Public Service Message: Big Reactors mod is out for 1.10 with a name change
- Thread starter asb3pe
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Tinker's Construct was a terrible offender before the new dev added in a Mending type modifier. The new tool part aspects, to me, aren't really interesting. The new attributes for width and breadth and very nice, until you see that you're no longer allowed extra modifier slots via paper or diamond/gold block upgrades. That's a poor tradeoff to add options and limit them simultaneously. At the end of the day, it's a damned tool. You don't need tools to be interesting, you need them to work. When a vanilla tool with a vanilla enchantment is superior to a modded item that once was superior, that's a step backwards. That's a hard nerf.
I'm going to guess it's due to people complaining that TiCo was too basic.
Once the "best" materials/modifiers were found there was a perceived lack of options. Everyone all made the same tools with the same materials for the same desired effect.
Now you have to choose, or make multiple tools for multiple jobs.
I feel that this is a step backwards.
Sent from a mystical device from North of the 49th
Botania (nerf passive flowers by making them die every three days)
Forestry (multiblock farms versus the old MFR style, then Bees: Pristine versus the kind that will not return a queen after x generations)
Applied Energistics (Channels)
I'm not convinced the dev made the perfect fix here but I have to agree with your assessment of the original problem, and I have to agree the dev is/was trying to attack that problem.
I actually think the new tools are really neat. I do feel that all tools should probably get +1 more modifiers than they already do, but whatever.
This is a great list. For the most part, its all changes where I agree with the devs.
With respect to Botania, I think a failure was not being able to harvest the Primus(?) flowers. Personal opinion.
Pristines and channels in particular are cases where the dev has decided the target audience should have to play a bit smarter. Its not a case of more or less overall fun, its just a case of some segments of the player base getting left behind. One way or another, somebody's going to be sad. (For the record: I love both channels and ignoble-bee-death. I feel both added more interesting decisions to my game)
To try to steer this discussion back on point (my own fault): Big Reactors traditionally has a pretty decent degree of customizability. Its one of the things I like about the mod. So long as that trend continues, I'm satisfied that any changes should be more or less palatable to the majority of players who really give a damn.
The botania nerf is perfectly reasonable, it's pretty easy to move away from passive flowers after just 5 min of botania, with vanilla redstone you can pretty much automate Endoflames.
Here's a simple botania automated ore production line
Here's a simple botania automated ore production line
The problem with Big Reactors is that there is not that much too them. People either fill them with Cryotheum, which is simply the best coolant, moderator and absorber. Or Diamond. Because Direwolf20 once did. And despite being a rotten coolant, moderator or absorber, it works too.
Graphite - the special moderator material added by Big Reactors? I don't think anyone pays it any heed except as a crafting ingredient.
The resulting reactors are pretty boring as energy via capture, or moderation, seems to play no actual part. The radiation only travelling in cardinal directions, and the very short distance you have to make use of it, makes anything other than another fuel rod next to a fuel rod a wasted opportunity.
The problem many people have with big reactors is its "too easy" to get lots of power for minimal effort
my problem with it is the lack of renewable resources without adding in magicrops or something along those lines. And at that point if you do add in a renewable way to get the fuel it's WAY too easy.
my problem with it is the lack of renewable resources without adding in magicrops or something along those lines. And at that point if you do add in a renewable way to get the fuel it's WAY too easy.
The other problem is that, above and beyond being easily min-maxed, it doesn't even really matter: you're going to get an absurd amount of power no matter what you do. Fortunately, again, configs go a long way towards addressing this problem.
Here's the problem, decaying flowers and non-pristine bees did not, in any way, affect Difficulty in the slightest. The *ONLY* thing it did was add a level of grinding which was just plain silly.
For example, the Forestry bees. For most of the worldgen type bees, you now have a 9 in 10 chance of your queen not actually being worth a damn, which makes you grind 10x as many hives to get one that is viable. This does not increase difficulty. Breaking hives is non-hazardous, there is absolutely ZERO risk of anything happening to you while going about doing this. It just artificially extends the early-game by forcing you to do a pointless grind.
Channels, for example, did not really nerf things so much as forces people to come up with solutions like the Super Soaryn Drive which not only wasn't that much of a challenge, but will also now bring a server to its knees. So congratulations on making a bad situation worse.
Let's all repeat again: Pointless grind does not equate challenge. It equates boredom. Which is the *OPPOSITE* of what a game should provide.
really the Botania change made the least difference, only people who didn't care about lag central made massive passive flower farms mostly consisting of Hydrangeas. It didn't slow down progression in the slightest, in fact my own progression sped up when I realized It was more time and resource efficient to use Endoflames and charcoal blocks.
