How can I figure out what is sucking the power out of my Redstone Energy Cell?

[twisto51]

Not that I like this system, but why is "you get to use the machine" not a reward?

Because a reward possessed by all machines isn't useful in distinguishing between machines.

On the TE subject I prefer TE because it "just works". After a long IT career that is something I appreciate. Conduits in particular just weren't better than conductive pipe, they actually worked when most of the time conductive pipe was busy blowing itself up simply because one chunk somewhere didn't load as fast as the others. I know kinesis pipes are much better now but that will take awhile to become widespread knowledge.

I don't feel TE needs to cost more just because it works. Making it cost more wouldn't making me use another mod that doesn't work at all some of the time. Furthermore, if a mod is going to "punish" the player like BC conductive pipe used to it shouldn't punish the player for things they don't have direct control over, like chunk-loading speeds.

On the AA itself it seems bizarre to complain about a machine that internalizes what vanilla minecraft does itself. Two buckets of water means endless source blocks of water, anywhere you want them in vanilla. The AA is just an interface to get that endless source of water into a pipe. This is another case where TE simply works whereas the BC alternative quite often doesn't.

On TE vs. IC2 experimental I only see TE getting more popular. It really feels like the gregtech tail is wagging the IC2 dog when looking at the changes in IC2-experimental. If they want to be more than just "that mod that makes uu-matter" they're heading in the wrong direction for most of us.

 

[zorn]

4 iron for an ender pearl is pretty reasonable. Ender Pearls are becoming the overused status quo progression brake. And in that role they are absolutely terrible. I don't take anyone seriously who says, "Oh, you just set up an endermen farm" or "oh, you just go to the End and bring a linking book." Apologist excuses for crappy mechanics. Ender pearls, their availability and drop rate, are tuned for a vanilla game, not modded MC demanding 32 pearls for one upgrade to a piece of gear. I think EE3 is a tragedy, not because minium stones are out of balance but because it's boring as hell compared to EE2 and it's been that way for a year. It was a great mod with useful utilities that could be extremely helpful and entirely balanced for people who are mature enough to moderate their own decisions and behavior, but the people who punch themselves in the face and blame it on television violence cried foul so the mod gets gutted and now it's just dull.

So people who felt making a diamond per minute out of milk was OP were immature? Interesting, I guess I was right about that other thread after all. . I thought ee2 was a safe bet to use as an example of how a mod could be too powerful but I guess not.

The ender pearl part makes no sense. Modded MC is different yes than vanilla in that you need 32 pearls to upgrade a piece of gear but the mods also give you abilities like flight that make it easier to fight mobs etc. providing invulnerability and flight should have a pretty good cost shouldn't it? No durability on those items either.... That's pretty powerful compared to vanilla it should require some work to get there. Minium stones make it ridiculously easy.

 

[immibis]

I think the problem is that the loss occurs when you are not using the machine. You can set up a system to disconnect the power when it's not being used, and there's no down side to doing so, so the loss is gaining you nothing. At least with the Thermionic Fabricator, the constant drain is giving you the benefit of the machine being available for work instantly without having to wait for it to melt the glass, similarly with the other machines that keep themselves hot for fast processing.

Not really different. With these machines (what machines does Buildcraft even have that aren't going to run all the time?) the constant drain is also giving you the benefit of the machine being available for work instantly.

However, I just see it as an artefact of how BC has implemented a system that is intended to be lossy and that is intended to have engines constantly running for optimal performance. It's an implementation artefact, sometimes you just have to put up with these things in games. A game will always be a simplified version of the "realilty" that it is trying to represent, and those simplifications can always be picked apart if you want to focus on them. I try to focus beyond them and see the reality that they are attempting to portray.

It's a deliberate design decision, not an implementation artifact.
IC2: "You only use energy when you use the machines."
Buildcraft: "You use energy just to have machines, but you use more when you're using them."
Of course I prefer the IC2 way, but for all the attempts at explaining it, I have not read a good reason to prefer one over the other.

Imagine if IC2 macerators took 0.25 EU/tick constantly. All this would mean is that you'd now need a solar panel or watermill for each macerator, and slightly bigger storage.
All this would mean is that if you want a macerator, instead of just making a macerator, you now make a macerator+batbox+solar panel. Each macerator now costs slightly more (but no different from a recipe change), and requires a bit more space (or a lot more space, if you choose a watermill) and nothing else has changed.

If Buildcraft had green generators, same thing. You'd just put a (hypothetical) solar engine behind each machine. Or add one solar engine for each machine to your energy network. That was easy.

