Tinkerer's construct balance ideas

[Antice]

1 iron surrounded by 4 coal = steel dust that can be cooked into 2 steel ingots. those can be smelted for casting too.

 

[Flipz]

1 iron surrounded by 4 coal = steel dust that can be cooked into 2 steel ingots. those can be smelted for casting too.

That's from MFFS, not Tinker's Construct.

 

[SonOfABirch]

Dear MDiyo, ignore this thread.

 

[Azzanine]

This is not entirely true.
Would it be easy to repair? Quite so.
But it would have an extremely low durability and mining speed. You'd have to repair this hammer every few minutes if you were doing a lot of mining.
So in retrospect, this hammer is worthless. It's just a short term solution. You're better off making it out of good materials and slapping a couple auto-repairs on it with some obsidian plates.

Well don't forget I did say it would be enhanced by diamond which are not as awesome rare (I probably wouldn't put an emerald on, but you could if you came in to some good early game villager trades). so right off the bat you have 500+ durability multiply that by 2 from a green slime handle and you have a pretty sturdy tool.
Also stone is actually rather fast thanks to it's passive stonebound trait, the more the tool gets damaged the faster it mines. When it gets about 66% durability it's like it's gained a haste modifier worth of speed.
I was on my server in it's testing phase of it's own mod pack I took a hammer made of Netherack to the nether with a standard tool station to repair and hand quarried a 6x6 chunk wide that was 15 blocks deep area in 2 or so hours. The admin saw what I was doing and how much nether ore (you can potentially triple that shit) I had and he decided "yeah, that has to go..." I begrudgingly agreed.

Also you do know you can put one lapis on and have rank 3 fortune it takes a long while to train it but you can potentially get fortune 3 for 1 lapis. It just depends on your level of patience I normally put like a stack on to get at least fortune 1 to start off but I never put on the full amount unless of course I have barrels full of lapis.

Stone man quarry hammers make things hella easy.

 

[Poppycocks]

So after playing around with Tinkerer's Construct a little, I'm a bit thrown by balance.

TC tools can be made from better materials, giving built-in efficiency.
Many have built-in unbreaking as well.

While you cannot toss them at enchanting tables, you can craft (guaranteed) things like silk touch, or improved efficiency; you can add fortune, etc.

And things you can't get in vanilla: Auto smelt.

And then there's self repair (moss), or work-station repair (more materials); no XP cost to make, upgrade, or maintain. The tool never goes poof.

With no downside.

For balance reasons, can the default number of "extra slots" on tools be dropped to either 1 (normal play), or zero (ultra hard mode play); extra slots would come from paper, thaumium, or adding mineral blocks to buy slots.

Simply put: There is no reason to make a vanilla tool at all with this mod installed.
That alone tells me that there is a serious balance problem.

===

Equally, the 2 to 1 bonus of using the smeltery results in no real reason to ever use a vanilla furnace, except to make one. Simply put, that bonus is too high. No, I don't know what to do for balancing that.

Have no fear young man!

I've heard mDiyo is pretty much leaving the scene, exit stage left! Your balance will be preserved!

You can make a thread about dart craft now.

 

[SpitefulFox]

I've heard mDiyo is pretty much leaving the scene, exit stage left! Your balance will be preserved!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! D:

 

[keybounce]

If we were comparing Vanilla to JUST TiC, you have a point, but we're not. This is a modpack. That means there's a million and oe ways to do everything. And in this modpack, it's trivial to set up an auto-enchanter and via Cow spawner, knocking out the books and the enchanting problems in one go.

Alright, lets stop there.

I'm looking at the balance of TiC.
It happens that I'm looking at UHS.
I am not looking at direwolf20, or other "OMG automate it all" pack.

The 12-15 diamond cost you predicted was just shot down to 3 since we're not going to waste that many diamonds since we now have books.

And this is why I don't like those packs: they destroy balance completely. It's no longer even close to the same game, it just uses the same engine. It is almost creative with a thin veneer of survival.

This compared to the infrastructure need just to get metal TiC tools is rather insignificant. Add the cost to go hunt down some cobalt in the nether, which is extremely difficult now with heatsear spiders and nitro creepers in adition to lava lakes, and there you go, even as can be.

Did you just say that setting up one of those auto-enchant thingies is almost trivial?

