Today, I saw two things that were interesting. The first is that the XU Ender-crafting thing no longer needs any power and is generally cheaper. I think it might also be faster. I like this.
The second is that BC is adding TC3-style research (read: resource drain). Just.....WHYYYYYYYYY. There's a config option to disable it, but.....well, read immibis' sig. In other BC-related news, robots can now do something more useful than pick up items and have a pretty respectable range, but they're still slow as hell and until that's fixed I don't see them being used in any serious modpack outside of VERY niche cases.
I think the whole "spam item to research tech" is interesting the first time. After that, auto-crafting is the only clear solution, and the rest is a sink for time and resources. I honestly like the idea of mini-games to avoid repetition and add something interesting to the session -- but in Thaumcraft, you still have to scan the freaking planet in order to discover aspects and gain research points, and that got tedious to me about ten scans in (and hasn't gotten any better).
I can't blame SpaceToad for this. Research is an excellent controlling mechanic for tiered mods. It's just rarely done in a fun and exciting way. If you hadn't known, the game Factorio was actually inspired by Buildcraft, but literally half the game is grinding out research in exactly this manner: so many of X, Y, and Z items over so many seconds/minutes per cycle to make your discovery. This means that one of the biggest sub-games in Factorio (and incidentally, a spam-to-research Buildcraft) is designing and building an efficient factory for your research materials.
Etho made Dr. Gravel (two blocks of gravel and a sign with that name on it) as a stand-in researcher when he did his Technic Let's Play years ago, and had to research Thaumcraft stuff. Amusing at the time, but... yeah. If a pile of gravel can stand in for the player, then your research mechanic
probably isn't very fun.
