The buildcraft quarry

[Zarkov]

Now, enter the seasoned player with late 2013 mods on their Nth world who knows how to get ~100MJ/t fairly quickly, can setup one or a few diamond pipes with void pipes and chests fairly quickly, and is on a server. We now have a balance issue.

I would have to disagree with that conclusion. Being able to get resources quickly if you know exactly what to do with the various mods, is what I would call a complete non-issue. "Balance issues" in Minecraft, in my opinion, is what happens when modders become concerned about balance. I've been through quite a few worlds by now and getting a quarry up and running and watching everything working and the resources flowing in is still something I enjoy. I'd actually call it one of the absolute highlights of the whole tech progression.

Another vaguely relevant example to illustrate what I mean: I've been playing a Resonant Rise world recently - without MFR.

Fine, I thought, I'll give the other mods a chance for my tree farming needs. But it's not just that MFR is powerful and has ease of use compared to the other mods. It's also more fun to use (to me at least) as a direct consequence. Now I instead had to craft 60 identical blocks to get a tree farm. How did that make anything better in any way? And while I'm ranting, another example is Steve's Carts 2. It got "balanced", and as a consequence there are now balance issues.

 

[Droideka30]

Personally, I just LOVE branch mining.
/sarcasm
To me, the quarry just seems like a great way to automate a very boring process. OP? Maybe. But if you think so, just don't use it.

 

[RavynousHunter]

Eeh, I like mining by hand. A man can only take so much of making fancier and fancier machines. Plus, with how long it takes to do all but the most brain-killingly SIMPLE tasks with GT installed and on near-default configs (or default, dunno if the server went back to it or not), it beats waiting around twiddling your thumbs while you try to get a machine going to make more useful things than your simple macerating and smelting. Which GT kinda fails at in light of damn near everything else, except maybe vanilla.

 

[MigukNamja]

Lol, yeah. I used to hate mining by hand, but after doing many worlds with quarries, one with a matter fab, and one with an MFR laser, I find tooling around my base for hours tending to bees, Thaumcraft, and machines to be a bit monotonous. Being forced to gather stuff by hand forces me out in the world with caves, ravines, lava, monsters, etc.,. I just might find a chest and even a dungeon.

It also slows down the progression so I can enjoy the world that much longer. Once I'm in near-creative-mode, I get bored with the world and re-roll.

Mining by hand is pretty fun with upgraded TiC tools, a jet-pack to get in and out of ravines and caves. It sure beats "branch" mining with a diamond pickaxe ! Having an Ender pouch to dump stuff into also helps.

 

[Succubism]

Now you guys think the QUARRY'S OP?
Good lord, guys. Get a hobby.

 

[MigukNamja]

Now you guys think the QUARRY'S OP?
Good lord, guys. Get a hobby.

LOL.

Problem is I've blown through hobby, waved at addiction as I passed him by, and have arrived at obsession.

 

[Wekmor]

A quarry is really only OP when you got alot of power for that thing. And even then in most cases it's the power production that is OP, like force or squid power.

 

[Loufmier]

Now you guys think the QUARRY'S OP?
Good lord, guys. Get a hobby.

i believe quarry has been flagged OP since when EE2 was no longer around.

 

[SatanicSanta]

A quarry is really only OP when you got alot of power for that thing. And even then in most cases it's the power production that is OP, like force or squid power.

The power requirement is the balance for the Quarry.

 

[draeath]

It also slows down the progression so I can enjoy the world that much longer. Once I'm in near-creative-mode, I get bored with the world and re-roll.

Why bother re-rolling? Just throw a chest down and dump your inventory into it, and go for a nice long walk (or abuse /tpx) and re-establish yourself. The world is (practically) limitless in size. You also get a kind of "history" in that you can see all your bases as you went along.

Even better: stick dynmap in there, and when you are -really- ready to reroll, you can go back and look at the world you exposed.

 

[MigukNamja]

I've done that, but it's not quite the same. I didn't/don't know how to reset Thaumcraft 3 research, the Ender Dragon was still dead and all Ender hives picked, and the world save file was pretty big and only getting bigger. Since then, I've just re-rolled.