Since Buildcraft does not have built-in green generators, just change "a solar engine" to "0.125 steam engines + 0.007 boilers + about 0.003 tree farms". (assuming 1 MJ/t)

 

[PhilHibbs]

So people who felt making a diamond per minute out of milk was OP were immature?

People who thought that it was OP but did it anyway were immature. I used the Minium Stone to make Ender Pearls, but maybe I did it 3 times when I just needed 1 more pearl to finish something off.
People who thought that it was fun and just part of a different game to MineCraft, well, good luck to them, have fun! That's the attitude that Slowpoke had - EE2 was its own game, and was the core of the whole FTB concept. That concept doesn't necessarily translate well to SMP play, which is the source of the problem.

It's a deliberate design decision, not an implementation artifact.
IC2: "You only use energy when you use the machines."
Buildcraft: "You use energy just to have machines, but you use more when you're using them."

That's how BC4 does it. BC3 did it differently.

 

[zilvarwolf]

That's how BC4 does it. BC3 did it differently.

Only inasmuch as the loss was intended to happen in the pipes instead of at the machine. TE honored that with the 5%/25% system loss on transfer.

 

[MigukNamja]

Ender pearls, their availability and drop rate, are tuned for a vanilla game, not modded MC demanding 32 pearls for one upgrade to a piece of gear.

Unless there is a good reason to ignore vanilla MC, vanilla indeed MC should be the yardstick for balance. As for 32 pearls for "one upgrade to a piece of gear", you're grossly _understating_ the usefulness of MPS jetpack and how powerful you are already. By the time you are looking at upgrading to flight, you are already:

1. Invincible or close to it
2. Can run super-fast
3. Can jump super-high
4. Can cheaply 1-shot or 2-shot Endermen from a safe distance

Getting 32 Ender Pearls using (quasi-)vanilla techniques should not be an insurmountable impediment to progress at that point. As for the benefit, the MPS JetPack to finish a fully upgraded suit beats the GraviSuite combo by a longshot, and that suit is pretty dang expensive.

EE3 as a whole isn't bad. Unfortunately, a handful or fewer completely unbalanced recipes give it a bad rep..

 

[zorn]

The thing is though, it's not a fair comparison to compare the AA to a pump though. Because they don't actually do the same things. A pump pumps liquid. Any liquid that can be placed in the world, which pretty much means all them these days. Not only that, it also removes the liquid from the world so it can not only be used to transport liquid, but also to reclaim land. An AA just creates water. Only water. It doesn't do anything for oil, lava, glowstone, liquid ender, liquid redstone, milk, sludge, sewage, pink slime, liquid meat, mob essence... and the list goes on. It also doesn't help at all when you build an underwater base and need to remove the water already there. In terms of overall utility, you can actually argue that the pump is "better" than the AA.



Maybe we just have widely different definitions of "end-game". A single quarry run overnight won't get you a quantum suit. It won't get you an ultimate hybrid solar panel. It won't fill out a single piece of thaumcraft research, or get you any alvearies, it won't breed either trees or bees for you. It won't build your tree farm, or setup a oil refining system or lava pumps. It won't create any mystcraft worlds.

Keep in mind, those aren't things that define end-game to me, those are "mid-game" for me. Just having a single alveary is mid-game to the end-game goal of having every single bee species and trait. Having a single mystcraft notebook is mid-game to the end-game goal of multiple dedicated worlds with a nexus linking them with a labelled and centrally controlled portal system. Having a tree farm is mid-game to the also mid-game goal of having automated frame production for bees and power for mid-game engines and machinery. A quantum suit is itself a late mid-game to the end-game goal of getting a gravisuit for flight and invulnerability. The single ultimate hybrid itself is also just a stepping stone to getting a field of ultimate hybrids that power a constantly running set of mass fabs and recyclers that replaces the need to use quarries.

And that's just scratching the surface of the infrastructure needed for a true end-game base. We still haven't touched building a fully automated AE system with several pages of crafting patterns, automated ore-processing, automatic creation of steel and refined iron, autocrafting of items like glass, frames, stone bricks, fertilizer. Nor have we talked about setting up mob farms, or automated enchanting. Or even the most important end-game goal of all, building a massive multi-thousand block Tower/Castle/Monument to your own glory with skulls dripping lava, or 100 block high fountains of liquid diamond, or a 1:1 scale replica of Superdimensional Fortress Macross. Now THAT is end-goal.

Notice i said the first quarry 'signaled the beginning of end game'. Its not a true end game, but the rate of progression jumps up by a HUGE margin once you get a quarry.

