New Thermal Expansion functionality/item: Tesseracts

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HeffronCM

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Jul 29, 2019
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So, at 4 ender pearls and 1 diamond per tesseract, with EE3 exchange rates, it'll only cost you a 100 iron, 4 lead, 4 obsidian, 14 tin, 4 silver, and 2 redstone to make a pair of Item Tesseracts that can replace a pair of Ender Chests. Not counting the infrastructure necessary to craft such (magma crucible, liquid transposer, induction furnace, pulverizer, significant amount of MJ production if you want it done sometime today)

That doesn't seem like a great deal compared to ender chests.
 

MrRobbie

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Jul 29, 2019
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Ender chest is cheaper but more of the comments are talking about the energy Tesseracts when all it is doing is making options for a power system. All people play differently..I play on a private server with my son and we use everything that sounds or looks fun..he likes it (LOL..his upgraded legos)
 

Malkuth

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Jul 29, 2019
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So, at 4 ender pearls and 1 diamond per tesseract, with EE3 exchange rates, it'll only cost you a 100 iron, 4 lead, 4 obsidian, 14 tin, 4 silver, and 2 redstone to make a pair of Item Tesseracts that can replace a pair of Ender Chests. Not counting the infrastructure necessary to craft such (magma crucible, liquid transposer, induction furnace, pulverizer, significant amount of MJ production if you want it done sometime today)

That doesn't seem like a great deal compared to ender chests.

Ender chests are cool too. But to transfer liquid you need a system for that too.

It all comes down to what you want really, and how you want to use it..
 

killerkerara

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Jul 29, 2019
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So, at 4 ender pearls and 1 diamond per tesseract, with EE3 exchange rates, it'll only cost you a 100 iron, 4 lead, 4 obsidian, 14 tin, 4 silver, and 2 redstone to make a pair of Item Tesseracts that can replace a pair of Ender Chests. Not counting the infrastructure necessary to craft such (magma crucible, liquid transposer, induction furnace, pulverizer, significant amount of MJ production if you want it done sometime today)

That doesn't seem like a great deal compared to ender chests.

For item transport, ender chests will probably be cheaper until you get the infrastructure and resources for tesseracts, but once you do, tesseracts will be far more compact since they can automatically output without needing transposers/filters/wooden pipes. Tesseracts also function with frequencies, meaning you can alter them quickly and easily without the need for dyes. For liquid transport, a liquid tesseract is obviously far superior to a pump>transposer>bucket>ender chest setup in terms of both speed and compactness (that's actually a word, TIL).

Playing on a new world I made earlier today, getting tesseracts was easy. I start with Thermal Expansion machines, so the infrastructure was already in place when I decided to make them. I always have very bad luck in finding nether fortresses, and this world is no different. I now have fully automated lava transport from the nether to the overworld without the need for blaze rods. Now all I need to do is get some way to use it, since I got these tesseracts before even having the resources to make enough magmatic engines to use them properly. Damn ferrous is actually useful now!
 

HeffronCM

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Jul 29, 2019
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Yeah, I'm plenty glad to have my magmatic engines set up before the update :p At least there is a case for pulverizing Iron now, to get that 10% per ore shot at some Ferrous if you're unlucky in finding the ore.

As far as tesseract balance, we'll have to agree to disagree. I don't value the compactness or liquid transit speed as highly as you do, and therefor find the resource, infrastructure requirements, and power loss adequate balancing aspects. I'd like to think everyone can agree that tesseracts are in a better place then the old teleport pipes.
 

Abdiel

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Jul 29, 2019
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Tesseracts can be set to private at no cost. Finally automation won't be pulling stuff from someone else's storage accidentally :)
 

noah_wolfe

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Jul 29, 2019
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Yeah, I'm plenty glad to have my magmatic engines set up before the update :p At least there is a case for pulverizing Iron now, to get that 10% per ore shot at some Ferrous if you're unlucky in finding the ore.

