Modern Retro Project - Impossibru?

[KingTriaxx]

I agree, but then again, I prefer that much slower progression of things, where a lot of people prefer higher-speed and efficiency. I don't mind having to go and farm/or automate the production of resources to move on, where I know lots of people would prefer to say have to fight a mob to get it.

Everyone says oh, I want the pack harder, but not crafting and grinding... Okay, so what options are left? Exploring, which works fine, but unless you add something in like Roguelikes, or Better Dungeons, that doesn't work as well in vanilla.

Alternately, if you're feeling mean, remove the spawning of Iron Ore, and remove it from dropping on the death of Iron Golems. The only source of iron is from killing zombies. There we are, expert mode with no resource dump and no crafting grind.

Incidentally, Future's Edge does have Roguelike dungeons, with untouched loot, so you can actually fight your way down and use the rewards to skip a lot of the worst bits of crafting.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I must say that I agree with @ShneekeyTheLost here. Yes, there is sometimes a need to increase recipe cost if automation needs to be forced (which is what the "expert" stuff probably refers to). However, these recipes need to become intresting to actually automate and automate at the point that you want to make them. Thus not crafting recipe into crafting recipe into crafting recipe but rather machine mod a into machine mod b into machine mod c. Of course these machines should be at least somewhat more interesting to automate then your standard furnace else it is the same as a basic crafting recipe.

Because of this I would say that having things cost steel instead of iron is only a resource dump rather then a step into expert mode as in most mods turning iron in steel is basically just smelting iron again. Granted some mods also require pulverized coal which help a bit into making it fun to automate but then you are still basically automating a vanilla furnace, except now one of its side is taken up by a power line and we also didn't expand our list of mods that we where using to create our item in the first place.

An example of something that may work better is to make it that fighting blazes is either really hard or even impossible. This needs to be done in such a way that farming them is still trivial, else that defeats the point.
If that is done getting blaze rods is suddenly a lot trickier but there are still ways to get the rods. One way that I know off is that you can turn 1 glowstone dust and some molten redstone into 1 blazepowder (thermal expansion) and 5 blaze powder can be turned into 1 blaze rod (Industrial craft2). This leaves us with a need of glowstone and redstone, luckily we can make a witch farm (vaniila minecraft/some mod that allow you to spawn them). There is also a way to make 2 glowstone out of 1 blaze rod, thus allowing us to be a lot less limited with glowstone needs and also adding one more mod into the mix.

Now, this all is without touching on the various ways that one could have made blazes so hard to farm that players go the above route nor the various ways that players can get around this and if a player manages to do that his game will at least when it comes to blazes be pretty normal again.

CoFH crew made blazes harder to farm by making them no longer drop blaze rods unless a player kills them (and by player, we mean any player-like entity such as a Killer Joe). Well, harder unless you have EnderIO installed, in which case it's trivialized.

The other option would be removing a way of auto-spawning enemies, or moving spawners. Meaning you have to go to the spawner to farm them rather than doing it conveniently from the safety of your main base. Which means building a mob grinding facility around an existing spawner... and for blazes, that means You have to construct said facility while being bombarded by Ghasts and other blazes. That is more challenging. Resource bleed for the sake of resource bleed (IC2 hammers and snips) isn't more difficult or even more interesting, just more grinding.

 

[KingTriaxx]

I've never really liked the idea of not building blaze spawners in place. (Though I frequently get lucky enough to find them buried inside cliff faces so I only have to close off the front.)

Now resource bleed, that I hate. Though IC2 has always been like that, given the tree taps (renewable anyway), wrench (comparably cheap), coolant cells (moderately expensive), and machines shattering to machine blocks (mildly to hilariously expensive). Honestly, I think that Embers did it right, the hammer doesn't deplete, but the plates take four ingots, which makes it faster, but prohibitively expensive.

 

[ratchet freak]

Doing large-scale recipe overhauls for difficulty is only interesting when you craft a decent tech tree out of it. With appropriate gating of recipes based on machines/items/mobs needed to create certain materials bonus points for linking several techmods. But still making it so that you can create a lot of a material you need a lot of.

For example if everything needs steel and the only way to make it is a super-slow coke-powered furnace then all you are doing is forcing the player to build hundreds of them to get anywhere. That's not interesting.

 

[Inaeo]

Doing large-scale recipe overhauls for difficulty is only interesting when you craft a decent tech tree out of it. With appropriate gating of recipes based on machines/items/mobs needed to create certain materials bonus points for linking several techmods. But still making it so that you can create a lot of a material you need a lot of.

