Metallurgy Discussion

[Staxed]

If you have a modpack and 4 tin types are generating, the pack author did it wrong. Almost every "big" mod offers the abilty to disable world gen features like ore in their config files.

Also, shadowclaimer, have you thought of doing a biome specific world gen for your ores? It would reduce the rainbow effect and create an exploration need for modpacks. Adding a whitelist for biomes in the config for each ore to be able to add support for world gen mods like BoP would be perfect. Of course a Boolean config to turn it on or off for people that don't like that sort of thing.

It was more of a generalist statement, I don't really know a whole lot about how generation works .

And I love the idea for biome specific ores.

 

[legomike]

tinkers construct and thaumcraft books do a great job, something like tinkers would work well i think

 

[Eyamaz]

Its been discussed heavily. The biggest issue is of course, as you said, config options for it and getting all the biome mods to play nicely. Its on the "to do" somewhere down the line, especially post 1.7 since Mojang will be "locked in" on biomes pretty much.

the best inspiration is open sourced projects and http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic...st-revival/page__hl__ custom ore generation this project does it wonderfully. granted you dont need ALL the functionality this provides, but its a good look into how it can be done.

 

[Velotican]

Whilst I remember, the total absence of Lead in your mod was a surprise considering how often it shows up now in other mods.

 

[Shadowclaimer]

Whilst I remember, the total absence of Lead in your mod was a surprise considering how often it shows up now in other mods.

Which is funny because we were going to add it but considered it unnecessary back in the day, then all of a sudden recently mods started adding it like mad to avoid Steel conflicts. It may still make its way in.

the best inspiration is open sourced projects andhttp://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1935710-162forge-custom-ore-generation-first-revival/page__hl__ custom ore generationthis project does it wonderfully. granted you dont need ALL the functionality this provides, but its a good look into how it can be done.

Thank you, I'll note it on the Issue on Git as a research topic =P

tinkers construct and thaumcraft books do a great job, something like tinkers would work well i think

I love Thaumcraft's book, I'd like to look into doing an Item-less system perhaps, but in general coming up with a good way to display the info is paramount.

 

[Flipz]

I personally think it would be hilarious for Metallurgy to add a small, rare "Rainbow Cave" biome just as an in-joke.

Personally, as far as the machine upgrades idea goes, I'd be more of a fan of crafting upgrade-specific items rather than feeding raw material to the machine; perhaps in addition to the "keep in place" method of upgrading, there could also be an optional crafting recipe with a Steve's Carts 2-type recipe, and the components you put into the machine to upgrade it in place are the ingredients for the crafting recipe. This opens up the option of letting these individual upgrades have some sort of beneficial effect on the machine individually, a la IC2 upgrades--in effect, imagine a Macerator that can upgrade itself to a Rotary Macerator once you've put a certain number of Overclockers and transformer upgrades into it.

It would also be great to see the ability to use different metals to customize the look of your machines--you could go for a cool steel finish, or a warm coppery look, or use a machine/tool to oxidize the copper to turn all your machines bluish-green.

Actually, on that note, I just had a thought for a Mosaic machine--you'd manufacture "mosaic tile blocks" by some method, then pop them into a machine that lets you customize the texture of the block tile by tile (basically, pixel by pixel), using nuggets of different metals as different "colors" of "ink".

 

[Velotican]

Oh! Another thing.

You list Prometheum as a fantasy metal. It's a real element. It's actually radioactive too!

 

[Shadowclaimer]

Oh! Another thing.

You list Prometheum as a fantasy metal. It's a real element. It's actually radioactive too!

I am aware =)

We also have Quicksilver as an alloy of Mithril and Silver. Originally we were going to remove it or rename it, but another specific mod author threw a fit about it so we kept it in to spite them. (It may get renamed eventually, but for now its hilarious.)

I think the spelling on my Prometheum might be different, I need to check.[DOUBLEPOST=1379694344][/DOUBLEPOST]

I personally think it would be hilarious for Metallurgy to add a small, rare "Rainbow Cave" biome just as an in-joke.

Personally, as far as the machine upgrades idea goes, I'd be more of a fan of crafting upgrade-specific items rather than feeding raw material to the machine; perhaps in addition to the "keep in place" method of upgrading, there could also be an optional crafting recipe with a Steve's Carts 2-type recipe, and the components you put into the machine to upgrade it in place are the ingredients for the crafting recipe. This opens up the option of letting these individual upgrades have some sort of beneficial effect on the machine individually, a la IC2 upgrades--in effect, imagine a Macerator that can upgrade itself to a Rotary Macerator once you've put a certain number of Overclockers and transformer upgrades into it.

