Regarding tesseracts: does anyone else think this is silly?

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KirinDave

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Jul 29, 2019
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It is a GREAT deal more inline with the Myst world functionality, which I agree with as such. If you want to discover a random world, you better know someone that knows how to properly write ages, or you better learn yourself, otherwise you are going to make a horrible unstable world. I actually wish that they'd make unwritten descriptive books not do anything at all, because that'd make more sense.

But you cannot find pages reliably. This isn't like bees or trees where you need to put in the time. This isn't like Thaumcraft where you can organically learn a system to help guide your research. This is, "Screw you. Make that stupid villager breeding contraption or don't make any ages at all." I'd love to dive into that writing system. It looks cool.

Too bad pages are so rare in normal play that you basically don't get enough to ever explore it.

And instead of a village grinder, what about dungeons? They should populate as loot in dungeon chests, so that should also be Thaumcraft altars, which are fairly common in open areas.

Dungeon loot is no better a system than villager drops. It doesn't work well in mixed-mod games because the plethora of lousy mixed-mod dungeon loot tends to choke out the stuff you need. I'm of the opinion that hard gating your mod on any form of world gen is bad design (e.g., Factorization logic gate programmers should have a recipe. Have it take 2 galgadorian drills or something; I don't care). It's one thing to be speed-limited on worldgen (a la diamonds which you can often make do without), it's another thing entirely to be completely shut down.

I don't care about Myst cannon, I care about fun gameplay. The previous system could be abused, but at least I got to play with the mod. As it stands now the only people enjoying the mod are the people who cheated; which is ironic because the changes were in response to cheaters anyways.
 

Guswut

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Jul 29, 2019
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I don't care about Myst cannon, I care about fun gameplay. The previous system could be abused, but at least I got to play with the mod. As it stands now the only people enjoying the mod are the people who cheated; which is ironic because the changes were in response to cheaters anyways.

Mm, well then, I really don't have anything else I can reply in regards to this as I have yet to truly get involved into the latest MystCraft update. Later next week when I get a chance to update my server, I'll have to confirm if it really is this bad.

Perhaps a config level change that makes difficulty modes? For example: Easy difficulty would allow you to get symbols directly from ages you make (you tear out the page, which means that you destroy the age you made), medium difficulty would allow you to tear out pages from pre-existing descriptive books but they would only work once (cannot be copied, etc), and would add a small bit of instability (a device to measure instability would be great. Maybe a clock [see Doomsday Clock] surrounded by mystcraft crystals, or something like that, eh?). And hard mode would let you tear out pages from descriptive books, but it would only be a random page, and then that page would only last for one usage (cannot be copied, etc). Most likely I'd also say those pages should add a bit more than a bit of instability (this is based on the canon [or cannon. I'd love a MystCraft cannon. I'll shoot between ages!) to make this a choice you don't do for most of your symbols.

This would give a way to get symbols without having to farm villagers or dungeon loot. It would, of course, require the MystCraft age-destroying system be set up so you can properly destroy ages (which also helps with removing excess ages that you don't need). Also, maybe an "insane" difficulty level that gives you no pages drops at all when destroying ages, and just works to remove them.

What'cha think? Should I go over to the MystCraft forum and poke the sleeping dragon Xy?
 

KirinDave

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What'cha think? Should I go over to the MystCraft forum and poke the sleeping dragon Xy?


It seems like Even they know the current system is broken. Their forum is full of people carefully asking, "What is the point of this mod right now?"

I dunno why he pushed this release. The writing system is pointless if you have no symbols to write with. And other people are having trouble getting scribe structures to spawn in existing worlds as well; I wonder if that has to be included at world generation time to work.
 

Guswut

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It seems like Even they know the current system is broken. Their forum is full of people carefully asking, "What is the point of this mod right now?"

I dunno why he pushed this release. The writing system is pointless if you have no symbols to write with. And other people are having trouble getting scribe structures to spawn in existing worlds as well; I wonder if that has to be included at world generation time to work.

xcompwiz said:
There is a structure which generates in ages which provides pages and other Mystcraft loot, but only the one. There was meant to be more and there will be more, but they are not added yet.

Villagers as a source of pages is meant to be a stop-gap measure, not the primary method. This will be addressed soon. I know it's not ideal, but it is at least workable.
If people find this too big an issue they can still get symbols the way they did before: spawn the creative notebook from the Mystcraft creative tab. ;)

My guess is that xcompwiz decided to release it for the same reason he released the last version of MystCraft with the horrible system of generating random ages for symbols, which I agree with him in saying that it is pointless and certainly not the correct way to do things.

Let's just hope the REAL way comes soon.
 

Golrith

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Nov 11, 2012
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I just hope the GUI on the book binder changes. It's not the best design, especially having to arrange all your pages in a notebook, then transfer that over to the book binder.

To my mind, a GUI that is separated into different components like steves carts would be good. It will help with basic page writing, as it will highlight that you need a weather page, biome page, etc, etc. The GUI can highlight the minimum number of pages to make an age stable but not tell you if the age will be unstable or not if you add pages beyond the minimum.