Now of course you're wondering "Why even bother with TiC if it's as hard as you say it is?". Here's the punch line, the system is better. Tools don't magically vanish in thin air.

I disagree that the system is better.
Tools that need to be repaired to be maintained, fine. Vanilla is that way.
Tools that can be completely broken, and still repaired? Instead of needing to be repaired while there's still something left to repair?

You will generate materials in play; repair that consumes materials is a fair balance.

TiC repairs with very little materials (or so it seems so far), and even then you only need to use the head material to repair. Now, for weapons, that starts fine; for the rest?

And since you never have to use the enchantment materials, or the special ability materials of the handles/plates/etc, it means you aren't really spending the item's construction to fix it.

Then there's moss...

The big thing that TiC takes out from the Vanilla tool system is the random enchanting because once you add random anything to a game, it instantly loses any sense of strategy or skill to acquire and just becomes a cut above crap.

I agree that the vanilla enchanting system is less than ideal.
As I mentioned, if you are going for a general collection of books to combine, it's not that bad, you just make a gigantic library of books and combine the books together.
Or, if you're going for a reasonable set of enchantments, you make a bunch of tools, have some waste, and combine what you get. But you've got a bigger expense and wasted XP/tools that way.

Vanilla enchantment mechanics are the worst thing ever imho. it is only designed to reward standing afk at a stupid mob grinder to grind levels so you can play the wheel of enchantments. in the hopes that something good comes out of it sooner rather than later (it tends to be later).

In my SMP server, I don't use mob grinders at all, don't permit them.

When I'm out and about, I generally collect 30 levels in a 60-90 minute play session.

Prior to books/anvils? I'd agree.
Since then? Expensive, repetitive, sure. But no longer roulette.

<grind>
I don't want that as part of my minecraft experience. hence i love TiC, I love the way rewards are given for effort. it takes effort to get those 100 lapis, not too much effort, but not too little either. I enjoy the fact that i can infinitely repair my favourite pick. the one i have spent time and effort, as well as some careful considerations into in order to make it what i want it to be.

The "get it once, keep it forever" is the whole issue. Vanilla gives you a 10% bonus for repairing, but you still have to keep buying it. Enchanted items keep getting more and more expensive each time until you can't.

You've got a couple things sorely wrong...
Vanilla tools are cheap as dirt to get, once you get a couple of villagers one Diamond pickaxe == 2 stacks of sugarcane.

Very few people I've heard of call the vanilla trading system fair, balanced, or fun. Many times you will have villagers with no trade that you want.

If you want to set up something where you have dozens and dozens of villagers in a breeding system to abuse the heck out of doors, then you might have a point here. But frankly, it's usually easier to get three diamonds than the trades needed to turn sugarcane into the specific diamond tool that you want.

Have you actually tried that type of system? I've seen videos / pictures of gigantic setups that people have done, so I know it's doable, but it's not a trivial thing to set up and get working. Granted, the trading post (just found it in the UHS pack) makes things much easier.

Next, Reinforced != Unbreaking. A Diamond pickaxe with Unbreaking 3 lasts 4 times as long as usual. A Cobalt pickaxe with Reinforced 2 only lasts about 1.3 times as long as usual.

This I did not know.
I actually was under the impression that reinforced was equal to unbreaking.
I'm glad to know that reinforced is significantly less than unbreaking.

Every time you repair a TC tool, it's repair costs goes up. For example, I had a stone hammer. I used it all the time and I figured that it would be dirt cheap to repair too. After the first time it broke I used 1 cobble to get it to full, the second 2, the third 4, the fourth, 7, the fifth 11, etc.

Ahh. I have only once had one of my own TiC tools break. I have done some repairs on other TiC tools (I'm on a 4 person server), and never seen any real increase in repair cost.

If the costs of repairing TiC tools -- when you do not let them get down to broken -- does go up, that's actually a good balance that I have not been aware of. But I suspect the rate of cost increase is currently too low.

Now for Vanilla tools, if I create a Diamond pickaxe and rename it before I enchant it, it's repair cost will never go up. Furthermore, you need 450 Lapis in order to max out Luck, so I don't know where you got that 100 figure from.

Wha?? Repair costs are supposed to go up by 2 levels every time through the anvil in all cases. Report that to Mojang as a bug.

