Um, it is? I have a copy of it in the modpack I'm building... Granted it was released on twitter, but it is still on the internets.
Is Ore processing and sorting disappearing?
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They aren't crap - just because you need a few diamonds after you've gotten an insane amount of wood that does not mean it's useless. Just that it has an additional cost. In other farms, that is called "power".
That I will totally grant you, I have one player who is terrible for this. I call him a power gamer without a cause.
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All good points, Im going by my experience only. I only used gravisuite with gregtech so it seemed balanced. In a non gregtech pack its just as bad as MPS. I think you made a type though on the ender tanks. You said 'before ener tanks were in 1.4' then said 'he used a liquid transposer with an ender tank'. Setting up rail systems to get lava from the nether is IMO balanced. Lots of available fuel, but requires lots of infrastructure. Not so with tesseracts. Good point on the rich slag with TE, its an example of how power creep was happening even back in 1.4. Induction Smelter is power creep from a macerator/furnace. now it seems you can do that AND use cinnabar to get even more? Seems like power creep to me.
The tubes and pipes is a good point. I just like that regular BC pipes punish you for not being careful. But its probably 'good' power creep, lots of people dont like it. Although I guess like item ducts, they cost metal so its not sooo bad. In a gregtech world with no turtles they would be great. Really... turtles ruin any hope of balance. Without turtles the increased cost of TE compared to BC options really becomes an issue. With turtles its not even a thought.
I never made a frame quarry, but i thought they took a lot of time and knowledge to set up? Arent these things making a comeback with the TE3 block breaker?
Really the more i try to wrap my head around pack balance, it seems the real issues are turtles and quarries. Remove turtles (or use Opencomputers) and up the power draw of a quarry and make it a single use item, and other mods get a lot better. Ive complained about TE3 recipes but with a higher energy draw quarry they are more expensive, and its a factor in game play. Unfortunately a 48 mj quarry makes everything basically cheap as hell to craft.
Im adding bc, railcraft, ic2 and gregtech to magicfarm, quarries up to 300 mj to max out, and single use. Single use gregtech quarries *might* be going too far. Ill have to see how it goes.
The difference between cart tool maintenance and power though is that you can set up infrastructure to automate power production, but there's no way to fully automate tool repair. Eventually you will come back to a cart that is cutting down nothing but still driving around and burning up fuel.
Another idea there Zorn that can be done, is to reduce the ore generation. That's what I've done on my server.
Roughly all ores have been reduced by 20-25%, in fewer but larger clusters (apart from gold, gold is used a lot, so that I've given a slight buff).
That in effect increases the power usage of a quarry as it needs to be used more often/over a larger area to net the same result.
Another thing that could be done is to use a mod to override the quarries recipe. If it required a BC chip in it's recipe, that means a player needs to have a laser system up and running before they can even build a quarry, and adds an artificial sense of progression.
Turtles and Quarries have always been the things that throw any idea of balance out of the window. Turtles even more then Quarries. I didn't want CC in my pack, but my players wanted it, although not for the mining turtles.
Again, the cost of computers/turtles could be overridden, make them require metals, chips, circuit boards, whatever, and you push their availability back further up the tech tree.
I honestly feel that any mod pack trying to provide a consistent feel to the gameplay should override mod recipes to that packs sense of "balance". Configs are great, but sometimes you need to go a step further.
Take for example the Energy Manipulator mod (basically the Energy Condensor from EE2), I asked the mod author if they could put configurable recipes, and they did. As a result, the basic Energy Manipulator requires 2 shiny ingots, 4 Naquadah Ingots, a ME chest, an Emerald Upgrade from MFR, and a redstone energy cell (Tier 3). It's multiblock addons to expand it's capabilities also have high recipe costs. This pushes the block to "mid/end game" instead of early game with it's vanilla recipe of emeralds, diamonds, redstone, glowstone and obsidian.
The induction smelter though is not power creep. Only cinnabar gives that big bonus, which can only be obtained 25% of the time from pulved Redstone Ore (IIRC). Early game you won't have silk touch to get that ore. Vanilla wise you'd need to get the XP, an enchantment table setup and some luck. That's a lot of extra infrastructure to support that so called Power Creep.
It's most likely something you'd only use when you really need those extra resources, usually the shiny ingots.
