Is Ore processing and sorting disappearing?

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Infallible83

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Jul 29, 2019
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@zorn

I, as most people here, agree with KirinDave and snooder, changing your mod pack or setup will not fix the problem for your friends.

However, I came up with an mod concept that could be ideal for you and your friends, it aims at giving people who lack goals more end game targets. It focus' on rewarding players for creating and automating different systems, even systems that achieve the same thing (I.E 2 different power systems, 3 different mob farms etc), it also acts as an item sink and it would have diminishing returns.

http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/posts/499430/

If you have any development skill, or tap up some of the names you were dropping :), I imagine you could create this relatively simply (albeit laboriously).

#Shameless plug to get people to read my idea.

Infallible
 

Kyll.Ing.

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Jul 29, 2019
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Could part of the issue be that mods to a smaller degree are being centered around ores? Or, to some degree the same, that ores account for a smaller percentage of mod content? Or even that there are too many resources to account for?

There are tons of other resources out there now, that do not need any processing in machines to be of use. In good ol' Tekkit your quarry would spit out a few metals, and a couple gemstones, marble/obsidian, and the rest would be dirt and cobble. The amount of different materials was so low that you could comfortably set up a sorting system that processed whatever needed to be processed, sorted whatever your depot was set up to receive, fried the useless stuff, and the "unsortable" leftovers could be put in a single chest at the end of your processing chain. As far as mining went, that setup would do the entire job. It could handle anything the quarry could come across, and didn't require an eternity of time or resources to make. In short: Building a setup would be well worth the time invested.

Nowadays, though, most players play mods with far greater content. If you want to mine quickly and comfortably, you have way more options than the standard quarry of the old days. You can use turtles, bores, drills, hammers and more, all outputting items in a different way. Some are manual, some are automatic and require supervision to various degrees. There is also more stuff in the ground to account for, setting up an auto-depot would require lots of work and contain far more chests than it had to before. There are all sorts of ores now, and all sorts of machines to process them with. If you hook your quarry up to the good ol' Tekkit system, about half the stuff it outputs would go straight through it and dump into the "unsortable" chest. It is a much greater hassle than before to set up a system capable of handling everything your mines will spew out. So many resources, so much time making the system recognise and deal with them all.
So players decide not to go for an automatic system that handles everything. It's easier to do it manually than forever tinkering with the system to be able to automatically receive and sort yet another resource.

This is even disregarding content such as bees, farms, magic and mob traps, which have their own ways of generating content, which usually requires a wholly different range of machines to process automatically. As stated above, the mining alone is bad enough, and once that is sorted out, I'd rather just play with my farm than setting up a similar system to handle farm output automatically. Heck, maybe my farms yield enough resources that I don't have to mine? If so, having a large automatic mining system is more of a hassle than it's worth. It's no longer worth the investment of time and resources, manual resource handling, moving and storing would be just as efficient.
 
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zorn

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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.


Im not trying to make resource scarcity last forever... im just setting up my own challenges. It all has to do with how you phrase things, isn't it? In the very same post above, a guy posted that he made a skyscraper out of certus quartz and then said that he made another world where he wasnt allowed to mine any blocks. How is this not far more extreme than what I am talking about? But think about it, why is no one bugging him? At the risk of offending people (I always seem to do so anyway so...) i think it might be the same reason that me just telling someone who asked about my religion that i am an atheist. The other guy is validating your playstyle, but then saying he also went more extreme than I ever would. The key is that he is still validating your playstyle.

I think the group of people who post here are also limiting their own experience. What you are doing is removing one aspect of the game (resource gathering as a *challenge*) and focusing on just one other aspect: creating 'stuff' and also creating 'systems'. IMO this is why so many people here were so keen to upgrade to newer mods, and why Horizons gets played. With the fast pace that packs take with respect to resources, the ONLY fun left is to create fun stuff. Which is fun, but it only last so long. As somoene else said, you are heading down a path of frustration. Or whatever. YOu will need new mods or mods to add new content all the time becuase a new mod will only be fun for a short while, you aren't pacing out your enjoyment. Like someone at a bar doing shots at 9pm over and over. Sure its fun but as most of us learned young... you will have more fun if you learn to pace yourself. enjoy the whole night. Of course the night will end at some point, but its more fun than just getting hammered by 10pm and passing out.

again in my defense, people like Player from IC2 said on direwolf's video that 'free item teleportation ruins the game'. Its not like my idea is really that drastic. A guy i just talked to yesterday was playing forgecraft lite i think its called, that direwolf played for a little while. to me the fuel carts of lava were a lot more interesting than a liquid tesseract, but i saw people in his feed keep saying things like 'just make an AE system dire!' AE auto sorts your stuff, which is the point of this whole thread.