As for that pick: it shows lapis 100/100, and fortune 3. Apparently, it can go up faster than the "450 worst case" if you are lucky. I did not make this pick; I inherited it when he made something better.

And that is from just one of your posts, if all of them is filled with the same kind of crap I think it's safe to say that you have no idea of what mod you're talking about, but I won't make any rash assumptions. I'm just saying that you need to be a lot more informed about what you're saying before you say it otherwise you'll never get anywhere.

Very possibly.

I have read all the in-game documentation I can find.
I have found two different "beginning/just starting" wiki's, full of stub pages; one here on FTB, one elsewhere with official mDiyo blessing. http://tinkers-construct.wikia.com/wiki/Tinkers'_Construct_Wiki

Can I say that I understand everything about the mod? No. There's a lot that I can't find. There's a lot that's not documented unless I take to reverse engineering with a spreadsheet to figure out what's happening in the code.

So I'm wrong with reinforced being worse than unbreaking, and unbreaking is a fairly common/cheap vanilla enchantment. Alright, so there's good cause for saying that maintenance should be cheaper in TiC than in vanilla; I still think it's too cheap. So the vanilla enchantment system is designed to keep going up in cost, and require getting a good supply of enchanted books until you've got a reasonably complete library. This means it takes a long time to get started, and as you go through the enchantments you want, you'll get a bunch of others that you might as well play with; versus TiC's "instantly exactly what you want" at no significant cost. (100 lapis is not significant; 450 is starting to get noticeable. 50 redstone is nothing.)

If there is balance here, it's that at the same time you don't spend XP on books, you don't get XP from smelting.

I, personally, agree with your point that Tinker's Construct has some balance issues from a certain perspective, but the reason why everyone is tearing you apart is because you don't have a reasonable amount of knowledge of what you're talking about in order to convey your idea.

So the concern of balance isn't unreasonable.

Do I know the mod inside out? No.
Am I learning more from this discussion? Yes.

Is it out of balance? You just said so yourself.

Are TiCo tools more powerful than vanilla tools? Eventually... sure! But they are also something else which is far more important... they are more fun.

I absolutely despise, with a fiery passion, the vanilla enchanting system. It is kludgy, random, and just adds grinding time. It doesn't make it impossible to make the tool you really want, it just makes you spend more time at your mob grinder to do it. This is very boring and tedious.

Fun? Sure. I have completely given up any sense of pretending that there is balance in a modpack/server where we are flying around on chocolate powered harnesses with golems automatically harvesting barrel after barrel of farm supplies; where the whole danger of releasing too much flux into the atmosphere is completely ignored because the wasted leaf energy from the cocoa is just tossed into phials and stuffed into a shelf. Not to mention the work I did growing silverwood after silverwood to make a pure node big enough to gobble up that other node ... we started with a 5th person who was a terrible thaumergist, knowingly tossing waste into the crucible because it was faster/more convenient. (Apparently, a milk bucket is never a good choice to use because you can always get those essences in a cleaner form... guess what he did?). I'm at the point where combat is only "if I want to", even with a modpack designed to be "Russian roulette with a loaded gun."

Is it fun to just "Wham!" and knock out a 3x3 tunnel with no work, autosmelting as I go? Sure. Do I have a sense of accomplishment? No.

Is it fun to single-shot creatures with an arrow? Someone I'm playing with just demonstrated doing 20 points of damage to everything he tried with one arrow shot each. I don't know if he can single-shot zombies with their damage reduction, but if not, I'm sure that the arrows can be boosted another 2 points to kill them as well. I suspect it will be fun; I haven't had a chance to do it yet.

Balanced? A sense of accomplishment? A sense of pride in what I'm doing? A sense of actually conquering it?

I've already addressed the enchanting table/anvil.

TiCo causes you to expend a lot of resources to get precisely the enchants you want. 450 lapis, for example, is NOT trivial, particularly in the early and mid game environment. It is also hotly contested in usage with IC2's Tier 2-3 equipment, which also consume large quantities of Lapis.

AHH...

So TiC is balanced in certain modpacks where those same materials are in heavy use elsewhere.