Roughly all ores have been reduced by 20-25%, in fewer but larger clusters (apart from gold, gold is used a lot, so that I've given a slight buff).
That in effect increases the power usage of a quarry as it needs to be used more often/over a larger area to net the same result.
Another thing that could be done is to use a mod to override the quarries recipe. If it required a BC chip in it's recipe, that means a player needs to have a laser system up and running before they can even build a quarry, and adds an artificial sense of progression.
Turtles and Quarries have always been the things that throw any idea of balance out of the window. Turtles even more then Quarries. I didn't want CC in my pack, but my players wanted it, although not for the mining turtles.
Again, the cost of computers/turtles could be overridden, make them require metals, chips, circuit boards, whatever, and you push their availability back further up the tech tree.
I honestly feel that any mod pack trying to provide a consistent feel to the gameplay should override mod recipes to that packs sense of "balance". Configs are great, but sometimes you need to go a step further.
Take for example the Energy Manipulator mod (basically the Energy Condensor from EE2), I asked the mod author if they could put configurable recipes, and they did. As a result, the basic Energy Manipulator requires 2 shiny ingots, 4 Naquadah Ingots, a ME chest, an Emerald Upgrade from MFR, and a redstone energy cell (Tier 3). It's multiblock addons to expand it's capabilities also have high recipe costs. This pushes the block to "mid/end game" instead of early game with it's vanilla recipe of emeralds, diamonds, redstone, glowstone and obsidian.
The induction smelter though is not power creep. Only cinnabar gives that big bonus, which can only be obtained 25% of the time from pulved Redstone Ore (IIRC). Early game you won't have silk touch to get that ore. Vanilla wise you'd need to get the XP, an enchantment table setup and some luck. That's a lot of extra infrastructure to support that so called Power Creep.
It's most likely something you'd only use when you really need those extra resources, usually the shiny ingots.
We thought of this, but does the reduced ore gen make hand mining too annoying? I thought ultimate 1.4.7 was pretty good, 1.5 was too high. Increasing quarry power draw also means less holes in the ground. But its a good idea, thanks, i might try it both ways and see how they go.
The recipe changing thing is awesome, apparently the mod is called Minetweaker? I only just noticed it, you can adjust recipes directly? This really opens up a lot of options, especially with Turtles. They are really fun but sheesh... too cheap.
As for induction smelter, I thought I read that you could still get rich slag and also use cinnabar on top of it, so even though it wasnt easy to get cinnabar, its still more than you got in TE2. If TC4 cinnabar never gets added then its not horrible though. Still... its a bit of power creep. Am I wrong that we still get rich slag AND now cinnabar?
TE now adds a steel recipe too? 4 coal and an iron? I hope i can disable it, it ruins steel as a tech tier.
Thsanks for the ideas, I appreciate it.
@Golrith: Now that you mention it, I wouldn't mind seeing an Engineer's Toolbox recipe for computers, using those circuits and a PSU in the recipe. It'd make computers a little more expensive, but not prohibitively so. And you can disable turtles, and still have computers.
@zorn: Essentially it means you find fewer ore clusters, but the individual clusters are larger.
@zorn: Essentially it means you find fewer ore clusters, but the individual clusters are larger.
This. The problem is not that the Steve's Carts carts cost more now. A couple extra diamonds for a machine that already costs a few diamonds isn't that big a deal. The problem is that they are now impossible to automate so you end up having to come back days or weeks after you've already moved on to bigger and better things to monkey around with a basic tree farm.
The problem isn't the 48MJ/t quarry. 48MJ is 480RF. Which means having at least 6 steam dynamos constantly running just to power the quarry. Which means a treefarm, or other farming setup to fuel the dynamos. It also means having redstone energy conduits since the maximum transfer rate on hardened energy conduits is 400RF/t. Which then means having a magma crucible and a fluid transposer. Which means needing to go to the nether. And so on, and so forth. Which doesn't even count the resource cost of the quarry in the first place. Or the infrastructure needed to collect and store the output of the quarry. At the basic end, you'd need a diamond pipe to filter out cobble, dirt and gravel and . The quarry fits well enough in it's place as the first major project after the initial phase of manual mining with picks to find diamonds. Ideally it happens around the same time that you get to the nether, since the nether phase also happens right around when you've done enough mining to get diamonds.
