Rock Crusher: Why?

[Recon]

Anybody know why Railcraft's "Rock Crusher" is a 3x2x2 multiblock structure costing twelve diamonds and can only be powered with MJ? What's the advantage of this over a pulverizer or macerator? And why is it so blasted expensive?

 

[Vauthil]

The Rock Crusher serves a couple functions:

• It provides packs with Railcraft but without IC2/TE/et al. the ability to create dusts. This is important since you need obsidian dust to create Reinforced Rails.
• It's a reliable creator for "ballast" materials, in this case gravel and/or crushed obsidian. This is useful if you're running the Railcraft Tunnel Bore or Undercutter, or for other applications where you want to use these materials (the other "reliable" gravel method in 1.6.4 is the Factorization Lacerator. We actually have both of these set up on my server for gravel production).

The cost is probably something of a "content gate": you must be yea tall when running Railcraft by itself before you can create Reinforced Rails.

 

[Recon]

I don't really understand your explanation as to why it costs so much. 12 diamonds is mighty steep for this kind of function.
Personally, the only reason I can think of building it is because it seems to be the ONLY way to process firestone ore. On top of that, it takes an additional 12 diamonds to cut the firestone, bringing the cost to 24.

TE/IC2 should really add that to their machines' recipes.

 

[abculatter_2]

Personally, I think it makes more sense to ask why macerators and pulverizers cost less then 12 diamonds.

Not every mod likes to balance things off the decisions of another.

Also, rock crushers ignore the damage on tools/armor, which can be useful if you have a mod that adds those recipes to the rock crusher. (Such as Gregtech)

 

[Vauthil]

I don't really understand your explanation as to why it costs so much.

Well, for one, because CovertJaguar (Railcraft dev) is known for many things, but chasing what everybody else does really isn't one of them. Installed on its own or with a few sparse additional mods included, Railcraft's internal balance and "tech tree" pops out a bit more without the perks from the other mods in play. In a modpack it does in fact seem to be redundant to many, admittedly. =)

If you have pulverizers, macerators, and even lacerators in a pack then you probably should be using those if your goal is ore multiplication. The Rock Crusher doing such is largely a "that's nice, let's tap into the API and let them do that if they want" thing, not a key design point.