Is Ore processing and sorting disappearing?

[Protocurity]

I do think a lot of the energy systems that are used currently are way too easy. So many blocks are made with the purpose of solving problems instead of providing something new, and the end result is players don't get a feel for machine building and problem solving anymore. Myself included. Honestly, I was blown away when I saw that there is a way to make a sorting machine using only vanilla minecraft:

This is also the reason why I put Chocolatequest/Better dungeons into my own modded MC. There are all of these different devices to use that do things like automatically mine, multiply ores, suck up water into tanks, and store energy, but to what end? The end result of playing with so many mods is that you use that stuff in the mod to... use that same stuff in the mod again. I like a challenge to face in the future, in which the tools from modded minecraft are a great help against.

I'm basically playing by myself ATM, and there's little reason to go about sculpting or designing buildings, since no one else will see it, and I'm not good at it anyway.

 

[snooder]

Thats precisely the point- thats everything on a silver platter with near 0 design/creativity from the player.

Not really. I've created several sorting/automation systems and no two of them are alike. And I've seen plenty of interesting/creative designs in that respect. It is not harder to make a creative and/or interesting design. In fact, with the better tools we have now, we can make some really good designs without having to build ugly workarounds to basic problems. I can, for example, setup my quarry tessaract to also funnel power to the quarry, and automatically shut off the power whenever the AE system isn't accepting any more items. I can build the SAME item transport system from my farms to a set of steam dynamos that I used to make from farms to stirling engines, but now instead of having a bulky set of transposers and tubes wrapped around nexus points, a single itemduct can have multiple independently configurable IO connections. Which means I can put the entire set of tubes inside a wall, cover the wall in covers and have a seemingly empty room with all the popes and connections hidden. Or mix/match with routers and tesseracts so there aren't any pipes at all. Better yet, since the machines have configurable input/outputs, I can build a room for a specific aesthetic and place the machines where they need to go, rather than having to design the machine layout first, and then have to choose a room design to fit it. And, if I mess up, I just end up with a full chest and a puzzling time trying to figure out where the bottleneck is, and not a few thousand entities spewing everywhere and killing the server for everyone else.

There is plenty of room for creativity and design and it is not just inaccurate, but actually insulting to people to suggest otherwise.

 

[zorn]

Im fine with 'not using' something. Im uninstalling Ender Storage for example. No tesseracts, etc.

The problem is that it takes a long damn time to try and get a handle on how to balance a mod pack to how you like it. This is why, I think, you often see people say Ultimate was their favorite pack - it has a moderate balance that appeals to lots of people. Its harder than current packs, but not 'gregtech hard mode'. It has lots of fun crazy stuff, but when you make a tier 5 Creeper shard you can actually USE the gunpowder you get. Without gregtech? There isnt even a use for a creeper shard. I guess I could make a TNT tower.
After 9 months of playing, there are still big mods Ive never gotten to, so im not sure how to balance them. I dont get to play as much as many do here. If I set forestry to Normal instead of the default Easy mode, how do I change MFR to match? Everyone has an opinion on how imbalanced things are... what are my odds of finding the right balance so one mod isnt super powerful compared to another?

And what really sucks is... by the time you realize some new mod is not what you wanted, the world is a month old and you AGAIN have to restart to try and get the experience you want. TiC hammers? Totally removes any need to make a tunnel bore, or a steves carts drill. I thought TiC would be ok at first, because you have to hand mine. And its a fun mod, at first I thought I had been wrong about thinking TiC was OP... but the modifications really make it go over the top. Iguana tweaks then? Or will it still be OP and ruin my fun? Again. Reduce smeltery to 1.5 ingots per ore instead of 2? pulverizers and such bumped up to the steel recipes? Im even thinking of ditching TE3 altogether so your only ore doubling is a Rock Crusher (17 mj/t and requires lots of steel and diamonds to make) or an industrial grinder.

Then you have fun mods that wont even let you try to config them for balance... like COmputerCraft. No wonder OpenComputers popped up... people kept requesting harder recipes and he refused, so someone else made something people wanted.

 

[KirinDave]

The problem is that it takes a long damn time to try and get a handle on how to balance a mod pack to how you like it. This is why, I think, you often see people say Ultimate was their favorite pack - it has a moderate balance that appeals to lots of people. Its harder than current packs, but not 'gregtech hard mode'. It has lots of fun crazy stuff, but when you make a tier 5 Creeper shard you can actually USE the gunpowder you get. Without gregtech? There isnt even a use for a creeper shard. I guess I could make a TNT tower.