The Induction Smelter requires a pair of invar now as well, so the progression is natural. I set up a new MultiMC instance several days ago, and through the basic pulverize/furnace cycle of a couple of stacks of iron, I had more than enough ferrous dust to both create the smelter and upgrade from steam to magmatic. At that point, after a quick nether trip, you have what you need to continue other upgrades such as conduit / portable tanks / ducts / etc. Still haven't hit any natural ferrous ore.
 

whythisname

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Jul 29, 2019
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Yeah unfortunately distance calculation (as cool as it is) presents a logistical problem - every tesseract needs to have a table knowing the pre-calculated distance to every other tesseract, to avoid stupid amounts of computation.

Which hey, that's great - it's constant, so you never have to worry about it, never have to recalculate. And then frames happened. Frames. Ruin. Everything.

So that's out. We have other idears. (not a typo)

I'd store the coordinates of every Tesseract in a global array, but I don't know if Frames trigger any sort of update you can hook onto to update that location?

Alternatively you can look at the mechanics of Enderchests. Each Tesseract could have a 'global' (and hidden from the player) inventory which they can take stuff out of every tick (or X amount of ticks, though that will put a limit on throughput). So basically you have 2 Tesseracts on a channel, when you put stuff into 1 Tesseract it's put into the other Tesseract's 'inventory' (which would be like an Enderchest separated from all other Enderchests/Tesseracts) and then the receiving Tesseract can pull stuff from that 'inventory' at a certain rate.
That way it doesn't matter where each Tesseract is as long as it can check it's inventory (which should be in any loaded chunk).

Good luck with it anyway ;) I'm looking forward to playing around with them, though I'm sure they are very expensive :p
 

KirinDave

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Jul 29, 2019
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So I am new to this discussion. Why is there hate for teleport pipes? Especially given how expensive they seem to be and how there are no more free diamond generation lunches to be had in most modern modpacks?
 

Golrith

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Personally I find ender pearls to be a rare resource. After about 2 weeks of playing, I managed to get 4. I'm kinda avoiding EE3 all together in the DW20 pack. I have had to use it once to make some waterproofing for my first pipes, no sign of a desert near me.

I still think that the Tesseract should have a shiny ingot in it's recipe, which you can only get from pulverized ferrous ore - if you are lucky. Before the update, I was finding plenty of Ferrous ore down at diamond level, but have been basically ignoring it as at the time there was no use for it.
 

King Lemming

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Jul 29, 2019
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Well, some weeks ago I suggested to use "molten enderpearls" as a way to teleport stuff, King lemming replied, and said that it will be something like that...

I guess I gave an idea and it got used :)

This had been determined a while ago; Tesseracts have been in development a long time - but you do think like me it would seem. ;)

I'd store the coordinates of every Tesseract in a global array, but I don't know if Frames trigger any sort of update you can hook onto to update that location?

Alternatively you can look at the mechanics of Enderchests. Each Tesseract could have a 'global' (and hidden from the player) inventory which they can take stuff out of every tick (or X amount of ticks, though that will put a limit on throughput). So basically you have 2 Tesseracts on a channel, when you put stuff into 1 Tesseract it's put into the other Tesseract's 'inventory' (which would be like an Enderchest separated from all other Enderchests/Tesseracts) and then the receiving Tesseract can pull stuff from that 'inventory' at a certain rate.
That way it doesn't matter where each Tesseract is as long as it can check it's inventory (which should be in any loaded chunk).

Good luck with it anyway ;) I'm looking forward to playing around with them, though I'm sure they are very expensive :p

Couple of issues here - doing it as an inventory would increase the computational burden of Tesseracts by at least a factor of 3. And yes, if we were to use any sort of distance based calc (but can't, 'cause Frames), it would certainly be a global. The current method of keeping track of these is actually a Hashmap of Lists. (It's not as bad as it sounds.)

Personally I find ender pearls to be a rare resource. After about 2 weeks of playing, I managed to get 4. I'm kinda avoiding EE3 all together in the DW20 pack. I have had to use it once to make some waterproofing for my first pipes, no sign of a desert near me.

