Mystcraft and your opinion

[Yusunoha]

so I've been seeing quite some discussion topics about certain mods lately where people discuss their opinions about that mod. I've been thinking about removing mystcraft for some time now, and thought it could be a good idea to open a topic like this for some discussion on it. first a bit of story why I started to question about mystcraft

Spoiler

I haven't used Mystcraft for quite a while now, and yesterday was the first real time I used it again. so I do my thing, and create my first descriptive book. ofcourse not forget the linking book home and ready to go, open the book, click the age and then..... nothing. whole world freezes. ok, so reloaded Minecraft, ready all again, and go.... but nope, world freezes again. luckily I have a backup mod installed so I went back to an earlier backup. again, prepared everything, created descriptive book, did all the things and yay, this time the world loaded. it was really red, but that was about it, as nothing else loaded.... so ok, reloaded minecraft, tried again, same thing happens.... so it's probably just that age, so I create a new age. it was probably a cave world as I spawned at a y level of around 225 with the whole world flat. the time was normal, but the light level was bright. I looked around and holy jeebus... Thaumcraft altars everywhere. I run around for a good hour or so and go back to the overworld with a backpack filled with loot

but when I went back to Minecraft today, I decided to just go back to an older backup, as this was just way too easy and felt really cheatish to me. so this time I decided to create an overworld age using a symbols guide, so ok, I do cheat in some pages because it'd take me ages to gather all the needed pages, after about 30 minutes I load up the new age and yea... it's kind of like the overworld, colors are a bit messed up though.

but I do hate that I cheated in those pages, so in the end I just decided to ditch that world and start a new one, but that got me thinking about how useful Mystcraft really is nowadays...

so, how useful is Mystcraft really...

Spoiler

you need to spend a whole hill of emeralds to get all the pages you want from villager trading. you could also get lucky with an age and find alot of libraries, but that also means alot of other world structures generate and means you'll have alot of easy loot for little to no work. then you have all the pages you want and you can make the ages you want. wrong. as you need to experiment alot to exactly get the age you want. any mistake can mean instability, which are all annoying effects. sure, you can turn them off, but that's just making it all too easy again.

and you can always come across certain pages or ages that are just ridiculous to get. diamond tendrils anyone? sure, you can choose to not use them, but what if you come across an age that has them, or has liquid pools of any metal or liquid you want... uu liquid oceans anyone?

to me Mystcraft just seems incredibly unbalanced and very hard to use it the way you want and it also feels very unfinished to me. you have to pretty much spam ages to get the perfect world you want, and if you're not careful you'll be swimming in loot for little to no work... I do love that it gives you the option to basically create a whole new overworld, but the world and time required to do it is just not worth it. seeing as other mods are now also adding dimensions you don't really need dense ores anymore, especially considering the instability it adds. I do love using link books to quickly get to certain places, but for some reason using any kind of mystcraft book causes lag spikes for me afterwards, and the more and more I use them, the worse the lag spikes become. but making the books has become... a bit of a hassle.

there's other mods nowadays who allow you to teleport between dimensions or in the same dimension, personally I really like Enhanced Portals as it also requires power to function.

but what could Mystcraft do to become more attractive again for me?

Spoiler

first I'd ditch the whole symbol gathering mechanic. it's annoying and can be very expensive and you've to gather a bunch of useless symbols you're never going to use before you get the ones you want. I'd rather like to see a research kind of mechanic like Thaumcraft has. you'd get a research tool that you can take with you, and you could scan certain things which would give you the knowledge to craft symbol pages out of them. you'd also be able to combine symbols together to get new symbols. I wouldn't completely ditch the myst villager... I would rather have it so that the myst villager has certain symbols that you can't acquire yourself. but the myst villager is, just like you, gathering symbols, so you'd need to trade symbols with him to get other symbols. this would require a new trading mechanic for the myst villager though. if you open the trade page the myst villager will show you some of the pages he has, and the pages he's looking for. ofcourse, as stingy as those damn squids are, he's asking more then what he's going to give. so certain pages can require several other pages as a trade.

I would also ditch the whole tendrils/lakes of resources. no more structures completely made out of one type of block, or whole oceans filled with liquid resources. nope, it's too unbalanced in my opinion and gets boring really fast. dense ores would still be available though, so you can still get the double/triple ore rate that you've always used.

