Loot Bags for Skyblocks

[MacAisling]

I'm working on my own skyblock pack that I hope to get up on Curse when it is ready.

By default, Loot Bags provide access to the loot tables that populate various village & dungeon chests. looking at the list, I think I need to customize it from the ground up.

So, for a Skyblock, what kinds of things do you want to come out of a loot bag, and at what level?
How much overlap should there be between bags? How much clutter should there be to keep things interesting?

Is there anything you DO NOT want to get out of a loot bag but would like to be able to use to make more loot bags?

There are 6 levels of bag to work with: common / uncommon / rare / epic / legendary / artifact

 

[Zarkov]

I haven't played any skyblock packs yet myself, but one suggestion based on what I've seen would be to lock "game changing" or very powerful rewards behind some sort of progression milestones. Meaning they are impossible to get before certain check points have been reached (if this is possible to configure).

This might be a tricky balance to achieve, allowing high end rewards to be something other than "meh", while at the same time not risking that RNG completely dictates progression / game play.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

Do you think something like the various levels of Better Builder's Wands might be good rewards? So make them uncraftable, but a really handy reward to find in a bag perhaps? hmm. Alternatively, high end food items? Things that would need a real lot of setup to make, will feed you well for ages (thus potentially lifesaving earlier on) but can't be used to shortcut earlier food progression (i.e. prepared foods rather than something like carrots or potatoes which can be planted)? I'm not good at this stuff :\

 

[MacAisling]

I barely know what I'm doing messing with the config files, and I want you to have the chance to experience the full range of what the included mods have to offer, so I am not changing any recipes, disabling any items, or gating anything behind anything else. Finally crafting that one whatever after weeks of building up the ability to get the materials and days of doing nothing but staring at a crafting grid is not intended to be the bottleneck to progress in this pack, so there is no single item I could give you that I would consider game breaking. Your own imagination and figuring out how to get by without many of the mods you are used to having will be the real barriers to progress in this pack. If anything, I may give you a little extra to help speed you along.

If I include one mod with a cheap and easy ring of flight, and another with a complicated, tiered series of jetpacks, it is because I want you to be able to choose how you want to play it. If you get more satisfaction from doing things the hard way but can't resist taking the easy way, then that is a character flaw in you and not my problem, as is getting mad when someone else takes the easy way after you decide to take the hard way.

Being able to get something only after you reach the point where you could easily make it isn't epic, it is pointless and annoying. On the other hand, some things are only epic the first few times you find them and would rapidly become clutter if you got one every other bag. So flight and top tier tools only from the highest tier bags.

Food & hunger will be strictly vanilla in this pack, but food and basic building materials are certainly up for consideration at the lower end.

Would you want a very slim chance to get, say, a creative capacitor bank out of a top tier bag?

Would you want to get vanilla tools & armor somewhere in the middle? Would you prefer to just get the ingots instead?

 

[MacAisling]

While I'm at it, horse armor and saddles--loot only, add the mods that make them craftable, or please god no more?

 

[Linda Hartlen]

Tbh the things I DONT want out of bags is just basic blocks. It is really boring when you go.. oh. 3 kinds of wool, or.. some cobble. I would rather get some mod items, heck even some pam harvestcraft fancy meals. Doesn't have to be all that powerful in my humble opinion, at low level say 16 meals is a great boon. Much more so to me then.. yay wool

If you want people to fiddle around with mods, give them various machine parts. Gears, circuits, perhaps a few cables. Those are things I will go. sweet useful stuff. Stairs will never make me go, oh sweet reward. No matter how fancy Botania can make them. That is the problem I have with the one I am playing know (simply magic) when it gives me stairs or wool i just toss it into a box to forget it. But when I got aura cascade stuff I went. oo whats this? and started playing with that mod. Or when it gives me diamond gear I need to either melt down for essentia or needed for other items. Useless on their own but parts of the machine so to speak (or spells in this case)

 

[MacAisling]

Clutter vs. value is one approach to balancing this type of mechanic. Rarity, both of drops and for the bags themselves is another.

The way I plan to set things up, anything that comes out of a bag can be fed into a recycler to make more common bags, which can then be used to craft your way up the chain to the artifact bags. You will be able to get bags when you kill mobs, but not with any auto-killing methods (not even the ones that get other player only drops), so they won't clog up your auto mob farms, but automating the bags themselves will require producing something to feed the recycler. I can add stuff to feed the recycler that you won't get out of any of the bags.

So maybe more decorative or harder to get building blocks, cooked meats, and ores at the low end, ingots and basic machine parts in the middle, & high end stuff at the high end.

 

[MacAisling]

The way the bags are set up by default, the common bags have access to the full loot table, so if you had a 1% chance to get a diamond & a 50% chance to get bread, you might get the diamond but you will probably get the bread. Each step up narrows the range of things the bag can drop (like closing in on a bullseye in darts). Should I keep to this pattern, or should I make rarer things more exclusive so you could only get them from the better bags?

 

[MacAisling]

Just figuring out how to customize Loot Bags. It turns out that there is an easier way than customizing each bag individually. Also, artifact bags are set as uncraftable, so I can use it for some extra rare and hard to get items, like some of the creative only items. Top row is the loot table from all the dungeon & village chests. bottom row I've removed the references to the chests and started a whitelist using a few props from DecoCraft to test.

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