There's robots in some tech mods. CC Turtles, OpenComputers turtle equivalent, Pneumaticraft drones, Mek Robits (granted those are mainly just mobile chest/workbench thingers). Granted not a lot, since mobs are one of (I would assume) harder things to code. And ReC has some definite pollution issues if you screw up, as well as nuclear waste. IC2's got 'waste' too, but you can keep reprocessing it.
Tech Mods: Missing the Point
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Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
IC2, Gtech, Roc/Rec, BC and RC all have varying consequences for screwing up- though not quite world-ending.
That annoyed me to no end.
Buildcraft is also getting its own robot army- that can shoot lasers and blow stuff up.
I would love to see a Tech Mod give more risk ( in real life great things come from many failures) to me Tech mods are all about the Tech tree and material needed to make them in the goal of automation. Tech mods can have a greater theme then magic if you think about it........... Magic mods have Golems ...Why no robots for Tech. Why not in the end game of Tech have the chance for a IA Or the chance for IA to become self aware Skynet anyone robot invasion lol. Magic has flux Tech can have pollution.. some times I thing Tech mods get to focused on sole goal of automation...any way my two cents on the magic/Tech thing
That annoyed me to no end.
I would like to see a tech mod that makes basic tool creation and smelting incredibly difficult and skill based, add in materials that are worse than others but easier to work and slow down mining to a border-line annoying pace. Wood would break into sticks (or 1 plank configurable) by hand and with axes each log will be broken into planks. Ores and Logs will also drop much less ore (or Planks) with lower quality pickaxes, this replaces the speed upgrades. Then make it so that you can start using advanced tools that assist you in the tedious jobs. Examples are:
After you get a lot of materials and pass quite a few tiers of advanced tools, you start to find yourself building machines run off of Mechanical Power run by running water or treadmills. This would be incredibly inefficient for later game projects for 2 reasons:
1. Machines can randomly break down, and the longer they run and the more separate power inputs are being put into one the easier it is for them to break.
2. Treadmills break down less often, but costs food. This will mean you need another automated contraption to get this one working.
These rules forces the progression into better machines if one wishes to use tech of a higher tier.
In the beginning, only farms, crafting machines and machines that break ore blocks or logs placed on it will be available. And each crafting machine can only craft a small number of items. But wait, how do you get ore blocks if they drop ore shards when they are broken? Well, you use a wheelbarrow of course! Wheelbarrows are items that will spawn a wheelbarrow with a block in it when you click on a block. You can only have one block per wheelbarrow and can only push it with an empty hand. It slows you down based on the weight of the block and cannot jump. This makes it much harder to transport logs and ores but the machines reward you so much. If you want to further automate your ore processing, you can use rollers. These are what treadmills are made of and can even be used to power your machines. They can be made of wood or metal and allow objects to keep moving and even accelerate while in motion. If an object moves too fast it will start to break the rollers and the more they are used and the longer the string is the more apt it is to break also. Finally, rollers cannot turn objects, for that you'll need some ingenuity and other machines. Also, you cannot move Wheelbarrows with water but you can if you use very low powered explosions.
- A Pickaxe that can break multiple blocks
- A Pickaxe that can randomly get extra ore shards
- A Pickaxe that breaks blocks faster
- An Axe that chops an entire tree at once at the cost of 1.25 damage per log
- An Axe that can randomly get extra planks
- An Axe that chops wood faster
After you get a lot of materials and pass quite a few tiers of advanced tools, you start to find yourself building machines run off of Mechanical Power run by running water or treadmills. This would be incredibly inefficient for later game projects for 2 reasons:
1. Machines can randomly break down, and the longer they run and the more separate power inputs are being put into one the easier it is for them to break.
2. Treadmills break down less often, but costs food. This will mean you need another automated contraption to get this one working.
These rules forces the progression into better machines if one wishes to use tech of a higher tier.
In the beginning, only farms, crafting machines and machines that break ore blocks or logs placed on it will be available. And each crafting machine can only craft a small number of items. But wait, how do you get ore blocks if they drop ore shards when they are broken? Well, you use a wheelbarrow of course! Wheelbarrows are items that will spawn a wheelbarrow with a block in it when you click on a block. You can only have one block per wheelbarrow and can only push it with an empty hand. It slows you down based on the weight of the block and cannot jump. This makes it much harder to transport logs and ores but the machines reward you so much. If you want to further automate your ore processing, you can use rollers. These are what treadmills are made of and can even be used to power your machines. They can be made of wood or metal and allow objects to keep moving and even accelerate while in motion. If an object moves too fast it will start to break the rollers and the more they are used and the longer the string is the more apt it is to break also. Finally, rollers cannot turn objects, for that you'll need some ingenuity and other machines. Also, you cannot move Wheelbarrows with water but you can if you use very low powered explosions.
