I've never been a fan of grind. It always came across as a lazy means to extend gameplay where a creative solution cannot be found.
This becomes especially apparent within modded Minecraft where balancing tends to materialize in the form of complicated recipes. These recipes either involve ludicrously expensive items consisting of "difficult" to acquire resources or compounded steps. Eyeballing that shiny new flux armor jet plate? Well, I hope you don't mind wading through six hundred different crafting steps.
The real problem with grind in Minecraft is that nothing is finite. I can make infinite everything if I so desire. Eventually, I'm churning out Nether Stars, Shiny Metal and, uu-matter like it's nobodies business. Power creep completely invalidates 99% of the grind I've ever encountered. The only finite resource here for most of us is time. Are you willing to invest the time necessary to craft the "expensive" item of your desires? If you're like me, or my wife, working full time with no car and errands to run that answer is probably no.
In short, grind /= difficulty. At least for me, opinions being what they are.
Grind does not require the player to think. There's always going to be a more efficient way to acquire an item and that's going to be the rout you'll take every time. Why? It's faster and time is the critical resource here.
Now, things that force the player to think, to plan are a step in the right direction.
Remember the days of Buildcraft sorting systems? Sure, setting up a simple sorting system was pretty easy. You just needed a redstone engine, a wooden pipe, some stone pipes and, a couple of chests. On the other hand, separating those items into specific chests and keeping them stocked required clever planning. Designing these systems was entirely optional and if you could figure it out, made your life much easier. Then along comes Redpower. Now all I need to do is plop some pipes down, paint them and boom, done.
A lot of people seem to hate the channel system AE2 added. I absolutely adore it. It incentivizes players to intelligently plan out their network in a way that makes future expansions possible. Players who start plopping down cables may find adding to their AE network in the future tedious and cumbersome.
IC2's e-net was another example of good difficulty (minus the exploding machines, I would have preferred they short out). You had to plan out your cabling, segregating machines into voltage tiers. This has been replaced by the set it and forget it cabling of the redstone flux era. Gregtech seems to be bringing this back so kudos to him.
If I'm going to spend time, I want it to be voluntary. I want to be forced to think.
What I don't want to do is grind resources for a week, hunt down mobs for countless hours or, generate millions of chunks to find a dungeon chest/meteor with the items in it I need to progress. None of these "problems" are difficult to solve. They all require brute force solutions and that is why they are bad (to me). They're also bad for server hosts, such as myself. I've added recipes for AE2's presses because, I don't need seven people all generating chunks for five hours searching for meteors.
Similarly, setting up dozens of mfr lasers/quarries/digital miners/alvearies/recyclers to procure resources isn't difficult. It's also absolute hell for server admins to deal with. What's that? Server lagging? Tps gone to hell? Blame the 150 force loaded chunks because everyone and their grandmother decided to build a full sized quarry.
If you want an example of difficulty done right in a crafting survival game, look no further than factorio. Resource automation is given to players right out of the gate. The game hands you your first mining drill. The difficulty arises from the player's desire to set up complex item routing and logistics. All of this is entirely unnecessary. Nearly every machine can be manually fed resources but, if you're smart enough to figure out factorio's logistics you can save yourself quite a bit of time. Progression is gated by research, research is gated by resources and, resource mining isn't gated at all. There's a natural progression to things that doesn't require tedious mini games or hours at a crafting table.
If you were smart and planned ahead the game will progress rather fluidly. Every resource in the game can be acquired by the player within the first ten to fifteen minutes of gameplay. No hours of exploration, no rng loot, no grind.
Immersive Engineering seems to have taken inspiration from factorio, especially with its conveyor system and wiring. Limit yourself to automating Immersive Engineering ore processing and you'll see what I mean.
I understand that we don't all enjoy the same things. Some people seem to love grinding for items and the reward that follows, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just not my cup of tea.
Please excuse this long winded post. Exhaustion has robbed me of my sanity and, it's been ages since I've visited these forums.
