The good things about Botania despawning passive plants

[rouge_bare]

A bunch of things could have been done to make passive flowers more inconvenient for mass mana generation.
Requiring a clear view of the sky would prevent hydrangea stacks.
Getting them to use sugar cane semantics and require water directly adjacent to their root level would make them a damn sight more attractive, as well as more inconvenient to stack. (Same applies to the lava eating flowers - root level please!)
That is all, because all the "I have too much mana to move from passive flowers" really seems to revolve around hydrangea stacks.

You are right that requiring sky view for all passives would hamper hydro stacks, but it is possible to slant the stack and still use non-floating flowers. So instead of a vertical stack, you either get a slanted stack or them just spread out horizantally. Sure it'd look nicer than the ugly tower, but it'd just take more space. It'd also make botania impossible to start in a cave world based modpack, unless an active flower is tweaked to not need mana, or the player is given a partially filled mana tablet as a hqm reward.

PS. Someone from the 'i love to automate botania' camp please post some screenshots of a build where flowers are automated, but the flower is on the surface, and the automation is hidden underground. The 3x3 area around the flower should be flat grass.

It's probibly possible if you abuse a vanilla mechanic I recently learned about for flowers that require dropped items (like the endoflame or kekimus). Face a dropper (might be dispensor, I'm rembering this off top of head, I'll edit when I find the post I'm thinking of..) upwards at grass and when triggered it should send the item through the grass. This can do a possibly wasteful endoflame, a spectrolous or a gourmaryliss setup. For the flowers that need things like placed objects near them, for the sake of example, the kekimus, you could use a rammuncarpus to place the cake on grass, but this would be a tad annoying to control.

 

[DriftinFool]

It would have been a lot smarter to limit the spamming of passive flowers by doing something like Reika did in RoC to prevent spamming cheap engines. If more than 4(I think it's 4) engines feed into the same shaft, they don't work. Vazki could have limited the hardcore spammers by imposing a hard limit on passive flowers in a certain area or set a hard cap on how many could connect to one mana spreader. This would have prevented spamming passive flowers while not hurting players like myself or Chris Becke who just need a little mana from time to time.

 

[desht]

So,
* Because I am content to let a small mana pool in the corner of my base tick over so I can make the occasional mana steel,
* Because I don't care for any of the botania automation I've seen as it all involves redstone and moving parts that detract entirely from the theme of flowers and nature

Its OK for Vazkii - because they are the mods author - to break my stuff - and take away the config option I might use if I am perfectly content to not invest more in their mod right now?

I don't have words...

At the end of the day, it's Vazkii's mod. She put all the time & effort into coding it, so what she says goes.

For the record, I'm 100% in favour of passives despawning. There's no good reason to be depending on huge fields of dayblooms or hydroangeas for mana generation. If you just want to make the occasional manasteel, have a pool fed by an endoflame and set up a charcoal dropper; it's not hard. Or put a narslimmus in a slime chunk. Or a munchdew near a tree farm. Or a gourmaryllis beside any source of food (potato/carrot farm is easy). But why wouldn't your manasteel production be near your main mana generation anyway? Or at least fed from your main mana supply via one or more spreaders?

Regarding ugly redstone etc., phantom lenses allow a lot of the generation stuff to be concealed...

 

[GreenZombie]

You are right that requiring sky view for all passives would hamper hydro stacks, but it is possible to slant the stack and still use non-floating flowers. So instead of a vertical stack, you either get a slanted stack or them just spread out horizantally. Sure it'd look nicer than the ugly tower, but it'd just take more space. It'd also make botania impossible to start in a cave world based modpack, unless an active flower is tweaked to not need mana, or the player is given a partially filled mana tablet as a hqm reward.

It's probibly possible if you abuse a vanilla mechanic I recently learned about for flowers that require dropped items (like the endoflame or kekimus). Face a dropper (might be dispensor, I'm rembering this off top of head, I'll edit when I find the post I'm thinking of..) upwards at grass and when triggered it should send the item through the grass. This can do a possibly wasteful endoflame, a spectrolous or a gourmaryliss setup. For the flowers that need things like placed objects near them, for the sake of example, the kekimus, you could use a rammuncarpus to place the cake on grass, but this would be a tad annoying to control.

Sure you could build slanted, but you are still limited by a fixed number of "sky" slots per chunk: at most 256 per chunk, but with (root level) water requirements, a lot less.
Allowing vertically stacked flowers makes the entire 3d volume available.