I still think that the Tesseract should have a shiny ingot in it's recipe, which you can only get from pulverized ferrous ore - if you are lucky. Before the update, I was finding plenty of Ferrous ore down at diamond level, but have been basically ignoring it as at the time there was no use for it.

Ender Pearls are a weird balance point - they're not super easy to come by until you hit the End, and then they're basically trivial. However, EE3 does effectively trivialize them right now, allowing you to basically use 16 iron to create a Tesseract. There's no great way to ever make Ender Pearls alone a great balance point, hence why we're looking into an energy cost. However, it has to be more interesting than simply requiring players to place an Energy Tesseract next to their Item/Liquid Tesseracts - that's boring and sort of dumb.

Mechanically, even setting a fairly low persistent Energy cost just means that Ender Chests get used instead of as opposed to alongside (they really do play very well together right now), and heck that's what I'd do. If we add any sort of cost, there will be a feature-based justification.

I went back and forth on the Shiny Ingot instead of a Diamond - I really really did. I have plans for that Ingot, but yeah I won't rule out some sort of Tesseract use, if not the initial recipe.
 

Abdiel

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Ender Pearls are a weird balance point - they're not super easy to come by until you hit the End, and then they're basically trivial. However, EE3 does effectively trivialize them right now, allowing you to basically use 16 iron to create a Tesseract.
It seems that with ongoing Minecraft and various mod updates we are running out of renewable-but-still-rare resources. Pretty much the only thing I can think of in this category are Ghast Tears - and then whatever added by the individual mods.
 

Golrith

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I agree, Iron to Ender Pearls doesn't really make sense. I know it's still really early days, but current EE3 still "stinks" of the old EE2 conversion rates. You can't balance your mod around that.

TE is now my favorite mod. Looking forward to it's development. I think you've covered all the core "basics", I think anything else you could add in future are more "toys" for us to play with.
 

ItharianEngineering

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Jul 29, 2019
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Well there is the option of requiring it to need ender pearls or molten ender as fuel, sort of like how the railcraft World Anchor does. It would be trivialized by liquid/item tesseracts next to all your other tesseracts but it could give use to molten ender outside of creating a tesseract, while increasing the need to go to the End and create a renewable source of ender pearls, since using EE3 or farming all your pearls would be ineffective in the long run.

As for using the liquid tesseract over enderchests + liquid transposer liquid transport systems, using the liquid tesseract reduces the need for constant power on machines other then the pump itself, and can also move the liquid far faster as there is not the 2 second delay from the transposer filling/emptying cells/cans/bucket.
 

danidas

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Jul 29, 2019
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Their is the balancing point of using tesseracts to fuel tesseract doubling the fuel cost since your fueling 4 instead of 2.

How about having the liquid ender slowly drain away in each tesseract akin to how the charge drops in energy cells and once it hits 0 require people to refuel them again in liquid transposers. With no way to refuel them out in the field as a balancing point since you would be unable to pump liquid ender into them directly. Prompting people to make turtle systems to auto pick them up and feed them into ender chests to be refilled back at base as needed.
 

HeffronCM

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Jul 29, 2019
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I'd greatly prefer a balance point that does not rely on turtles for automation. I'm not a fan at all of coding-as-gameplay, and feel the focus on turtles and RP2 computers takes away from the game. This is all opinion, of course, but I'd still like my game to be more about creatively using available mechanics than creating the mechanics I need.
 
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danidas

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Jul 29, 2019
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I'd greatly prefer a balance point that does not rely on turtles for automation. I'm not a fan at all of coding-as-gameplay, and feel the focus on turtles and RP2 computers takes away from the game. This is all opinion, of course, but I'd still like my game to be more about creatively using available mechanics than creating the mechanics I need.

Instead of using a turtle you could always use a block breaker and deployer to remove and replace the tesseracts. Just have to make sure their empty before breaking them.