Overated/Problematic/Misused Mods
- Thread starter jdog1408
- Start date
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I find minetweaker really overrated. Because of it, so many packs out there take it upon themselves to fudge with the mod recipes in the name of 'balance' or whatnot... Can't they just accept that it's impossible to balance everything when you're using too many mods... give up already and stop screwing with my muscle memory, arg... That's the biggest reason I'm playing the DW20 pack at the moment, recipes I recognise.
It's not impossible, it's just a lot of effort, people who use minetweaker need to be willing to put in that effort.
Most uses of Minetweaker are to fix incompatibilities between two mods, or to make a themed pack with a single sense of progression, or to make more interesting cross mod interaction.
Minetweaker definitely has it's uses, themed packs and recipe conflicts among the top. But there are quite a few packs that seem to put it in "just because". You enter into the pack knowing there may be some recipe changes, but they're just balance or tweaking. Then you go to make something and find out that loads of recipes have been screwed with, and something like mekanism or enderIO requires progress in thaumcraft or something, it's just a complete brain-@#%$.
Ofcourse it belongs in full-on theme pack's, and story/challenge maps, you go into those expecting recipe changes and weird stuff. but your garden variety kitchen sink pack should steer clear of it, It's way overused. HQM, as mentioned a page or so ago has the same problem.
And this is exactly the problem with minetweaker, being used to implant someone's idea of "balance". balance does not necessarily equal fun, or a good pack. by endgame everything is "overpowered" the only difference is how quick you get there, and that's entirely up to the player. There's always a hundred and one exploits to use in cross-mod interactions, the players who like to progress slowly don't use them, the players who do, will use them.
Every individual pack author editing recipes through minetweaker only leads to a whole bunch of 'somewhat balanced' packs that are all different. Then you have a million extra recipes to remember and to screw you over whenever you change packs.
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
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Thats called a compromise; the alternative choices being not having Xmod, or a broken pack/exploits.
This is the same trap as HQM; how well its used depends on the experience of the designer. Now how do you get experienced with something again?
Thats called a compromise; the alternative choices being not having Xmod, or a broken pack/exploits.
And obviously everything is crafted from memory; there is no in game interface/mod that allows us to search and display crafting recipes.
This is the same trap as HQM; how well its used depends on the experience of the designer. Now how do you get experienced with something again?
So you look up the chest recipe every time you want to craft a chest? You don't know roughly what materials to invest in when you want to make some transfer pipes? you work through mod X all the way, get up to that awesome item you want, then you check the recipe for the item, and it turns out you need to get all the way through mod Y to get it - does the ability to check the recipe remove the frustration you feel?
Minetweaker is a great mod, but only in packs where it's appropriate - not in every pack just because the pack author thought some item needed balancing. I went looking for a pack a few months ago and couldn't find a decent one that hadn't butchered the recipes, there's probably a few around though.
It's best to get experience with HQM and minetweaker by making a pack that dedicates itself to those mods, make a story, or give the pack a theme, that's a great way to learn. Rather than tweaking recipes in a normal pack just because you can, or because you want to figure out how.
This is the main point of making packs nowadays, if you want mods with default configs, just take a minimal pack as a base and throw them together yourself, it's really that easy now.
Personally I like the different feeling that different well-designed packs have, and part of that feeling is harder/easier/tiered/dependent recipes, depending on the focus of the pack.
It usually doesn't work that way, or do you have most recipes for 100+ mods in your head? Even when I think I remember the recipe, I look it up to be sure, ESPECIALLY when it requires going all the way through mod X.
I think I've struck some kind of nerve, It's like minetweaker is the holy grail or something...
I'll give another example, say you want the speedy sash and ring of magnetisation from botania, now, you know those things are going to require some botania basics, some mana and stuff. You're not necessarily going to look up the recipe for the ring of magnetisation of the sojourners sash right away, you'd probably go: "Right, I want some botania stuff, let's get started", and go off, make some basic mana generation a mana pool and a ritual stone. Then you find out the pack maker made the sash require a lvl3 blood altar and the magnet needs a slice'n'spice or something. The time wasn't necessarily wasted, but your sure as hell going to be dissapointed.
I'm not arguing that it's not useful or appropriate for themed packs, and theme can involve difficulty changes, recipe changes are expected in heavily themed packs.
I'm just saying it's generally overused for implementing 'balance' changes, or annoyingly making endgame content from one mod require endgame content from another mod. Most people go through mods separately, and combining them all together haphazardly gets weird since their functionalities are fundamentally different. It also delays the endgame stuff from any mod until you've gone through all of them, or many of them.
Each mod is, usually, fundamentally unique, and combining radically different mods through recipes just makes things weird, in general packs.
Combining the recipes for things like enderIO, thermal expansion, and MFR are generally alright, since those mods are closely related in functionality, cross-mod functionality, and purpose. but linking for example botania with thaumcraft would be rather odd. Sure, they're both magic mods, but they're fundamentally different, they behave mechanically different and have different themes.
This is all in the area of 'balance' changes, 'tweaks' and such. A complete overhaul with themed recipes and if it's included, relevant quests, can remove all the oddity of combining any mods together. I'm saying minetweaker is getting overused in more general styled packs.
playing modded minecraft for years, you get to know the general materials needed for most items fairly easily, and memorising new ones gets easier and easier... I'm not saying I know every recipe for everything, but most people who've been playing for a while would know for example that a filler needs "some dye, gold gears, and one of those blue redstone torch things, right?", or that a resonant energy cell is going to require some enderium, which needs ender pearls.