Given the restrictions on passive flowers, i'd argue that the friendliest thing would be to remove them entirely, and just add the occasional naturally spawning mana pool to the world gen - this would be easier if mana was a forge liquid.

 

[GreenZombie]

... This would have prevented spamming passive flowers while not hurting players like myself or Chris Becke who just need a little mana from time to time.

And, and I can't stress this enough because this seems to be the core of my annoyance, want a flower garden, that looks like a flower garden, including things that I can defensibly call flowers.

 

[rouge_bare]

I doubt vazkii will ever make mana a traditonal liquid (april fools jokes aside...)

Anyhow - here's a very quick proof of concept using a gourmaryliss. Thanks to @ICountFrom0 for the note about dispensor behavior.

 

[Cptqrk]

I imagine it's to do with having infinite water for hydroangeas but non-infinite lava for thermalillys.

I guess so, but I watch folks are using drawbridges to place source blocks of lava, infinitely.. So same issue.. So the real issue here is stacks of Hydros and Termals.. People complaining of fields of Dayblooms to do "anything" are just idiots... In my opinion.

But, opinions are like arseholes, everyone's got one.

 

[SolManX]

I guess so, but I watch folks are using drawbridges to place source blocks of lava, infinitely.. So same issue.. So the real issue here is stacks of Hydros and Termals.. People complaining of fields of Dayblooms to do "anything" are just idiots... In my opinion.

But, opinions are like arseholes, everyone's got one.

Setting up infinite lava is a bit more advanced than placing two source blocks, no?

The thing is, all of the flowers can be auto-fed in some way, and the passives can be auto-created. In Vanilla + Botania only, automation can be pretty hard to do, but with any 'conduit' mod, it's as easy/hard as any other method.

 

[DeathOfTime]

And, and I can't stress this enough because this seems to be the core of my annoyance, want a flower garden, that looks like a flower garden, including things that I can defensibly call flowers.

Yeah, I could see how one might find that annoying. You were liking the old system because it had facets that lent to your immersion in the experience. Now those facets are gone it has broke that immersion.

Kinda like a good book possibly. You were so getting into the series and felt like the author was just bringing it alive before your very eyes. Then for one reason or another they decide to take a dump all over that universe and totally destroy the experience. Felt that way with "the Myth Inc." Series by Robert Aspirin. Series was awesome the books were full of humor. Then for some reason the next books in all his series just lost the humor or it seemed forced at best.

 

[RenzosNips]

Setting up infinite lava is a bit more advanced than placing two source blocks, no?

In most packs, it's 2 steps more, give or take.



Honestly, Vazkii has a great mod that a lot of people love. Her design choices lately have been terrible though. She doesn't want us (lazy people or people who aren't going far into the mod) using passives? Ok, we'll bum rush thermolillies or the coal burning ones, and use NOTHING else. Most likely, it wouldn't even get automated. It's just switching one set of flowers for another (1 or 2 step more) flowers. It's not promoting diversity, it's just taking it away.

 

[jordsta95]

In most packs, it's 2 steps more, give or take.



Honestly, Vazkii has a great mod that a lot of people love. Her design choices lately have been terrible though. She doesn't want us (lazy people or people who aren't going far into the mod) using passives? Ok, we'll bum rush thermolillies or the coal burning ones, and use NOTHING else. Most likely, it wouldn't even get automated. It's just switching one set of flowers for another (1 or 2 step more) flowers. It's not promoting diversity, it's just taking it away.

Well seeing as Endoflames are the 2nd flower you make (if you only make dayblooms, and not nightshades), the "coal burning" flowers aren't exactly hard to get.

As for the Thermalilies, yes, you're bum-rushing them. But at least you are using something that requires SOME effort.
Even if you had Rosa Arcanas all around your base, so whenever you walked up to your AE system, or your furnaces, or whatever, your XP becomes mana. It's not something that anyone would call "easy" to set up. But as soon as it is set up it's about as passive as dayblooms, only requiring you to be in your base, near stuff that you are always near...
No, it isn't a replacement for FREE mana, but it is still pretty simple once you have set it up (and remember, these can be under the floor, so the whole layer under your floor could be Rosa Arcanas.

Let's get back off that tangent...

Thermalillies are one of the few flowers which can quite easily be automated and run from RF (through the use of a few machines), so I understand why people use them. And if you only use Botania for a few things; sojourners sash, flugel tiara, etc. then I can understand people only using thermalillies and/or endoflames, as they are pretty simple, and easy to use.

