Thoughts on the Quarry

[AlanEsh]

Everything that saves you time is "op".

Thank god for the Quarry; I've played MC long enough that I get no joy from mining by hand. There are other much more interesting things I want to do with many mods, and having a solid energy and resource base makes it fun to explore them.

 

[Darkstone]

Everything that saves you time is "op".

Thank god for the Quarry; I've played MC long enough that I get no joy from mining by hand. There are other much more interesting things I want to do with many mods, and having a solid energy and resource base makes it fun to explore them.

Amen to that !!

 

[cynric]

Chunkloaders are a workaround to a technical problem in MC. Are you in the world? Then everything you built should be running. Is it a server? Everything should be running all the time. Time doesn't stop because you walked across the street.

True, however I also don't get paid for 8 hours of work if I'm only there 5 minutes a day. Real life comparisons break down the instant you enter the game world. As such, vanilla and mods are balanced around the game world, where stuff stops when you don't look at them, the sun comes up 10 seconds after you went to bed at dusk and trees grow to full size a few minutes after you planted them.

There probably needs to be a server wide setting how fast the fire and forget mechanics work. Still kinda hard to balance because some people might be playing most of the day while others only log on once a week for an hour.

 

[Emasher]

Quarries themselves are pretty well balanced. As others have said, it's features added by other mods that really make them overpowered, if anything does. With just BuildCraft, you need a lot of infrastructure to get a quarry going, especially to obtain the oil you need to power one.

Mining can be fun in the early game, especially with TC's newer tools, but it soon becomes boring. Automating it, and allowing the player to concentrate on just building more interesting fun stuff makes the game a lot less boring. there are of course, more complicated ways of automating it, using frame replacement mods like Redstone in Motion, or just frames if you're still on 1.4.7, but to be honest, I don't want to build one of those every playthrough; I'd rather come up with new stuff, and thr quarry is a reliable way to get the resources required to do just that.

In the real world, you don't just go out an mine when you need resources. You buy what you need from a company that specializes in producing said resources. You spend your existing resources to get the ones you need. A quarry isn't much different from this. You spend your resources (energy) to have minerals extracted that you need to do other things (in the real world, things that you have a comparative advantage in, in Minecraft, more likely things that are more fun). Almost all automation in minecraft can be thought of this way. I think what's most important is that the amount of resources you have to put into automating something is appropriate for what you get out of it.

 

[Recon]

That's fine (spending energy to get mining done for you) except for the bit where energy is infinite, due to lava from the nether. Magmatic engines are REAL cheap, and do a very good job at providing all the energy you need.

And also your comment "With just BuildCraft..." - Exactly. But who uses "just" buildcraft?

For people with all the mods of FTB, maybe the quarry just needs to come around a bit later in the game. Or maybe the magmatic engine needs a nerf, I don't know. I'm still brainstorming, as I don't have a solution yet.

 

[Pawz]

I think "OP" is only in regards to how well the quarry fits into the general progression of the FTB pack. On its own it's fine - it has two major disadvantages which are namely pumping massive amounts of blocks, and requiring lots of power. However, once you chuck it into the mix with Thermal Expansion and Applied Energistics, it basically takes those two disadvantages away - at the point where you're ready to spend the diamonds on a quarry, you'll have tesseracts...

At which point it occurs to me that perhaps it's the easy access to tesseracts that's the issue. And you get easy access to 'em by using.. the Minium stone to get ender pearls.

So, perhaps the root cause of the imbalance / out of order progression is EE3 instead?

 

[PierceSG]

Maybe because all mods are "OP"(or time efficient) when in comparison with the vanilla experience?

 

[Pawz]

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.

 

[Golrith]

Try without using EE3. Suddenly getting those ender pearls is a lot more time consuming and risky. No longer can you spam tesseracts everywhere, at least not until you've defeated the dragon, or worked out a mob farm that will get you ender pearls. Both of which require more time and resources then a minimum stone.

 

[Recon]

Yeah we are now planning on removing EE3 from the game, since it adds nothing of value really, except for the ability to make: Ink, Minium Stones, and Clay.
We use the Hostile Drops mod, which lets you craft items normally dropped by a hostile mob. The recipes seem pretty well balanced, and their recipe for ender pearls require 4 gunpowder, 4 redstone and a diamond. This makes tesseracts cost 5 diamonds each instead of 1. Seems much more appropriate.

We'll also be adding a mod which lets you modify recipes or add your own. Mystcraft requires a LOT of ink, so it makes sense to add a recipe for it that doesn't require squid hunting.
http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/recipemanager/

 

[Riuga]

Yeah we are now planning on removing EE3 from the game, since it adds nothing of value really, except for the ability to make: Ink, Minium Stones, and Clay.
We use the Hostile Drops mod, which lets you craft items normally dropped by a hostile mob. The recipes seem pretty well balanced, and their recipe for ender pearls require 4 gunpowder, 4 redstone and a diamond. This makes tesseracts cost 5 diamonds each instead of 1. Seems much more appropriate.

We'll also be adding a mod which lets you modify recipes or add your own. Mystcraft requires a LOT of ink, so it makes sense to add a recipe for it that doesn't require squid hunting.
http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/recipemanager/

I use UUM To get my first 15 enderpearls.

No need for extra mods

MFR Lets you farm ink sacs from squid in a tank.

Ihave 1500 Clay now from sludge boiler alone.

 

[Recon]

I haven't checked out the sludge boiler yet.
How do you get a squid in a tank?
UUM is kind of late game to be getting ender pearls.

 

[Golrith]

I use the energy manipulator mod instead of EE3, heavily configured for tech based mods. (A diamond is worth 78k, and enderpearl is 79k (or 8 iron), there's 10% loss in the conversion, and the crafting recipe requires shiny ingots, Invar, lead, ME chest, MFR emerald upgrade and a filled redstone energy frame). It's been working fairly well on the omega dawn server.