For example if everything needs steel and the only way to make it is a super-slow coke-powered furnace then all you are doing is forcing the player to build hundreds of them to get anywhere. That's not interesting.

If you can invest some of that steel (and maybe some resource made available by a newly craftable machine) into a way to make steel at a more reasonable pace, then I add that to the balanced tech tree, and call it logical progression. If RailCraft Coke Ovens remain my only steel source, and everything uses steel rather than iron, I would simply walk away - my time is worth more than that.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

If you can invest some of that steel (and maybe some resource made available by a newly craftable machine) into a way to make steel at a more reasonable pace, then I add that to the balanced tech tree, and call it logical progression. If RailCraft Coke Ovens remain my only steel source, and everything uses steel rather than iron, I would simply walk away - my time is worth more than that.

See, IE does this - the steel is used to make the better blast furnace, which then makes steel faster!

 

[Inaeo]

See, IE does this - the steel is used to make the better blast furnace, which then makes steel faster!

Indeed. Also, if memory serves, the original blast furnace is not able to be automated (without some inventive trickery), but the improved blast furnace becomes an industry.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Thankfully, one of the updates for Railcraft improved the speed of the blast furnace. Though it does have the advantage of being able to recycle iron and steel weapons, armor and items which makes it very useful. Still, spamming them up and automating them is how you're supposed to use them.

Age of Engineering on the other hand, nudges you towards the IC2 blast furnace which is slow, but relatively easy to automate. (Pushing/Pulling Upgrades, and IE conveyors are crazy useful for the task.)

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Thankfully, one of the updates for Railcraft improved the speed of the blast furnace. Though it does have the advantage of being able to recycle iron and steel weapons, armor and items which makes it very useful. Still, spamming them up and automating them is how you're supposed to use them.

Age of Engineering on the other hand, nudges you towards the IC2 blast furnace which is slow, but relatively easy to automate. (Pushing/Pulling Upgrades, and IE conveyors are crazy useful for the task.)

Well, it kinda *forces* you to do IC2's blast furnace first, since the IE version requires the slag from the former to make the blast bricks with.

The IC2 blast furnace basically runs on EU (converted into heat), while the IE version runs on Coal Coke and RF makes it go faster. IE is much faster (since you can effectively start off with the advanced version that can accept the pre-heaters) and can be run entirely on passive RF generation.

Also, how the Twitch Launcher/Curse handles modpacks makes it exceedingly annoying to make an instance in MMC with it.

 

[KingTriaxx]

In AoE it's actually better to use a Liquid Heat Exchanger, rather than the EU powered one, since it'll generate Pahoehoe lava, which is necessary much later down the line.

Really? Open the profile, and use the export profile option. That generates a zip file of the mod list and configs, which should be able to drop into the MMC instance.

 

[Kel_Co]

Also, how the Twitch Launcher/Curse handles modpacks makes it exceedingly annoying to make an instance in MMC with it.

I remember hearing that adding support for Twitch/Curse instances was one of the planned features for the next release of MMC.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

In AoE it's actually better to use a Liquid Heat Exchanger, rather than the EU powered one, since it'll generate Pahoehoe lava, which is necessary much later down the line.

*blinks*

What on earth do you need pahoehoe for?! Also, I didn't realise that it was actually a real thing until recently - one of my volcanologist colleagues mentioned it, and I did such a double-take I nearly cricked my neck. It was a bit like that with Invar, I assumed for years that it was just something TE had made up, until I actually looked it up and discovered that not only was it real, but the contexts in which it was used in TE suddenly made sense.

 

[Kel_Co]

*blinks*

What on earth do you need pahoehoe for?! Also, I didn't realise that it was actually a real thing until recently - one of my volcanologist colleagues mentioned it, and I did such a double-take I nearly cricked my neck. It was a bit like that with Invar, I assumed for years that it was just something TE had made up, until I actually looked it up and discovered that not only was it real, but the contexts in which it was used in TE suddenly made sense.

I think some machines need IC2 basalt, which is made by cooling pahoehoe.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

I think some machines need IC2 basalt, which is made by cooling pahoehoe.

Ah! That makes sense

 

[KingTriaxx]

Yeah, I've been watching Thorgal's AoE streams, and hearing some of the other people have the exact same reaction to needing the stuff. And it can only be made by actually using it in a Heat Exchanger and it has to actually be using the heat, so...