And, and I can't stress this enough because this seems to be the core of my annoyance, want a flower garden, that looks like a flower garden, including things that I can defensibly call flowers.

Then just make the motif flowers, or use the ones that spawn in the world, and have your generating flora hidden away?

It would have been a lot smarter to limit the spamming of passive flowers by doing something like Reika did in RoC to prevent spamming cheap engines. If more than 4(I think it's 4) engines feed into the same shaft, they don't work. Vazki could have limited the hardcore spammers by imposing a hard limit on passive flowers in a certain area or set a hard cap on how many could connect to one mana spreader. This would have prevented spamming passive flowers while not hurting players like myself or Chris Becke who just need a little mana from time to time.

This would work. However, if someone wants to make 10+ dayblooms for their initial burst of mana to get started in Botania, I don't think it is something that would work, and I doubt Vaz would want to penalize the people who want to get a decent amount of "starting mana"

 

[GreenZombie]

This would work. However, if someone wants to make 10+ dayblooms for their initial burst of mana to get started in Botania, I don't think it is something that would work, and I doubt Vaz would want to penalize the people who want to get a decent amount of "starting mana"

Why not? Remove the decay, and make the mana requirements growth more strongly exponential.

Your tier 1 blooms - daybloom / hydrangea - would generate a basic quantity of mana/t - sufficient to make the starting mana well and a "few" things.
The next tier of blooms would make 10x more mana per tick. A few more things craftable. Still no proper mana well or mana steel.
The 3rd tier uses 10x - and yields more mana again. A single flower has the mana production of 100 dayblooms. Is anyone mad enough to persist with dayblooms? A proper mana well and mana steel.
The 4th tier, 10x more mana again is produces and required. 1,000 dayblooms would be required to produce the mana required at this level. Do we have the Alfheim portal yet? Thats probably Tier 5.
Tier 5. 10x the mana again. 10,000 dayblooms would be required to maintain the Alfheim portal and craft at this level. Seriously - don't worry about those guys persisting with dayblooms.

 

[jordsta95]

Why not? Remove the decay, and make the mana requirements growth more strongly exponential.

Your tier 1 blooms - daybloom / hydrangea - would generate a basic quantity of mana/t - sufficient to make the starting mana well and a "few" things.
The next tier of blooms would make 10x more mana per tick. A few more things craftable. Still no proper mana well or mana steel.
The 3rd tier uses 10x - and yields more mana again. A single flower has the mana production of 100 dayblooms. Is anyone mad enough to persist with dayblooms? A proper mana well and mana steel.
The 4th tier, 10x more mana again is produces and required. 1,000 dayblooms would be required to produce the mana required at this level. Do we have the Alfheim portal yet? Thats probably Tier 5.
Tier 5. 10x the mana again. 10,000 dayblooms would be required to maintain the Alfheim portal and craft at this level. Seriously - don't worry about those guys persisting with dayblooms.

But what's stopping you having 10*X "blooms" where X would be whatever amount would be seen as "sufficient" for tier 3, if all you need from botania is in the "tier 3" section of the game?

 

[GreenZombie]

But what's stopping you having 10*X "blooms" where X would be whatever amount would be seen as "sufficient" for tier 3, if all you need from botania is in the "tier 3" section of the game?

nothing. The goal is to provide local choice: "near" a tier you can choose 10 of those, or 1 of these. But trying to skip tiers is infeasible.

For example - each tier of altar in blood magic holds 10x the blood of the previous. Each of the orbs requires ~ an order of magnitude LP to craft. The things you get, get orders of magnitude more expensive.

 

[jordsta95]

nothing. The goal is to provide local choice: "near" a tier you can choose 10 of those, or 1 of these. But trying to skip tiers is infeasible.

One of the reasons the withering flowers was added was, because when given a choice, many people just spammed passives.
And unless you make it monumentally stupid numbers (which would require rewriting the whole mana system, as it doesn't use huge numbers) then you will always have the odd person who will just spam passives (which isn't something Vazkii wants to deal with, as she got monumental amount of "bug" reports because of passive spammers)

 

[rouge_bare]

The alter? more like the orbs. A T1 alter by default, holds the exact same LP as a T6 does. There are runes of Enhanced and Superior Capacity that up it's capacity. The orbs need more and more LP to make as you go up, and also hold more and more. I don't really delve heavily into BM, so I don't remeber the exact numbers. There is also the Rune of the Orb that increases the orb's storage (and is needed to get to T6). It's only really the 3rd orb that is "challenging" to get. It needs you to top off the alter as it's crafting the orb, and assumes you use (self-) sacrifice runes. after that you get access to Enhanced Capacity and Dislocation runes, which make further orbs much less troublesome to get, as you can either bump up the capacity so you have enough to cover or use dislocation runes to have an adequate influx of pumped in blood.

