Tech Mods: Missing the Point

[Strikingwolf]

Worth noting is that strong tiering and enforced progression is stupidly difficult and often unpopular to maintain. To do so, it is absolutely essential that you maintain a total lock on what can and cannot produce your critical gating materials/power/et cetera, and on the recipes and/or other parameters of the mod.

The former is extremely difficult to pull off because it essentially means closing the mod inward; you cannot have tiering if you can go, for example, from endgame RailCraft straight to your mod, or if your tungsten ingots are ore-dictionary interchangeable with those which can simply be mined out of the ground from other mods. Even if you attempt to try this, like I do, it makes a lot of players unhappy or at least confused, and can easily be destroyed by unwanted interactions from other mods. For example, if magic bees gained the ability to produce jet fuel, or magic crops gained a bedrock dust crop, the entirety of RotaryCraft would become so horrifically unbalanced that I myself would refuse to use it on a server. You can of course always try to solve things diplomatically like I try to do, asking other developers to not interfere with your mod's progression, but that is no guarantee that they will do so; about half of the ones I talk to either simply do not care or feel it is the height of self-importance to ask for things like "no uncapped EU-RoC converters". And if another mod does crap all over your progression and the developer makes it clear that they will make no efforts to change, what can you do? As soon as you start interfering with other mods, even something as minor as removing a recipe (like, for example, 8 of these hypothetical bedrock essence to 1 bedrock dust), you will be vilified, and your mod's usage in packs will suffer severely. If their interference is less easily "broken", you are essentially SOL; all you can do is either discard all concern with what people think of you and reflect/ASM the hell out of someone else's mod or sit back and watch as you get branded as the most OP mod ever made. Either way is a losing game and will see your user base plummet as users flee and most packs pull your mod.

The latter...oh god, where do I start?
Locking down your recipes and other progression is a surefire way to make yourself one of the most divisive and polarizing developers in the entire community. Those well-acquainted with your mod will probably not mind, but pack makers and server owners will take it as a direct (and often personal) assault on their "domain of control", something they will make extremely (and often loudly) clear to you and likely everyone they think listens to them. Like above, you will rapidly gain a reputation as a developer who thinks they are above the rest of the community and who is so engrossed with their own self-interest that they are to be avoided at all costs, and that your mod forces everything else to be balanced around it. You will be flooded with indignant, often livid, server owners and pack developers, 95% of whom have never used your mod and are entirely unaware of the progression, demanding that you allow them to "replace bedrock with compressed cobble, 'cause bedrock's too easy" or "disable [crucial techtree] machine X, it's OP". If you refuse, they hate you. If you concede, they screw up their server's economy or pack's balance....and hate you.
On top of all that, a lot of other mod developers, only familiar with their own mod's traditional resource-gating systems, will also see your refusal to add configs to modify core behavior/disable items as a case study in what not to do, and many will make that abundantly clear to you.

Long story short, you can make a mod with a rigid progression system, and it can work out very well, but very few developers can or care to put up with the mountains of feces they will have slung at them, day in and day out, as a result.

Sometimes I wish the modded community would grow up.

As we both just witnessed.

A VIRUS a firkin VIRUS no just no

 

[Skyqula]

Having just watched some factorio on youtube all I can say is: Looks somewhat interesting. But everything you can do there, I can already do in minecraft.

When I first started playing modded minecraft I remembered playing with the terrible starting mod IC2. Things exploded left right and center and what should work didnt because dispite it wanting to be an electric system it behaved nothing like it. Annyway, eventually I managed to get some automated production going. I was making some sort of chipsets out of MFFS ore. Completly useless... but! It was amazing. The feeling of finally getting something to work and to see hundreds of chipsets flowing trough my little hidout cave. I loved it.