Lapis's only consumption in vanilla is for decoration. You might think that 450 is a lot; it is. But 100 isn't that much (what? 3 vanilla deposits? 4?), and redstone is even cheaper. Nether quartz ... I can't comment on it, really. This modpack is the first time I've played 152, and from what I've seen so far, NQ is very common once you start getting it. (Our old 147 nether is kinda big ... 152's need to go far, far away will be a pain.)

Mossy stone hasn't been a problem since our first jungle temple. We've got a surplus of it on our main server. We've got a ton of it on this UHS server.

On the other hand, sitting at your mob grinder for several hours will, eventually, produce a looting book. In terms of actual resources, TiCo is far more expensive. Where TiCo is better, however, is in time management. You don't need to AFK for several hours to get things done.

I have never mob grindered or AFK'd. When I concentrate on XP, I get it fairly quickly (60-90 minutes for 30 levels). Once I realized that large libraries of cheap books combined was a better way, the real issue is just the need for lots and lots of books plus combining them.

Books stink, by the way (No significant tool bonus; no categorization; no control; have to make a complete library). Except that trying to start with a good tool and then book on top of that is a slightly wasteful combination. Cheaper overall (fewer trips through the anvil; material bonus on the tool; potential to start with 2+ enchantments instead of only one).

The whole "some special enchants you can only get by books" doesn't help, really.

Furthermore, TiCo permits you to build precisely the tool you want for the situation at hand. There are thousands of possibilities when it comes to tools. Which ones you produce depends on the resources available to you. If you don't have enough clay to make a smeltry, you're going to be stuck with non-metal tools. In that case, it is actually far more restrictive than vanilla. You can't make any iron tools without a smeltry, it just won't work. Which means a fairly substantive amount of clay to build one. Stacks of the stuff. You'll also need Lava to power the damn thing, meaning you'll need to already have some iron in the form of buckets.

Err ...

I'm still able to make vanilla iron tools. Was doing so at first as supplemental tools because I can repair those on the road. Eventually I found out how cheap a basic table was and how to make one; then I realized I could repair TiC tools while out. Not needing a smeltery to repair stone/iron headed items no matter how exotic the rest of the tool was ...

Clay ... yea, Vanilla clay is borked. That's hardly a balance when you can make iron stuff from the beginning. Point is, toolset #2 is TiC, and you only use vanilla tools at game start if you don't have easy vanilla clay.

Lava? I've never had trouble getting lava once I've gotten some iron in vanilla.

The mechanic of making patterns, making molds by pouring your material around the item shape you are wanting to cast, the mechanics and possible automation of the smeltry itself... it's an interesting and entertaining process which doesn't have too many boring steps.

Wait. Automation?

That bleeping smeltery is nothing but a pain to operate. Automation?

We are getting lots of ore nuggets that we can't smelt or do anything with.
There is no way to see how much that casting basin is short of being a full block.
There is no "nugget cast", and no easy way to get the residue out of a smeltery.

We've had that thing jammed for several real hours before we could get enough stuff to clear it; eventually, we got enough oreberry bushes growing so that we can get up to an ingot and clear it out.

Interesting process? No boring steps? I'm at the point of being so bleeped at the mis-match between 64 items per stack and 81 berries per block. I'm constantly making math errors in calculating how much stuff to toss into the furnace. That I can't just take 9 ingots and put it into a block, that I have to wait for it to smelt, that when I do toss 81 ingots in, it takes bleeping long time to pour them all out.

And that's with a 9 layer, a 9x9 smeltery. Getting it that big was actually the biggest time saver we had -- at first, we had a single layer and had to constantly pour ingot casts out all the time, and then resmelt the ingots to make blocks. Heck, at 4 layers the berries were a real pain to work with.

Between berries being 1/9th of an ingot, and parts being 1/2 of an ingot, and those not matching, with nothing matching a vanilla stack of 64, with no ingot cast, with no way to smelt ingots other than vanilla's gold ingot, and the whole "have to completely finish working with one before starting working with another", and the whole "This deliberately takes much longer than the vanilla furnace or crafting table" ... and you call that "an interesting and entertaining process which doesn't have too many boring steps", and complain about having to AFK at a grinder when I'm AFK'ing at a smeltery?

That's on top of the whole issue of dealing with golem-tended farms of stuff that wants to hurt you, moving a good supply of stuff from the golem output chests to the smeltery's waiting chest, figuring out which stuff to put in all the time ...