Shneekey
Let's pretend for a moment that you're right and the flowers and bees contribute nothing but grind (you're actually wrong about this but we'll get back to that in a second)
This is a popular (and misguided) argument for those without a background and/or education in game design fundamentals: that grind != challenge. These people are objectively, provably wrong for two reasons.
1) There's no such thing as "challenge". There's only different numbers of things to do, and a question of how many of those things you know/remember how to do. Everything you consider a "challenge" is just your brain playing tricks on you. Its all still just various degrees of grind. Sucks right?
2) Even when you set aside (1), nearly-pure-grind is still challenge because it puts you in a position where you need to figure out ways to mitigate that grind. See Gregtech. Its a challenge because most people aren't willing to devote the time to figure out how to actually remove the grind. (This is why GT players are so elitest: because they're fundamentally better-skilled players. And have more time to waste.)
Regarding your grind examples: Pure grind is repeating the same mundane task repeatedly. So, sifting ex-nihilo sands or mining a manual cobble gen are pretty darn close to pure grind.
You can't argue that decaying flowers and non-pristine bees are pure grind because they actually fundamentally changed the way players play the game. For decaying flowers, it destroyed the ability for large-scale farms of passives. You had to learn how to do the non-passive generations. For pristines, you had to change your approach to spamming bees (to some degree) and decide how to handle your ignobles (I use them as production bees rather than breeding bees, but to each his own).
Be careful when you say stuff like this; it puts you in a weird position where you're claiming the world is flat when we all have fairly strong reason to believe otherwise. If the other half of the community (ie those who like grindy minecraft) were so bored, why would they only want to play grindy minecraft?
This stuff above isn't subjective opinion for what its worth. This is first-year psych and logic.
Can we move this conversation private going forward or start a new thread?
TBH the worst offender of turning a mod into a grindfest is Magical Crops, removing seed multiplying with fortune and leaving no real way to multiply your crops outside craft more made it sooo tedious and monotonous. I've migrated over to the less OP and less grindy Agricraft because that MC went too far with the grind.
Regarding botania - I don't like it post nerf because I don't like fiddly things I can't automate. It sells itself as a mod about flowers. Its called botania FFS. And yet, when I have a field of flowers, I expect to come back and find more, not less. The only flowers that can actually be used in a build, and presented as, flowers, are the passives. And keeping a garden of passives going means I need to keep manually visiting the petal apothecary. The automatable flowers all have ridiculous mechanics (they eat cake? generate mana from exploding TNT?) and/or require ungainly redstone contraptions to automate that for the most part cannot be hidden underground.
So now the mod just makes me angry when I think about it. Because I cannot use it in my builds. When I tried regrowth I got stuck at the fact I'd need to make some botania things. And I just couldn't.
The mod itself has a certain amount of self awareness that it looks horrid as the more end-gaming items you get include lenses that allow you to hide the ugly mana distributor blocks behind walls.
If it dropped the worldgen flowers, replaced the magic flowers with glowing runed rocks or something and changed the name to dispense with the notion that it is in any way related to nature, flowers or things that grow, then I might start to find it palatable.
Right now its contradictory nature just makes me hate it.
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Regarding bees and "ignoble" princesses: When I find an ignoble princess it goes into a chest of princesses to trade with Apiarist villagers. But other than that, its like not finding a princess at all. You can't use her for breeding, or production, or anything except perhaps a decorative Bee House. I don't know how you can claim to use ignoble princesses for production as, for me, production means automation, and suddenly having your princess go missing is kind of the opposite of that.
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AE2 and its channels? I really don't mind. This mod is totally OP and channels try and add some complexity to an otherwise dead easy automate-all-the-things system. My issue with channels is that, of all the ways to make the mod more challenging this one is poor as it encourages builds that are hard on server TPS. The real resource you are abstracting in a mod like AE is the servers CPU, and the difficulty mechanic should have been designed to encourage CPU efficient, not inefficient builds.
I do not even want to think of how complicated it is for that mod to trace a complete network to compute if there are sufficient channels, power, etc. And each time there is a block update somewhere on that network, a change of power or cable connectivity might mean the whole network (and its subnetworks) is entirely different.
When I first saw the channel limit it really looked like an optimization to limit the computations AE2 does, but in practice its really just made AE2 ME networks very unfriendly to servers.
