Request Suggestions for balanced tweaks for a single player modpack

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epidemia78

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Jul 29, 2019
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Have you had a look at TPPI2 btw? It is currently in open beta exactly because it is missing GT. It should be fully playable, but I have not tried it out myself. Perhaps you can find some ideas from that.

Ive already downloaded it hoping for minetweaker scripts to look at but they are non existent. I am pretty sure they still plan on integrating GT into the pack at some point in the future. I think I would rather go with Reika's mods instead of IC2 for the complicated side of things although I know virtually nothing about them.
 

rhn

Too Much Free Time
Nov 11, 2013
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Ive already downloaded it hoping for minetweaker scripts to look at but they are non existent. I am pretty sure they still plan on integrating GT into the pack at some point in the future. I think I would rather go with Reika's mods instead of IC2 for the complicated side of things although I know virtually nothing about them.
Yeah it is in standby mode more or less, awaiting GT6 becoming more finished AFAIK.

And yeah I would personally also love to see a balanced modpack with Reikas mods as a core part. But due to his visions of his mods there are no real configs available and tweaking it is... difficult to gain permission for public modpacks. But might be possible to do in some order(recipe changes etc.) for a personal pack to some extent.
 

epidemia78

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Yeah it is in standby mode more or less, awaiting GT6 becoming more finished AFAIK.

And yeah I would personally also love to see a balanced modpack with Reikas mods as a core part. But due to his visions of his mods there are no real configs available and tweaking it is... difficult to gain permission for public modpacks. But might be possible to do in some order(recipe changes etc.) for a personal pack to some extent.


That is a very good point you made about Reika's mods. I think the reason he is so stringent is because his mods improperly used can wreck worlds which makes him public enemy number 1 to server admins. but I want to make this pack specifically for SSP. Thats another thing I should have mentioned already. Need to edit the title again I think.
 

rhn

Too Much Free Time
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That is a very good point you made about Reika's mods. I think the reason he is so stringent is because his mods improperly used can wreck worlds which makes him public enemy number 1 to server admins. but I want to make this pack specifically for SSP. Thats another thing I should have mentioned already. Need to edit the title again I think.
Without wanting to derail the thread completely, I think his reason is that he has a strong vision with his mods and cares a lot about the quality of them. Adding config options and allowing people to tweak them opens up for a ton of possibilities of bad modpack authors/server owners to diminish his work in so many ways. And that is a very valid concern I think. But giving the good modpack owners these tools could equally give us some amazing gameplay experiences and some truly high quality packs IMO.
 

epidemia78

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Without wanting to derail the thread completely, I think his reason is that he has a strong vision with his mods and cares a lot about the quality of them. Adding config options and allowing people to tweak them opens up for a ton of possibilities of bad modpack authors/server owners to diminish his work in so many ways. And that is a very valid concern I think. But giving the good modpack owners these tools could equally give us some amazing gameplay experiences and some truly high quality packs IMO.

Yeah, that too lol. I might just shoot him a private message, see if he might be able to relax some rules for a dedicated single player pack although I wont hold my breath. And dont worry about derailing the thread, I honestly dont think it has much of a future anyway. Theres an awful lot of apathy round here when it comes to playing the game as a creative outlet. Which is priority number one in my book, and plays a huge role in what mods I choose to include. Im not sure anyone but me (and maybe you) would even be interested. As the saying goes, if you want something done right...
 

epidemia78

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But yeah, back a a few years ago I played around with the Custom Ore Gen mod and Metallurgy did some cool things with it. Like generate certain ores in the nether as part of floating netherrack platforms in lava lakes, and gave the metal bricks (which only take four ingots) and armor sets especially nice looking textures to increase their value to me. I think I might just have to revisit that idea. That was the last time IC2 was fun for me, because it was the only way to double most metallurgy ores at the time. A better way to go about it now might be to make certain chisel blocks crafted from different metals, and restrict what mods can be used to process the ores so its not so easy as just dumping them all into the same machine.
 

KingTriaxx

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Jul 27, 2013
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The only thing I can see that I'd have to take out before starting is Project Red. Everytime I start Etho's Pack with it, it tries to download something, and ends up failing. So I had to remove it, and so I'd likely have to extract it from this as well.