Here is an easy way to explain: This vanilla video is more 'epic' than anything ive seen on any direwolf video, ever.


Not that I want to go back to vanilla, but... rows of chests, a huge sorting room, stuff floating by...that's awesome. Or... I make an AE system and a ME drive. The only satisfaction is that its expensive. But people say thats not a valid argument with things like hv solars and gregch stuff. it has to be 'complex'. Now tell me, is AE not similar to hv solars? removes all the fun, but is expensive to craft? Two blocks vs a huge sorting room that looks cool as hell. My early days of modded minecraft (BC pipes, redstone engines and wooden chests) made me feel more like those guys in the video. AE systems do not.
 
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Infallible83

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Im not trying to make resource scarcity last forever... im just setting up my own challenges. It all has to do with how you phrase things, isn't it? In the very same post above, a guy posted that he made a skyscraper out of certus quartz and then said that he made another world where he wasnt allowed to mine any blocks. How is this not far more extreme than what I am talking about? But think about it, why is no one bugging him? At the risk of offending people (I always seem to do so anyway so...) i think it might be the same reason that me just telling someone who asked about my religion that i am an atheist. The other guy is validating your playstyle, but then saying he also went more extreme than I ever would.

I am not sure if I am misreading something, but I missed the bit where anyone critised your way of playing, I think people were just trying to answer your question, at least that was my intent. I think you might be being a little defensive for no reason.

My interpretation is that, rather than offering lots of things that might temporarily fix your server issues, they tried to highlight why the issues are occuring and then work out a solution. I dont think anyone was intending to be offensive or attack you.

On my part, I apologise if my post came across that way.
 

Dorque

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Jul 29, 2019
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I have to agree with Infallible here, more or less.

Yes, we are judging the playstyle you are espousing, and I won't make apologies for that, because that's basically what we've been asked to do. What we're trying to do here, that I feel you may be missing, is address the core of the issue that you are having, rather than suggest or defend "band-aid" solutions.

Let me come at it from another angle. Yeah, I absolutely put forth my most extreme examples up there... although, with MFR laser drills, the c-quartz skyscraper wasn't all that difficult. The amber brick on the first floor took more time and effort. The point is though, bearing in mind that I am a primary gatherer, not a builder... when I found myself with an extreme resource glut, I worked out a project and went for it... and anyone who does not or cannot do that inevitably becomes bored with modded MC. To my mind, your players are missing the entire point of playing a mod pack.

Do you know where the resource-gathering I'm most proud of is, currently? It's on my vanilla server, in a giant network of carefully hand-sorted storage rooms, all done by hand. I don't even try to replicate that when playing a mod pack, because everyone else looks at it and says, "So?" Instead, I assemble an awesome ME network to contain it and hook all of my friends up to that network. Or I start collecting liquids and build a huge Railcraft tank.... area.... thing. That skyscraper was intended to be my liquid lab, with various chambers for handling all the different liquids; one for TE-exclusive fluids like molten ender, redstone and glowstone, one room for smeltery-exclusives, one to process Forestry products, etc etc.

The point that most people in this thread are trying to make is that... how to put this precisely... there is nothing wrong with anything that you are proposing but all of your suggestions are surface solutions to wanting to play a different game, if you will allow that an FTB modpack is a game in its own right.
 

SatanicSanta

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Do you have Ars and Railcraft? Explore the top speed of rail carts!
Build something you havent built, or do it in a new way.
Or build a huge Railcraft system that does everything you need it to (grind ores -> smelt ores -> sort items, etc). Yes it is possible, yes it is fun.
 

