Mystcraft woes..

[Vaygrim]

Before I was playing FTB I was playing Tekkit Lite. It has Mystcraft bundled in it, something that I believe is an older version of Mystcraft. I found it fun, simple to take advantage of.. and found the exploration of ages to be a real blast. Now I switch over to FTB Ultimate with the excitement that it too has Mystcraft... and a more up to date version as well!

Unfortunately.. descriptive books don't work the same way anymore. Whenever I make a blank descriptive book and use it, I get taken to a void age (up to Age 27 now.. with every single one being a Void Age that inflicts Hunger III). I teleport back using the Linking Book I created to the overworld.. which plants me safely back in my base. Unfortunately the Descriptive Book I just used does NOT have any symbols in it for the age attributes, so I have no way of learning new symbols from it.

Every so often I find a villager that is trading Emeralds for book pages. Trouble is.. I have only 1 Emerald so far and that one I found inside a chest in some mines. I have yet to dig up any Emeralds, even after several days straight running my quarry set to maximum size.

So... why was Mystcraft changed in the recent updates to be made so much harder? HOW am I supposed to get pages? Can someone give me some tips?

 

[Lambert2191]

watch this.

 

[FavoriteFox]

You can trade other villagers to get emeralds e.g. 21 wheat, 17 cooked fish, or 15 paper for one emerald. Also in some villages on mystcraft worlds (not in the overwold) there is a mystcraft house with writing desks with pages and sometimes a hidden chest with more pages.

 

[DZCreeper]

Emeralds can only be found in Extreme Mountains biome, or other mountainous biomes added by mods.

 

[57782]

Unfortunetly (In my opinion), the new mystcraft system kind of forces you into trading with villagers in order to get emeralds so you can trade with the npc for pages. This will mean plenty of sheep, wheat, and a villager spawn construction of some sort since vanilla villagers have a limited number of trades. Sometimes you can find a page or two in the village, and I'm not sure about whether they can be found in dungeons. I'm fairly certain that emeralds are specific to the extreme hills biome, and even then they are rare.

Direwolf's spotlight explains how to "write" new ages a bit better than I can.


I guess it was made harder because of how powerful some of the stuff you could do was. I assume it was also done to prevent having to create tens of ages that you have no intention of really using, since that occupies disk space. This new system makes things a little less random. Although I'm not entirely certain how, since you have to find the villager (might not be there, then you have to spawn villagers until one shows up) and hope that it offers a useful page.

Edit: Removed redundant youtube link. I take too long to respond.

 

[Vaygrim]

No I actually understand the whole "how to write a proper book" approach, I get that. Minimum required ages to establish a stable age.. the correct order to put them in... interesting affects you can do. Very neat stuff, and yes Direwolf20 explained it very well. Unfortunately whenever I find a village, I don't have to what they want to wheel and deal. I go back to my base, get some stuff for them to trade and come back within a few game days. By that time the village is abandoned / empty, I expect because all of the villagers have been killed from nighttime monster spawns.

Is there no way to dissect the ages you go to, and figure out what symbols those books have anymore? That was a real awesome mechanism that made the whole mod villager independent for the player if desired.

 

[ItharianEngineering]

No I actually understand the whole "how to write a proper book" approach, I get that. Minimum required ages to establish a stable age.. the correct order to put them in... interesting affects you can do. Very neat stuff, and yes Direwolf20 explained it very well. Unfortunately whenever I find a village, I don't have to what they want to wheel and deal. I go back to my base, get some stuff for them to trade and come back within a few game days. By that time the village is abandoned / empty, I expect because all of the villagers have been killed from nighttime monster spawns.

Is there no way to dissect the ages you go to, and figure out what symbols those books have anymore? That was a real awesome mechanism that made the whole mod villager independent for the player if desired.

No. Not at the moment anyway. He hasn't added all the ways for us to obtain ages, and at the moment villagers are the only reliable way to obtain them. You can find ancient libraries around the spawn in some ages which might have a page or 2 in them and the same with villages that have mystcraft houses, but for now you have to cheat or pay the villager's price in emeralds to obtain them in any real magnitude to be useful. In the future we should have easier, or less annoying way to get them.

 

[KirinDave]

Mod is WIP, etc etc.

But DW20 just pointed out that if you can find an age you can tolerate being in for awhile, you can actually find forgotten libraries which are full of pages. It helps to have haste boots and flight capability.

 

[Eunomiac]

I was going to start a topic on this, but then I saw someone had already:

... Whenever I make a blank descriptive book and use it, I get taken to a void age (up to Age 27 now.. with every single one being a Void Age ...

I'm having the same problem: Every single Age I create lands me in a Void Age. Mine aren't entirely blank, but they're limited by my small inventory of pages: I tend to make something like "Biome 1, Biome 2, Biome 3, Huge Biomes, Dark, No Weather", trying to cover as many bases as I can, but every single Age I go to is a Void age.

(This has put a serious wrench in my plans to pillage libraries in unstable Ages for new pages, since I can't stand trading with villagers.)

This has to be a bug, doesn't it? I mean, OP got up to 27 random Ages, and every one of them a Void Age for him, too?

 

[Eunomiac]

Oh my God. A few minutes after necro'ing this thread with the same problem, I create another random book just to see... and end up in a startlingly tranquil forest age where the only instability effect seems to be hunger. Checked my server, and this was the 19th Age -- 18 Void Ages, so I reply to this thread, then my 19th is a forest. (I blame Greg. It's always GregTech's fault. Even when I'm not playing GregTech.)