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
You always seem to have good ideas. I hope someone / something can help you make these interesting suggestions become reality.
Thank you, I do hope that someone works on a mod similar to that farming one from a few pages back on the mod suggestions thread though, farming for me just isn't hands on enough.
P.S. Good news is I'm aspiring to learn Programming. Bad news is I'm still in Sophmore and need to wait one more year to do any game design classes IIRC.
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You're horribly misinformed on the purpose of igneous extruders if that's how you feel about them, they aren't there to make cobblegen easier but to provide a form of cobblegen with less lag.
notably in a time where the only other auto cobble gen required a block breaker of some description and then waiting on lava.
granted the extra util nodes can do this now much more efficiently but those came later
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
Yes- lag prevention; at the cost of ingenuity, creativity, design and engineering.
Not that there's any noticeable difference between a equivalent mechanical cobble gen and an extruder- a lot of the lag came from people spamming them [compressed cobble/IC2 recyclables], using extruders to match that output would also result in a performance hit.
I prefer lag prevention to involve optimising the code and making the game run smoother, rather the cutting into the core mechanics of the game.
Yes, spamming extruders will result in a performance hit as well. But 'mechanical' cobblegens that keep up with that same rate will result it *much* more lag. Yes, to some it ruins 'core mechanics'. But, in essence, isn't that what *all* mods do? Altering core mechanics and changing the nature of the game? Every mod, bar none, ruins 'core mechanics'. And that's just fine because it's supposed to.
No matter how optimized the code gets, there will always be a limit to how much it can.
Not always. Many mods are designed to play alongside the vanilla mechanics, possibly obsoletizing (is that a word?) them, but not removing or dramatically altering them. For many, myself included, changing those mechanics too severely ruins the feel of the entire game.
That said, TE is not a mod that dramatically changes the game mechanics, so this argument does not apply to it.
You are correct in that it is inherent in tech mods that they make large parts of vanilla obsolete, but that is not my problem with the extruder. No, my problems is that it is too easy to use for what it does. Cobble and stone is perfectly fine, but obsidian is one of the rarest and hardest-to-obtain resources in vanilla, something reflected in many mods, including to some degree my own. The igneous extruder trivializes that, making it a simple matter of some copper, a gold ingot, some iron, some tin, some glass, and a few GUI clicks. Not only that, but it can operate autonomously with 100% efficiency and defaults to a production rate more than ten times what is possible in vanilla.
I am of course not saying automated high-speed obsidian generation is off-limits - I have one too - but for a machine that can be constructed in less than five minutes of gameplay? That is what I would consider problematic.
Autonomous Activator (or any fluid placer) + Terrain Smasher (or any block breaker) + flowing water. That will also get you a decent speed obsi gen and is also pretty early-game. Yes, it may take less time than breaking it with a vanilla diamond pick, but is time spent hitting a single block to harvest it really making it 'harder' to get? Increased time is only tedium. It's why many prefer faster ore-doubling to slower ore-tripling. Case in point Factorization, the slow ore-tripling that few used due to the forced time drain, despite it's interesting mechanics. Time spent 'waiting' doesn't add depth. Adding mechanics does.
Obsidian has never been a difficult thing to acquire and isn't required in large numbers for just about anything. The limiter has always been on getting the lava to create it. And the extruder does nothing for that.
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
Auto-Activator+Smasher is engineering. By building that you are designing a system and actually playing the game.
The difference between that, and manually collecting obsidian, isnt the time factor
- you could use a second activator with a silk touch wood pick for mining obsidian; 5 minutes a shot (I think).
It'll still be less tedious because the key difference is player interaction.If a particular aspect of the game does little/nothing to engage the player, then it becomes tedious very quickly.
Which is why manually collecting obsidian is tedious.
If time isnt a gameplay mechanic; why do furnaces (and almost every modded machine) process 1 item at a time over X seconds, rather than whole stacks instantly (1 tick). [assuming enough fuel to process that much]
Why doesn't wheat/trees/any crop grow instantly*?
If correctly implemented time delay creates a bottleneck, and significantly increases the value of the materials gained
- Railcraft blast furnace and coking oven is a perfect example of slow mechanics done right.