 

[MigukNamja]

Indeed, yes.

Also note we're not talking about a quarry in isolation. A quarry powered by early-game engines pumping into a vanilla chest is quite a bit different than a fully powered one with an Energy Tesseract and an Ender Chest or Item Tesseract on top feeding into a bulk sorting system back in your base.

1. Find oil spout
2. Plop down pump + redstone engine(s), Liquid Tesseract, and chunkloader made with EE3 pearls and diamonds
3. Refine back in base and feed directly into 36HP or smaller boiler
4. Plop down 64x64 quarry with Energy Tesseract and Item Tesseract, again made with EE3 diamonds and pearls
5. Void pipe cobble, dirt, and perhaps gravel, and sort the rest into barrels or diamond chests using diamond pipes made with...yup...EE3 diamonds
6. If you have time, find more oil spouts
7. Let run overnight

You can also replace steps 1 through 3 with Nether lava. The next day, you can then leverage your gains to expand power and quarry production several times over, again replicating Tesseracts with near limitless ender pearls.

Without EE3, the steps above would take several real-life days or else very tedious and possibly risky Endermen farming for several hours, assuming someone hasn't killed the Ender Dragon and/or you don't know or don't have access to an End Portal / Fortress / already-linked-linkbook. With EE3, though, you can safely skip mid-game with no risk.

 

[Golrith]

Unless there is a good reason to ignore vanilla MC, vanilla indeed MC should be the yardstick for balance. As for 32 pearls for "one upgrade to a piece of gear", you're grossly _understating_ the usefulness of MPS jetpack and how powerful you are already. By the time you are looking at upgrading to flight, you are already:

1. Invincible or close to it
2. Can run super-fast
3. Can jump super-high
4. Can cheaply 1-shot or 2-shot Endermen from a safe distance

Getting 32 Ender Pearls using (quasi-)vanilla techniques should not be an insurmountable impediment to progress at that point. As for the benefit, the MPS JetPack to finish a fully upgraded suit beats the GraviSuite combo by a longshot, and that suit is pretty dang expensive.

EE3 as a whole isn't bad. Unfortunately, a handful or fewer completely unbalanced recipes give it a bad rep..

Not really, my MPS suit consists of the jetpack, flight control, solar panel and blade launcher thingy. I have no armour modules installed on it. On my server, flight is a greater survival strategy then being able to take damage. But what made it possible to get straight to flight is that someone else took care of the ender dragon, so visiting the end to farm some pearls up is simplicity in itself for ALL players on the server now.
The End Dragon is a SSP boss which unlocks easy access to ender pearls, which are used by most mods as an attempt at balance. The idea is fine for SSP, not for SMP.

 

[zorn]

I agree EE3 is also a big problem. Someone said here that any sort of transmutation of resources will always be broken, because so many resources can be found infinitely at little cost, so turning those infinite resources into rarer ones will always be a problem. UU matter at least requires a lot of steps to create lots of resources, although id balance it out between the currrent mass fab and gregs matter fab (gregtech fab is really only ever going to be used for iridium and maybe titanium? No one will make oak logs out of gregtech UU matter, etc.)

Even without EE3 (but again i admit its probably THE biggest thing that skips people right to end game) the quarry is still far stronger than any other automated mining system.

IMO a quarry should have a durability, and require more power. Same with turtles. Although a quarry without landmarks isnt too bad. When i started i remember seeing screenshots of people running 4 quarries at once (or more) at default size... when did landmarks come in? Once i stumbled upon them, things got much easier.

And this gets back to the real crux of any balance argument with these mods. No one is going to run default sized quarries while their friends all use landmarks. Its just not going to happen. But if a server banned them, people would still play and resource incomes would slow down. Other automated mining systems would look attractive. As it is, Landmarks basically made, as the guy said in the quote i referenced earlier, ic2 miners, steves carts miners, thaumcraft bores, etc. all obsolete. The only thing people use other than quarries are things faster than quarries. Its just our nature, humans naturally want to be lazy and find more efficient ways to do things. the idea that this is about maturity is just ridiculous. I want to try out ic2 miners, default quarries, thaumcraft bores, and whatever and try to find ways to make each one more efficient, or find out which one IS more efficient, or ideally find out how each works better in certain situations.

Its like ic2 jetpacks. they are balanced because to gain flight, you lose armor. Quantum armor has no flight capability(without addons), and for a reason. Gravisuits and MPS suits removed the costs of flight (reduced protection) so no one is going to poke around on jetpacks with 60% armor protection, when they can easily Transmute a ton of ender pearls to make an MPS suit that gives them 100% protection and even faster flight. Like pandoras box though, once opened you can't close it. Once we all got used to MPS flight... who wants to go back to jetpacks?