I do like the idea of the pack. I'd love to see Metallurgy in. That was so much fun in Horizons. More fun if my world hadn't been generated before Zinc was allowed to spawn. (No Zinc, no steel, and no RC in horizons.)

I would suggest making flight extremely expensive. Ludicrite Blocks around a Nether Star expensive. Would enforce alternate modes of transportation.
 
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jordsta95

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Jul 29, 2019
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The only thing I can see that I'd have to take out before starting is Project Red. Everytime I start Etho's Pack with it, it tries to download something, and ends up failing. So I had to remove it, and so I'd likely have to extract it from this as well.

I do like the idea of the pack. I'd love to see Metallurgy in. That was so much fun in Horizons. More fun if my world hadn't been generated before Zinc was allowed to spawn. (No Zinc, no steel, and no RC in horizons.)

I would suggest making flight extremely expensive. Ludicrite Blocks around a Nether Star expensive. Would enforce alternate modes of transportation.
Project:Red download MrTJPCore if you don't already have it installed. Like Thaumcraft downloading Baubles.
Don't know why it wouldn't download for you though :/
 

Pyure

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Aug 14, 2013
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This is more of a "how are you doing balance changes" than a "how do you suggest I balance my modpack" kinda response. So, somewhat hijacking. Beg your pardons.

One thing that bothers me in some packs is the ability to easily spam low-tech power solutions, making later-tech less useful. For instance, its easy to ignore Fission when you can just have a big MFR tree-farm and a bunch of furnaces smelting charcoal, or pumping gallons of lava from the nether.

One thing I'm looking at doing (specifically for gregtech) is making low-tech power generation capabilities create pollution, and having pollution interfere with the running efficiency of GT machinery. So having a small-scale coal-plant might have zero impact on your base, but having a large-scale one would make everything else (from GT) run 50% slower.

The net result of all this is that you don't have to actually nerf things like coal generation, biofuel, etc. They can still be awesome during their era, but at some point you're going to outgrow this outdated tech and need to invest your time in something better.
 

malicious_bloke

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Jul 28, 2013
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One thing that bothers me in some packs is the ability to easily spam low-tech power solutions, making later-tech less useful. For instance, its easy to ignore Fission when you can just have a big MFR tree-farm and a bunch of furnaces smelting charcoal, or pumping gallons of lava from the nether

Yes.

Rotarycraft is the only mod I know of that adds a mechanic that actively prevents this...and even that can be circumvented with a bit of effort.

It make a bit of a mockery of in-mod progression if you never need to leave the lower-tiers
 

epidemia78

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Jul 29, 2019
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This is more of a "how are you doing balance changes" than a "how do you suggest I balance my modpack" kinda response. So, somewhat hijacking. Beg your pardons.

One thing that bothers me in some packs is the ability to easily spam low-tech power solutions, making later-tech less useful. For instance, its easy to ignore Fission when you can just have a big MFR tree-farm and a bunch of furnaces smelting charcoal, or pumping gallons of lava from the nether.

One thing I'm looking at doing (specifically for gregtech) is making low-tech power generation capabilities create pollution, and having pollution interfere with the running efficiency of GT machinery. So having a small-scale coal-plant might have zero impact on your base, but having a large-scale one would make everything else (from GT) run 50% slower.

The net result of all this is that you don't have to actually nerf things like coal generation, biofuel, etc. They can still be awesome during their era, but at some point you're going to outgrow this outdated tech and need to invest your time in something better.


How would you go about doing the pollution?
 

Pyure

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How would you go about doing the pollution?
Since I'm more interested in the balancing mechanic than anything else, I'm keeping it really simple:

Any machine can generation pollution of one of three types:
  • Local (this chunk)
  • Dimensional (This dimension)
  • Universal (this world. And yes, this is pretty unrealistic, but I'll provide a hook for it regardless. It may make sense for some themed packs.)

Every cycle (tick or second, probably latter) that a machine is running, it spills pollution into the types above as configured by the user/packdesigner. So, maybe you have things like lava boilers generate 30 units of Local pollution and 2 units of dimensional pollution.