In addition, there are multiple other options for automated mining. People don't use them because the quarry is simple and well-known, but Steve's Carts drills aren't all that bad. Nor are Railcraft (Traincraft?) tunnel bores. Or a Thaumcraft Arcane Bore. MFR has laser drills. And ultimately, the point of an automated mining is to save time. If you nerf all the methods of automatic mining so that it takes longer and costs more than just mining yourself with a mining laser or TiC hammer, or wand of excavation, then people will just go do that for a few hours to stock up on stacks and stacks of resources instead of wasting the time on building a system that's less effective.
The problem is that you want a modpack setup that extends the time spent playing vanilla-style manual mining with iron picks and puts off any mod-style automated farming and mining until later. That's not balance, that's altering the play experience to fit your own individual preferences. Which is ok, but thinking about it that way should make it more obvious why it's ultimately a personal choice that is best served by making personal goals and challenges for yourself rather than by trying to fiddle with the configs until they work the way you think they should. Because the people designing the mod, and most other people playing them are not playing that way, so the mods aren't intended to work that way, and will always end up having some sort of loophole or trick that defeats your purpose. Maybe you fix quarries, but forget turtles. Or you get both of them, but then someone makes a cart that can deploy items like a player, and someone else puts a TiC Hammer on it. And you get that one, and someone else makes an add-on for Thaumcraft that lets you make any item in the game by combining aspects. It'll never end, and you'll always be frustrated and complaining that stuff is "OP."
You can only use Rich Slag, or Cinnabar, not both at the same time. I don't think TC4 cinnabar works though (well, not according to my mod pack I think).
I think TE only adds a steel recipe if it detects no other mod that can produce steel. I use the steel option, so have to use Railcraft, smelt down chain mail drops or find it as dungeon loot.
Also, TE also adds an "expensive" mod that on most recipes turns the two bottom ingots in it's machine recipes into Gears. That's about a 20% cost increase. Use that alongside the Steel option (MFR also set to use TE recipes, along with MPS, so all tech need steel).
The reduced ores haven't been too noticable when hand mining. Getting it right takes a few attempts. Yes, there's bigger areas of plain stone, but once you find some ore, you'll get a nice haul. It'll seem a lot, but it's actually less.
One of our server players placed down a default size quarry, and only dug up 2 iron ore blocks. He must have been really unlucky with his positioning, with the quarry between all the iron ore clusters.
Overall, it's slowed down progression slightly, and has actually made me make use of Ore Berry bushes and set up an automated farm and ingot processing facility for them. Another one of our players wanted MORE, so he went and crafted up the Deep Dark Portal and is mining up insane amount of ores there. Although there are some odd results coming up in what he is digging, redstone and diamond seem to be less then the overworld :S
If you want to Zorn, you can always visit my server, just to get a feel for it with the configs I use. Been working on Omega Dawn now for around 6 months originally in 1.5.2. Slowly getting the "balance" right to what I think "works".
I think TE only adds a steel recipe if it detects no other mod that can produce steel. I use the steel option, so have to use Railcraft, smelt down chain mail drops or find it as dungeon loot.
Also, TE also adds an "expensive" mod that on most recipes turns the two bottom ingots in it's machine recipes into Gears. That's about a 20% cost increase. Use that alongside the Steel option (MFR also set to use TE recipes, along with MPS, so all tech need steel).
The reduced ores haven't been too noticable when hand mining. Getting it right takes a few attempts. Yes, there's bigger areas of plain stone, but once you find some ore, you'll get a nice haul. It'll seem a lot, but it's actually less.
One of our server players placed down a default size quarry, and only dug up 2 iron ore blocks. He must have been really unlucky with his positioning, with the quarry between all the iron ore clusters.
Overall, it's slowed down progression slightly, and has actually made me make use of Ore Berry bushes and set up an automated farm and ingot processing facility for them. Another one of our players wanted MORE, so he went and crafted up the Deep Dark Portal and is mining up insane amount of ores there. Although there are some odd results coming up in what he is digging, redstone and diamond seem to be less then the overworld :S
If you want to Zorn, you can always visit my server, just to get a feel for it with the configs I use. Been working on Omega Dawn now for around 6 months originally in 1.5.2. Slowly getting the "balance" right to what I think "works".