I think what Mdyio is saying is not that current tech mods are bad, but that there isnt alot of visual representation of whats going on. In the factorio video's you clearly see moving arms picking up items, you seem them being stransported around. Picked back up, insterted into the next machine rince and repeat. In modded minecraft this aspect exists aswell, but alot less. And the reason is very very simple: performance. Minecraft cannot handle hundreds of items being rendered and hundreds of moving objects moving said items around.

Minecraft 1,8 in that regard, might be just what we need. The massive increase in performance might allow for more moving machinery and transform the "magic box" into a machine that actually feels "alive". Use MFR's conveyer belts, use some creative minecraft building and you can have the factorio experience in minecraft aswell.

I also have to say though, is that the way I play is different from most other people. Ive never made a quarry, I dont make a "wall of machines" and I hate the fixed machines from MFR that give a fixed solution to a problem. I, on the other hand, love the autonomous activator from TE. Its not an instant solution to problem X. Its a tool, a device of increadible power. Yet on its own its practily useless. But give it shears and you can make a wool farm. Give it a bucket and you can make a milking machine. Give it an axe and you can automate tree farming. And while this might initially seem like a wonder block that works to do everything, I highly suggest you actually tree making such setups. There is alot more you have to deal with then just plop down a machine and get results.

 

[OrsonThinks&Talks]

I think the main problem is balancing mods together in modpacks in this way. Because most mods want to change everything or add-on a feature they are incredibly hard to balance in modpacks and keep a good narrative. This is why modpacks are made the way they are thanks to mods like HQM, Minetweaker and modpacks like Agrarian skies and others show you can create a consistent structured gameplay based on controlled progression no matter how compressed a tech mod may be; albeit that most modpacks with progression are confined to a map. I am developing a modpack that will be released in alpha very soon that will use a variety of mechanisms to create a developing game i.e. you gradually unlock new mods using alot of HQM/Minetweaker trickery. The pack uses aspects of mods to create a ever evolving state of gameplay and negates the "I AM THOR" feeling some tech mods give. This is the way to go. Modpacks

 

[Golrith]

Having just watched some factorio on youtube all I can say is: Looks somewhat interesting. But everything you can do there, I can already do in minecraft.

When I first started playing modded minecraft I remembered playing with the terrible starting mod IC2. Things exploded left right and center and what should work didnt because dispite it wanting to be an electric system it behaved nothing like it. Annyway, eventually I managed to get some automated production going. I was making some sort of chipsets out of MFFS ore. Completly useless... but! It was amazing. The feeling of finally getting something to work and to see hundreds of chipsets flowing trough my little hidout cave. I loved it.

I think what Mdyio is saying is not that current tech mods are bad, but that there isnt alot of visual representation of whats going on. In the factorio video's you clearly see moving arms picking up items, you seem them being stransported around. Picked back up, insterted into the next machine rince and repeat. In modded minecraft this aspect exists aswell, but alot less. And the reason is very very simple: performance. Minecraft cannot handle hundreds of items being rendered and hundreds of moving objects moving said items around.

Minecraft 1,8 in that regard, might be just what we need. The massive increase in performance might allow for more moving machinery and transform the "magic box" into a machine that actually feels "alive". Use MFR's conveyer belts, use some creative minecraft building and you can have the factorio experience in minecraft aswell.

I also have to say though, is that the way I play is different from most other people. Ive never made a quarry, I dont make a "wall of machines" and I hate the fixed machines from MFR that give a fixed solution to a problem. I, on the other hand, love the autonomous activator from TE. Its not an instant solution to problem X. Its a tool, a device of increadible power. Yet on its own its practily useless. But give it shears and you can make a wool farm. Give it a bucket and you can make a milking machine. Give it an axe and you can automate tree farming. And while this might initially seem like a wonder block that works to do everything, I highly suggest you actually tree making such setups. There is alot more you have to deal with then just plop down a machine and get results.

While somewhat true, one big difference with Factorio is that you'll get a lot more resources to transport around compared to minecraft. Factorio resource gathering/usage is 10-50 times higher than MC. Quite common for your belts being "backstuffed" from 20+ quarries (including chests which act only as buffers, not as storage), with everything being processed at full speed and you are still running out of resources to get what you need done.