I would also like to see some sort of system that allows you to preview an age before you generate it. this way you don't need to first spam ages before you get the right combination of symbols for the age you want. I know this could very well be impossible to do, but I just hate, HATE making an age and finding out it's totally not the age I wanted. I know you can follow some guidelines so you're sure to be able to get the right age, but that requires you to first gather all the required symbols to be able to do that.

I would also change the instability effects. some of them are annoying to have and make it pretty much impossible to use an age. I'm not entirely sure what would be a good mechanic for the instabilities though. I agree there should be some penalty for certain symbols, but the instability shouldn't make the age completely useless. perhaps link certain instabilities to certain symbols, but give you the option to add a certain other symbol to prevent that instability from happening

now to not be completely negative about Mystcraft I'll also add some of the things I do like about it...

Spoiler

Mystcraft gives you the option to travel between locations pretty easily. this is great for servers if you don't like to spend ages travelling the world to visit your friend. it's also awesome that you can make a whole new age for people to mine in so the overworld doesn't get wrecked. I also like how you can completely customize a world to your liking, but ofcourse I hate the trouble you've to go through before you get that specific world you wanted.

I really love using Mystcraft, but it just feels really unbalanced and unfinished to me and it starts to make me wonder if I should actually still use it or not... so, what are your thoughts about Mystcraft?

 

[Golrith]

It's a nice concept, but not really a mod to be taken "seriously". Generate your own personal world and all the resources contained within in for basically leather and ink...
The link books and the portal system I think is the best portal system I've seen. It's smooth and pretty seamless. It could be a mod all by itself with the crystals part of the world gen.


I personally feel that all random ages should be floating islands, with some form of instability. Only making a fully described book should result in a true world.


I also agree that it would be better with some sort of research mechanic. Let us draw symbols to make pages, and you only find out what you've written once you visit. The symbols follow certain patterns, so if one shape produced a forest, and slightly different shape produces a different style of forest. Once you work out the basics, then you experiment with combining shapes to get even stranger results.

 

[b0bst3r]

Well for SMP servers mystcraft is 99% of the time disabled for players anyway, servers can't handle running multiple dimensions with players living in them loaded all the time.

So as far as SMP goes usually there's a mining world to save destroying the surface of the overworld and sometimes donator worlds.

Since the above are usually created by admins the mechanics behind making worlds are void as they simply spawn the pages in.

The other useful feature besides worlds is the portals which can be used by players.

 

[SonOfABirch]

For a server with 5 or more people myst is essential. Keeps people from destroying the world with quarries and whatnot. But it should be admin only, and I cannot think of any exceptions where regular players should have control over that.

For singleplayer, heeeellll no. It's disabled for me and will always stay so.

 

[Yusunoha]

true, Mystcraft on server's is always either banned, administrator/moderator or donor only.
seeing as Mystcraft doesn't add any real worldgen besides the villager I guess I'll keep it installed, unless it happens for everyone when using the descriptive/linking books that they'll get lag spikes afterwards...

 

[rhn]

For a server with 5 or more people myst is essential. Keeps people from destroying the world with quarries and whatnot. But it should be admin only, and I cannot think of any exceptions where regular players should have control over that.

For singleplayer, heeeellll no. It's disabled for me and will always stay so.

I kinda use Mystcraft in singleplayer as I would on a server. I set up a mining world and possible a lava world if I have a need for that. Purely because I don't want overworld ruined by Quarriying. And it is SO much easier to set up and run quarries in a flat world with constant daylight and no caves/water/lava in it I also usually make it a desert biome so there is plenty of sand and sandstone(so far has been one of my favourite building materials).
And I am under the impression that it is much more demanding(specially with all the new additions) to keep the nether loaded for lava than a bare lava ocean world.

So for those two things alone, I will keep Mystcraft. The "new" intralinking portals are great as well and I use them as my main transport means.

 

[Petrus]

I like Mystcraft; but I primarily use it as an upgraded/somewhat more mature version of what the Nether Portal mechanic already should have been, in the sense that you can put portals anywhere you like, rather than needing to care if the co-ordinates are divisible by 8.

XCompWiz is somewhat balance obsessed, and has put a lot of things in the mod which I basically consider pointless, although fortunately he has also included a config file which lets me turn most of the detritus off. I don't approve of the ink well mechanic either, personally; it belongs in the same category as Greg's metal former/tin snips/hammer in recent IC2. Tedious, pointless, doesn't add anything.