You want to complain about sitting at a blaze farm for 15 minutes as being boring? How about the tedium of spending 20-30 minutes doing repetitive work to make mineral blocks and tend to this thing.

Once you gain the ability to do something with it, the process of doing it is fairly straightforward. It doesn't punish you by requiring a dozen tools just to do something like make wire.

What??? Where does that come from?

Wire: Toss some dust on the ground, instant wire.

Want to protect it from water? Much harder.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think that's the point of TiC dude... It's designed to render "vanilla" tools obsolete.

It's not really a serious balance issue TBH.

Rendering vanilla tools obsolete is not a serious balance issue?
Then we have different concepts of balance.

Also your furnace comment leads me to think you are trolling... You can't get a smeltery without the ability to smelt the grout and the smeltery only handles metals, I mean try and fill it with cobble to get smooth stone, it won't work.

Alright, now you're being a nitpick. I'm talking about the 2 for 1 bonus on ores. Yes, I use charcoal; yes, I use smooth stone for decoration (stone brick blocks, stone slabs) and redstone. But having an autosmelt hammer ... I haven't needed to use that furnace except for charcoal when we're low on the real stuff, and we've got a barrel with well over 100 stacks of smooth stone. (We barely got up to 3 times compressed cobblestone ... frankly, we don't collect much of it anymore unless we're doing precision mining, and are probably going to see just how much can fit into a large barrel soon enough.)

Yes, that autosmelt did require killing some blazes. It took some time, but now we've got a good potion room, plenty of brewing stands, and blaze rods. Now it's all about the 3x3 hammer smelt.
(That's page two ... time to turn the page)

 

[Loufmier]

IC2 bronze has a 40% bonus in durability for all tools/armor, last time I checked. As for mining level, I'm fairly sure it can mine the same things iron can.

i didnt say anything about bronze`s durability bonus, i was talking about it`s availability. in IC2 you need macerator to create bronze, while to create iron you just need to smelt ore.

 

[RedBoss]

i didnt say anything about bronze`s durability bonus, i was talking about it`s availability. in IC2 you need macerator to create bronze, while to create iron you just need to smelt ore.

Since when? I've always made bronze in the crafting grid

 

[Loufmier]

Since when? I've always made bronze in the crafting grid

since it`s Forestry`s recipe?

 

[Ember Quill]

Since when? I've always made bronze in the crafting grid

Yeah, and that's not even a TiC recipe. It's from Forestry.

 

[Antice]

//-snipped wallO'text-//

I want to address some of your complaints about the smeltery.
first off, why in the heck are you smelting ore berries in the smeltery???? there is no gain compared to just turning them into nuggets in a vanilla furnace. (except for a slight speed increase since you smelt them in batches of 9), but it's not like fuel is expensive or anything. an entirely vanilla setup can be made with hoppers and furnace that will keep melting berries until it runs out of fuel. ore berries turn into nuggets on a 1 to 1 basis in the furnace. just craft them together into ingots later on in batches of up to 64 ingot at a time if you want.
secondly, TiC has storage tanks for liquid metal. check the ingame book for the recipe. (hint: 5 glass + 4 charred bricks). this allows storing excess metals for later. it can then be pumped into other types of tanks as well, and even be transported in buckets if there is enough of it. or if you don't care about saving that half nugget of gold or whatever got left behind just break the tank and it will be gone. there are no excuse for spending hours trying to clean out the smeltery. resources are not really scarce, and oreberries are practically free resources once you have an auto harvesting setup going.

secondly. i recommend never making tall smelteries. put a chute on top instead, or even a vanilla hopper, to keep feeding the smeltery until it's liquid storage is full. no need to sit around and wait for it. wooden pipes and redstone engines can empty basins and casts, just put a pulsed redstone signal on the smeltery drain to keep the metal flowing, then set up individual smelteries for each metal. that would have been a much better use of all that seared brick.

and lastly, if you are really worried about getting every last scrap of resource out of your setup as cheaply as possible, set it up with multiple drains, and smelt only one type of material at a time. you then just switch witch drain you use for emptying it out depending on metal being worked at the time.

