Tech mods: Why have a power system?

[GreenZombie]

Yeah, sometimes I wish I liked bees too, since people make them look like so much fun to automate. But I really dont. Years I played with IC2 and Forestry installed and could never find anything about them worth having. I have fond memories of my first modded world with its magmatic engines, diamond pipes and overclocked macerator but things have changed and theres no putting the genie back in the bottle.

They are not particularly fun. Whichever way you slice them, what you get from bees is entirely worthless by the time you can get them, with few exceptions.
One exception being, assuming you don't have another source of renewable glowstone setup, they can supply glowstone.

 

[epidemia78]

They are not particularly fun. Whichever way you slice them, what you get from bees is entirely worthless by the time you can get them, with few exceptions.
One exception being, assuming you don't have another source of renewable glowstone setup, they can supply glowstone.

I hate that tendency in mods, to gate the most practical things to late game when they arent needed anymore.

 

[jordsta95]

If your primary point is that IC2e is a dumb name, I'm inclined to agree. Its no more "experimental" than any mod under development or reversioning.

Dumb name is very dumb. When a mod changes so much, you change either the version number (IC3) or the name (Gregtech Lite?)

They are not particularly fun. Whichever way you slice them, what you get from bees is entirely worthless by the time you can get them, with few exceptions.
One exception being, assuming you don't have another source of renewable glowstone setup, they can supply glowstone.

There are a few exceptions, such as the diamond bees. But my issue with bees is, once you have the bee, the main "balance" mechanic is time (it takes forever for good bees to give great loot). And we all know how popular Steve's Carts (2) is, because of the hour+ long wait times for a good tree cutting cart.

 

[Pyure]

My primary problem with bees is a balance issue, but that's primarily because of the types of mods I usually play. Its less of an issue on something like Agrarian Skies, where infinite resources are common, or, well, just about anything besides Gregtech, where you can build a quarry to win minecraft anyway.

I once wrote some neat Bee scripting for my hardcore GT games: bees don't generate resources, they generate resource-multipliers. In other words, "iron bees" don't generate iron, they generate a dust that you can combine with iron ore in a machine to produce 3 ingots instead of 2 (macerating) or 1 (furnacing).

Combined with the fact that GT doesn't have randomly distributed ores (you can't plonk a 64x64 quarry down just anywhere and get every resource ever), it made bees simultaneously powerful but not silly.

 

[Pyure]

COG with biome dependent ores in sparse vein + BOP + PFAA = no quarry anymore

iirc, PFAA itself is the major factor in that equation. It also does "veins" of ores, no?

But yeah, its not just GT, there's others that handle this well

Edit: I just did some reading. COG's the big contributor, since pfaa's geologica component wraps COG.

 

[Pyure]

PFAA cannot generate ores itself and require COG.
Biome dependency gives an use to exploring the world, and having a lot more biome allow ores to be a lot more interesting to mine ;D

Yeah, see my follow-up edit

 

[malicious_bloke]

They are not particularly fun. Whichever way you slice them, what you get from bees is entirely worthless by the time you can get them, with few exceptions.
One exception being, assuming you don't have another source of renewable glowstone setup, they can supply glowstone.

I'm producing gold, diamonds, silicon, certus quartz, glowstone and redstone via the cunning use of bees.

My ME network is constantly expanding so these things will never be obsolete.

 

[jordsta95]

I'm producing gold, diamonds, silicon, certus quartz, glowstone and redstone via the cunning use of bees.

My ME network is constantly expanding so these things will never be obsolete.

But the question to you is, what's the point?
It's all well and good having 15 billion diamonds. But when are you ever going to need that many.
This is something I don't understand about a lot of the community's "I will have a mining machine that is super efficient and runs forever" ideology.

 

[KingTriaxx]

PFAA? COG?

I'm not sure about the infinite ideology, but me I just like to build huge machines.

 

[asiekierka]

Feeding coal to a hundred furnaces with item pipes is a more indirect kind of power system.

 

[GreenZombie]

Bees would make more sense to me if the species allele was dropped, and the bees output was determined as a function of flower trait and environment and that would drive the effect. So a bee with nether as a flower and an aggressive effect could get blaze rods IF there were blazes in the vicinity. To get nether Quartz, nether flowers, some 'chipping' effect, and quantities of nether rack.

The productivity and access to higher tier products would be inextricably linked to effect so you could not just breed it out.

 

[Type1Ninja]

The productivity and access to higher tier products would be inextricably linked to effect so you could not just breed it out.

But then you can't get super bees.
In all seriousness, though, I think the whole "I will destroy the economy with my overflow of bee-source (get it? Bee-resource? heheheheheh) production" is a core part of how people play with bees. The amount of work actually seems quite proportional to the end (super-powerful) result, even with difficulty-easing mods like Gendustry installed.

 

[Wolfie_Waffle]

I'm pretty sure that MUST be avoided.
Otherwise, not only RF will keep going, but also, you can't have a RF to whatever ratio that is not broken.
Either the ratio is low and big generators are OP, either the ratio is high and not only low level generators are useless, but also the conversion is broken in the other way. Maybe, with a conversion cost that grow exponentially would be ok, and with a ratio depending of the sense (direction?) of conversion. But that sounds complicated to balance...