I just don't understand this notion of difficulty purely as a function as time invested for the minimum viable build.

Don't get me wrong, balance still matters. But no matter how I tweak power balance or Jaded stomps recipes, there will always be winners and losers for any given task. There will always be easy mode and hardmode packs in any pac with ANY sort of overlap. The idea that you should counter this by removing overlapping mods springs to mind, but this can have profoundly limiting effects since many great mods do slightly overlap (IC2 and TE3 play nicely together, but they DO certainly overlap).

After 9 months of playing, there are still big mods Ive never gotten to, so im not sure how to balance them. I dont get to play as much as many do here. If I set forestry to Normal instead of the default Easy mode, how do I change MFR to match? Everyone has an opinion on how imbalanced things are... what are my odds of finding the right balance so one mod isnt super powerful compared to another?

Forestry actually isn't a bad counter to MFR for very large farms. The farms are fast and the main reason people think that MFR is so much better is that it LOOKS faster and has this very obvious method of action. On balance, the main limiting factor on treefarms is how long it takes to grow the trees. Both MFR and Forestry allow you to amplify this so much that MFR fertilizer is actually a waste of time. I actually find myself liking forestry farms more and more because they give you a bit more cross-mod freedom.

And what really sucks is... by the time you realize some new mod is not what you wanted, the world is a month old and you AGAIN have to restart to try and get the experience you want. TiC hammers? Totally removes any need to make a tunnel bore, or a steves carts drill.

No. This is absolutely wrong and you do not understand the value of bores or drills if you think this.

Tunnel bores have always been slower than good endgame manual mining techniques. It's been that way since 1.4.7. It is like we collectively forget the Vajra and Atomic Disassembler exist.

The value of Quarries, Tunnel Bores, and SC2 is that they can rapidly clean out an area without your intervention. All 3 of the things I've name can clear out a VERY large sum of material VERY quickly if you want them to. So much so that even with power/material constraints it'll work really well. And of course, unlike your hammer, you can run 2 quarries/bores/carts. Or 20. Or whatever.

I use one of the most powerful manual mining techniques since the Destruction Catalyst and Divinging rod pairing from EE2. I do not do it very often and I keep my little mining cart system running because I want to spend my playtime building rather than mining. I did a lot of mining and exploring at the start, and I still do exploration and resource gathering, but mining? No. I am past that stage of the game.

And that's okay. A good modpack should be robust in the face of post-metal-scarcity. Even with just buildcraft, that's going to happen. Even with just 1.2.5 buildcraft and IC2, that's going to happen. And you should not need an artifical and semi-useless goal like a fusion reactor (I have all the power now... what did I need it for again? More UU?) to get you there.

Then you have fun mods that wont even let you try to config them for balance... like COmputerCraft. No wonder OpenComputers popped up... people kept requesting harder recipes and he refused, so someone else made something people wanted.

Another mod people love to rail on without any real understanding of the balance considerations at play. You CAN make a turtle quarry. Must you? No. Are they very good? No. Is it trivial to surpass them? Yes! Turtle quarries are a great way to end up slowly trading coal for other metals. And until you get a wood farm set up, that's a bum deal and only makes sense if you have a surplus of coal. Once you have a wood farm set up, why wouldn't you use the bigger solutions?

CC is flexible and universal, but is it OP? No.

And OpenComputers is a total non-start until the author can fix his major technical issue that makes it only playable on windows.

 

[snooder]

Reduce smeltery to 1.5 ingots per ore instead of 2? pulverizers and such bumped up to the steel recipes? Im even thinking of ditching TE3 altogether so your only ore doubling is a Rock Crusher (17 mj/t and requires lots of steel and diamonds to make) or an industrial grinder.

You DO realize that with your playstyle no matter what, you'll still end up in the same place right? Whether the smeltery gets you 1.5 ingots or even half an ingot per ore block, you'll eventually get the same surplus of material right? Even if an expensive Rock Crusher is the only method of ore doubling, you'll eventually make one and then what will you do? Nerf it so the rock crusher takes slightly longer to build?