 

[Ember Quill]

secondly. i recommend never making tall smelteries. put a chute on top instead, or even a vanilla hopper, to keep feeding the smeltery until it's liquid storage is full. no need to sit around and wait for it. wooden pipes and redstone engines can empty basins and casts, just put a pulsed redstone signal on the smeltery drain to keep the metal flowing, then set up individual smelteries for each metal. that would have been a much better use of all that seared brick.

Vanilla hoppers can be used to empty out basins and casting tables too. Just put a hopper underneath each basin/table, set up in a line that leads to a chest (make sure the hoppers are pointed the right way). All of the resulting tool parts, ingots, and blocks will be picked up by the hoppers barely a moment after they solidify, and sent into the chest.

 

[keybounce]

... To get a pick equally fast to a diamond efficiency 5 pickaxe you need a cobalt pickaxe head with 3 modifier slots used up for haste. For a shovel its even more hilarious as you pretty much need 5 slots used up for haste.

<Sigh>. Why, why, does everyone assume that you are comparing the top-of-the-line vanilla tool that most likely won't be used?

So you have a cobalt (nether material, speed 11, reinforced 2) (or ardite, speed 8, stonebound 2) head, thaumium handle, paper binding; that's 5 slots. Or instead of ardite (speed 8, nether material, stonebound 2), you use alumite (speed 8, reinforced 2) Diamond and gold, 6 slots. 3 slots for redstone, and your speed is done. Or 2 slots for redstone, and keep it at low durability for the stonebound bonus of ardite. Now add in a diamond or emerald for durability (not sure which would give that tool more durability), some lapis for fortune. One (or two) slot left.

And ... when all is said and done, what's your point?

Why assume that an E5 pick is what you want, anyways?

Near a haste beacon, sure, an e5 diamond pick mines instantly. But E3 or e4 mines as fast as you walk, and the truth is when I'm doing mass mining with e4 diamond picks I'm making errors and digging out stuff I did not want to dig.

And if you want mass mining, the pick-axe is the wrong tool. Compare that E5 vanilla diamond pick to a hammer.

Now if you factor in that reinforced is no where near as powerful your really not getting that good a deal.

Your vanilla pick will need to be repaired with levels, and constantly cost more. Eventually you'll have to remake it.
Your iron-headed hammer with modifiers only needs iron to repair.
And even an alumite head is fairly easy to get the parts for (obsidian is the only thing you have to look for, aluminum and iron are too common to worry about.)

Still think vanilla is the better deal?

Additionally, silk touch is overrated. Its a good thing its so rare in vanilla because of how mandatory fortune 3 is.

Silk touch's primary use is decoration. It has no business being a rare level 30; it should be a level 15.

The point of silk touch:
1. Moving ender chests (most powerful/abuseable function).
2. Getting grass for transplanting.
3. Getting Mycelium from a mushroom biome for transplanting.
4. Collecting ice to make stackable water, or for making skid pads.
5. Collecting ore blocks to move them for decorating something, or moving redstone ore blocks for some sort of block detector/odd lighting system.
Abilities 2-5 don't qualify as being worth level 30. Abilities 2-3 can be done on a shovel.

That it hurts you when mining some ores doesn't help it either.

Ah, finally, we arrive at the point where TiC's downsite shows. Yes, yes there is one. TiC tools don't last as long as vanilla tools

Wha??? Are you thinking of vanilla diamond tools? Iron tools seem about the same (I haven't paid exact attention, there's too much potential variation), and you certainly can get multiple-thousand durability TiC tools.

The reason is obvious: Reinforced is weak compared to unbreaking. So to counter that we get to place moss on a tool that will repair it over time.

No, you toss it at a repair station. Yes, you can use moss. I did, at first; now, unless the head is manyullym, I say why bother.

But! With heavy use, 1 moss is not enough, even with reinforced 2/3. We already established that we need 3 of our slots for haste, 1 for looting which only leaves 1 for moss. It also means we used a block of gold, a diamond and a nether star!!!.

Or thaumium, or paper. Nether star is just pointless -- don't bother.

So eventually you will have to go to base to repair the pick or give it time to repair by using another. On the topic of repairing your TiC tools, you need a lot more materials to repair a TiC tool then you do a vanilla tool. Vanilla you simply slap on 3 diamonds or in case of a shovel another shovel (aka 1 diamond).

No, with a vanilla enchanted tool, you need the diamonds, plus an anvil, plus levels.