The other issue with Mystcraft for me, is that for me to get real use out of the mod, and use it in the same manner as vanilla Nether portals, I need crystals to be renewable. I get around that problem by making a recipe for them with CustomStuff 2, consisting of a piece of obsidian and glowstone dust. I also don't consider that excessively cheap, either, because a single gate pair will still cost me nearly half a stack of both.

As for custom Ages being overpowered; I'm honestly starting to wonder, if someone came out with a mod for Minecraft, where the player was literally gagged, blindfolded, and bound in a straitjacket, whether or not some of you would still consider that not "balanced."

 

[Skyqula]

Balance problems:
- It makes animal farms absolete ==> cheap empty age book spam your way into new worlds ==> kill animals around spawn ==> toss book
- It makes books valueless ==> librabries are to easy to find and contain way to manny books ==> level 30 enchanting accesable at the cost of a single age book
- It can spawn seriously overpowered ore tendrils or liquid oceans.
- Its page finding mechanic is terrible, especially when biome mods are added
- Linking books to cheap and portal crystals locked behind RNG/page grind
- Mod structures can spawn and with the right page combinations in huge quantities ==> Easy acces to huge quantities of loot chests

Whats great:
- How linking books work and turning that into a portal system. However, a much more lightweight and significantly better balanced mod is something like enhanced portals 2/3.
- Can make anny and every world you want and exactly the world you want.

Some ideas to make it better:
- A different way of getting pages, a research system or harder dungeons with no free stuff.
- Everything needs to be pages. Each animal, each ore, each tree, each stone type. Nothing generates by default.
- A world needs to be unable to have everything. Basicly assign everything a point cost and a world can have X points before instability occurs. It should not be possible to get annywhere near an overworld like age.
- Some kind of rare dungeon loot that allows the creation of high point ages, these would allow you to create overworld like ages with almost everything present.

 

[Golrith]

Petrus, once you locate the crystals page, you can easily make an age that is full of the stuff, or get lucky with a a random age.

At one point a server player needed some glowstone, instead of going to the nether, he just made an age that was purely glowstone spheres and tendrils. It was only slightly unstable. All the dangers and exploration of the Nether made obsolete.
Building dimensions to order to obtain resources you need just totally breaks any sense of "progression" that mod authors are designing in their mods.

 

[PierceSG]

For travelling only, I just use the Waypoints mod now. The crafting recipe of it is cheap and the function it grants can be said to be OP by a lot but I would still recommend it highly to others.
I wanted to use Dimensional Doors but at the moment the beta is pretty buggy with the rogue rifts that keeps reappearing even after the configs set them to not do that, so I had it removed (SSP).
As for Mystcraft, I have never liked it. Probably because I find it tedious to hunt/trade for the pages.

Sent from my GT-N8020 using Tapatalk

 

[darkeshrine]

It's pretty useful for me, if only to make travel between different dimensions easier. Though, it's never been all that important, it is nice to be able to travel freely between the Nether and Twilight Forest without going to the overworld first. Mystcraft also saved one of my worlds once when i accidentally broke the twilight forest portal and got trapped there. I would have had to recreate the world or start completely over without the tpx command.

I never really did much as far as making worlds. I always ended up with dozens of duplicate pages and never found the pages i really wanted, even with villager trades. That was always very disappointing for me.

 

[portablejim]

Mystcraft also saved one of my worlds once when i accidentally broke the twilight forest portal and got trapped there. I would have had to recreate the world or start completely over without the tpx command.

Unless I am mistaken you can get out of the twilight forest without any materials. Ore spawns there (the bottom layers, so you may not be able to get copper, for example) so you have iron for a bucket and a diamond as well. It has plant life you can plant around and it has water.

 

[Yusunoha]

I also made a few suggestions concerning the notebook on the mystcraft forums a few days ago, this is a direct copy of that post

Spoiler

I can understand that part of the Mystcraft experience lies in the maintaining of several notebooks, all with categorized symbols for each type and such, but to be honest, I don't really like this part of Mystcraft.