 

[PhilHibbs]

By the time you are looking at upgrading to flight, you are already:

1. Just back from the Nether for the first time to get a couple of bits of glowstone. I love the IC2 jet pack and advanced jet pack, I don't ever intend to "upgrade" from them.

*Edit* Oh, hi Zorn, didn't see you there. Don't mind me.

 

[MigukNamja]

Not really, my MPS suit consists of the jetpack, flight control, solar panel and blade launcher thingy. I have no armour modules installed on it. On my server, flight is a greater survival strategy then being able to take damage. But what made it possible to get straight to flight is that someone else took care of the ender dragon, so visiting the end to farm some pearls up is simplicity in itself for ALL players on the server now.
The End Dragon is a SSP boss which unlocks easy access to ender pearls, which are used by most mods as an attempt at balance. The idea is fine for SSP, not for SMP.

Aye, and you don't need EE3 as a crutch, so all is good. My point about 32 Ender Pearls being "too expensive" to get without EE3 was to show how specious that argument was and why 32 pearls for creative-mode flight (w/flight control, which is super-cheap) is a justifiable cost, even when one is not on a server or else on a new server with a living, new-player-slaying Ender Dragon on the other side of a yet-to-be-found portal in a yet-to-be-found fortress.[DOUBLEPOST=1380812037][/DOUBLEPOST]

1. Just back from the Nether for the first time to get a couple of bits of glowstone. I love the IC2 jet pack and advanced jet pack, I don't ever intend to "upgrade" from them.

*Edit* Oh, hi Zorn, didn't see you there. Don't mind me.

Indeed, the IC2-based armor system is quite nice. The Nether is a very dangerous and difficult-to-navigate place when on foot. With flight, however, it's far easier. The IC2 starter jet pack makes the Nether much more accessible at a very early stage. If one is so lucky, you can even find a Nether Fortress early on, wall up a blaze spawner, and start collecting blaze rods for early-game Ender Chests/Packs/Tanks and other recipes.

 

[MigukNamja]

Its like ic2 jetpacks. they are balanced because to gain flight, you lose armor. Quantum armor has no flight capability(without addons), and for a reason. Gravisuits and MPS suits removed the costs of flight (reduced protection) so no one is going to poke around on jetpacks with 60% armor protection, when they can easily Transmute a ton of ender pearls to make an MPS suit that gives them 100% protection and even faster flight. Like pandoras box though, once opened you can't close it. Once we all got used to MPS flight... who wants to go back to jetpacks?

GraviChestPlate + UltimateSolarHat comes close to MPS, but MPS has the edge, yes. It has near-infinite power regen anywhere whereas the SolarHat has its limits. And, both GraviChestPlate and UltimateSolarHat are much more expensive than MPS. In Unleashed, they require UU-matter to make the Iridium and tons and tons of copper, iron, tin, rubber, etc.,. to make the hat.

I think the reason people don't commonly say MPS is OP is because it's extremely well done and quite fun. The flat/broad "choose how and when you upgrade" tech tree has broad appeal. MachineMuse deserves a lot of props for her original contributions to the MC modded community.

 

[Golrith]

I agree EE3 is also a big problem. Someone said here that any sort of transmutation of resources will always be broken, because so many resources can be found infinitely at little cost, so turning those infinite resources into rarer ones will always be a problem. UU matter at least requires a lot of steps to create lots of resources, although id balance it out between the currrent mass fab and gregs matter fab (gregtech fab is really only ever going to be used for iridium and maybe titanium? No one will make oak logs out of gregtech UU matter, etc.)

Even without EE3 (but again i admit its probably THE biggest thing that skips people right to end game) the quarry is still far stronger than any other automated mining system.

IMO a quarry should have a durability, and require more power. Same with turtles. Although a quarry without landmarks isnt too bad. When i started i remember seeing screenshots of people running 4 quarries at once (or more) at default size... when did landmarks come in? Once i stumbled upon them, things got much easier.

And this gets back to the real crux of any balance argument with these mods. No one is going to run default sized quarries while their friends all use landmarks. Its just not going to happen. But if a server banned them, people would still play and resource incomes would slow down. Other automated mining systems would look attractive. As it is, Landmarks basically made, as the guy said in the quote i referenced earlier, ic2 miners, steves carts miners, thaumcraft bores, etc. all obsolete. The only thing people use other than quarries are things faster than quarries. Its just our nature, humans naturally want to be lazy and find more efficient ways to do things. the idea that this is about maturity is just ridiculous. I want to try out ic2 miners, default quarries, thaumcraft bores, and whatever and try to find ways to make each one more efficient, or find out which one IS more efficient, or ideally find out how each works better in certain situations.