 

[Skyqula]

While somewhat true, one big difference with Factorio is that you'll get a lot more resources to transport around compared to minecraft. Factorio resource gathering/usage is 10-50 times higher than MC. Quite common for your belts being "backstuffed" from 20+ quarries (including chests which act only as buffers, not as storage), with everything being processed at full speed and you are still running out of resources to get what you need done.

The exact same things happens if you place down quary's in minecraft and use basic wooden chests. Modded minecraft evolved because of that and tada, Applied Energistics. Not that you need applied energistics, you could just use some redstone and turn the machine off that isnt required to do annything. Wich, unless I am mistaken, is something you can do in factorio aswell. Where the major difference is that in modded minecraft, wherever is a need, a mod will arise.

I can savely say that redstone logic mechanics is above most people. Even modded players. Its why we see tons of mods adding circuits/computers/logic units/wires/etc. Remove all those mods. Remove the instant solution mods like MFR/AE and see what you get.

If you want a certain experience, make a modpack that creates the experience you want. Now I get it, this isnt easy and requires an advanced user to do. So I understand why people like it when a game with gameplay close to what they like pops up. Its click and play. But to go and say: "Hey modded minecraft, your doing it wrong! Look at this game!" is the lazy way of doing it.

 

[Arkandos]

But to go and say: "Hey modded minecraft, your doing it wrong! Look at this game!" is the lazy way of doing it.

Not that wrong considering Factorio is heavily inspired by modded minecraft.

 

[GreenZombie]

Not that wrong considering Factorio is heavily inspired by modded minecraft.

And I far prefer minecrafts take, where the valuable minerals arn't lying in convenient clusters on the surface, but are found underground.

 

[Golrith]

The exact same things happens if you place down quary's in minecraft and use basic wooden chests. Modded minecraft evolved because of that and tada, Applied Energistics. Not that you need applied energistics, you could just use some redstone and turn the machine off that isnt required to do annything. Wich, unless I am mistaken, is something you can do in factorio aswell. Where the major difference is that in modded minecraft, wherever is a need, a mod will arise.

I can savely say that redstone logic mechanics is above most people. Even modded players. Its why we see tons of mods adding circuits/computers/logic units/wires/etc. Remove all those mods. Remove the instant solution mods like MFR/AE and see what you get.

If you want a certain experience, make a modpack that creates the experience you want. Now I get it, this isnt easy and requires an advanced user to do. So I understand why people like it when a game with gameplay close to what they like pops up. Its click and play. But to go and say: "Hey modded minecraft, your doing it wrong! Look at this game!" is the lazy way of doing it.

Factorio does have some logic systems, which I never got as far into. It's a mid/late tech system you need to research/unlock.
A single quarry only scratches the surface of the resources you'll generate (and use up) from Factorio. Imagine we can twist MC physics, and fix 10 max size quarrys into one chunk, that's more like what you get from Factorio. Luckily Factorio quarries stop when they can't output the resource they've mined up. Clearing (and preventing) backstuffing in Factorio is part of the challange, get it wrong somewhere, and you'll find your entire system grinds to a halt.

I think what makes it is that none of the machines automatically accept inputs or auto-eject, you have to use those claw arms to move items. Each arm type has different speeds/ranges and only operate in a single direction, so your builds try to take that into account, which makes a nice visually impressive system when it's all running. Something that really would send MC to it's knees just due to how it handles entities.

And I far prefer minecrafts take, where the valuable minerals arn't lying in convenient clusters on the surface, but are found underground.

Not that convenient if one resource is "miles" away from another. Starting out, you have to find a group of each resource close to each other (if you can), then as they get used up, you'll end up travelling long distances to get your resources. Usually the native alien lifeforms are quite close to the best resources, and they sure hate factories!