With TiC you need to slap on up to 9 ingots to repair your tool. Not a big deal with cheap materials like iron/steel. But cobalt/manylian? That's going to be quite some nether adventures to keep that one up.

So far, no problem. Granted, the cobalt headed one has moss, but as I said, plenty of space left.

And here we get to vanilla balance, you can easily maintain your tools when mining. You get more exp then it costs to repair your tools (and thats ignoring mob grinders!). You get way more diamonds then it costs to repair your tools. Ontop, diamonds are only used for making and repairing tools and armor in vanilla. So realy, vanilla tools are not hard to maintain at all....

Except for the constantly increasing level cost, and the hard cap that makes it unrepairable.

And yes, you will get the XP to repair it; but that means you're not putting that XP into your book library.

And then we have the most important part: fun! TiC is fun to play around with all the possibility's, what strengths will you take? At wich tradeoffs? There are lots of tool combinations with different strengths and weaknesses giving you choices!!!
While vanilla is not fun at all, you either get lucky with your first enchant or your stuck grinding for more XP ontop of there being only 1 best possible tool.

TiC does have choices. But there still gets down to "best". You don't have just "one ultimate", but you do have only a few potential choices. No one will use cactus on the "best pick", for example; while a good argument can be made for iron or stone as the head, the rest will be of only a very few possible choices

And ... TiC has it's own type of grind.

If anything, vanilla tools are cheap. Cheap to get and cheap to maintain. They just require a stupid RNG mechanic that's bypassed with boring mob grinders... TiC tools are a lot more expensive, but also guaranteed and a lot more fun to find the right tool for you.

So don't play with mob grinders. I don't. It's an RNG mechanic, yes. It's also a probability mechanic if you toss large numbers at it, and the book/anvil system lets you do just that. Suddenly you are no longer going for luck, you are going for relative distribution. (Granted, that won't work unless you are working at the level where all the enchantments you want have a base form. Silk touch is still pointlessly a pain.)

So here are some of my current tools. Note that these are not "optimized", there are some early learning tools here:

1. "Pwnhammer": 8167 durability. Cobalt level. Approximately 12.67 base speed. Moss, 100 redstone, 10 knockback, 450 lapis, lava. Stonebound, Thaumic, Reinforced 3, auto-repair, haste, knockback, luck, auto-smelt, fortune 3.

This was the tool that taught us that base speed is not just the head.
This is my inherited hammer.

2. "Glassmaker": 2467 durability. Cobalt level. 7.5 speed. Thaumic, Stonebound, Reinforced 3, auto smelt, auto repair. It's an excavator, and we use it on the desert around us. (shared tool)

3. Unnamed Cobalt pick: Speed 11, Durability 2000, has moss, two unused slots. Don't need anything more for a simple pick.

4. Unnamed stone/iron excavator. Speed 8, 50 redstone, stonebound, reinforced 1. Works just fine, stone cheap to repair.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Alright, lets stop there.

I'm looking at the balance of TiC.
It happens that I'm looking at UHS.
I am not looking at direwolf20, or other "OMG automate it all" pack.

Whoa. Full stop. Right here.

In case you hadn't noticed, this is the FTB Forum, in the FTB sub-forum, in the Mod Discussion forum dedicated to talking about mods as they pertain to FTB mod packs in general. All of which are what you ascribe as "OMG automate it all" packs. If that's not what you are talking about, then you might want to consider a different forum, because that is literally what this forum was created to talk about.

Everything else is either repeating what you have already said, beating up on straw men, hyperbole so strained it makes <insert political party in opposition to your views here>'s arguments sound reasoned, and in general manage to miss the whole point.

Most of us are here because that 'sense of accomplishment' is long gone. We've all done it before. We've 'beaten' vanilla minecraft. I've personally dropped the EnderDragon with no enchantments or potions on the fourth day (mostly because it took so damn long to farm enderpearls before Saice showed me a MUCH more effective, vanilla, method). There is already zero sense of accomplishment in vanilla Minecraft. That's not what most of us are looking for.

I want a mod that is fun. I don't want to have to grind for hours to get the enchants I want. By the way, half an hour to get level 30? Dude, you need to get some better grinder designs. Either that, or you need to go light up the caves in your area leeching spawns. I'm talking an entire corridor of double chests full of books. I'm talking about needing an entire base's storage to hold all the potions. Been there. Done that. Got bored.