It doesn't require player interaction, and can be fully automated.
Its slow enough to make steel production an essential part of the game, but surprisingly fast when you leave it to get the job done.
*Note: this is ignoring bonemeal- sitting there clicking stuff to make it instant gets very tedious.It doesn't require player interaction, and can be fully automated.
Its slow enough to make steel production an essential part of the game, but surprisingly fast when you leave it to get the job done.
I don't see any great feat or challenge in cobblegen, obsigen, or water collection. A collector and (sometimes) a placer. That's not really what I call engineering. Sorting systems without AE? That's engineering. Fully automating a TCon smeltery. That's engineering. Two blocks, one input and one output? That's something so simple that there really isn't any downside to compressing it to a single block.
I should also point out that the AA/TS combo is faster than the Igneous Extruder. So there is a benefit to 'engineering' that if you're looking for speed.
And time spent, even if you're not actively doing it, is still tedium. Five minutes automated is still five minutes wasted if that's the single resource you need. Not saying all things should be instant, but unreasonably long processing times (your definition may vary from mine) are what should be avoided.
There is reasonable time delay and there is unreasonably long time delay. Your definitions may vary for both. Single block at a time over stack at a time? That makes sense as it's reinforced through vanilla mechanics. Same with growth mechanics. Things that deviate from vanilla mechanics for time expenditure are what catch people's attention. Things like XU Ender-lilies and RC Blast Furnaces. But at least XU Ender-lilies can still be sped up though in-mod mechanics (Endstone and Ender Core). Blast Furnaces cannot be.
And speaking of Blast Furnaces, I find the default rate to be too slow for my tastes. Once you get it up and running then you can automate it and never need to worry about it again, yes. But when you're first getting into it there is too much time spent just waiting for the damn thing to process a single iron ingot at a time. Even if you halve it's processing time it's still much slower than most any other material processing that I've seen, but at least then it doesn't feel like quite as much tedium.
Celestialphoenix
Too Much Free Time
Its not complex engineering as such, but its still a lot more interesting than just using the extruder.
Water collecting/storage gets a lot more interesting when you remove the easy options (try just forestry and railcraft for a viable water supply)
Its bringing in a design process, which is kinda what the game is about.
If you waiting for it, then yeah you might as well be actively doing it.
Five minutes automated is five minutes available for another part of the game.
Though 5min for 1 items is kinda unreasonable for a building stone. I wholeheartedly agree with unreasonable time, but cannot define [let alone agree on] an "unreasonable" time.But RC furnaces feel about right for that material- given the amount needed later on and the availability of the iron needed.
Speed buffs via an in-game/mod mechanic can actually be really cool, encouraging further design and ingenuity to use them effectively.
-old IC2's overclockers were pretty neat; how far should/can you push your powergrid? how many is too many? [speed vs energy efficiency]
-likewise the 'advanced machines' add-on requiring constant power to maintain the speed buff.
It does, however, subvert the need for a diamond pick, making obsidian easier to acquire than redstone. I have no idea what you are talking about with lava; I always have hundreds of times what I need as soon as I find a y=10 cave.
Forestry's solution relies on rain IIRC, and I dislike relying on weather for mechanics. Railcraft's is just a multiblock, slower Accumulator. Water, being infinite in Minecraft, is the 'problem' with water collection mechanics.
Now I'd *love* to see a total rehaul of the water system using Enviromine's saltwater/freshwater system. Especially if it included a good floodgate and pump solution and could handle non-renewable freshwater rivers/lakes and infinite saltwater oceans. Maybe a steam distiller and/or reverse osmosis machine for freshwater conversion.
Were there a method to speed up Blast Furnaces, then I'd not mind so much. But parallelization of large(-ish) multiblocks being the only method isn't a mechanic I enjoy. Nor are 'always-on' mechanics. The idea of overclockers, though, I do enjoy. Especially TE's method where there is not only a limit to overclocking, but also options for increasing efficiency.
With a pump, yes. I don't generally have a powered pump in the first 10 minutes of the game, though. I generally have enough diamonds for a single diamond pick well before I start pumping any fluids.
But this is all disagreements of balance, and your own mods and modpacks balance can be set via configs and recipe alterations to suit *your* preferences. Just as mods like TE upset the balance of your mod, RotaryCraft upsets the balance of a few other mods as well. It's up to modpack creators and us players to assemble them to *our* needs.