Yeah Ender Tank was a typo, what he did was pump the lava into a Liquid Transposer which put it in IC2 cells, ejected into an Ender Chest (that was the typo) and used another Transposer on the other side to unload the lava into a BC tank tower.
I don't quite agree on tripling in 1.4 as power creep, but I'm a bit busy right now so I'll elaborate later.
If TE ever added a pump and automated mining, then yes, that's going to really push BC into the grave. There's nothing stopping TE from doing that since it's pulling away from the MJ scene. Maybe after all these years with IC and BC dominating the scene, their time is over. In a few years, TE might be in the same boat, and some other mod is "in the spotlight".
I could reply to everything you wrote but this is the key. Interesting that we agreed on a few things though. (ender pearls, moving spawners, etc.)
Notice the mods that have nerfed things? Now tell me which mods in a big pack like monster get the most use and fame, and which ones get people complaining?
A zillion posts on this forum and others about people not using bc pipes for items or power. "Going all TE3"
Forestry multifarms vs MFR farms? Most everyone makes a MFR farm except those bored with them, or older players. MFR farms are MUCH more popular. Steves carts? I would bet what hair is left on my head that quarries turtles and MFR get used far more than steves carts for drilling and farming. Which is why im nerfing quarries, booting turtles, and nerfing MFR. But my ideas still sound radical?
turtles with rubies? Come on thats a stretch. But you bring up a big point... Redpower. Redpower frames were cheap, its items were cheap. And what mod has MORE people wanting back than any other mod ever? Redpower. People here said that redpower frame quarries were OP... and everyone wants the mod back!
Non power using autocrafing table? Again Buildcraft nerfs, and everyone complains and complains. What mod offered the best, cheaptest autocrafting table ever? Xycraft. And which mod does everyone want to come back? Xycraft. It really didnt offer much, but everyone wants it back. Xycraft soil also very powerful... and everyone wants it back. For what? The gems that took up tons of world gen space and did nothing? Or the huge tanks made out of stone and not a pile of iron or steel like railcraft tanks? (admittedly, I loved multitanks for the design aspect)
To me you wrapped up my whole theory with your post. Every nerf we have seen gets constant complaints, and people are always, always posting things here like 'BC is just behind the times, TE3 is what I use for everything now". "I only use railcraft for the boilers".
Im sure you can say that you and other veterans have done so, but you have to agree that for the average player what i say is true. You did not mention ONE NERF that referenced Thermal Expansion at all, and it's the most popular mod out there. Every mod you did mention gets a lot of flack or is less used than other options. Forestry is not really referenced either way and suprise surprise... defaults to 'easy' mode.
but this has been great really, any doubt i had is long gone.
BC pipes and kinesis pipes have not been nerfed, in fact, the bug fix can be seen as a buff (you certainly seem to think it's a buff, judging by your previous comments) People are using TE3 because it is better not because it's cheaper (it's not cheaper anyway... by any stretch of the imagination) because it's softer on your computer (how many people do you really think have mega awesome uber computers? I certainly don't) and because it's not got a ridiculously assinine policy of "we don't use other peoples APIs"
Railcraft nerfed boiler efficiency, I still use it because boilers are cool
Steves Carts nerfed their carts, I still use them because carts are cool
And can you just stop slinging shit at MFR, the block is cheaper yes (arguable not so if you enable TE recipies and TE steel) and requires more power per log than a forestry farm
Calm down birch. No need to get defensive, other people also agree that MFR is very powerful.
oh I agree that it's powerful, and I do up the costs myself (of both power and recipe). I don't use forestry because I don't like the aesthetic, and I'm quite calm, the bolded parts are meant to imply emphasis, not rage
First, you're asking Birch to calm the fuck down, and you really can't do that. And since when MFR being powerful is a bad thing? It's a good thing! This is an error I'm tired of seeing, which is leveling by the low point when we should be leveling by the high point! C'mon, MFR is easy to setup, but man that thing draws energy FAST. Steve's Carts can run on its own for a good while with less fuel per log and Forestry's arguably the most versatile. Yes, all of these options are available, it's up to you to choose the right tool for the right job, in YOUR opinion. There's no "we" in this equation. Only "I".