I'd rather like it if you'd only need 1 notebook for all of your pages, and that the notebook automatically categorizes all the pages.
if you'd open up the notebook you'd find more of an introduction page as the front page, with on the sides several buttons for the different page categories. when you click on one of those buttons it takes you to the page of that category. there you can find all the pages you've collected of that category. you can mark certain pages if you want to use them to create an age. there'll be some sort of hotbar on the bottom of the book with all the pages you've marked. on the front page you can find these pages aswell, though on the frontpage you can order them aswell and remove certain marked pages.

the notebook will also be a bit of a guide for mystcraft, containing informtion about things like the different types of instabilities, how the order of pages work, what kind of world gen you can find from mystcraft and perhaps even pages for each symbol you've collected explaining what the symbol does.

the trading with myst villagers would also change because of this notebook. you'd only be able to trade with myst villagers if you're carrying a notebook. when you open up the trading page your notebook actually opens up in a special page of the notebook. here you can still trade emeralds for pages with the myst villager. instead of offering just 1 page the myst villager will offer you several pages, the price for the pages still remain though. the benefit of trading with the myst villager with this way is that the notebook can tell what pages you already have when trading with the villager, this way the chance of buying a page that you already have decreases. perhaps some of the page trades could also involve trading other pages. for example the villager offers a specific page, but wants another page in return, because I can imagine the myst villager also wants to collect pages.

the notebook is able to have several of the same kinds of pages, which will stack in the book. this way you can trade duplicate pages with the myst villager without losing those pages.

though sadly if you lose the notebook you'll still lose all your pages. with this the notebook becomes a whole lot more organized, and also a whole lot more important.

these are just some of my suggestions I've come up with while playing with mystcraft.

I really don't want to remove mystcraft, as I love having the option to create a new overworld age, but if I keep getting those lag spikes when using the descriptive/linking books, Mystcraft basically becomes useless for me... I can still try out the mystcraft portals though, perhaps that those won't cause the lag spikes...

 

[Golrith]

This topic reminds me of a mod to create suggestion I posted 6 months ago as a result of being a bit dissatisfied with mystcraft.
http://forum.feed-the-beast.com/threads/suggest-mods-for-creation-here.22821/page-6#post-361023

A tech version but you build your world (which is always a floating island) using resources. If you want an island full of gold ore, you would need a stack of gold ore blocks in the "crafting". The more complex the design, the smaller the island.
While the resource costs would be massive, you would net a profit.

 

[Democretes]

I think the thing about Mystcraft is that it can become very overpowered extremely easily. Thaumcraft hills are very common making loads of rare loot fairly easy to get. Tendrils are vastly overpower when combined with any ore page. Molten metal lakes/oceans are now a thing, adding another problem to worry about.

The biggest use for Mystcraft leans on server use. Mining/Lava ages can be made which help people out since the overworld/Nether don't get torn up.

 

[Trunks9809]

I don't approve of the ink well mechanic either, personally; it belongs in the same category as Greg's metal former/tin snips/hammer in recent IC2. Tedious, pointless, doesn't add anything.

Actually, the ink mixer added a method to add the various effects to you link books without having to rely on a creative-only block to do so.

On the subject of Mystcraft itself, I honestly am a huge fan of it. I regularly am the one who ends up writing the mining worlds or other public dims for my server, and I'm currently living in my own void age. I don't really get what people find difficult about the new writing system, the Mystcraft wiki goes into so much detail its almost impossible not to get the age you want. Instability is pretty much a thing of the past, unless you either a) REALLY muck up your writing or b) choose to add pages that add huge amounts of instability (diamond ore, oil, dense ore, accelerated to name a few).

The thaumcraft altars\barrows thing has always been an issue, though.

 

[Yusunoha]

Actually, the ink mixer added a method to add the various effects to you link books without having to rely on a creative-only block to do so.

On the subject of Mystcraft itself, I honestly am a huge fan of it. I regularly am the one who ends up writing the mining worlds or other public dims for my server, and I'm currently living in my own void age. I don't really get what people find difficult about the new writing system, the Mystcraft wiki goes into so much detail its almost impossible not to get the age you want. Instability is pretty much a thing of the past, unless you either a) REALLY muck up your writing or b) choose to add pages that add huge amounts of instability (diamond ore, oil, dense ore, accelerated to name a few).