Its like ic2 jetpacks. they are balanced because to gain flight, you lose armor. Quantum armor has no flight capability(without addons), and for a reason. Gravisuits and MPS suits removed the costs of flight (reduced protection) so no one is going to poke around on jetpacks with 60% armor protection, when they can easily Transmute a ton of ender pearls to make an MPS suit that gives them 100% protection and even faster flight. Like pandoras box though, once opened you can't close it. Once we all got used to MPS flight... who wants to go back to jetpacks?

Would have to agree with you on the transmutation. I use the Energy Manipulator mod, which I've heavily configured. The basic block costs a emerald upgrade from MFR, 2 shiny ingots, 2 invar ingots, 2 lead ingots, a filled redstone energy frame and an AE Chest. This one block allows for transmutes up to 20k in value. Adding extra type of block to the energy manpulator raises the limit by 40k each time. These extra blocks also have a high resource cost. Even with my custom EMC values (A block of wood is 8, an emerald is 87k) and no values on known easy exploits plus a 10% tax rate on each conversion, our one farm has eventually generated thousands of emeralds.

I also feel the quarry is unbalanced within BC itself. It's sole purpose is to automate mining. That's it's advantage. I feel it shouldn't do it faster then the player equipped with a diamond pickaxe. It should have at least two modes. The original slow "player" speed, and the current faster "overdrive" speed, but requiring 10x the energy. The MJ running cost of the quarry just feels too low. Unfortunately (I checked last night), there's not a config option to control MJ usage.

 

[MigukNamja]

You need to stop baiting me or this is going to start going very badly for you. Nothing is OP if you don't use/abuse it. Grow up.

Please refrain from personal attacks and taunts if only for your own sake - they usually make the attacker look worse than the person they are attacking.

 

[PhilHibbs]

You can't call a specific, explicit implementation an artifact.

Er, yes I can, in fact I did. It's all a matter of perspective, how you view the world and the rules that describe it. This has been a long-running debate in the world of roleplaying games - do the game rules affect the world? Does a character in a game notice when the game mechanics change from one rules version to another? If your view is that the world is the game and the game is the world, then yes, Steve does notice when the BuildCraft mechanics change. If you view the specific BC mechanics as an attempt to present a crude, simplified, efficient emulation, then no Steve does not notice. I'm using the latter mind set when I say that these are implementation details.

 

[Enigmius1]

Please refrain from personal attacks and taunts if only for your own sake - they usually make the attacker look worse than the person they are attacking.

You're not a moderator, don't pretend to be one.[DOUBLEPOST=1380813911][/DOUBLEPOST]

Er, yes I can, in fact I did. It's all a matter of perspective, how you view the world and the rules that describe it. This has been a long-running debate in the world of roleplaying games - do the game rules affect the world? Does a character in a game notice when the game mechanics change from one rules version to another? If your view is that the world is the game and the game is the world, then yes, Steve does notice when the BuildCraft mechanics change. If you view the specific BC mechanics as an attempt to present a crude, simplified, efficient emulation, then no Steve does not notice. I'm using the latter mind set when I say that these are implementation details.

An artifact is something that existed and remains unchanged. Power drain on idle machines did not exist when pipes were lossy and machines exploded. It's a specific implementation. I can call an apple an orange and pretend it's an orange because I said so, but at the end of the day, reality is reality. It's not an artifact.

 

[PhilHibbs]

An artifact is something that existed and remains unchanged. Power drain on idle machines did not exist when pipes were lossy and machines exploded.

I meant artefact in the same sense as "JPEG compression artefacts", they aren't a deliberate part of the image, they're just a consequence of the compression. Constant machine drain is similarly a consequence of a simplified implementation of a lossy power system.

 

[Nathan2055]

I thought I should give an update as to my status. I removed all of the idling BC machines and everything is working again. I really need to get started on steam...
Thanks for your help everyone!

 

[Enigmius1]

I meant artefact in the same sense as "JPEG compression artefacts", they aren't a deliberate part of the image, they're just a consequence of the compression. Constant machine drain is similarly a consequence of a simplified implementation of a lossy power system.

There's a word that describes what's going on here. It's "apologist". Constant power drain on idle, basic machines is a poorly conceived system that was made for reasons that had nothing to do with enhancing the player experience.