Minecraft just doesn't work long-term that way. You have to have an expanding set of goals if you don't want to be bored, and complaining that it takes a week to get to the same point that it might take 3 weeks to get to with "harder" config settings ignores the real problem that you need to be able to have some new set of goals to accomplish once the thing that it took a week to do is done. That's the real problem you need to fix, and messing around with configs isn't going to solve it for you.

 

[Bomb Bloke]

And OpenComputers is a total non-start until the author can fix his major technical issue that makes it only playable on windows.

Eh what? It's always been "playable" on anything MineCraft runs on, and even the server component was never strictly Windows-only.

 

[KirinDave]

Eh what? It's always been "playable" on anything MineCraft runs on, and even the server component was never strictly Windows-only.

Untrue, though it's improved.

 

[zorn]

You DO realize that with your playstyle no matter what, you'll still end up in the same place right? Whether the smeltery gets you 1.5 ingots or even half an ingot per ore block, you'll eventually get the same surplus of material right? Even if an expensive Rock Crusher is the only method of ore doubling, you'll eventually make one and then what will you do? Nerf it so the rock crusher takes slightly longer to build?

Minecraft just doesn't work long-term that way. You have to have an expanding set of goals if you don't want to be bored, and complaining that it takes a week to get to the same point that it might take 3 weeks to get to with "harder" config settings ignores the real problem that you need to be able to have some new set of goals to accomplish once the thing that it took a week to do is done. That's the real problem you need to fix, and messing around with configs isn't going to solve it for you.

I thought we could all play the game how we wanted? I cant remember the mod dev, I think it was denoflions who told me on reddit that he wuold play a world for a few months, but once he got to 2 boilers... he quit the world. When I asked why, he said "because there no need to make more power than that, so there is no point in continuing". He also complained about starting a world next to a skeleton spawner in 1.4.7 and using a bioreactor and siad 'it ruined any concept of game progression'. It might have been another mod dev though, i can find it in my reddit history if someone is really interested.

I enjoy SOME end game. It's not a problem that I enjoy the early to mid game more, and I want to stretch it out. I plan on keeping worlds for 3-4 months, and want to hit end game in the last few weeks. removing pulverizers and only allowing rock crushers slows down game progression. Covertjaguar also told me once that 'all other mods are OP' when I asked him why he didnt buff the rock crusher.

My point isnt to name drop, its to say that other respected people have different opinions, telling me my PROBLEM is not enjoying the end game and that I HAVE to find goals beyond that is frankly insulting. Ill play my way, you play yours. Do you see me telling anyone else here how to play? Im just explaining why I play like I do, and why my players are bored with the current packs.

 

[zorn]

CC is flexible and universal, but is it OP? No.

If you think quarries are the 'bigger solution' vs turtles, you haven't used the right scripts. Turtles do require the peripherals addon, but with that turtles are far better than a quarry.

4 turtles and 8 single wooden chests. Fill 4 of them with charcoal. Comparable cost to a quarry but far faster and requires less infrastructure. Those 4 turtles will go faster than a full blown quarry, think its easier for me to fill 4 single wooden chests full of charcoal, or for you to set up 48 mj/t worth of power? We both make and mfr farm... and I toss the charcoal right in the turtles. You have to make engines, etc.

late game? Turtles and ender chests, far better than quarries. You can drop 25 turtles and let them go for a week real time, 2 weeks, whatever. They never stop, no resetting of quarries. 25 turtles with 2 ender chests each are about as fast as 3 max speed quarries. But again my only 'infrastructure' is ender chests compared to your engines, and I can set the 25 down once and let the blocks come in 24/7, no stopping at all, for a week or two. Try keeping 3 quarries running 24/7 with no breaks.

edit: no post merge?

 

[KirinDave]

I thought we could all play the game how we wanted? I cant remember the mod dev, I think it was denoflions who told me on reddit that he wuold play a world for a few months, but once he got to 2 boilers... he quit the world. When I asked why, he said "because there no need to make more power than that, so there is no point in continuing". He also complained about starting a world next to a skeleton spawner in 1.4.7 and using a bioreactor and siad 'it ruined any concept of game progression'. It might have been another mod dev though, i can find it in my reddit history if someone is really interested.

You can. But we're warning you. The path you are walking is the path of burnout and frustration.

I enjoy SOME end game. It's not a problem that I enjoy the early to mid game more, and I want to stretch it out. I plan on keeping worlds for 3-4 months, and want to hit end game in the last few weeks. removing pulverizers and only allowing rock crushers slows down game progression. Covertjaguar also told me once that 'all other mods are OP' when I asked him why he didnt buff the rock crusher.