 

[GreenZombie]

I observed, long before looking and Fabrico, that Minecraft seems to lack reasonable ore veins.

I mean that it would seem desirable (in a game about building) to be able to find enough mineral resources in a location that (even with just vanilla Minecraft) it would be advantageous to actually build a railway to the mine to carry all the materials out.

Perhaps a mod that added special ore blocks that need to be mined multiple times to actually break them. Up to ~250 "ore units" could be retrieved by repeatedly mining a single "dense" copper ore block. The hardness of these dense ore blocks would be immense, requiring machines to mine them. Then the problem would be: what to do with all the minerals thusly obtained.

 

[Arkandos]

I observed, long before looking and Fabrico, that Minecraft seems to lack reasonable ore veins.

I mean that it would seem desirable to be able to find enough mineral resources in a location that, with just vanilla Minecraft, it became desirable to actually build a railway to the mine to carry the materials out.

Perhaps a mod that added special ore blocks that need to be mined multiple times to actually break them. Up to ~250 "ore units" could be retrieved by repeatedly mining a single "dense" copper ore block. The hardness of these dense ore blocks would be immense, requiring machines to mine them.

... or just use Custom Ore Generation?
Altough that second option sounds interesting

 

[Golrith]

I observed, long before looking and Fabrico, that Minecraft seems to lack reasonable ore veins.

I mean that it would seem desirable to be able to find enough mineral resources in a location that, with just vanilla Minecraft, it became desirable to actually build a railway to the mine to carry the materials out.

Perhaps a mod that added special ore blocks that need to be mined multiple times to actually break them. Up to ~250 "ore units" could be retrieved by repeatedly mining a single "dense" copper ore block. The hardness of these dense ore blocks would be immense, requiring machines to mine them.

I've attempted this a tiny bit with my pack. Large ore veins, but mostly poor ores (nuggets) with rare and super rare normal and custom dense ores mixed in. You have to mine a lot more to get equal yield (with ore processing) compared to vanilla.

Issue is that every chunk has a chance of every resource. Might give a different style of gameplay if one in every 10 chunks contained a large iron ore vein, 1 in 40 containing a gold vein, etc. Would be like a factorio spread of resources, but mostly all hidden underground. That would also give a use to the BC Mining well, take a sample in a chunk, if it brings up some ore, somewhere down there is a rich vein to dig up.

 

[Golrith]

Thinking further on the above, you could almost do that in MC with custom ore gen. Since ore gen makes 1 attempt per cluster to find a spot to spawn, you could say iron spawns between 50 and 150 in 1 big cluster. In fairly normal landscapes, only roughly 10% of the potential area (below 64) is a valid area. That gives you a crude 1 in 10 chunk ore gen, with much higher chances in mountains and lower chance in oceans.
Only down side is that it kills the idea of hunting in the depths for resources.
Damnit, now I want to experiment with this idea I love tinkering with world gen

 

[Bevo]

Locking down your recipes and other progression is a surefire way to make yourself one of the most divisive and polarizing developers in the entire community. Those well-acquainted with your mod will probably not mind, but pack makers and server owners will take it as a direct (and often personal) assault on their "domain of control", something they will make extremely (and often loudly) clear to you and likely everyone they think listens to them.

I made a comment on this a couple days ago, so I thought I would go ahead and explain myself here as to why this would be a concern for a pack maker. I am sure you understand why this would be a concern for pack makers, but since your post was mostly why people would hate you for it and I don't see any of why those concerns would exist, I'd at least like to point out my view on this. For myself, being concerned about the ballance of my pack doesn't mean I hate someone for not allowing me to balance my pack. It just means it is something I have to consider every time I add a mod to my pack. Especially if it has world gen, since the only fix I'd be allowed to make would be removing said mod. I fully understand that as a mod maker you can't expect everyone that adds your mods to fix balance issues, but as a pack maker I hope you understand I too can't expect all mod developers to balance their mods perfectly with all the other mod developers. Because we all know they don't. That would be an impossible task for any developer to try to do. Greg tries absurdly hard to accomplish this and I can still find plenty of mods to destroy the balance of Gregtech easily.

