Thoughts on the Quarry

[MigukNamja]

Yeah that confirms our decision to go with ender pearls costing a diamond instead of just 4 iron as can be made with a minium stone. Delaying tesseracts until you can afford to spend 10 diamonds for a pair of them, will balance out the progression we think.

Agreed. 4 iron for an Ender Peal is ridiculously cheap and it doesn't take long at all to get 9 Minimum Shards. Early game, I'm lucky if I can kill an Enderman with Iron Armor and an Iron Sword, and that's if I'm lucky enough to find one, lucky enough for them to stick around long enough to be killed, and lucky they don't kill me before I kill them.

As it is, once I have a quarry up and running, I can make Tesseracts a 64-stack at a time.

So, yeah, 4 iron is way too cheap.

 

[MigukNamja]

Nah.. there is a definite progression in FTB, and it's actually quite good. It's just that the fully automated options for mass mining (eg, Steve's carts) take quite a lot more configuration and setup than a simple quarry.

It's just that EE3 with the Minium stone makes it dead easy to whip out tesseracts, which make it even easier to power a quarry and feed the items back into your inventory.

Agreed. EE3 also makes it too easy to acquire blaze rods, which makes the alternative to Tesseracts - color-coded Ender Storage Ender Chests and Ender Tanks - also too cheap. A BC quarry by itself is perfectly balanced. What is not balanced is how easy it is to support the (remote) energy and item infrastructure that effectively trivializes them.

An early-to-mid-game quarry that requires local power and local item processing would be more balanced, IMHO, and a more sensical progression, i.e.:

1. diggy diggy hole
2. diggy diggy hole better/faster
3. 1st quarry with limited power and crude item processing
4. 2nd and subsequent quarry with more power and better item processing
5. ...
6. Nth quarry with Tesseracts/EnderStorage powered by (near) infinite energy and (near) infinite item processing

If that occurred, I think you'd see a more linear progression. As it is, once the 1st quarry is built with 4 Tesseracts to support it. 62x62, let it run overnight, and a (too) huge a leap forwards has been made.

*note Liquid/Item Tesseracts into Magmatic/Steam/etc.,. Engines also trivializes quarry power generation

 

[Azzanine]

Agreed. 4 iron for an Ender Peal is ridiculously cheap and it doesn't take long at all to get 9 Minimum Shards. Early game, I'm lucky if I can kill an Enderman with Iron Armor and an Iron Sword, and that's if I'm lucky enough to find one, lucky enough for them to stick around long enough to be killed, and lucky they don't kill me before I kill them.

As it is, once I have a quarry up and running, I can make Tesseracts a 64-stack at a time.

So, yeah, 4 iron is way too cheap.

build yourself an alcove with no more then 2 blocks of space and the enderman will never touch you. if you are out in the field just make one out of dirt.

 

[Recon]

Pawz and I highly recommend a mod called Hostile Drops as a replacement for Equivalent Exchange. Specifically, Hostile Drops creates recipes or recipe paths for you to craft all the stuff that is normally dropped by hostile mobs. In particular, blaze rods, ender pearls, gunpowder and nether stars are the most notable recipes. Removing EE3 makes acquiring ender pearls very difficult in standard FTB, but with Hostile Drops you can make one with a diamond, four redstone and four gunpowder (gunpoweder can also be crafted using coal and redstone). The mod's recipes are not cheap for these items, so its still worth killing those mobs for their drops. Most notable is the Nether Star which is completely impossible to get for some people who just can't kill a wither.

With Hostile Drops installed, we don't need EE3 at all. All the recipes which EE3 provides are redundant with other acquisition methods. We never liked how it removed the need to go hunting for items from the game (finding a particular flower etc). But when it comes to Ender Pearls specifically, HD gives a great alternative which maintains the balance of the game while keeping it from being too difficult to get yourself a quantity of these items.