad', so much as it needed some more refinement, and perhaps a slightly different direction to go with some of the mods, especially Efab. I feel there's a lot to learn here, to improve upon, for the next generation of packs.
I feel that there's a lot to be gained by exploring and examining what went right and what went wrong with Continuum, something which all pack developers everywhere can learn from, both the merits and the flaws.
So, without further ado, permit me to begin:
I believe I should start with the white elephant in the room: the timesinks. Specifically the half hour (later mitigated down to... what was it, fifteen or even ten minutes?) on a couple of the crafts, using that new mod. One that caused quite the kerfluffle amongst the community and had... plenty of negative things to say about it.
I won't try to defend it, but instead I will point out that it wasn't all bad. The multiblock was a phenomenal idea, and one I really enjoyed and encourage other pack developers take note of. It doesn't have to be used as a timed roadblock, but the fact that you can have multiple fluids in multiple tanks in the same block-by-block built multiblock structure means that you can have FAR more complex recipes than Continuum had using this method. Really, Continuum only scratched the surface of what this mod can do, and I feel that part of it was perhaps overused and caused much consternation which left the rest of the elegance largely ignored, which I find quite tragic.
I feel that this mod shouldn't have been early-game, I feel that it should have been mid-game, or perhaps even early-late game. Instead of being used as a harsh gate, it should have been used as a way of crafting very complex and involved recipes, something higher-tiered. For example, consider Enderium. To craft it requires resonant ender, plus tin, silver, and platinum dust. But it uses that klunky idea of needing the bucket of resonant ender. What if, instead, you created a recipe which required a bucket's worth of resonant ender in a tank, plus the required metal dusts? If Same goes with flux-infused stuff, which could be crafted in a similar manner, requiring a certain amount of liquid redstone in a tank for the craft to proceed.
Suddenly, instead of being used as a gate, it's being used as a crafting table plus, which I believe was its original intent. And machine operations that were there to require an energy investment can be replaced by the RF requirements already built into the mod. It could've gone a great deal towards being an all-in-one crafting system, a fantastic and complex multiblock that the player creates one block at a time, and constantly builds upon and improves upon as he progresses. That idea, that concept, is a fantastic one, and one I hope shows up again in other packs.
The next topic I want to broach is resource generation and acquisition. One of the things Continuum did was halve the amount of wood from each log and halve the amount of sticks from each two planks, right from the start, as a way to incentivise the early reach for the lumber mill. However, I feel that it wasn't very properly handled, because all that did was make people chop down twice to four times as many trees to perform the same early-game task. In other words, it wasn't something that really benefited the pack excessively, it was just an early-game grind, and one which doesn't really contribute to an interesting gameplay style, merely a grindy one.
Instead, I would do something similar to TFC's method of logs, chopping down a tree with an axe yields logs, which can be split with an axe to make Lumber, but you need the lumber mill to make planks. Lumber could be used for some things, like building structures or being chopped into sticks, but you need planks for constructing anything higher-tech.
Furthermore, to keep wood production relevant into the mid and late game, I'd bake in wood requirements into everything you do, so that you will always need a consumption of wood to get things made. An easy way to do this is to require charcoal, not coal or coal coke, to produce steel, or something similar to that effect. Maybe require two charcoal to fuel one iron ingot's transformation into a steel ingot in a blast furnace. Now for every piece of steel, you need two logs. This is a MUCH better way of mitigating excessive resource hoarding syndrome, instead of simply halving or quartering the amount of resources you get. This requires that you set up automated logging, automated smelting into charcoal, and automated charcoal getting to the blast furnace. Which is a system and a process which requires thought and infrastructure built to facilitate. And once it is done, you can move on to your next project.
Automating a resource should be something that might require planning, or even pre-planning how it will be upgraded in the future, but instead of trying to punish a player for doing it, make it required and expected, and make things expensive enough that it will be assumed that the resources will be automated to get things done in a timely manner.
By that same token, instead of making ores more rare, and requiring more boring and grindy branch mining to get, increase the costs involved in making higher tech items. This is, again, where Efab can come to the rescue. By requiring more complex crafting recipes, perhaps ones with more complex subcombines, you increase the amount of materials required to craft things, so that the user feels like he is accomplishing something instead of simply beating his head against a brick wall as he spends a half hour branch mining at a certain Y level to find a certain ore he needs to proceed. In fact, I could see some form of auto-mining be relatively early-access, much like Factorio does, but at a relatively slow but consistent rate. Maybe have different auto-miners for different ores or resources. Make automation the key thing the player is doing instead of crafting. And if you can set up Efab to do sub-combines, that would be a real boon.
You don't want your player either grinding resources or staring at a crafting grid as the vast majority of the gameplay, because that gets boring (digging pun unintentional) and repetitive. You want the player *engaged* in doing something. You want him building, or planning, or expanding, or seeking... something that keeps him not just playing but actively engaged and enjoying themselves. Which is why, even as you increase the cost and the subcombines, you should also give automation options early on so that he can simply keep the subcombines going so the recipes themselves don't take him particularly long to accomplish. You want him to be able to set up a stockpile of components, so that the actual crafting of the item itself won't take too long. If the player is saying something like "Once I got the automation infrastructure down, these things were a breeze to make!", then you're doing something very right.
In fact, you can set up 'soft' progression tiers based on resource consumption, instead of 'hard' progression locks that require specific items to unlock. If it's going to take you a half a stack of iron, a stack of wood, a half a stack of redstone, and eight or so gold to produce this thingy... well, now you know what you need to set up as automation in order to get going with that. And automating the iron, gold, and redstone is going to be needed for *other* things as well, so best have it set up in a modular manner, because you're *going* to want more throughput later. I mean, sure you might be able to make *one* item manually, eventually, but the mod pack will assume that you will automate a given task as soon as you are able to, so making a single item is going to be less useful than being able to crank out a given item every half a minute or so in order to be able to make the next thing. Think Factorio.
In conclusion, Continuum, as it stands, fell victim to the common 'expert' trope of 'make it grindy'. However, that doesn't necessarily mean that it was 'bad', so much as it needed some more refinement, and perhaps a slightly different direction to go with some of the mods, especially Efab. I feel there's a lot to learn here, to improve upon, for the next generation of packs.
Last edited:
