Public Service Message: Big Reactors mod is out for 1.10 with a name change

[Pyure]

In a way that already kind of was implented. You couldn't and still can't put dayblooms to close to each other. It's not a perfect by any means But it was there. Maybe the logic behind the change was that after awhile mana production is toxic to the flower. Active generation flowers get around this by having the catalyst also act as a toxin scrubber, in the case of the hydrogena water isn't a strong enough cleanser. That's how I would explain it.

I thought you could keep dayblooms close together now. Maybe that's only true in the unofficial fork(s)?

 

[Scottly318]

Bear in mind I'm still in 1.7.10.

 

[KingTriaxx]

*waves Forestry without Gendustry flag* Seriously, I see people complaining about Forestry and ignobles, but after playing with it, I think out of all the hives I've broken, I've gotten one ignoble.

Botania power automation is possible, but a bit awkward. Use a Munchdew to eat some of the leaves off of a tree. Use a redstone mana spreader with a breaking mana lens aimed upwards. There's a trick to bend the beam, which I don't remember quite off hand. That harvests the wood, and it all drops into a hopperhock, along with saplings. Some saplings go to refresh the tree, others can be burnt in an Endoflame, along with the wood.

I always thought the passive generators should be two high and only the top generates, and while that dies off, you can still have the bottom as decoration.

 

[RyokuHasu]

I always thought the passive generators should be two high and only the top generates, and while that dies off, you can still have the bottom as decoration.

You can have them as decorations, the process of miniaturizing them does make them into decorations that wont decay.

 

[RyokuHasu]

No. Botania is about things called flowers, that have none of the properties one would expect of flowers. Except, nominally, being modeled after them. But they don't grow. They die. There are no seeds. And they need complicated redstone contraptions to do anything. Do they need the sun? Water? Open space and fresh air? Do bees play any part in their life cycle? Flowers? Not really.

Someone is taking a fantasy game and applying way too much realism into their thought process here. Hell why not say diamond armor should be very weak? Real diamonds have something called shearing planes and if you hit diamond armor along one of those planes it would split quite easily. Or how bout water sources don't mix to make infinite water, or you can't punch a wood tree down with your fist because you would have a bloody stump before the free fell.

Applying realism to a video game only goes so far before it's no longer fun.

 

[Scottly318]

Someone is taking a fantasy game and applying way to much realism into their thought process here. Hell why not say diamond armor should be very weak? Real diamonds have something called shearing planes and if you hit diamond armor along one of those plane it would split quite easily. Or how bout water sources don't mix to make infinite water, or you can't punch a wood tree down with your fist because you would have a bloody stump before the free fell.

Applying realism to a video game only goes so far before it's no longer fun.

This really is what the argument is about. FUN. Very clearly what I find fun in a game may be vastly different then someone else. These arguments have been had time and again. With the same results. Everyone runs in circles with no one changing their mind.

We all came to minecraft and by extension modded minecraft because we found it fun. Let's just agree that no matter how we choose to define it, Fun is what we can agree on

 

[GreenZombie]

The problem for botania was as simple as people relied too heavily on Passives and didn't try anything else... and they lagged servers, looking at you mass hydrongena farmers.

That's a different problem - players can always spam any kind of flower / low yield device with bad server effects. This is usually offset by having a steeper "power" curve in the mod: Look at IC2 - whatever else you might say about it - water mills can provide starting power - and you *could* spam water mills, but why, when a single geothermal can replace about 20 of them. And then you *could* spam geothermals. But a single nuclear reactor (again) can replace about 20 geothermals (or a 200 item watermill "farm"). It is just easier ultimately to use the mod properly.

 

[RedBoss]

There's nothing really more to discuss with the exhaustive and thorough reply by Shneeky. None of you have properly addressed anything he's said about good game design, rewards systems for gamers, or anything else.

Hell, nothing in my reply got addressed either. So this isn't really a discussion. It's apassive aggressive insult contest that discussion minded people didn't want

 

[KingTriaxx]

Frankly? It's all fine, but not everyone plays games the same way. He's got a mod pack focused entirely on maximum compactness, and I've lain sixteen thousand minecart tracks. The one thing we agree on is cutting it down to only RF. Everything else, we're more or less completely at odds on. Other than both of us playing Minecraft, but even then...

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I probably would have attacked the passive problem a bit differently. Making them die was a "hard control". I typically use "soft controls". In this case: make it so that passive flowers are progressively self-defeating.

One way to do this might be for passive flowers to emit a sort of "flux" that makes flowers (as a whole) less productive. The more passives you have, the less productive any nearby (?) flowers become. With, say, 10 or so passives, you wouldn't notice a penalty, but once you get up to 50, maybe your orechids are suddenly useless, your endoflames are weak, and hopperhocks take way too long to grab stuff.

Actually, that's exactly what I would've done to. Set a limit, X, flowers of a certain type. More than that in the chunk, or adjacent chunks, and you see a reduction in output, with a sliding scale down to y number of flowers where you just hit zero.

And really, I think the bigger problem here isn't necessarily grind so much as changing a player's expectations.

With Botania, it was seen as largely a 'casual' mod. You planted flowers, they produced mana. The change to cause passive decay caused so much flack because the expectation that the players had come to rely upon, that flowers, once created, didn't just vanish, was reversed. And, to quote Heath, 'well then, everyone looses their minds!'.

It's not just adding additional grind (and by grind, I mean adding in content that is not engaging for the sole purpose of extending the number of hours it takes to play through content), it's changing a fundamental concept of the mod's mechanics. You had a heel-face-turn and suddenly got hit in the face with 'all my flowers died!'. Naturally, there's a bit of negative feedback. Enough so that it caused someone to fork Botania just to remove that. Which, according to Curseforge, at one point actually had more downloads than Botania itself did.

And, in fact, let's explore this a bit more, because there's another concept here. I don't know who here is familiar with 'the power of the default', but it's the core power behind Microsoft's business model. Basically, the assumption is that 90% of your users will never bother changing settings away from the default settings. Think about that a moment. Nine out of ten users never bother touching their config file, especially not if they are playing a pre-created pack from one of the launchers.

When Vaskii included passive decay, it started off as an option. Then it started 'on' as the default. Which apparently enough people turned off to cause Vaskii to decide to remove that option. Rewind that, play that again. Enough players and server admins bucked the power of the default and turned decay back off. This was an active decision on the part of these people, you had to go in and change your config file. Sure, it's not a lot of effort, but it is an effort that, typically, you don't see much of. So that enough players were going in and changing the defaults (and remember, server admins had to also make this change deliberately and consciously for it to work on that server, so we can't put all the blame on the end-users) is pretty staggering.

To me, personally, it would've been a clear warning signal that maybe I need to implement some other fix to the problem (passive flower spam lagging out servers). And I'd like to think I'd have implemented the feature Pyure and I have endorsed.

I have absolutely nothing against challenging mods. I think they are great for those who like them. The problem is when your mod, however inadvertently, catered to more casual players, and suddenly a mechanic changes to make it less casual and more hardcore, you're going to see a dissonance, and quite a lot of drama.

There are mods like GregTech, and there are players who like playing it. And that's great. And you know, going in, from the moment you install GT, that this isn't going to be a mod that hands you everything on a silver platter. Your expectation, as a player, is that this is a mod which sets a high bar on skill level with the mechanics and concepts introduced in the mod. That is good game design.

There are more casual mods like... let's say MFR. You understand that this isn't a mod which is going to challenge you, it is there mostly so you don't have to keep farming renewable resources so you can go do more enjoyable things. This is also good game design.

You would no more expect machine explosions in MFR than you would a single-block early-game solution from GregTech. Heck, remember the furor around the April Fool's Joke that Direwolf20 did earlier this year with BC and IC2 switching some fundamental concepts?

This is what things like the ignoble bee nerf or the passive decay nerf is doing. It is changing fundamental concepts about the mod as we understand them. And change is something which human nature has a great deal of difficulty dealing with.

 

[Hambeau]

I probably would have attacked the passive problem a bit differently. Making them die was a "hard control". I typically use "soft controls". In this case: make it so that passive flowers are progressively self-defeating.

One way to do this might be for passive flowers to emit a sort of "flux" that makes flowers (as a whole) less productive. The more passives you have, the less productive any nearby (?) flowers become. With, say, 10 or so passives, you wouldn't notice a penalty, but once you get up to 50, maybe your orechids are suddenly useless, your endoflames are weak, and hopperhocks take way too long to grab stuff.

You mean like trees... Their leaves/needles tend to inhibit the growth of seedlings. Another contribution to "population control" would be access to sunlight.

If flowers slowly "contaminated" neighboring blocks so new ones would have to be planted further away, maybe?

 

[KingTriaxx]

Oh gods no, not another Taint mechanic. Unless I could fix it with Purifying Daisies. Normal Pure Daisy Infused with Mana that eventually reverts to a normal Pure Daisy when it's 'dry'.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Well, there's already a mechanic whereby passive flowers adjacent to each other reduce effectiveness. Just spread that out over the chunk (and adjacent chunks so the user doesn't try to cheese chunk boundaries) and you should be good.

 

[Cptqrk]

Look folks... here we are again second guessing and redesigning a mod. A mid that the original author changed for what ever reason. How long ago was this? How long ago was the big sh!tstorm about passive, and here we are again, in a derailed thread.

This is not going to change/help anything. Let the thread die, before we go too far down the rabbit hole.

Sent from a mystical device from North of the 49th

 

[Pyure]

This is what things like the ignoble bee nerf or the passive decay nerf is doing. It is changing fundamental concepts about the mod as we understand them. And change is something which human nature has a great deal of difficulty dealing with.

+1