That will ensure that if you are learning the mod, your first age should be stable (but quite boring), and if you want to experiment, you can, and may help reduce the number of junk ages being created on servers.
 

Edrosty

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Jul 29, 2019
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I just hope the GUI on the book binder changes. It's not the best design, especially having to arrange all your pages in a notebook, then transfer that over to the book binder.

To my mind, a GUI that is separated into different components like steves carts would be good. It will help with basic page writing, as it will highlight that you need a weather page, biome page, etc, etc. The GUI can highlight the minimum number of pages to make an age stable but not tell you if the age will be unstable or not if you add pages beyond the minimum.

That will ensure that if you are learning the mod, your first age should be stable (but quite boring), and if you want to experiment, you can, and may help reduce the number of junk ages being created on servers.

I would LOVE a GUI of some sort to tell me the order in which to put pages. It's confusing as hell. A better guide for how to modify the terrain generation and biome types and sky and such would be really nice. All we have is Direwolf's mod spotlight as far as I know, and that's nice ,but it's not the best if you want to learn the mod. I think an Easy and Hard mode for Mystcraft should be able to be created. In the easy mode, you're given an extremely detailed GUI that tells you "Put weather effects here" "Put sky effects here" and such, and in the Hard mode, you just do it without the GUI.
 

Larroke

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Jul 29, 2019
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Silly, but not unreasonable.

Tesseracts should have a central hub control block that is required (yes, then a single point A to B system would require an additional (expensive block!), and this block should be powered. But each control block should be able to manage as many tesseracts and types as it takes to max out the power grid (rather then just public/private, you also have to configure the network the tesseract will connect to) (which TE seems to suggest is 100MJ/tick). Like GT buffers/translocators, each item transferred should use energy :)

Like the GT blocks.. the power consumption balances this block and IS NOT unreasonable.

Energy should be the cheapest unit to transfer as it is in all intents and purposes the most basic form of matter.
 

KirinDave

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Jul 29, 2019
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Silly, but not unreasonable.

Tesseracts should have a central hub control block that is required (yes, then a single point A to B system would require an additional (expensive block!), and this block should be powered. But each control block should be able to manage as many tesseracts and types as it takes to max out the power grid (rather then just public/private, you also have to configure the network the tesseract will connect to) (which TE seems to suggest is 100MJ/tick). Like GT buffers/translocators, each item transferred should use energy :)

Like the GT blocks.. the power consumption balances this block and IS NOT unreasonable.

Energy should be the cheapest unit to transfer as it is in all intents and purposes the most basic form of matter.

This is how AE does it, and it's actually really good design. What's also clever about AE is that the idling power of the system grows with the size of the network. The more things you add, the more power you need just to keep the entire system powered on. For example, sending a cable down from y:100 to y:10 represents an expense that slowly adds up and requires careful consideration (I think that alone is 10 EU/t, so probably a dark cable and wireless redstone to conserve power early on).

But the competition is ender chests. So remember that anything that is worse than an ender chest will just be replaced by an ender chest. Item tesseracts, at least, should be free.
 

MagusUnion

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Jul 29, 2019
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But liquids are energy. I don't see why they wouldn't have a loss.

Liquids are fuel, not energy... they follow the same classifications as fuels that haven't been burned yet, therefore they are items...

Energy tesseracts are better if you want to minimize space, and can accept the energy loss in your setup. Sure, you could just have liquids output to engines, but you'd need more engines to match the desired speed of the block in question.

But the tedious grind of GregTech boggles my mind, so carry on without me...
 

Larroke

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Jul 29, 2019
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This is how AE does it, and it's actually really good design. What's also clever about AE is that the idling power of the system grows with the size of the network. The more things you add, the more power you need just to keep the entire system powered on. For example, sending a cable down from y:100 to y:10 represents an expense that slowly adds up and requires careful consideration (I think that alone is 10 EU/t, so probably a dark cable and wireless redstone to conserve power early on).

But the competition is ender chests. So remember that anything that is worse than an ender chest will just be replaced by an ender chest. Item tesseracts, at least, should be free.

I don't see it that way, a block that directly feeds to pipes/tubes/inventories is not the same as enderchests. If a mod, or block completely replaces all the functionality of an entire system or hybrid-mod solution in a way that makes people never look back at the previous method then really, that new mod/pack is overpowered (for example... considering current sorting/processing methods an enderchest will likely ALWAYS be my item transport of choice (plus they can be moved by frames).

Powering a control block, I'm not suggesting significant power AKA GT (but really, by the time you get to tesseracts you likely have significant power systems), and really not power based on distance (although cross dimension I could evilly see more power required), but they are endgame enough they should require a reasonable infrastructure behind them.

I would also love to see these also be able to remotely control the tesseracts connected to that network. See who owns them, what their usages are (power consumption to maintain the link) and be able to shut them down/turn them on.

I limit my use of tesseracts, as I see them as a bit cheesy (in a good way not bad, I love them KL, I really do!).

And with enderchests.. balance seems to have been attempted in their configurations in how many slots you can set them up to have, we all just ignored that and configured it to the max chest size. ;)