Just taking a bunch of mods and throwing them in the mods folder just doesn't make for a very good play experience and will discourage anyone playing that pack from using most of the mods in the pack since players typically just use whatever accomplishes whatever specific task they are trying to accomplish in the easiest most timely manner. If a player has a choice of automating something using Enderchest or a Railcraft Rail system more often than not, that player will use the the Enderchest. It isn't nearly as cool, fun or exciting as a nifty rail line system but it is easy and fast. If someone can use MFR to automate magical crops, players are not as likely to go out exploring caves.

If the mod pack is designed to encourage exploration they not being allowed to disable certain things in say Magical Crops (you can, but pretend we weren't allowed to) that mod would destroy the pack. There are legit reasons for pack makers to have concerns about balance and want to have some control over the mods they are putting in the packs.

Your mods as they are I don't feel would break the ballance of my pack at all. I think they most likely would fit perfectly. But I haven't done a full playthrough of them since 1.6 and I quit 1.6 months ago. So that means I need to be very sure of them prior to adding them since I will not be allowed to make any changes to fix any issues once they are added other than flat out removing the mods. Given the world gen in many of them adding and removing mods with lots of world gen would leave the players with nasty looking worlds and isn't a very good option. So that is why I have much higher concerns regarding mods I can't make changes to over mods I can. Not saying I think your stance on this is bad, or evil, and I certainly don't hate you for it. It is your mod, you have every right in the world to do with it as you like. Just trying to explain why a pack maker would have such concerns since I didn't see anything in your post about that.

 

[epidemia78]

In a perfect world, modders could make what they want to make without people pressuring them to conform.

 

[Reika]

I made a comment on this a couple days ago, so I thought I would go ahead and explain myself here as to why this would be a concern for a pack maker. I am sure you understand why this would be a concern for pack makers, but since your post was mostly why people would hate you for it and I don't see any of why those concerns would exist, I'd at least like to point out my view on this. For myself, being concerned about the ballance of my pack doesn't mean I hate someone for not allowing me to balance my pack. It just means it is something I have to consider every time I add a mod to my pack. Especially if it has world gen, since the only fix I'd be allowed to make would be removing said mod. I fully understand that as a mod maker you can't expect everyone that adds your mods to fix balance issues, but as a pack maker I hope you understand I too can't expect all mod developers to balance their mods perfectly with all the other mod developers. Because we all know they don't. That would be an impossible task for any developer to try to do. Greg tries absurdly hard to accomplish this and I can still find plenty of mods to destroy the balance of Gregtech easily.

Just taking a bunch of mods and throwing them in the mods folder just doesn't make for a very good play experience and will discourage anyone playing that pack from using most of the mods in the pack since players typically just use whatever accomplishes whatever specific task they are trying to accomplish in the easiest most timely manner. If a player has a choice of automating something using Enderchest or a Railcraft Rail system more often than not, that player will use the the Enderchest. It isn't nearly as cool, fun or exciting as a nifty rail line system but it is easy and fast. If someone can use MFR to automate magical crops, players are not as likely to go out exploring caves.

If the mod pack is designed to encourage exploration they not being allowed to disable certain things in say Magical Crops (you can, but pretend we weren't allowed to) that mod would destroy the pack. There are legit reasons for pack makers to have concerns about balance and want to have some control over the mods they are putting in the packs.

Your mods as they are I don't feel would break the ballance of my pack at all. I think they most likely would fit perfectly. But I haven't done a full playthrough of them since 1.6 and I quit 1.6 months ago. So that means I need to be very sure of them prior to adding them since I will not be allowed to make any changes to fix any issues once they are added other than flat out removing the mods. Given the world gen in many of them adding and removing mods with lots of world gen would leave the players with nasty looking worlds and isn't a very good option. So that is why I have much higher concerns regarding mods I can't make changes to over mods I can. Not saying I think your stance on this is bad, or evil, and I certainly don't hate you for it. It is your mod, you have every right in the world to do with it as you like. Just trying to explain why a pack maker would have such concerns since I didn't see anything in your post about that.