Sludge boiler does give you a lot of resources, especially as it supports mods, generating peat, tainted soil, quicksand, etc. It's all random, but weighted for clay production.

 

[Riuga]

I haven't checked out the sludge boiler yet.
How do you get a squid in a tank?
UUM is kind of late game to be getting ender pearls.

Capture it in a safari net.

UUM takes a while per piece early game, but I managed. After the first 15, then the End is open.

 

[Niseg]

About quarries and its costs. Moving 1 block costs 20-123MJ and digging one block takes 60Mj. this means the cost per block is 80-183MJ . The cost depend on how "charged" the quarry is if you limit its power to a minimum it will mine at a speed of 2 blocks per second at maximum it's 5.2 blocks per second. I once calculated that it takes about 14 hours at full power for a quarry to mine 64x64x64 area. The energy use of that operation (not including the frame) is about 48 million MJ . At the slowest speed it will mine that area in 36.5~ hours and take about 0.5 million MJ.

The main disadvantage of the quarry is that it takes quiet a few layers for it to yield anything useful. A mining well turtle script will generally be more efficient,faster and yield ores immediately despite the recent mining well nerf . The only problem with turtles is a lack of a reliable session persistence method which make quarries the preferred method to mine on servers .

Recently power generation have been buffed significantly especially in the form of Dart-Craft which make a lot of mod obsolete because it's so OP . Both buildcraft and thermal expansion got rid of energy loss on the energy pipes . The energy tesseract cost was reduced to 20 % from 25%. AE TE steam engines got buffed from 2mj to 4 mj/t. The steve cart was made more complicated which made it less popular while MFR gained more popularity.

There is always an issue with ftb that the more useful mods gain popularity but you can generally limit yourself by disabling mods or limiting yourself. I think that disabling certain recipies on servers will balance it . I think that if you still want quarries you can nerf power generation in the configs in one way or another.

I've recently stumbled upon a mod called quarries plus which is crazy overpowered but it's advantage is that you can configure it well in the config file. You can set how much it cost to move the head and dig and the effect of "efficiency" (if you set it to 1 it will have no effect) and/fortune. you can add that mod and disable the enchantment transfer block and then hit the parameters with a big nerf. I'm still not sure if you can nerf energy storage which effects mining rate but it can probably be done.

 

[Riuga]

About quarries and its costs. Moving 1 block costs 20-123MJ and digging one block takes 60Mj. this means the cost per block is 80-183MJ . The cost depend on how "charged" the quarry is if you limit its power to a minimum it will mine at a speed of 2 blocks per second at maximum it's 5.2 blocks per second. I once calculated that it takes about 14 hours at full power for a quarry to mine 64x64x64 area. The energy use of that operation (not including the frame) is about 48 million MJ . At the slowest speed it will mine that area in 36.5~ hours and take about 0.5 million MJ.

The main disadvantage of the quarry is that it takes quiet a few layers for it to yield anything useful. A mining well turtle script will generally be more efficient,faster and yield ores immediately despite the recent mining well nerf . The only problem with turtles is a lack of a reliable session persistence method which make quarries the preferred method to mine on servers .

Recently power generation have been buffed significantly especially in the form of Dart-Craft which make a lot of mod obsolete because it's so OP . Both buildcraft and thermal expansion got rid of energy loss on the energy pipes . The energy tesseract cost was reduced to 20 % from 25%. AE steam engines got buffed from 2mj to 4 mj/t. The steve cart was made more complicated which made it less popular while MFR gained more popularity.

There is always an issue with ftb that the more useful mods gain popularity but you can generally limit yourself by disabling mods or limiting yourself. I think that disabling certain recipies on servers will balance it . I think that if you still want quarries you can nerf power generation in the configs in one way or another.

I've recently stumbled upon a mod called quarries plus which is crazy overpowered but it's advantage is that you can configure it well in the config file. You can set how much it cost to move the head and dig and the effect of "efficiency" (if you set it to 1 it will have no effect) and/fortune. you can add that mod and disable the enchantment transfer block and then hit the parameters with a big nerf. I'm still not sure if you can nerf energy storage which effects mining rate but it can probably be done.

AE has Steam Engines? D:

What witchcraft is this.

 

[Niseg]

AE has Steam Engines? D:

What witchcraft is this.

oops TE fixed

 

[Emasher]

That's fine (spending energy to get mining done for you) except for the bit where energy is infinite, due to lava from the nether. Magmatic engines are REAL cheap, and do a very good job at providing all the energy you need.

And also your comment "With just BuildCraft..." - Exactly. But who uses "just" buildcraft?

For people with all the mods of FTB, maybe the quarry just needs to come around a bit later in the game. Or maybe the magmatic engine needs a nerf, I don't know. I'm still brainstorming, as I don't have a solution yet.

I actually did run through with just BuildCraft and IC^2 back in 1.2.5 (as well as Flan's mod to scout out oil). It's really quite a different experience than the packs most people play these days.

I don't think it's magmatic engine's themself that are really OP, but the ability to teleport resources basically for free once you've found a few ender pearls. Without teleportation, you actually have to build up real infrastructure in order to automate stuff, which changes the game a lot.

 

[Recon]

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.

 

[Recon]

Regarding squid ink harvesting, I tried it on a test world just now and I have to say its ridiculous how much ink you get. Since the machine stores energy, it keeps harvesting ink at a very rapid pace even after you cut the power. You get stacks. Poor creature. lol.
Safari net works great too getting it in there of course.

I tried the sludge boiler with 15 or so buckets of sludge to test. I got every kind if dirt, mud and sand except clay. Probably need to run it longer, but it may take a lot of sludge to produce it.