Personally I enjoy the early game a lot. But the post-resource-scarcity part of the game is the place I am working on being more awesome.

My point isnt to name drop, its to say that other respected people have different opinions, telling me my PROBLEM is not enjoying the end game and that I HAVE to find goals beyond that is frankly insulting.

What we're saying is that all you can do is delay the inevitable. You can do that. It will do exactly what it says on the tin. That may even be enough.

And I used to think like you did. Early versions of RR reflect this. Then I got frustrated and burned out and had to take a few months off from MC. I finally found a different perspective and I've been much happier since I did.

 

[Bomb Bloke]

Untrue, though it's improved.

Indeed it has, but I suspect you're getting confused over where the native libraries are being used - I'm not aware of any time in the mod's development at which they were a requirement on the client side, nor any time in which it only supported Windows.

I won't pretend that it's always been as easy to set up on one platform as any other, but to state that it is or ever was "only playable on windows" is a fallacy.

 

[Zenthon_127]

My point isnt to name drop, its to say that other respected people have different opinions, telling me my PROBLEM is not enjoying the end game and that I HAVE to find goals beyond that is frankly insulting. Ill play my way, you play yours. Do you see me telling anyone else here how to play? Im just explaining why I play like I do, and why my players are bored with the current packs.

Hey, you can play however you like. I can say that I at least have no issue with what you are trying to do.

However, I will warn you: the style of gameplay you are looking for is something that nearly all tech and magic mods do not support or acknowledge to even exist. I truly hate to say it, but you may be better off looking outside of FTB, tech/magic mods as a whole, or possibly even all of Minecraft. The issue isn't you or anyone else, the issue is simply that your style of play is just not easily possible in the greater ecosystem of modded MC.

 

[KirinDave]

If you think quarries are the 'bigger solution' vs turtles, you haven't used the right scripts. Turtles do require the peripherals addon, but with that turtles are far better than a quarry.

They are slower and have worse fuel efficiency. They are absolutely worse. And this ignores a bunch of other tools. The quarry is just one with easily understood cost factors (it is not very expensive at all).

late game? Turtles and ender chests, far better than quarries. You can drop 25 turtles and let them go for a week real time, 2 weeks, whatever. They never stop, no resetting of quarries. 25 turtles with 2 ender chests each are about as fast as 3 max speed quarries.

Quarries are better in the mid game. Later turtles are best used as a way to deploy other tools.

But again my only 'infrastructure' is ender chests compared to your engines,

Ender chest are way more expensive than engines and even fuel. And your fuel efficiency is gonna drop through the floor.

I can set the 25 down once and let the blocks come in 24/7, no stopping at all, for a week or two. Try keeping 3 quarries running 24/7 with no breaks.

Okay. Can I just use SC2 and do the same with even better yield? I can do that without frames.

 

[WTFFFS]

I use the most powerful manual mining method since the destruction catalyst and it is the destruction catalyst in some respects this version is actually even better than the original you never have any cobble\dirt\gravel in your inventory. It clears everything other than the ores in a 3x3x3 area, you can them silk touch\fortune whichever you want, powering it is easy if you have a decent mobfarm it takes 3 gunpowder per use and a Hunters backpack full lasts a very long time. Though "Beast" mode bound tools look like they could be slightly better from a certain perspective. I still think the no "waste" from the Reliquary destruction catalyst is probably better or at least it vastly increases the possible length of a mining trip.

Though that is a little offtopic but I made my point to the topic of this thread earlier which I will reiterate, the tools to sort\process have increased in capability by a very large margin you can easily achieve the same level you used to be able to without much input from yourself at all but if you are willing to put in the effort and\or enjoy the design challenge you can do things that were simply not possible with earlier tools.

 

[twisto51]

A tunnel bore keeps going when I'm hiding cicadas behind walls in the bases of other people on the server, my TiC hammer doesn't. It doesn't matter how fast it goes, it matters that it keeps on going like the energizer bunny.

 

[KirinDave]

A tunnel bore keeps going when I'm hiding cicadas behind walls in the bases of other people on the server

This should be a banable offense. You can't even reliably use the sonic helmet to find them!