So now the mod just makes me angry when I think about it. Because I cannot use it in my builds. When I tried regrowth I got stuck at the fact I'd need to make some botania things. And I just couldn't.
The mod itself has a certain amount of self awareness that it looks horrid as the more end-gaming items you get include lenses that allow you to hide the ugly mana distributor blocks behind walls.
If it dropped the worldgen flowers, replaced the magic flowers with glowing runed rocks or something and changed the name to dispense with the notion that it is in any way related to nature, flowers or things that grow, then I might start to find it palatable.
Right now its contradictory nature just makes me hate it.
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Regarding bees and "ignoble" princesses: When I find an ignoble princess it goes into a chest of princesses to trade with Apiarist villagers. But other than that, its like not finding a princess at all. You can't use her for breeding, or production, or anything except perhaps a decorative Bee House. I don't know how you can claim to use ignoble princesses for production as, for me, production means automation, and suddenly having your princess go missing is kind of the opposite of that.
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AE2 and its channels? I really don't mind. This mod is totally OP and channels try and add some complexity to an otherwise dead easy automate-all-the-things system. My issue with channels is that, of all the ways to make the mod more challenging this one is poor as it encourages builds that are hard on server TPS. The real resource you are abstracting in a mod like AE is the servers CPU, and the difficulty mechanic should have been designed to encourage CPU efficient, not inefficient builds.
I do not even want to think of how complicated it is for that mod to trace a complete network to compute if there are sufficient channels, power, etc. And each time there is a block update somewhere on that network, a change of power or cable connectivity might mean the whole network (and its subnetworks) is entirely different.
When I first saw the channel limit it really looked like an optimization to limit the computations AE2 does, but in practice its really just made AE2 ME networks very unfriendly to servers.
Hounded by grind obsessed people? Because lots of tedium and grind was added. The dev had to be hounded to reimplement a repair mechanic. And the smeltery is slower to cast now, but no one mentions that. Before that TiCo2 was a resource hog. I no longer use it
Can't automate Botania? You have a funny way of automating things, I've done it with vanilla redstone. Botania just takes a tiny bit more effort, you will get better mana yields if you just automate a dropper over some endoflames.
And there's no true incentive to do anything but scale up this design.
Bear in mind with Big Reactors, the complaints about simplicity of the mod are obtuse statements. Erogenous Beef made the mod EXACTLY how he intended. Simple, big, and powerful. Complain to the pack devs about it's inclusion or configs. It was designed to be simple, powerful, and effective. Plus the community filled in the knowledge gaps quickly. Heck, even I was helping post basic designs back when it still ran on MJ, and I'm not a numbers guy.
I'd look forward to more content in the mod, but I don't want to see hoops added that lead to the same result. THAT is what turns the casual player off.
The turn off with TiCo2 is the new dev forgetting that part of the original thrust of the mod was to avoid the grind of vanilla enchanting. TiCo2 is still particularly weak versus new .vanilla Mending.
Botania's nerf of passives didn't spur creativity and was served George Lucas style with a retcon "passives were never intended" presentation. No new mechanic was offered to replace the passives, they just got JarJar'd. People uninterested in large, Redstone builds just spammed Endoflames with charcoal.
When you change the goal posts, you have to measure the scoring system. Sure, these changes will appeal to hard nosed, balance focused people. But you're going to lose the casual audience. And that's a shame, because this is just a game and these well used and loved mods rose to popularity on the backs of casual users. To turn on them by changing a mod drastically and reducing the reward potential, is not good.
Remember Steve's Carts?
One could argue there was no true incentive to do anything but upscale passive flower farms before, your argument is flawed.
Endoflames are only the Simplest things to automate, but for boat loads of mana you want Munchdews with a "tree farm reactor" or a Kek in a "cake reactor."
Endoflames are only the Simplest things to automate, but for boat loads of mana you want Munchdews with a "tree farm reactor" or a Kek in a "cake reactor."
I was referring there to the fact that you can't practically automate the production (and re-deployment) of passive flowers. And I consider the passive flowers the only acceptably aesthetic flowers to use. (As it is, the water and lava based flowers should work like sugarcane, and require the water/lava to be one block below and to the side of the flower).
And yet, Botania offers no way to automate tree farms, or the production of cake. So it can never exist in a non-tech centric mod pack.
I'd like Botania more if it was possible to use it casually, and not automate it. But my sense was the mana yields of fuel items are (purposely) small, again making it annoying to use "manually" by computing how much fuel I will need for a particular craft - throwing/placing/detonating it manually, and then doing the craft.
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