The thaumcraft altars\barrows thing has always been an issue, though.

the thing with the ink mixer is, you've to use items to get the effect that you want, but the chances are very low to get that effect you desire.
sure, you can use items with a higher chance, but they'll also cost more. I don't know if you can actually see from the ink which effects it already has, but I think it doesn't show that, meaning you either have to waste alot of pages and ink hoping you get the effect you want for a cheap item usage, or spend alot of items on one panel which has a higher chance to have that effect. I also don't really see the relation between the items needed for the effects and the ink color... mushroom stew? dusts of resources? mob drops? I'd rather like it if you needed to use actual dye colors to get the ink color you want for the effect you're working towards. perhaps even make it so you need to combine colored inks to get another ink color to get one of the better effects...

and yes, you can make the exact age you're looking for, but you need to gather all the pages needed first, which is a very annoying task to do, you then need to create some ages to experiment so you get the symbols and order exactly right before you can create the age you want. meanwhile these experimental ages have the possibility of spawning certain resources which basically makes the whole game become boring really fast... the second random age I made was a cave world and I spawned ontop, there were hundreds of thaumcraft altars and dungeons spawned everywhere, after an hour I swimmed in resources and the next day I decided to ditch that whole world because it was all just too easy.

 

[Algester]

mystcraft is fun regardless but its practicality really lies on a good server... *ahem*pahicraft*ahem* but that's aint cheap... and it really shines on SMP, SSP if you want to create a void age and live in that void age

 

[Trunks9809]

and yes, you can make the exact age you're looking for, but you need to gather all the pages needed first, which is a very annoying task to do, you then need to create some ages to experiment so you get the symbols and order exactly right before you can create the age you want. meanwhile these experimental ages have the possibility of spawning certain resources which basically makes the whole game become boring really fast...

Why do you need to create experimental ages? The order of symbols is fixed - once you've created one age, you know the order things should go in. The only time there'd be any variance from this is if you don't include ANY symbol, the engine generates a random one to replace it (not necessarily of the same type as the missing symbol - this is what can lead to 'cheaty' spawns).

For the record, the order I use and rarely have trouble with is as follows [Optional Pages]:
Biome(s) + Biome Controller OR Native Biome Controller (Does not require biome pages);
Material Block + Ocean Liquid Block + Terrain Generator;
[Celestial Position] + [Time Modifier] + [Colour] + Moon OR Dark Moon;
[Celestial Position] + [Time Modifier] + [Colour] + Sun OR Dark Sun;
[Time Modifier] + [Colour] + Stars OR Dark Stars;
Lighting Page;
Weather Page;
Populators - Villages, Ravines, Obelisks, Crystal Formations etc. 3 in total seems to be a good number, but never more than 2 of a given individual pages.
[Effects] - Be aware that Accelerated ALWAYS adds instability, so you will need to balance this by adding negative effects pages.
[Colour] + [Foliage Colour];
[Colour] + [Grass Colour];
[Colour] + [Water Colour];
[Colour] + [Sky Colour];
[Colour] + [Cloud Colour];
[Colour] + [Sunset Colour];

Although the various element + colour combination pages are optional - ie, the world will generate mostly what you've asked for without them, they are the most common causes of differences between what you wanted (wrote) and what was generated. So it's always worth specifying them in all cases.

 

[PsionicArchon]

In a single player world, you are your own balancing mechanic. As modded Minecraft continues to grow, multiplayer modded servers become increasingly common and, steps to balance for multiplayer must be taken.

Mystcraft is a fantastic utility mod that opens up thousands of possibilities for a player should they require them. Just added a new mod that lacks retogen? Whip up a mystcraft age. Playing with Biomes O Plenty enabled and, require vanilla biomes? Create an age that only contains vanilla biomes.

Single player vs Multiplayer balancing are vastly different beasts. As far as SMP is concerned, Mystcraft is a no go. Having ten people spamming ages and, all simultaneously exploring is simply not sustainable if you care at all about tickrate. Combine that with the ease at which Mystcraft makes some reasonably difficult to acquire things acquirable "cough" diamond tendrils "cough" and, we really have a problem.

When Mystcraft is limited as an admin only tool it's difficult to imagine running a server without it installed.

I do however have one major issue with Mystcraft that's been around since the 1.4 days. There's a rather bad entity based memory leak were objects are not dumped from memory after one teleports away from a dimension using Mystcraft. Eventually this will cause your available heap space to fill up, forcing you to restart your client. With two gigs allocated this can take as few as ten jumps and, I've gone to other mods for my inter dimensional traveling needs as a result.