Not the best example perhaps, but I see what you are getting at, I've always seen the flowers as being in teirs anyhow based on what was needed to craft them, Dayblooms and Nightshades needed no mana to make, so I see them as Tier 1.
Hydrogenas and Endoflames need mana petals, but no runes, and made up tier 2, but these days I'd class hydros as tier 1.5.
Next come the flowers that need an elemental rune or a rune of mana. The Rosa Arcana and the Thermalilly are the two I remeber here. (Incidently, neither of these flowers are fully automatble with just Botania and Vanilla.)
Next are flowers needing seasonal runes, such as the gourmaryliss.
Then the ones needing the deadly sin runes, I think all of these are now post-alfheim, needing Pixie dust as well.
And finally the sole flower needing a single Gaia Spirit, The Dandelifon.

I'm not sure that these tiers would fit an exponetial scale, due to the nature of how mana is consumed in Botania. There isn't much that demands a constant drain of mana, and even these in most cases are turned off when not needed. Mana is often consumed in bursts of activity, not constantly. The biggest thing I can think of that is intended to be always on, is the Alfhiem portal. Possibly Agricarnations could also be constantly draining, but even then you only need so much in the way of crops. Without withering, even a single Daybloom will eventually make enough mana to fill a mana pool completely, no matter if the mana pool holds 1 billion mana and the Daybloom only makes 1 mana a second during the day.

EDIT: Also I doubt there is ever going to be a solution that pleases everyone.

 

[Adagiovibe]

Why is this still being debated. How many weeks has it been? Both sides of the argument have been repeated to death. If you really hate the passive change that much either grind your way through Runic Dungeons for like 30 minutes and get all the Overgrowth Seeds you will ever need or go use some of the shitty forks that are out there

 

[jordsta95]

Next come the flowers that need an elemental rune or a rune of mana. The Rosa Arcana and the Thermalilly are the two I remeber here. (Incidently, neither of these flowers are fully automatble with just Botania and Vanilla.)

Technically the Rosa Arcana can never be automated, as it requires the player to stand near it, as it drains from a player's XP bar.

Why is this still being debated. How many weeks has it been? Both sides of the argument have been repeated to death. If you really hate the passive change that much either grind your way through Runic Dungeons for like 30 minutes and get all the Overgrowth Seeds you will ever need or go use some of the shitty forks that are out there

It seems a few FTB packs were using outdated Botania versions, and only just updated to post-wither... Or servers weren't using the latest pack version for a while.
But yes, it has been a few months.

 

[Padfoote]

EDIT: Also I doubt there is ever going to be a solution that pleases everyone.

Bingo. This is why I've called it quits with the mod and uninstalled it. Not worth my time to screw with anymore.

Why is this still being debated. How many weeks has it been? Both sides of the argument have been repeated to death. If you really hate the passive change that much either grind your way through Runic Dungeons for like 30 minutes and get all the Overgrowth Seeds you will ever need or go use some of the shitty forks that are out there

With the number of mods in use by people, I wouldn't be surprised if someone discovers this for the first time in a month when they first try Botania.

 

[Cptqrk]

Why is this still being debated. How many weeks has it been? Both sides of the argument have been repeated to death.

Because people just don't understand why the move was made. Why do some folks still argue over GT? It's human nature.

It's a false premise that folks would only spam basic flowers, and never move up in the tiers, when it falls apart when you only really need to get to tier 2 (Thermalily) to be able to make everything you need/want from the mod.

The thing I fear, is that Vazkii will keep nerfing flowers. As I stated before, you need 8... Yes, only 8 Termalily to power the Portal. Why, following the logic of spamming, would anyone make anything other than Thermalilies? Is this not the same issue? Yes there is a little set up needed to keep them fed, but after, what? 10? 20 minutes it's a set it and forget it flower. Even using vanilla and Botania only, it is easy to automate. So following the "logic" next up for the nerf? Thermalily!

How do you stop the never ending cycle of "flower spam" when the mod is not set up in tiers apart from flower crafting? Yes you have better mana pools (one upgrade) and spreaders (two upgrades) but the requirements to run/feed/upkeep those items is nill.

This is why I'm disappointed at the choice that was made. It's not an issue of the flower, but the things that use the flowers, IMO.