Here in a Brazil we have a saying that is: opinions are like ass - everyone has theirs.
....and no one wants to see yours
finishing the quote, not saying I don't wanna see your opinion.[/quote]
We all have our ideas of game balance. I am not against a point-buy principle for ender pearls, but it should not be for 4 iron. 4 gold is a better place to start.
Lots and lots of people still use BC pipes, but mostly because of Logistics Pipes or gate conditionals. Base BC pipes still have a place, but look at their costing. They're early game stuff you move away from. You can be using BC pipes literally on day one before you have metal tools. In the late game, they make a resurgence because no mod really can do what gate can do.
TE3 is good for simple systems, it performs well, and it is costed pretty fairly. It is not universally better than every other pipe system. If I had to make a bet on the "best itempipes" it's a tough tie between EnderIO and Logistics Pipes, with Project Red's transport rapidly joining that group. EnderIO and LP both have a fairly complex entry cost (LP having more, but being incredibly more capable).
One thing I've learned, and it's one of the reasons I've started a youtube channel, is that novice MMC players do what they've seen. The modscape is so big and intimidating that it's unfair to ask them to come up with a build from scratch. So when Jaded and Dire do a MFR farm, they copy that. For a LONG time. It's not necessarily some sort of ruthless optimization process, it's just a function of how the userbase copes with complexity.
This is because there are so few examples for novice players. My mining system sans processing was easy and much more capable than a quarry. But I had only found ONE other video on youtube explaining how it worked (and I confess, I needed help with vanilla rail mechanics to understand how an SC2 miner could clear a large area and I asked months ago on this forum and got ONE response). I hope by spreading the word that SC2 can do this, we'll see a wave of people adopting it.
Quarries are one-stop-shopping magic blocks. They are pretty good at what they do, but also pretty dumb at what they do. I think BetterQuarries is way op, and I think Digital Miners from Mekanism are BEYOND OP until Aidan tunes them a bit. Quarries? They sort of self limit because they're so awkward to reset and damage the landscape so badly.
TBH, they kinda do. Quarries? I mean... what's the problem? Weren't you concerned people would further be driven towards hammers? Turtles? Make lousy quarries; terrible fuel efficiency and you'll end up with no coal for other uses even in my fuel-dense worldgen. MFR? MFR has some great stuff in there outside of the 2 blocks you seem fixated on, and it'd be a shame to lose those things.
I didn't actually say this!
I didn't write this either, but um...
I think most people agree that Xycraft Fabricators were both a bit too good, but also a placeholder for things to come. Dartcraft can still do powerless autocrafting, but in 1.6.4 it is a magical option that is a few tiers in and doesn't feel particularly OP given the investment; on the order of Thaumcraft powerful. People want Xycraft back because it has a great art style and a theme that is under-represented. If you want Fabricator-like action, buildcraft still has it (albeit for a power cost).
TE3 has had lots of nerfs. The fuel consumption nerf (engines got "buffed" but actually this was a fuel economy nerf in practice), the servo nerf. From TE2 to now, things are less powerful and conduits are much worse than they used to be. Tesseracts are not really any better now, but require a LOT more effort to craft. As for Forestry, he "ignoble stock" nerf was unnecessary and you'll see more mods like Gendustry push back on the absurd new difficulty of bees. Forestry power is actually quite well balanced and an excellent choice (tree breeding, which is quite fun and balanced as it stands, can yield fantastic power from Forestry but the initial systems are somewhat underwhelming).
Forestry farms were stealth buffed a few versions ago (I dunno if their low yields were actually a nerf). People think MFR is the best because it looks like a phantom weedwhacker, but the reality is that the primary limitation on all treefarms is how fast you can make them grow. Forestry has the worst max speed for growing, but on the other hand has the very best power efficiency over a wide (wide!) area. The notion that SC2 or Forestry are somehow disadvantaged is very sketchy, because the inputs they require literally last for weeks of continuous operation with even a modest sum.
And of course, the newcomers on the treefarm scene from the Magic mods? We'll see people start making Ars2 treefarms soon. They're quite good if you know how to do it. And Thaumcraft? Golems are quite good as well.[/quote]