It would also be great to see the ability to use different metals to customize the look of your machines--you could go for a cool steel finish, or a warm coppery look, or use a machine/tool to oxidize the copper to turn all your machines bluish-green.

Actually, on that note, I just had a thought for a Mosaic machine--you'd manufacture "mosaic tile blocks" by some method, then pop them into a machine that lets you customize the texture of the block tile by tile (basically, pixel by pixel), using nuggets of different metals as different "colors" of "ink".

While I love the idea the issue comes down to overcomplication. Aesthetics are important, but its possible to try too hard for aesthetics over features.

Originally we considered doing crafting recipes for items that are slotted into the machines, but once again that's more out of game information for players to pick up. A big thing people love about the tier system is that its something you work on and towards. "I have this Copper Furnace, and I'm slowly working on getting it to a Steel one!" I've seen whole communities on our test server get together to finalize a Tartarite Abstractor for instance, its just really cool to see. I think it'd be fun to see players working together to simply upgrade the machine by dumping various metals into it (and it drives them back into the mines for more which is always a bonus.)

 

[mushroom taco]

Its actually a "bug" that we're not working with the smeltery. There's a guy in IRC who has a fix and we're working on getting it merged with Lemming's retirement its been hard to really sit down and get things done with TE. I'll put a note under issues to remind me to talk to whoever takes over the project.

Github is going to really help us get organized with stuff like this.

Well, I was talking about your alloys (like electrum, Damascus steel, etc) being able to be made in the smeltery.

And also ore doubling with the smeltery would be nice

Edit: something about what I just said sounded like a suggestion... It would be cool to have but it's not something I think you should work on if you have bigger things to do in the mod.

 

[Shadowclaimer]

Well, I was talking about your alloys (like electrum, Damascus steel, etc) being able to be made in the smeltery.

We've got someone working on that, but yea that'd be a submod =) he's got liquid metals for all of our stuff so far.

Partially my fault, I haven't played enough TC.

 

[Flipz]

We've got someone working on that, but yea that'd be a submod =) he's got liquid metals for all of our stuff so far.

Partially my fault, I haven't played enough TC.

Just a heads-up, it's normally called TiC around here to distinguish it from ThaumCraft.

 

[namae]

With all things said I don't really see much use for metallurgy outside of TiC. Modpacks right now revolve around technology mods which are IC2/GT, TE, MFR, forestry and so on. Since you can't make new alloys useful for them (unless maybe you'll work on ways making new alloys different/easier to be in use as old ones), your metals will stick out like xycraft resources but those could be used for decoration blocks though. So its either to become a part of TiC which is probably easier and safer, or come up with something completely new and overall useful.

 

[zahfelade]

incoming wall-o-opinions:

Ore & World-Gen:

In my opinion, a mod like yours would be more of a world-gen replacement, than an addition...at least for the general metals (copper, alluminum, tin, silver, etc...). Metallurgy is all about mining and metal-work...be it making tools/weapons, coins, etc... I think your best bet here is to make your world-gen so robust that the best option for most users is to just disable other mod's world gen in favor of yours. Give people the options to set the size of the nodes, the height that nodes can spawn, options to specify which biomes each ore can spawn in, etc... In your config, set the defaults for how you envision the world-gen to be. From there, the only thing that is needed is to provide a basic tutorial on how to disable other redundant world-gen (and possibly adjustments to your config to account for the additional quantity needed for the other mod(s)).​

From my point of view, the biggest decision to make here is how much compatability you are willing to try and build into the new version of Metallurgy. With upcoming mods like Electrodynamics (http://www.electrodynamicsmod.com/blocks/4576161533) adding ore that will provide multiple kinds of metal dusts when processed, you run into issues with different ore providing the same kind of metal when processed.​

Metal (processed dusts/ingots) & crafting

This seems like the point where balance concerns come in. Metallurgy's way of making one type of ingot might be harder/easier than another mod's method. I don't see any way around this short of collaborating with all other mod authors and coming to a compromise. Ultimately it's going to be up to the user to decide what is balanced. If something seems too easy, there's nothing (besides sweet-sweet temptation) making players use the easy method. I think the only thing that will alleviate this problem is something like a config setting for disabling crafting recipes, so moderators can disallow certain ways of obtaining items/materials on their servers. Adding these kinds of configs to Metallurgy will help solve the problem, but I don't feel there is anything that any ONE mod can do to fix a problem across the entire modding community.​