The power requirement is the balance for the Quarry.

Agreed. Fully-powered MFR laser is 400MJ/t or 1000 EU/t. Yet, I would not want the quarry to be scaled up linearly to match this.

Perhaps an exponential power curve that doesn't punish early and mid-game play, but does make late-game play more challenging/interesting.

ex:
10 MJ/t input into Quarry2 (future version) results in roughly same output as 10 MJ/t input into Quarry1 (current version)
100 MJ/t Q2 ~= 50 MJ/t Q1
400 MJ/t Q2 ~= 100 MJ/t Q1

 

[Wekmor]

I've done that, but it's not quite the same. I didn't/don't know how to reset Thaumcraft 3 research, the Ender Dragon was still dead and all Ender hives picked, and the world save file was pretty big and only getting bigger. Since then, I've just re-rolled.



Agreed. Fully-powered MFR laser is 400MJ/t or 1000 EU/t. Yet, I would not want the quarry to be scaled up linearly to match this.

Perhaps an exponential power curve that doesn't punish early and mid-game play, but does make late-game play more challenging/interesting.

ex:
10 MJ/t input into Quarry2 (future version) results in roughly same output as 10 MJ/t input into Quarry1 (current version)
100 MJ/t Q2 ~= 50 MJ/t Q1
400 MJ/t Q2 ~= 100 MJ/t Q1

I actually think this is a pretty good idea

 

[MigukNamja]

Configurable, of course. I'll see if CJ will take a BC 4.1 pull this request with this suggested change

 

[AlanEsh]

Regarding the OP; doesn't it seem like checking every block for hardness is going to put quite a load on the server? Seems like a few quarries running at full speed are going to shove a ton of checks at the server asking how it should respond to trying to break every single block.

When I first started reading, I thoguht the OP might suggest Quarries gain "upgrade" slots where you add certain modules to make it work better in various environments. So if you want to quarry in the nether, you would put a Nether card in it. And say, maybe, it can't break certain blocks until it is upgraded a level or two or three. Or maybe you want it to auto-harden lava into obsidian as it mines, you can add an upgrade for that. Or maybe auto-freeze water into ice on the fly...

If you only give the quarry a couple of upgrade "slots" but you provide a large number of modules, then people would be more engaged with their mining, going to the quarry now and then to swap out modules as needed. "oh, it hit lava, i'm going to pull out the "faster mining" upgrade for a while and put in this "Obsidian-ator" module instead.

 

[MigukNamja]

Here's what I have so far for a modified input power equation into the quarry:

let x by the effective power (power stored internally) in the quarry
let y by the accepted input power (power over its maximum will be refunded and not subject to this equation):

y = x^1.6 / 4

or, to write it the other way so we compute effective power x from y accepted input power:

x = root_1.6( 4y )

To give some numbers:
When y (input power ) is 1 MJ, the stored energy is 2.4, which is a gain. This means the quarry is actually *more* effective at super-low power, i.e.

1 MJ input results in 2.4 MJ of work /* efficiency gain */
10 MJ maps to 10 MJ /* break even ! */
100 MJ maps to 42 MJ
400 MJ maps to 100 MJ

If someone objects to the net gain below 10MJ/t, I can always ceiling (cap) the output to y so x cannot exceed y.

To accomplish this while maintaining the current BuildCraft code and not making things ugly, I'll have to:

1. Modify TileQuarry so it accepts 400 MJ/t and is config file-aware of this feature. Its max. accepted per tick is currently 100MJ.
2. Extend a modified Perdition Calculator that supports the above equation
3. Modify PowerHandler so it passes the maximum power parameter required by the scaling equation to the perdition calculator
4. Modify BuildCraftFactory read/write a config parameters for this feature. The default is to use current, linear behavior. In other words, you have to turn this on in the config for it to apply. This is to aid in the acceptance of this feature so CJ hopefully accepts it. If people / mod-pack makers like it, the exponential power tax may become default and linear the configurable. But, I'm not holding my breath.

A bit much to do at work, so I'll try to hit this tonight ;-)