 

[snooder]

My point isnt to name drop, its to say that other respected people have different opinions, telling me my PROBLEM is not enjoying the end game and that I HAVE to find goals beyond that is frankly insulting. Ill play my way, you play yours. Do you see me telling anyone else here how to play? Im just explaining why I play like I do, and why my players are bored with the current packs.

I'm not saying that you have to play a certain way, or that your way is wrong. I'm saying that you literally cannot make either vanilla minecraft or any of the FTB modpacks do what you are trying to do. I.E. make the period of resource scarcity last forever. It has nothing to do with end-game or non-end-game. If you define your game as working toward having X amount of material, you will eventually reach that point. It may take a week, or it may take a month, but it WILL happen. That's just how the minecraft economy is set up. You can deal with this by resetting the world every so often, but you can't also complain that you keep running out of things to do when you are the one deliberately choosing to play in a way that requires running out of things to do and then resetting the world.

Maybe what you need is a total conversion mod that introduces item decay or something. I just don't know.

 

[Dorque]

For me, when I start getting large amounts of resources coming in, I start assembling more "valuable" structures; I was faced with resource glut in my last Unleashed server so I built a subway tunnel between my base and another friend's base; the walls and ceiling were all nether quartz blocks, the floor was entirely lapis blocks, it was a 5x5 tunnel with two parallel, elevated, high-speed tracks.

I installed a 6-buff beacon in my base, built to max height on diamond blocks.

I built a skyscraper out of freakin' CERTUS QUARTZ BLOCKS.

I built a highly-stylized carpentry workshop entirely out of ExtraTrees carpentry blocks with about 20 different varieties of wood.

I set up a huge field of alvearies out back of my primary base, which took damned near forever.

All that, and I'm far more of a gatherer than a builder; my exterior design skills are fairly pathetic.

If someone cannot take their resource glut and apply themselves to showing it off, if they cannot challenge themselves in some way, there is only so much anyone can do to help them not be "bored". We're generally playing with over a hundred mods here at FTB; surely there is something that they can do. When I'm bored, I start breeding bees'n'trees and I don't use a wiki to do it. The challenge is all in finding the new ones for myself. When I'm REALLY bored, I start exploring Twilight Forest, or making new Mystcraft ages and page-hunting, or.... the list goes on. In fact, there's an entire thread around here somewhere for "challenges" to undertake if you're stuck for ideas.

If your players find themselves frustrated for a challenge as soon as they've brought home a stack of diamonds, Minecraft may not be for them. If they need a challenge, give me a holler or do a thread search; we can absolutely find them something to do.

::EDIT:: I've mentioned it in another thread, but my current "challenge" game is Horizons with *no mining allowed*. If it takes a pick to gather it, I have to find another way to get it beyond digging it out of the ground or I just have to deal without it.

I got my first cobblestone about 20 hours in, and that was only due to intense exploration and Roguelike Dungeons putting cobble in chests; now I have a TE Igneous Extruder blasting it out for me, I have just about a stack of gold, I've got several farms running, I'm even making Rotarycraft's whatever-steel. I'm a gatherer by nature, so I set myself an environment which made gathering very, very difficult and then worked hard to overcome it.

 

[WTFFFS]

::EDIT:: I've mentioned it in another thread, but my current "challenge" game is Horizons with *no mining allowed*. If it takes a pick to gather it, I have to find another way to get it beyond digging it out of the ground or I just have to deal without it.

Hmmm might be time to try the superflat challenge again, the 3 layer original superflat world with mods. I had a hardcore superflat vanilla world which I did eventually lose due to dying but before I did I had a stack of Iron blocks that was fun

 

[Golrith]

It's all down to need, if a player sees no need for something, they won't craft it/use it.

I personally have no need for mega power systems. My base is running quite nicely on 3 steam dynamo's with excess power being generated, even with MFRs config edited to double power usage. For some players, if there isn't a need for doing something, then they won't do it.
I've used a boiler once, and only plugged a couple of engines into it, so not making use of it's potential, no need.
Made an AE system once, overly complex, resource intensive and boring for what it does compared to an old fashioned sorting system.


For me, my game play consists of making use of all the resources I gather from farms and getting those resources to the right machines/storage. I use the Energy Manipulator mod (Energy Condensor from EE2) configured with expensive recipes and custom EMC values. My base can now make almost any resource I could need, I've done the mining part of the game, now I can play with other things from the mods. I've only needed to use a default size quarry 4 times along with some manual mining, in a customised world gen that lowers the rate of ore generation.