Machines

As far as machines, I'd like to see a method that has never been used before. The reason it may have never been used is because it's not possible, but hopefully not...hopefully it just hasn't been considered, but I doubt that.....Anyway...follow me here. When you make something like a rock-crusher out of basic things like stone slabs, that slam together & crush anything in-between them, it's 1) Not very efficient 2) rough on the material & machinery 3) not something that you would WANT to upgrade to a new material even if you could. Once you got to the next tier, you'd want to innovate & improve the process...you wouldn't want to just make 2 iron slabs that would replace the old stone ones you were using to crush you ore, previously...you'd want to build iron grinding cylinders that when turned together would crush anything put into them into a more refined material than was possible by just bashing them with stones. On the same note, you wouldn't include your old stone crusher in the recipe for your new iron grinder, either...it doesn't make sense. Therefor, as you move through the tiers of technology, the previous technology becomes obsolete. There is no longer any reason to make a stone crusher, just to upgrade it to an iron one...that's progress. "But, Zahfelade!!" you say. "Now I have a useless crusher sitting around my base taking up space." So, why not give your machinery a durability cost. Let them burn themselves out after a certain number of uses. Once they come to the end of their life-cycle, they break, returning a bit of the material used to craft them. This gives you one more use for the different tiers of metal & machinery. Once you work your way up to the highest tier, that machine is unbreakable. Viola! No more useless machine clutter, no more nonsensical upgrade/machine tier system, no more set-it-and-forget-it ore processing systems (until you reach the highest tier), plus you get another reason to go find better & brighter metals.​

So, in short: Don't do a straight "better-version-of-the-same-machine" upgrade system, and don't just do one machine that never changes outside of the GUI. Come up with new machines for different tiers, or come up with a multi-block machine where the "upgrade" piece is one of the blocks that are used to the structure & ultimately change the look/feel of the finished product.​

Again, these are just my opinions...but these are some of the reasons that I have opted for not including Metallurgy in my worlds in the past. Hope this helps.

 

[MajPayne21]

The biggest issue I had with Metallurgy is that fully half the ores I found weren't any better than iron, and even the high end ores are hovering right around diamond. Once I've found 3 diamonds, I've leapfrogged 85% of Metallurgy's content unless I have a specific need for a very narrow set of parameters, and often by that point I'll have a top end ore or alloy anyway, so there's no incentive to use a mid tier metal for much of anything. I found myself using Dark Iron for armor just to avoid using my regular iron and occasionally making a top end pickaxe. I used low tiers up to steel to make the grinders and furnaces (which I liked!) and never bothered with them again. I like the idea of the ores-to-XP mechanic, but there was never a compelling reason for me to mine a specific metallurgy ore unless it gave off particle effects.

That brings me to my next point, which is that I had a very hard time telling ores apart by sight. I know there are a lot and you have a limited spectrum (and I am partially colorblind, which is probably the biggest problem). I think your ore textures are very attractive, and I love the particle effects on the high end ones. Would you consider altering tge textures somewhat between ore tiers, since the colors can get recycled? If other (non-colorblind) people don't have this problem, feel free to discount this paragraph.

I think the inventory sprites for most of your armor were awesome, but I frequently was disappointed upon actually wearing the pieces. I think improving your armor textures could help, unless you are limited by the bounding boxes (MPS suggests this is not a problem).

All in all, I enjoyed Metallurgy immensely and it seems like a very well thought-out mod, especially with the grinders and furnaces and the clear effort that went into texturing (except where some armor falls short, imo). I think TiCo smeltery integration would be fantastic.

I did end up accumulating a large amount of middling ores and never using them, so it got to the point where I would leave metallurgy ores unmined unless they were sparkly ones.

One drawback of the high end ores is that even though they have high enchantability with high durability, you still aren't guaranteed a good pick for your efforts. I had several top-4 tier picks with bad enchants even after using 30 lvls on them. Would your higher enchantability provide a benefit in a mod like EPlus where you choose your enchants? Would the enchantability modifier provide a lower level cost for the same group of enchants versus diamond tools?

I also recognize the difficulty in balancing meaningful content with outdoing vanilla or other mods. If Dark Iron was twice as durable as diamond, the balance of tool usefulness would be unreasonable, so I respect that you chose to make only your very high tier metals have more durability and enchantability than diamond.

Have you ever considered a 'modern' or 'space age' tier that includes special alloys like Inconel, Hastelloy, Titanium alloys, or the like? We could combine a large number of medium tier (nickel, copper, chromium, etc) ores in a special machine (like a steel tier furnace but called the 'alloy smelter' or something) to create them, and they could have high speed and durability but bad enchantability so they are good for regular tools or armor but still provide some tradeoff vs Tartarite and the like.

