-
The FTB Forum is now read-only, and is here as an archive. To participate in our community discussions, please join our Discord! https://ftb.team/discord
Is mekanism a must have?
- Thread starter imfabby
- Start date
zilvarwolf
New Member
The digital miner is one of my favorite automatic mining devices, and pre 1.7, I was very fond of the hydrogen generators.
But must-have? Probably not, when you've got the other laundry list. There's a lot of overlap with TE, BC, and IE.
But must-have? Probably not, when you've got the other laundry list. There's a lot of overlap with TE, BC, and IE.
I love Mekanism. Some of my favorite features:
- Armored jetpack is slightly OP but awesome. You can wear the armored jetpack + one other piece of armor for full armor. Pair it with the Mek boots to get walk assist and immunity to fall damage. Beware--default configs make the jetpack a power hog, because the machine used to make the gas to fill it is a hungry little beast. But you can just carry around extra gas and fill it on the fly, which is handy.
- Scuba gear! Great for building underwater, or if you also enjoy Mariculture.
- The Digital Miner. Screw mining dimensions, Mystcraft mining ages, etc. Plop down the digital miner, no giant landscape hole of doom. Has silk touch and can literally search for specific ores. It can also be used to replace building blocks, so you can make your building out of cheap bricks and replace them automatically later. It's cheap compared to making the Ender Quarry, which has similar features (silk touch, speed upgrades, etc.) now.
- Complicated Ore 5x setup. It's a fun system to set up and looks pretty cool when it's finished.
- Robit. He is adorable.
- Atomic Disassembler. Great way to free up your toolbar, can be used as a pick, shovel, sword, and hoe. Don't think you can enchant it, so you will still want silk touch if you're mining by hand. (Mining by hand? What is this sorcery?) It's not OP because you will still want specific tools for specific situations. I still keep a shovel, excavator, lumber axe, silk touch pick, and beheading sword in my golden bag of holding.
epidemia78
New Member
It is definitely ultra hyper cool. Theres absolutely no reason not to include it. In my opinion it is way better than IC2 which it has a lot in common with.
It is sort of the IC2 of the RF ecosystem, but it's a lot less of a resource grind than IC2 often ends up being. I really like Mekanism's models and way of thinking about things, but be aware that its default configs give it RF generation and consumption, weapon damage, and armor values and enchantability that are well beyond that of most other mods. Unless you are just going to play Mekanism, you may want to consider toning its configs down a bit. The Digital Miner in particular does far more with far greater efficiency any other automated miner, and there is very little you can do to mitigate how insanely effective it is. But if you are not too concerned with ideas of pace or balance, Mekanism is really a ton of fun. xyzzy75 covered most of the main points. I would also mention the Fluidic Plenisher, which is similar in concept to Buildcraft's Flood Gate, and the Seismic Vibrator and Reader, loosely based on some real world technology, which helps you assess the ore and spatial composition of a chunk. And yeah, the I/O setup for machines might seem a little weird at first, but there's some good discussion of how colors and faces work on Youtube. For the longest time, I thought it was necessary to use Mekanism's Configurator tool to configure machine sides, and didn't quite understand the color coding system, but it works a bit like Thermal Expansion in that the machine's slots in the GUI each have an assigned color, and you can select which face of the machine block associates with that color.
I mostly use mechanism for a couple things.
Equipment: Atomic Dissasembler is proably my favorite multi-tool.
Armored jetpack is cool and I really like how it looks.
Universal cables. I really do like the universal cables. In some ways they are rather unbalanced. But from a purely design standpoint of powering everything (except shaft powered machines) and being multiparts, they're awesome.
As for the hydrogen costs in 1.7. I'd rather disable the hydrogen generator and lower the cost of the sperator's operation.
Mekanism's power gen in general is or was (still playing 1.6.4) more than a bit OP.
Equipment: Atomic Dissasembler is proably my favorite multi-tool.
Armored jetpack is cool and I really like how it looks.
Universal cables. I really do like the universal cables. In some ways they are rather unbalanced. But from a purely design standpoint of powering everything (except shaft powered machines) and being multiparts, they're awesome.
As for the hydrogen costs in 1.7. I'd rather disable the hydrogen generator and lower the cost of the sperator's operation.
Mekanism's power gen in general is or was (still playing 1.6.4) more than a bit OP.
I would say it's a bit OP, at least solar/wind-wise. The problem with such systems is that MC doesn't really *have* weather. There aren't windy and still days. Since you can easily store solar power (unlike in the real world, where solar is difficult/expensive to store), rain/night is meaningless. We (a friend I play modded MC with) still use wind/solar for the 5x setup, but I do feel a bit guilty about it. To assuage our guilt we are powering all of our Ender IO machines with zombie brains in jars. Much more difficult to set up than windmills and the power output is pretty terrible.
Not sure why you are trying mechanism then... It's essentially IC2 that runs off RF that has a incredibly powerful automated mining and ore quintupling.
I'm struggling to think of anything that mechanism does that is original, I'm sure there's something but I can't think of it.
I think it's just one of those one up mods that just does what it's predecessors did but better.
For your consideration, the following may be relatively unique to Mek:
Robit
Walkie-talkies
Portable Teleporters
MekaCape
Maybe cardboard box?
Its actually fun though.
In 1.6.4 it was possible to make tremendously powerful positive energy loops with hydrogen. in 1.7.10 its been so nerfed into the ground that early game items like the jetpack are useless. It didn't go full Steve's Carts nerf, but its in the ball park.I've never actually used it, but since the Yogscast love it, I'm assuming it's ridiculously OP
Personally I think the Hydrogen nerf was done extremely poorly. The concept of the hydrogen generator was the broken aspect of the mod, not the creation of hydrogen/oxygen.
I'm just starting to put together my own 1.7.10 pack, and intend to have mechanism mostly for it's equipment and universal cables. Hopefully the config options are robust and I can undo the nerf and disable most/all of mek's powergen. As my pack's powergen will be centered on Rotarycraft (and companion mods), with the probable exception of Railcraft and Survivalist generators.
I'm just starting to put together my own 1.7.10 pack, and intend to have mechanism mostly for it's equipment and universal cables. Hopefully the config options are robust and I can undo the nerf and disable most/all of mek's powergen. As my pack's powergen will be centered on Rotarycraft (and companion mods), with the probable exception of Railcraft and Survivalist generators.
There's an obscure config setting for the amount of energy needed to produce Hydrogen. You can drastically lower that. I believe the increase in energy cost is for a not yet implemented feature. So, bit bad on the timing. I need to test that out myself, so that generating fuel for jetpacks is still a viable option, but not as easy as it was before.
All other machines and energy producers have config options for their energy usage/generation. I personally set the wind turbine to half that of a standard solar panel, hit the heat gens with a massive reduction, and doubled the power usage of all machines, and I think x4 the power usage of the digital miner.
You can also use Minetweaker to remove or adjust the recipes to your personal sense of balance.