Thermal Expansion Status

  • FTB will be shutting down this forum by the end of July. To participate in our community discussions, please join our Discord! https://ftb.team/discord
Status
Not open for further replies.

MigukNamja

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
2,202
0
0
Yeah, it makes IC2 look grumpy. Don't like how an MFSU loses all its energy when you move it - with a wrench in lossless mode, no less. I hope it's just a coding thing and not an intentional. I am not a big fan of those that punish people for moving stuff. Someone improving their base layout *should* be encouraged.

Also, another IC2 exp gripe while I'm here that probably *is* a bug. The RTG doesn't work with a wrench and breaking it with a pickaxe will sometimes result in a generator. But, again, probably a bug. All other IC2 machines at least pickup correctly with a wrench in lossless mode.
 

CascadingDragon

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
114
0
0
Yeah, it makes IC2 look grumpy. Don't like how an MFSU loses all its energy when you move it - with a wrench in lossless mode, no less. I hope it's just a coding thing and not an intentional. I am not a big fan of those that punish people for moving stuff. Someone improving their base layout *should* be encouraged. [/spoiler]
This is completely intentional. It's a remnant from the beginning days of modded Minecraft, but Player and company haven't seen fit to add in that functionality.

I'm excited to see what mods adapt to RSF, when TE is updated.
 

Recon

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
408
0
0
I've joined this party late, as I've been busy with RL stuff. In the offhand chance that KL is still working on TE and open to feedback, there is one thing I'd really like to say.

In our server, we've taken out EE (no easy ender pearls till later) and agreed to not use quarries. We've also doubled the lava requirements of the Magmatic Engine. We find this much more of a balanced progression curve. Having said that, we also didn't build Tesseracts in the early or mid game at all, and found that to be a good decision, as to keep alternative techniques valid for longer.

Having said that, I did come up with what I thought would have been a great tesseract change. The idea comes from the fact that they are relatively easy to make and also extremely powerful. I would love it if the tesseracts had a maximum range of transfer. Say, 200 blocks by default. Then, if there was some kind of expensive upgrade that allowed for a range extension. This is similar to other range based devices such as the AE wireless access point. Upgrades could add +1000 blocks of distance to the tesseract as an example. Then, as an ultimate upgrade which would be very very expensive (Netherstar? Multiple Diamond Blocks?), allow for tesseracts to transmit across dimensions, like they do now.

This upgrade business is mostly born out of the idea that tesseracts are extremely useful for complex systems and its nice to have 30+ of them in your base managing things. However, the ability to transmit energy, liquid and items literally ANYWHERE (across dimensions etc) makes them overly powerful especially in the early/mid game. If tesseracts had a very expensive upgrade that allowed them to cross dimensions, then you would only build a select few of these, and certainly not in the early game - and yet the non-upgraded tesseracts you could still build a number of them for your complex builds and not be overly expensive. Another idea *may* be to require a power source in order to operate Perhaps a certain amount of power based on distance or dimension crossing. All of this essentially maintains a sort of cost/usefulness ratio that is consistent over the course of the game.

My $0.02
 
  • Like
Reactions: 001100110

SonOfABirch

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
981
0
0
I've joined this party late, as I've been busy with RL stuff. In the offhand chance that KL is still working on TE and open to feedback, there is one thing I'd really like to say.

In our server, we've taken out EE (no easy ender pearls till later) and agreed to not use quarries. We've also doubled the lava requirements of the Magmatic Engine. We find this much more of a balanced progression curve. Having said that, we also didn't build Tesseracts in the early or mid game at all, and found that to be a good decision, as to keep alternative techniques valid for longer.

Having said that, I did come up with what I thought would have been a great tesseract change. The idea comes from the fact that they are relatively easy to make and also extremely powerful. I would love it if the tesseracts had a maximum range of transfer. Say, 200 blocks by default. Then, if there was some kind of expensive upgrade that allowed for a range extension. This is similar to other range based devices such as the AE wireless access point. Upgrades could add +1000 blocks of distance to the tesseract as an example. Then, as an ultimate upgrade which would be very very expensive (Netherstar? Multiple Diamond Blocks?), allow for tesseracts to transmit across dimensions, like they do now.

This upgrade business is mostly born out of the idea that tesseracts are extremely useful for complex systems and its nice to have 30+ of them in your base managing things. However, the ability to transmit energy, liquid and items literally ANYWHERE (across dimensions etc) makes them overly powerful especially in the early/mid game. If tesseracts had a very expensive upgrade that allowed them to cross dimensions, then you would only build a select few of these, and certainly not in the early game - and yet the non-upgraded tesseracts you could still build a number of them for your complex builds and not be overly expensive. Another idea *may* be to require a power source in order to operate Perhaps a certain amount of power based on distance or dimension crossing. All of this essentially maintains a sort of cost/usefulness ratio that is consistent over the course of the game.