Infallible83

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Jul 29, 2019
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Or build a huge Railcraft system that does everything you need it to (grind ores -> smelt ores -> sort items, etc). Yes it is possible, yes it is fun.

If you did this and have the world save or video/picture etc, I would LOVE to see this. I am about as creative as a small dry coffee stain and love seeing things like this.

Infallible
 
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SatanicSanta

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If you did this and have the world save or video/picture etc, I would LOVE to see this. I am about as creative as a small dry coffee stain and love seeing things like this.

Infallible
I don't think I ever got my sorting system screencapped before the server broke due to GT machines destroying the TPS. I believe it is still up, but pretty much unplayable. This picture should get you the gist of the system though:
RU5dztz.png

Basically, we have the three coke ovens, with Item Unloaders on top, and Item Loaders on the sides (and of course, the Liquid Loaders below dropping creosote into the tank cart). The Item Unloaders are placed where the input side of any machine is, and will also work with other transport systems (BC, AE, etc). On top of them are Holding Tracks, basically, they output a redstone signal when a task is complete. This task being taking the items from the chest cart to the coke oven. They also have an internal buffer of 9 slots. When the redstone signal is outputted, the cart will move onto the next oven. This took some tweaking to get right, but I got it working so that the chest is almost never overflowing (chest being the one connected to the automatic crafting table and harvester), and the buffer always has enough to supply for a short while. Anywho, to output it is the same concept, only instead of Holding Tracks on all of the ovens, there is also one Boarding Track. A Holding Track will make the cart continue whichever direction it is originally going, while the Boarding Track will make the cart turn around.

So, essentially you have a system where you make the chest cart go from where your ores are stored, to the ore grinding unit. It just moves back and forth from these two spots, with a Loader connected to the chest, and an Unloader connected to the grinder, of course using Boarding Tracks so the cart dissapears. Wherever you output your dusts (preferably using a pulverizer as those have customizable output/input sides) smack an Item Loader down, set it up properly (When I was working on the Railcraft part of the wiki, I made some in depth pages about these machines and how they work, I recommend reading it if you decide to use a system with them), and use a basic cart system going back and forth from your furnace to your grinder. Rinse and repeat until you get to the sorting system. For a sorting system, you basically want a line of chests, with one or two blocks apart from each other so the loaders don't shove items into each other. On top of the chests (or behind, that should work too) place Item Unloaders, with Holding Tracks on top. Inside the GUI set the mode so that it only takes a certain set of items (this can only be 9 items, but I believe the Advanced Loaders allow for more, don't quote me on that, I have not tested it). Set it up so that it brings all of your items into the one cart, and into the sorting system. If you need pictures let me know, though you probably won't get them as I am leaving for school in a minute.

Edit: I might make a video on how to do this, so it probably won't exist for a little while as my internet is horrible.
 

SatanicSanta

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This has given me an amzing idea for a build that I literally cannot wait to get home and try. Thank you VERY much. lots and lots of trains.

P.S I will add some golems, everything is better with golems :D
Golems and carts are my favorite devices for stuff transport, I guess I just like stuff moving around and be able to see things happening.
 

Dorque

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Jul 29, 2019
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This has given me an amzing idea for a build that I literally cannot wait to get home and try. Thank you VERY much. lots and lots of trains.

P.S I will add some golems, everything is better with golems :D

Well, everything except server stability =P
 

Dorque

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Jul 29, 2019
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And personal sanity. The Void Nietzsche described is actually the current rev of Thaumcraft research.
I was thinking more Shelley:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
 
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zorn

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Jul 29, 2019
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Id just heard people say 'gregtech went into Unleashed with no issues" and stuff like that. I had no idea why it would be different for different packs. Some packs have the gregtech config folder already in it, as if to make it easier to add gregtech to the pack. Not sure what you mean by 'in theory'.
 

Dorque

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Id just heard people say 'gregtech went into Unleashed with no issues" and stuff like that. I had no idea why it would be different for different packs. Some packs have the gregtech config folder already in it, as if to make it easier to add gregtech to the pack. Not sure what you mean by 'in theory'.
The short short version:

Yes, you can add it.

No, it's probably not gonna be anything like easy.