You could even allow them to be used in special (perhaps EU/MJ powered versions!) of the furnaces that were very fast or had a large inventory (think 4 input slot version of the induction furnace from IC2) or industrial tools like a TiCo hammer. It would be important to give these alloys special uses or advantages to keep them from being yet another middling tier of ores.

All in all, I like Metallurgy and I compliment the excellent spriting/texturing. I wish more mods offered the visual polish you did with your tools and weapons and blocks.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 4

 

[Shadowclaimer]

The biggest issue I had with Metallurgy is that fully half the ores I found weren't any better than iron, and even the high end ores are hovering right around diamond. Once I've found 3 diamonds, I've leapfrogged 85% of Metallurgy's content unless I have a specific need for a very narrow set of parameters, and often by that point I'll have a top end ore or alloy anyway, so there's no incentive to use a mid tier metal for much of anything. I found myself using Dark Iron for armor just to avoid using my regular iron and occasionally making a top end pickaxe. I used low tiers up to steel to make the grinders and furnaces (which I liked!) and never bothered with them again. I like the idea of the ores-to-XP mechanic, but there was never a compelling reason for me to mine a specific metallurgy ore unless it gave off particle effects.

That brings me to my next point, which is that I had a very hard time telling ores apart by sight. I know there are a lot and you have a limited spectrum (and I am partially colorblind, which is probably the biggest problem). I think your ore textures are very attractive, and I love the particle effects on the high end ones. Would you consider altering tge textures somewhat between ore tiers, since the colors can get recycled? If other (non-colorblind) people don't have this problem, feel free to discount this paragraph.

I think the inventory sprites for most of your armor were awesome, but I frequently was disappointed upon actually wearing the pieces. I think improving your armor textures could help, unless you are limited by the bounding boxes (MPS suggests this is not a problem).

All in all, I enjoyed Metallurgy immensely and it seems like a very well thought-out mod, especially with the grinders and furnaces and the clear effort that went into texturing (except where some armor falls short, imo). I think TiCo smeltery integration would be fantastic.

I did end up accumulating a large amount of middling ores and never using them, so it got to the point where I would leave metallurgy ores unmined unless they were sparkly ones.

One drawback of the high end ores is that even though they have high enchantability with high durability, you still aren't guaranteed a good pick for your efforts. I had several top-4 tier picks with bad enchants even after using 30 lvls on them. Would your higher enchantability provide a benefit in a mod like EPlus where you choose your enchants? Would the enchantability modifier provide a lower level cost for the same group of enchants versus diamond tools?

I also recognize the difficulty in balancing meaningful content with outdoing vanilla or other mods. If Dark Iron was twice as durable as diamond, the balance of tool usefulness would be unreasonable, so I respect that you chose to make only your very high tier metals have more durability and enchantability than diamond.

Have you ever considered a 'modern' or 'space age' tier that includes special alloys like Inconel, Hastelloy, Titanium alloys, or the like? We could combine a large number of medium tier (nickel, copper, chromium, etc) ores in a special machine (like a steel tier furnace but called the 'alloy smelter' or something) to create them, and they could have high speed and durability but bad enchantability so they are good for regular tools or armor but still provide some tradeoff vs Tartarite and the like.

You could even allow them to be used in special (perhaps EU/MJ powered versions!) of the furnaces that were very fast or had a large inventory (think 4 input slot version of the induction furnace from IC2) or industrial tools like a TiCo hammer. It would be important to give these alloys special uses or advantages to keep them from being yet another middling tier of ores.

All in all, I like Metallurgy and I compliment the excellent spriting/texturing. I wish more mods offered the visual polish you did with your tools and weapons and blocks.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 4

I HIGHLY recommend Enchanting Plus with Metallurgy. Not just because Odininon is on the team, but because it plays exceptionally well along our high enchant values. We also have a Tartarite Enchanter we're testing (its in the game at the moment) that enchants to absurd levels

Modern/Sci-Fi Metals were two planned packs that might return some day depending on how progress goes. Each metal set had a planned machine and Modern Metals had electricity and electric versions of the machines, etc.

The Machine Overhaul is changing a lot, not just with upgrades, input/output storage is a big thing going on a lot of them and some other features I'll talk about more as we get things in.