My $0.02

thats all well and good, but tesseracts are literally the least laggiest form of item/liquid transport available. Making them super expensive will make people just gravitate towards cheaper, laggier alternatives and then complain when their worlds are crawling
 
  • Like
Reactions: ThatOneSlowking

Omicron

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
2,974
0
0
Balancing powerful items by building cost is borderline unworkable in Minecraft because the amount of resources in any given world is practically infinite - even the non-renewables are so plentiful that no player will ever be able to consume them, even if he plays in one world for his entire natural life. As a result, making powerful items more expensive simply ends up making it aggravating to use, while not actually being any real hindrance to their construction and doing absolutely nothing for balance.

Example: Soul Shards in 1.4.7. Tier 5 shards were extremely broken, balance-wise. Granted, it required a massive investment of playing time (also a resource) to build. But you know what? Everyone and their grandmother had one anyway. Or ten. And every single one was just as broken.

Better balancing methods:

- Limiting power. Resisting the urge to implement gamebreaking features, or making an item with very powerful features have inherent, unmitigatable drawbacks. An example is the Flux effects of Thaumcraft 3 that you get if you screw around with powerful magic too much.

- Infrastructure and upkeep. Fuel needs, energy needs. Railcraft's chunkloaders are an example. You can litter the world with them without breaking the server, because only if you constantly invest effort to keep them supplied with enderpearls will they actually work. And beyond a certain number this becomes too much of a bother for the player to deal with, which limits the number anyone's willing to build. Plus, if the player stops playing, eventually they run out of fuel and stop taking up server resources. And the personal anchor variant even only chunkloads (and only consumes fuel) when the player is actually online. It's a great concept because it allows you to make powerful items publicily available while having them self-regulated by their very design (and also more interesting game mechanics wise than just "build, place, forget").

- Limited use. Making items consumable, non-repairable or accessible only in limited numbers at once. A concept that I've always wanted to see was some kind of "usage license" for certain things. Let's stick with tesseracts as an example: what if a server admin could grant and/or sell "tesseract licenses" to players? Each license would allow for one extra channel/frequency to be used at the same time, with any number of tesseracts connected to it. A player could buy a liquid license to bring in lava from the nether, and later maybe repurpose it to transport biofuel instead - but not both at the same time. He'd need two licenses for that.

That way the server admin could mitigate the "distance doesn't matter anymore" effect that item/power teleportation has on worlds, but still let players access the convenient and powerful tesseracts. A good admin could set his players interesting challenges ("Bring me a boss trophy from Twilight Forest to prove your worth!"), or make prices scale by number of licenses ("The first sample is free... after that, not so much"), or even require taxation ("You can have this energy tesseract license if I can hook into it to power pointless but fancy things at the world spawn hub to impress visitors").

Ideally it would be possible for the admin to control this ingame via commands or a special block. Is that maybe something that the CoFH social features could support, King Lemming? :)
 

MigukNamja

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
2,202
0
0
Recon and Omicron - I agree with you both.

I think Recon's point was not that Tesseracts are OP, period, but that they are accessible a bit too early in the game. Take the quarry OP debate, for example. It's not the quarry that's necessarily OP, but the triviality of deploying one with teleporting items and energy (whether direct or in liquid form). When you combine 11 diamonds with 8 ender pearls, which is not terribly difficult in 10 playtime hours or less (EE3 aside), you get a combo that's not balancing as designed.

I also agree that it would be nice if server admins had more fine-grained control over very powerful mechanics like chunk loading and item/liquid/energy teleporting, if only to encourage players to use the mechanics and tools available in the mid-game and to be creative with them rather than skipping straight to end-game mechanics.
 

Larandar

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
48
0
0
I've joined this party late, as I've been busy with RL stuff. In the offhand chance that KL is still working on TE and open to feedback, there is one thing I'd really like to say.

In our server, we've taken out EE (no easy ender pearls till later) and agreed to not use quarries. We've also doubled the lava requirements of the Magmatic Engine. We find this much more of a balanced progression curve. Having said that, we also didn't build Tesseracts in the early or mid game at all, and found that to be a good decision, as to keep alternative techniques valid for longer.

Having said that, I did come up with what I thought would have been a great tesseract change. The idea comes from the fact that they are relatively easy to make and also extremely powerful. I would love it if the tesseracts had a maximum range of transfer. Say, 200 blocks by default. Then, if there was some kind of expensive upgrade that allowed for a range extension. This is similar to other range based devices such as the AE wireless access point. Upgrades could add +1000 blocks of distance to the tesseract as an example. Then, as an ultimate upgrade which would be very very expensive (Netherstar? Multiple Diamond Blocks?), allow for tesseracts to transmit across dimensions, like they do now.

This upgrade business is mostly born out of the idea that tesseracts are extremely useful for complex systems and its nice to have 30+ of them in your base managing things. However, the ability to transmit energy, liquid and items literally ANYWHERE (across dimensions etc) makes them overly powerful especially in the early/mid game. If tesseracts had a very expensive upgrade that allowed them to cross dimensions, then you would only build a select few of these, and certainly not in the early game - and yet the non-upgraded tesseracts you could still build a number of them for your complex builds and not be overly expensive. Another idea *may* be to require a power source in order to operate Perhaps a certain amount of power based on distance or dimension crossing. All of this essentially maintains a sort of cost/usefulness ratio that is consistent over the course of the game.