The thing is... none of that is a challenge. Once you get your grinder going, any eight year old (or at least MY eight year old) can whack at skeleton/zombie/spider feets until the number reaches 30, then enchant another book. It is, however, time consuming and tedious. Some of us have this thing called a 'job' and a 'family' which also takes up quite a bit of time. I don't have twenty hours to devote to grinding books or diamond gear enchants anymore.

You want a challenge? TiCo is not going to be your cuppa, because challenge is not built into the design consideration of the mod. If you want a challenge, I suggest Better Than Wolves or Terra-Firma Craft. They will most certainly give you more of a challenge than you are used to. Or, if you just want to stick with vanilla, you can try Vech's Super Hostile maps. For you, I'd suggest Waking Up. It's not a 'tutorial map' like, say, Kaizo Caverns or Inferno Mines is.

tl;dr version: If you aren't talking about mod packs, then why are you talking on a forum dedicated to mod packs?

 

[Hydra]

You want a challenge? TiCo is not going to be your cuppa, because challenge is not built into the design consideration of the mod. If you want a challenge, I suggest Better Than Wolves or Terra-Firma Craft. They will most certainly give you more of a challenge than you are used to. Or, if you just want to stick with vanilla, you can try Vech's Super Hostile maps. For you, I'd suggest Waking Up. It's not a 'tutorial map' like, say, Kaizo Caverns or Inferno Mines is.

Every time you call those tedious timesinks a 'challenge' a gamedesigner kills a kitten. Please mind the kittens.

 

[SpitefulFox]

Every time you call those tedious timesinks a 'challenge' a gamedesigner kills a kitten. Please mind the kittens.

Actually, I'd consider both mods to be actually "challenging" as opposed to just resource sinking. They make things more difficult by changing how gameplay actually works instead of just adding arbitrary steps and costs to crafting like a certain IC2 add-on out there.

 

[Symmetryc]

About Villager Trading: Yes, villager trading is that easy, you can build this insanely small thing to get infinite villagers, which in turn means infinite diamond tools/gear/etc.:

Spoiler

About Vanilla Repairing: The renaming thing has been a long - standing thing in Vanilla minecraft and many people have done it, I doubt it's a bug, but I could be wrong. Even if they were to take it way, you could still infinitely repair your Vanilla tools by finding a priest villager with an enchanting trade and do it when your tool is at low durability. The returned tool will be at full.

About UHS: TC is the most underpowered mod in UHS. Seriously, if they were to take it out it wouldn't even have natural health regeneration off...

 

[SonOfABirch]

As for that pick: it shows lapis 100/100, and fortune 3. Apparently, it can go up faster than the "450 worst case" if you are lucky. I did not make this pick; I inherited it when he made something better.

Lol you're using a really old version of TiCo and crying about balance. It's kinda pathetic.

 

[Democretes]

I'm looking at the balance of TiC.
It happens that I'm looking at UHS.
I am not looking at direwolf20, or other "OMG automate it all" pack.

By the same concepts you consider "balance", and by that I mean having a better system to replace one that didn't work too well, all mods would be unbalanced. They all add ore doubling, invicibility, flight, undestructable weapons, ridiculously powerful weapons, etc., etc.

What you considering "unbalanced" is taking away the grind and random luck that most people hate, and that's why they're here, to use these mods to eliminate that.

And the smeltery, I'll admit, is less than ideal. It's not the greatest structure to exist, but it's main purpose is to smelt metals into tool parts. It's what most would describe as an infastructure. It's a requirement to proceed further into the TiC tech tree.

And because it just so happens that this is forum.feed-the-beast.com, and that just so happens to be forums for a modpack, taking into consideration all the other tools in the game that don't break, TiC is pretty balanced. A diamond drill that can be recharged over and over for infinite uses with no major costs after the initial (and can also be enchanted I might add). Dartcraft, which adds tools and armor which basically make the beginning game fly by? You can argue that one, that Dartcraft is unbalanced here, because compared to other mods, it's slightly OP. TiC compared to other mods is just a new way to do things. No more using the same tool, you've got something new to do. That is the big point here. This is a modpack, you can say you're only focusing on the direct balance on vanilla for TiC, but that hardly applies to a modpack forum.