Every cycle, the world then cleans up X pollution of each type, as configured by the user. So, perhaps 100 units of Local pollution removed from each polluted chunk (stored in a simple hash table btw), and 10 units subtracted from each dimension, etc. This ensures you never get penalized for keeping pollution small scale.

Every cycle, after cleanup, X/Y units of pollution are spread out into adjacent chunks. You can't just keep your lava boilers in one chunk and your macerators in another. They'd need to be pretty far apart to avoid contamination, and even then eventually Dimensional pollution may bite you in the ass.

Every tick that a machine is running, it checks the local+dimensional pollution level, and runs a risk of "losing" a progression tick if the area is polluted. In other words it would have a chance to to consume fuel/electricity/steam/whatever, but not progress further on whatever task its working on.

There's all kinds of fun things that people always want to add to this: destroying crops, acid rain...you know, all the usual crap. I might add all that later, but the critical features are just the arrays and math listed above.

Bonus if I can provide feedback though: I'd really want the sky color to get smoggier, and possibly add a gui element that indicates the smog level of the chunk you're in. In-game user feedback is critical.

Why GT only? Two reasons: I suck at modding and only know how to tweak GT so far. Also, its really hard to impact the running efficiency of other mods' machines (even via reflection). That said, I could see me investigating a universal pollution mod one day and simply making it mod-compatible one-by-one as needed.
 
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epidemia78

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The pollution idea is a no brainer but your implementation is really interesting, I wish you luck and hope to see that universal pollution mod someday. I guess my idea of balance is simply to make underutilized processing and crafting mechanics more prevalent and do away with a lot of the crafting table recipes, make complicated automation more a necessity and less a convenience, and integrate the mods into a cohesive experience.
 

Lethosos

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Jul 29, 2019
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I've been kicking around an idea for localized pollution based on smog. Basically, an area around a pollutant would slowly fill up (on a block by block basis) that has several numbers built in: maxSmog, maxThreshold, and minThreshold. When minThreshold is hit, it will check the side for space to seep into. If there isn't, it just sits until maxThreshold is reached, then vents smog into the space up if there is any. (maxSmog is there to hold excess smog in case of a runaway process.) The player doesn't get affected by the smog until it goes upwards, where the player's head is breathing in that crap. Take your pick of effect; I like Mining Fatigue and Slowness together.

A Scrubber would be a cool way of sucking up smog, though.

Sent from my Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron using Tapatalk 2
 

Pyure

Not Totally Useless
Aug 14, 2013
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The pollution idea is a no brainer but your implementation is really interesting, I wish you luck and hope to see that universal pollution mod someday. I guess my idea of balance is simply to make underutilized processing and crafting mechanics more prevalent and do away with a lot of the crafting table recipes, make complicated automation more a necessity and less a convenience, and integrate the mods into a cohesive experience.
thanks for the feed back :)

Won't lie, your processing chain sounds extremely greggy, although presumably not taken to such ridiculous extremes as needing an entire processing chain of multiple machines just to output a single specific end result (like, say, a Bronze rotor)

I've been kicking around an idea for localized pollution based on smog. Basically, an area around a pollutant would slowly fill up (on a block by block basis) that has several numbers built in: maxSmog, maxThreshold, and minThreshold. When minThreshold is hit, it will check the side for space to seep into. If there isn't, it just sits until maxThreshold is reached, then vents smog into the space up if there is any. (maxSmog is there to hold excess smog in case of a runaway process.) The player doesn't get affected by the smog until it goes upwards, where the player's head is breathing in that crap. Take your pick of effect; I like Mining Fatigue and Slowness together.
The thought of those entities floating around eating my FPS gives me the heebie jeebies :p
 

Lethosos

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Yeah, I've been working out some better means of making it FPS friendly. If nothing else, it can be a slow fog of sorts.

Sent from my Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron using Tapatalk 2
 

KingTriaxx

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That's the one. MRTJPCore. Just throws up that it can't reach the server. (I have Sat internet, and so high speed and low.) Does it no matter the speed of the internet at the time. No clue why.

@Pyure: Been playing Factorio?