My $0.02


I'm sorry but no. By definition tesseract are not limited by fourth dimension, in this case the parallel dimension you're in. And ender pearl is magic, so like enderman and ender pearl tesseract, who are based on ender pearl magic, have to be be powerful.

I agree it can be more expensive, but why not a need of ender pearl liquid every 64 000 transmission ?

If you whant something expensive to build and maintain, limited in space it will not be a tesseract. It can be a "bridge" and why not a "quantum bridge" ? Because I don't thing AE bridge is overpowered, it's well balanced in your way to see.
 

Yusunoha

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
6,440
-4
0
I'm sorry but no. By definition tesseract are not limited by fourth dimension, in this case the parallel dimension you're in. And ender pearl is magic, so like enderman and ender pearl tesseract, who are based on ender pearl magic, have to be be powerful.

I agree it can be more expensive, but why not a need of ender pearl liquid every 64 000 transmission ?

If you whant something expensive to build and maintain, limited in space it will not be a tesseract. It can be a "bridge" and why not a "quantum bridge" ? Because I don't thing AE bridge is overpowered, it's well balanced in your way to see.

I always thought it was weird that the only tesseract that had a costs was the power tesseract. I thought it'd be a good balance if the item and liquid tesseract also had a cost to use, but it'd be weird to use liquids or items because of that, so I thought the liquid and item tesseract would also require power to work. it would mean that with every item or liquid tesseract you'd place, you'd either have it connected to a power line, or use a power tesseract next to it
 
  • Like
Reactions: PhilHibbs

Larandar

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
48
0
0
I always thought it was weird that the only tesseract that had a costs was the power tesseract. I thought it'd be a good balance if the item and liquid tesseract also had a cost to use, but it'd be weird to use liquids or items because of that, so I thought the liquid and item tesseract would also require power to work. it would mean that with every item or liquid tesseract you'd place, you'd either have it connected to a power line, or use a power tesseract next to it

Yes, but as say in future it will be only tesseract, no fluid or item version, one to tules them all. With that power can be acquire from any tesseract from a channel and be other will only have to use passively.
 

angelnc

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
232
0
0
Yes, but as say in future it will be only tesseract, no fluid or item version, one to tules them all. With that power can be acquire from any tesseract from a channel and be other will only have to use passively.

That's pretty much what Ender IO does.
 

RavynousHunter

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
2,784
-3
1
First, they came for the quarries, but I didn't speak, because I did not own a quarry.
Then, they came for the tesseracts, but I didn't speak, because I could not make a tesseract.
 

King Lemming

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
664
0
0
Tesseracts are staying in TE, but they are being redone on the backend to support integration from lots of other aspects of the mod. There's a chance that Tesseracts themselves will be "nerfed" in the sense of having their tech-tree progression manipulated. But the efficiency part stays. Ender Frequencies might change a bit, again, to support other aspects. We'll see.
 

MigukNamja

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
2,202
0
0
I don't mind a progression curve and indeed welcome it. It provides incentive throughout the life of the world.

I'll add the only kind of progression I don't like are "solutions" to self-created problems, like a machine that does something a manual tool did to make an intermediate ingredient in a recipe, and you can't create the machine until you use the manual tools. The machine and tools otherwise serve no purpose than to add a crafting tax on clicks and time.

That's less progression and more tedium. But, TE has never been about that and I doubt that's the direction you're going.
 

Ngar

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
17
0
0
In older versions we use EnderChest or telepipes to transport energy (may be as filled lava bucket), items or liquid. This needs a bigger (laggier) build, but items to build this were cheep (eg RP2). Tesseracs are more elegant, less laggier (no lag of course), and liquid ender is much heavier to get.
Before Enderchest I remember hunderds of block long Buildcraft - pipes, to get Oil...

I like Tesseracs and I miss them :)
 

huldu

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
59
0
0
Quarries and turtles, most op things in the game but... they've been around for a long time so people are just used to them. If you increase the "cost" on something, people just find another mod/way to deal with it, that's the problem. I think Omicron put it well. I've been a big fan of IC2 for a long time but... time changes and the mod doesn't feel that great any longer I guess this is mostly because there are other mods that does things better than it does. It doesn't really add to the benefit of making things more difficult to build, it just leads to the original point of you finding other ways to do things. Then you have mods like GT that aim to make the game more into a tedious grind, but people confuse this with something being "difficult", making it a grind has nothing to do with making anything difficult. But I guess it's in the eye of the beholder.

In the end it's a sandbox game, good luck trying to balance that with new mods coming in every day(which is great, keep up the work modders!).
 

MigukNamja

New Member
Jul 29, 2019
2,202
0
0
Ngar,

That's the first release of Forge for 1.7. You can guarantee the first will not be complete or stable. Then, the mods begin the process of porting, which again could take months or never, if the mod is not being maintained. Then, there's months of working through bugs/conflicts before there is a stable release.

So, I hope TE 3 does not wait for 1.7 . That means effectively a year without TE 3.

We're going to be with 1.6 for a long time, probably most of 2014. 1.6 will almost certainly have a longer shelf life than 1.5 .
 
Status
Not open for further replies.