It is an argument I see very, very commonly. I did address it in a way in the original post, but in a different sort of way, that being to (attempt to) explain that for every legitimate argument I get about my mods balance relative to a pack, there are somewhere between ten and fifty others which are based on completely false pretenses, usually either the assumption that with infinite resources, endgame can be achieved immediately, or that a BigReactors powerplant can max out a room full of RC machinery. There are indeed packs RC will completely unbalance, but they tend to be either very hardcore-driven or very contrived.

Also, with regards to balancing mods against each other, this is kind of what I meant by closing everything inward. If you take the proper precautions, it is possible to prevent another mod from allowing players to shortcut your progression, barring direct interference (like jet fuel bees). Greg took a bit of a different approach, and instead decided to modify the other mods around him. It achieves the same end result, but is generally far more undesirable and is also much easier to break by introducing a not-yet-anticipated mod.

In all fairness, I would argue that the mods that truly do force others to balance around them are ones that are very easily interfered with. Most commonly, this is mods whose only gating system is raw resource costs, as it is immediately halved as soon as you add TE, AE, IC2, or any other mod with an ore doubler, and cut further if you install Factorization, Mekanism, or RotaryCraft.
In other words, if the introduction of a simple and predictable mechanic like ore multiplication, flight, powerful armor or the like unbalances a mod, chances are it is that mod to blame, not the one introducing (or more commonly, reintroducing with improvement) some simple mechanic.

EDIT:
People also like to mix mods of totally different styles into packs and wonder why they are so poorly balanced against each other. For example, every pack I have played since 1.5 contained, in addition to all the major tech mods, Twilight Forest.
On its own merit, Twilight Forest is well-balanced and well-designed, but plop it next to MPS, RotaryCraft, or the like, and you both completely nullify most of the challenges associated with the mod and arguably make the rewards worthless. Flight makes things like the dark tower a joke, and who needs a Fortune I pickaxe with TiC installed? With any powerful armor you care to name, bedrock included, you can stand there as high-level mobs, even the Naga, knock you around without taking any damage, and then stand there and kill it with little to no effort.
Is this TF's fault? No, it was balanced for vanilla-style play. Is this the powerful mods' fault? No, they were designed to be powerful, and no amount of recipe changes and config options could fix it without in essence totally redesigning the mod.

 

[ChJees]

In a perfect world, modders could make what they want to make without people pressuring them to conform.

This. So much this.

 

[midi_sec]

People also like to mix mods of totally different styles into packs and wonder why they are so poorly balanced against each other.

This.

It's all I can do to keep myself from lashing out at people that complain about certain mods completely breaking other certain mods when used together.

 

[Bevo]

Also, with regards to balancing mods against each other, this is kind of what I meant by closing everything inward. If you take the proper precautions, it is possible to prevent another mod from allowing players to shortcut your progression

Thing is this is the difference between where the developers concern over ballance ends, and the pack makers concerns begin. As a developer by closing off your mod so others are less likely to break the balance you have achieved a way to maintain that balance for your mod (for the most part). But as a pack maker I also have to consider what that closed mod does to the other mods I am putting it with, as you said. Sticking with the example you used, right now we have Fz and Mek which do have 3+ ore processing. Right now that isn't of much concern for me as a pack maker since (for whatever reason) no one uses Fz's ore processing, and the Mek 3x+ preprocessing isn't realistically possible since we don't have big reactors (the nerf to Mek's 3x+ is hardcoded and I can't change that). If I add RotaryCraft the players would most likely jump on that for the processing and continue ignoring Fz (again for whatever reason, lol).