I'll give another example, say you want the speedy sash and ring of magnetisation from botania, now, you know those things are going to require some botania basics, some mana and stuff. You're not necessarily going to look up the recipe for the ring of magnetisation of the sojourners sash right away, you'd probably go: "Right, I want some botania stuff, let's get started", and go off, make some basic mana generation a mana pool and a ritual stone. Then you find out the pack maker made the sash require a lvl3 blood altar and the magnet needs a slice'n'spice or something. The time wasn't necessarily wasted, but your sure as hell going to be dissapointed.
I'm not arguing that it's not useful or appropriate for themed packs, and theme can involve difficulty changes, recipe changes are expected in heavily themed packs.
I'm just saying it's generally overused for implementing 'balance' changes, or annoyingly making endgame content from one mod require endgame content from another mod. Most people go through mods separately, and combining them all together haphazardly gets weird since their functionalities are fundamentally different. It also delays the endgame stuff from any mod until you've gone through all of them, or many of them.
Each mod is, usually, fundamentally unique, and combining radically different mods through recipes just makes things weird, in general packs.
Combining the recipes for things like enderIO, thermal expansion, and MFR are generally alright, since those mods are closely related in functionality, cross-mod functionality, and purpose. but linking for example botania with thaumcraft would be rather odd. Sure, they're both magic mods, but they're fundamentally different, they behave mechanically different and have different themes.
This is all in the area of 'balance' changes, 'tweaks' and such. A complete overhaul with themed recipes and if it's included, relevant quests, can remove all the oddity of combining any mods together. I'm saying minetweaker is getting overused in more general styled packs.
Not particularly, it's called "defending an argument". But I think we should just agree to disagree at this point.
nothing against you but most people in this thread find mine tweaker as there best friend ;P
Plus my pack (ShamCraft (Kinda) 2) is gonna be heavily minetweaked vanilla and mods, I was just tired of playing through the same progression through packs so I was like f%$& it, hello minetweaker.
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Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
That is so wrong on so many levels. With all the possibilies that we have at the moment, HQM - Minetweaker - Modtweaker - Default Generation - Quadrum/TabulaRasa/CustomItems, modpack authors have giant possibilites to create custom content. This means themes can get adjusted, adventure maps are more easy to create, you don't have to use hacky ways to get stuff done anymore and so on.
It is indeed possible to balance a mod against other mods. That is very much a challenge but not "impossible" as you stated.
Making new recipes or ways to get specific items/blocks demands creativity and a thought of balance. Thus, they spice things up as it is enjoyable to experience new content a modpack author added.
Let's take @ChatFawkes' FluxGalaxy as an example. He adjusted many recipes (EnderQuarry, Digital Miner) to specific outer space places like the Moon, asteroids, Mars, etc. I, for one, find this very creative and enjoyable.
Plus you can solve missing/conflicting recipes with it, which is CRUCIAL in a mainstream modpack.
Just my 2 cents.
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
There's one or two mods that are conceptually incompatible on a basic design level; no amount of minetweaker and reworking will fix the design/play issues that crop up when both are installed together. [one or the other works fine- you can't have both]
That aside; someone who knows their stuff can effectively build a new mod [or even a new game], out of existing content when using these tools.
Just because your .jar works doesn't mean it'll play well.
That aside; someone who knows their stuff can effectively build a new mod [or even a new game], out of existing content when using these tools.
That aside, in general, each mod is designed to be played seperately, or stand on its own in a pack. Those that are designed to be played together show it and work reasonably well with recipe changes between them, see my example of MFR, EnderIO, and TE. However, combining mods that don't mix together well, via recipe changes in a general pack where the author isn't shooting for a 'game feel', 'overhaul' or 'theme'; they're just modifying recipes for balance, not to create a new experience, twists and distorts the mods outside of their feel and tree, you're left with stuff that feels incoherent, and the pack offers no good explanation of why, just "because it was op", or "because exploit #8425".
By the time someone has modified all of the recipes required to actually balance a pack that includes a hundred or so mods, they've already made a truly different experience. either that or they've made a jumble of a bunch of mods because they didn't have a clear idea in their head when they started, and just tried to balance the recipes, with no theme or focus.
How come mods like MFR have EnderIO/ThermalFoundation recipes in its config? Making mods compatible makes a way more fluid gameplay as you don't have to create two kinds of special circuitry, materials, etc.
Let's take Pam's Harvestcraft as an example. Little mods that add food stuff, e.g. Kitchencraft, can be made dependent on Harvestcraft so that you don't have two Mortar and Pestles laying around, three kinds of knives, multiple types of tomatos and so on. These tweaks can create a very fluid gameplay that is appreciated very much, if you look at PhoenixConfigs. However, some people may not appreciate the creativity and work that people put into making things like that, sadly.
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
Which is entirely down to experience [again]. If someone knows what they're doing, they can negate a lot of the exploits without it feeling unnatural.
It almost sounds like you have a personal vendetta against pack devs who don't know their stuff; rather than anything to do with Minetweaker usage itself.
you're reiterating a point I made, and using it as an argument... what?
All I'm saying is that minetweaker can and has been overused, and glorified, by pack devs to change understandable and coherent recipes to recipes that don't make sense, in the name of balance.
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