Overall, I'd suggest playing Metallurgy alongside other mods where you NEED powerful armor/weapons (Infernal Mobs for instance) or you need to consume a lot of tool durability (Millenaire), as you said, its easy to get mired in metals if you have nothing to spend them on effectively. I'm working on some stuff ingame for us at the moment (a lot of costs are increasing for instance) to help alleviate that, but we'll see how it goes.

 

[Glassmaker]

Hey Everyone,

I have released an alpha build for ExtraTiC.

ExtraTiC is a Tinkers' Construct & Metallurgy add-on mod, currently in the Alpha stage it adds the ability of smelting Metallurgy's Metals / Alloy mixing in Tinkers' Construct smeltery. plus casting ingots and blocks from Molten Metallurgy metals.

 

[Zenthon_127]

Overall, I'd suggest playing Metallurgy alongside other mods where you NEED powerful armor/weapons (Infernal Mobs for instance) or you need to consume a lot of tool durability (Millenaire), as you said, its easy to get mired in metals if you have nothing to spend them on effectively. I'm working on some stuff ingame for us at the moment (a lot of costs are increasing for instance) to help alleviate that, but we'll see how it goes.

See, I think this is the largest issue aside from the rainbow cave (which you should add as a legitimate feature for lols). Basically, Metallurgy's general power level is pathetic compared something like MPS or TiC where you're getting crazy damage reduction, flight, 3x3 mining, autorepair/electricity, etc. It would work great in a pack like Hexxit because it's around the same level of power as Twilight Forest, but we all know that Twilight Forest tools/armor is horrifically UP compared to most of FTB.

In other words the mod needs mid/late-game content comparative to the late game of a tech-based modpack like Unleashed, possibly by configs so it doesn't completely ruin the balance of current Metallurgy.

 

[Shadowclaimer]

See, I think this is the largest issue aside from the rainbow cave (which you should add as a legitimate feature for lols). Basically, Metallurgy's general power level is pathetic compared something like MPS or TiC where you're getting crazy damage reduction, flight, 3x3 mining, autorepair/electricity, etc. It would work great in a pack like Hexxit because it's around the same level of power as Twilight Forest, but we all know that Twilight Forest tools/armor is horrifically UP compared to most of FTB.

In other words the mod needs mid/late-game content comparative to the late game of a tech-based modpack like Unleashed, possibly by configs so it doesn't completely ruin the balance of current Metallurgy.

I highly suggest dimension mods with Metallurgy, they play great with them.

The thing was i tried to keep the power level low. I don't like mods that just let players go to town with some of the most absurd things possible.

The hard thing is to add mid/late game content that consumes said tools/weapons. Mobs of some sort are outside our scope, we're not a mob mod, we're an ore and machine mod. At worst I could add golems of our metals for any metals you have enabled that are really rare mobs or something and it'd still fit the theme, otherwise we're really SOL.

But yea, I do fully agree, more mid-late game content and more things to consume metals are MAJOR must-haves for us in the core of Metallurgy.

 

[Zenthon_127]

See, I think it already fits pretty well in lower-power packs (usually ones focused around dimension mods). It's just that FTB isn't one. There's a few things I think are essential for mods of your type to fit in with tech mods:

• Special Effects: Right now Metallurgy to my knowledge is a bunch of really powerful, but overall similar tools/armor. There are a ton of things that could be added to specific metals to help out. Autorepair? Autosmelting/grinding? Extended range? Electric? AoE? Insta-mine ore/gravel veins? Significantly better at mining weak/strong materials? TELEPORTATING THROUGH WALLS (*cough*ender metals*cough*)??? Heck, you could even add these to basic metals and as you combine them they get both effects.
• Overall power level needs increasing if it's going to be in tech packs, but I already mentioned this.
• Non-tool/weapon/armor utility devices. Every great mod has at least one device that makes it special.

And if you add things drastically more powerful than the current norm you can always have a config for it. I just feel it's a damn shame that a great concept like Metallurgy can't really work in a tech pack.

 

[lindyhopfan]

What I think would help Metallurgy to fit in with tech packs better are mid-late game machines that combine a wide variety of mixtures of metallurgy ores, and possibly other ingredients to make other materials, not just other Metallurgy ores like the current alloys, but all sorts of stuff. I'm thinking similar to the way that the gregtech centrifuge and electolyser recipes work, minus the greg. It would be cool if Metallurgy gave us new ways to automate the manufacture of specific generally useful things like clay, gravel, soul sand, lava, ender pearls, etc. It would give us options as to where to send our quarry output of Metallurgy metals in an automated fashion that does not have to do with tools and armor. I like having multiple different ways to do things.