Not Enough Items out of the game

[Maxiride]

I'm looking for a way to browse and use NEI out of the game. Since NEI builds the recipe list based on the mods installed I was wondering if there is something to browse the the NEI "catalog" after it's built after the first time a Modpack is started.

I think it will be useful to plan item creation and know exactly the amount of raw materials needed. Furthermore it would be awesome if such planning could be arranged in a kind of tree with branches converging from raw stuff to final item and having a counter for the needed raw materials.

I came with this idea in mind while playing Crush Landing and noticing how much time I was wasting sweating and getting hungry while browsing NEI and writing down my progression checklist.

Do you think guys this idea is viable and it's worth it?

 

[Celestialphoenix]

Actually that could be quite useful.

Given MC is a fairly heavy performance hog, and causes lag for a lot of users [such as when searching NEI]- an external programme could make life a lot faster, as well as providing other functions (like totalling the raw materials/energy/processing time needed).

Also being able to display recipes/material lists dynamically on a second window/monitor would be pretty convenient considering my short term memory (I need to craft what? again. Do I need 6 of xx or 8?)

 

[Maxiride]

I found this which was buried in the forum (last post was from August 2013), and now it came up with the update post. It's kinda what I was looking for =) I'll check it better.

 

[Odovbold]

There are Minecraft Resource Calculator still actively maintained.

The common issue of this kind of projects is that you need to manually update the recipes for each mod, every update.

And minetweaks & modtweaks & configurable recipes (e.g. EnderIO SAG Mill and other machines) is quite popular in current modpacks, those recipes info is much less useful unless it's coming directly from the pack you are running.

I'm thinking about if it's possible to extract those recipes from jars without Forge loading the whole game but might be too hard, so a more approachable way might be having a mod loads with your pack and dump all the recipes registered with Forge (maybe utilise NEI) then have another app (in any language, maybe Javascript) to do the query/calculation/display/etc. outside of the game.

Update: Turned out both Crafting Guide & Minecraft Resource Calculator is standalone javascript app and accept recipes in json formats

 

[Maxiride]

Yeah, I don't know anything about modding, but dumping from NEI the reciepes if not hard the best solution imho.

 

[Fuzzbling]

Java can output to JSON, and document databases such as MongoDB use JSON. If a mod such as NEI could automagicly or manually output recipes to JSON then an external application could take advantage of that. A mod could even use that JSON doc as a source of information, recipe planner, note pad, etc.

I've always wondered why mod authors don't take advantage of document databases as a means to store data.