Here is another reason pack makers might want to be able to change things in mods. Not for balance but for game play. Some game play I would love to do, but will never be possible. If my players wanted to use Mek's 3x+ ore processing rather than going the Big Reactor route they would need to get into Reactor Craft. That to me would be amazing. But obviously they wouldn't bother since they would have Rotary Craft for that sort of thing pretty much ensuring no-one will ever bother with Mek. For you as the developer there is the obvious question of "Why not just have the players using RotC processing?" and the reason for me would be, 1) because I would rather gate that sort of processing behind Reactor Craft and 2) because the build required for Mek's is bloody EPIC! lol. I mean both Mek and Reactor Craft to me are the kinds of amazing builds and accomplishments that a player never forgets. The huge, epic, crazy build that is required by Mek to do 5x processing plus the huge epic crazy build that would be required from Reactor Craft would be a HUGE amount of fun for the players. But the vast majority of the players will only do that if the pack is designed specifically that way.

This is just one of many amazing possibilities that pack makers will never be able to provide players due to either hardcoding one way, or forbidding alterations (in this case both).

And in a post AgSkies modded MC, in which we have things like Mine/Mod Tweakers, HQM, and the many dozens of new tools for pack makers, I just can't see the old fashioned packs of "throw a bunch of mods together" being as enjoyable to many (definitely not me anymore). Packs should, and will, have designs of their own using mods as tools to achieve that. Obviously some mod makers aren't going to like that someone else is designing the focus of the gameplay using their creations, and I get that. But what can now be done with all these new tools at our disposal is really fun.

Edit: hope you don't think I am trying to pressure you into anything. I know you will never change your mind on this, and that is cool. This is just a discussion.

 

[RavynousHunter]

In a perfect world, modders could make what they want to make without people pressuring them to conform.

Damn right! Take GregTech, for example. I may have some personal misgivings with Greg himself, but he has a vision, he has something he wants his mod to do, and he bloody well does it. Is it something I particularly enjoy? Not by a longshot, but I respect the man for continuing with his vision instead of caving to the whims of a few vocal detractors. Hell, that's one of the reasons I respect Reika so much. He has his vision, and while he listens, he doesn't bend over backwards to accommodate everyone; if something doesn't fit into his vision for his mods, then it doesn't go into his mods, simple as that.

 

[Celestialphoenix]

Work takes too many hours out the day...

A single quarry only scratches the surface of the resources you'll generate (and use up) from Factorio. Imagine we can twist MC physics, and fix 10 max size quarrys into one chunk, that's more like what you get from Factorio. Luckily Factorio quarries stop when they can't output the resource they've mined up. Clearing (and preventing) backstuffing in Factorio is part of the challange, get it wrong somewhere, and you'll find your entire system grinds to a halt.

I think what makes it is that none of the machines automatically accept inputs or auto-eject, you have to use those claw arms to move items. Each arm type has different speeds/ranges and only operate in a single direction, so your builds try to take that into account, which makes a nice visually impressive system when it's all running. Something that really would send MC to it's knees just due to how it handles entities.!

I could kinda see this working
-Quarries vomit everywhere if the items have nowhere to go, but allow for some creative gated control.
-All the Redpower machines only operate in 1 direction (relay/buffer aside)
-The old style piping networks (RP/BC) didn't self regulate; leaving it open for player design and ingenuity.

Issue is that every chunk has a chance of every resource. Might give a different style of gameplay if one in every 10 chunks contained a large iron ore vein, 1 in 40 containing a gold vein, etc. Would be like a factorio spread of resources, but mostly all hidden underground. That would also give a use to the BC Mining well, take a sample in a chunk, if it brings up some ore, somewhere down there is a rich vein to dig up.

I like the idea of biome-based resources; chance of a particular ore type in a vein is weighted by biome- and randomised by the world seed
-so deserts might have a high redstone content and some gold, but no iron or diamond. Next world desert is copper and gold in the jungle.
(I'm assuming this is based on the temperature-humidity mapping to cover modded biomes)