Yeah, that's why I thought it wouldn't be possible. You would have multiple voltages (possibly), where RF only has one, etc. I just want a more complex power system without losing all my RF mods XD

 

[Type1Ninja]

I just want a more complex power system without losing all my RF mods XD

I think that's why RF has such a huge hold.
Maybe it's simple, maybe it's too cheap, maybe RF to usefulness ratios have gone out of control - but it has every addon you could possibly imagine. You name it, RF has it - jetpacks, drills, quarries, ender quarries, transdimensional transport, recycling, huge storage systems, spaceships, liquid pumping, armor, handheld lasers, automation of every process you could think to automate (and a couple more). Compatibility runs rampant among all of these, even joining up with magic mods. Heck, we have Equivalent Exchange and Mystcraft, powered by RF, thanks to Matter Overdrive and RFTools. Industrialcraft, Reactorcraft, Rotarycraft... None of those (or their addons) can replicate every RF capability at once.

There are two ideal fixes for this which come to my mind - deploying one would be great, deploying both would be stellar. Here's what I think:
1. The authors of every RF mod ever get together and figure out a balanced set of cost/capability values for RF transport, storage, and use (the authors of Big Reactors, Thermal Expansion, and EnderIO come to mind as some important figures). They organize this into a spreadsheet (or some such) which is distributed along with the RF API, allowing new RF mods to access it and utilize it.
2. Someone programs an RF mod with lossy RF transport and storage, as a sort of hardcore alternative to TE and EIO.

Both of these, unfortunately, seem like they'd be impossible.
I'd do the second myself, but I'm not *that* great at modding and I have other priorities.
For the first, it might be possible without collaboration between mod authors - someone could make a pack with as many RF mods as can be found, and put it on GitHub. People could play the pack, and submit change requests just for configs, specifically for energy use, storage, and transport. These could then be the "universal configs" for RF, which I think could also please a lot of people who complain about power creep. I'd be more willing to do this one, but again, I don't have that much time - I might be persuaded to do it if a lot of people got behind the idea.

TL;DR: RF has a sh*t ton of addons - that's why people (including me) like it. Some kind of definitive balancing needs to happen and/or someone needs to make a lossy cables mod.

 

[OreCruncher]

You name it, RF has it - jetpacks, drills, quarries, ender quarries, transdimensional transport, huge storage systems, spaceships, liquid pumping, armor, handheld lasers, automation of every process you could think to automate (and a couple more). Compatibility runs rampant among all of these, even joining up with magic mods. Heck, we have Equivalent Exchange and Mystcraft, powered by RF, thanks to Matter Overdrive and RFTools. Industrialcraft, Reactorcraft, Rotarycraft... None of those (or their addons) can replicate every RF capability at once.]

You forgot recycling with Thermal Recycling. Yeah, a shameless plug.

There are two ideal fixes for this which come to my mind - deploying one would be great, deploying both would be stellar. Here's what I think:
1. The authors of every RF mod ever get together and figure out a balanced set of cost/capability values for RF transport, storage, and use (the authors of Big Reactors, Thermal Expansion, and EnderIO come to mind as some important figures). They organize this into a spreadsheet (or some such) which is distributed along with the RF API, allowing new RF mods to access it and utilize it.
2. Someone programs an RF mod with lossy RF transport and storage, as a sort of hardcore alternative to TE and EIO.

1. Maybe it would be better that mod authors make the power consumption configurable so that a pack author can tweak to fit into the theme of the pack. I doubt you would be able to get all the authors on the same page, and someone will need tools to tweak anyways.

2. I wouldn't mind more complicated power routing systems. I like the fact that Thermal Dynamics is a separate mod now a days so I can put in whatever power/liquid transport system I want. I am just starting to kick around Immersive Engineering because I am fan of glass insulators. I wish EnderIO would separate out its wiring/liquid transport. There are many times I want the piping, but there would be massive redundancy in the machine blocks in the pack so I don't include it.

 

[Type1Ninja]

You forgot recycling with Thermal Recycling. Yeah, a shameless plug.



1. Maybe it would be better that mod authors make the power consumption configurable so that a pack author can tweak to fit into the theme of the pack. I doubt you would be able to get all the authors on the same page, and someone will need tools to tweak anyways.

2. I wouldn't mind more complicated power routing systems. I like the fact that Thermal Dynamics is a separate mod now a days so I can put in whatever power/liquid transport system I want. I am just starting to kick around Immersive Engineering because I am fan of glass insulators. I wish EnderIO would separate out its wiring/liquid transport. There are many times I want the piping, but there would be massive redundancy in the machine blocks in the pack so I don't include it.

Aw, shoot, recycling is actually big for me... I feel bad now, I should have remembered that. Editing it in.

1. Most mods DO have it configurable, which is why a community-driven GitHub "RF configs pack" would work well.
2. Yeah. HTD - Hardcore Thermal Dynamics. TEMA, GET ON THAT!

 

[epidemia78]

The last thing I need in my pack are more cables. Honestly thermal dynamics has way too many imo.

 

[GreenZombie]

I would prefer to have bees as a kind of late game extreme ore-multiplication mechanisim.

Place a hive of "mining" bees with several Iron Ore blocks in the vicinity and the beehive will start to produce iron nugget / iron dust enriched combs occasionally. For each nugget produced there is a 1/1000 chance that an iron ore block in the territory is destroyed.

 

[KingTriaxx]

I just use bees to breed cool looking trees.

 

[GreenZombie]

I just use bees to breed cool looking trees.

Thats what butterflies are for.