To design a Hardcore or Expert Mode pack

[ShneekeyTheLost]

It's not Engineer's Toolbox. (Which made me really sad.) It's making your own multi-blocks to fill holes in existing structures. Such as the Multi-block smeltery IE lacks before you get to the arc furnace.

I'm not worried about the lack of multiblock furnace. I'm planning on including Thaumcraft and Astral Sorcery, so the Infernal Furnace will be a possibility, and I'm actually giving the player the opportunity to use IE's External Heater and not have it immediately useless. While it requires a bit more coordination to fully automate multiple furnaces using it, the results should be fairly comparable. It ends up an effective multiblock structure which smelts pretty darn rapidly (remember, the heater speeds up the smelting speed per furnace, so each furnace adjacent is going to be individually faster, plus you have multiple furnaces running independently).

I'm going to start working on BWM and see if I can do it this way first. Looking over Modular Machinery, it doesn't really have what I'm looking for here for this particular pack. I'm going for a Medium-core 'vanilla++' style approach, with a steampunk vibe. Modular Machinery doesn't really give any value added to that.

I like Geolosys, I really do, and I really want to use it. But I don't think that's going to be possible. It doesn't play well with Quark's 'realistic' generation, and the json file is fairly minimal with respect to how it can be manipulated. Shame, really.

 

[Golrith]

You could include Geolosys, disable it's oregen system, then use CoFH World to spawn in it's ores instead.
When I was experimenting with a pack design ages ago, I had the same thought, used Geolosys, then started to encounter issues, then used CoFH World to spawn it.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Last time I tried external heater and Vanilla furnace smelting, it didn't work well because there were no extracting conveyors, so the furnaces would back up eventually because you had to pull with hoppers. It should work better now.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

You could include Geolosys, disable it's oregen system, then use CoFH World to spawn in it's ores instead.
When I was experimenting with a pack design ages ago, I had the same thought, used Geolosys, then started to encounter issues, then used CoFH World to spawn it.

Yea, but it won't spawn the surface deposits, which kind of defeats the purpose, and I'm not sure how Ore Prospectors would work with that. Plus, yanno, the whole 'installing a whole mod just to not use it' thing really chafes. Comes from focusing mostly on lite pack design, I guess.

Also, I've found that using Antique Atlas doesn't really take away from the experience much. You can still put marks on the map when you bring up the full map, which still show on your minimap. The only thing you are truly missing are your absolute coordinates, and I find that works to the feeling of... I don't want to say disempowerment, but more a sense that you work by guesstimate and WAG than by calculation. You feel like you are doing more flying by the seat of your pants and eyeballing things than taking exacting measurements. It helps fuel the sense of wonder at the world, which is what I wanted to capture. Especially in the modded minecraft community, I've seen a lot of burnout where 'ho hum, I've done all this before', and I'm wanting to try to bring back the sense of wonder, the sense of enjoyment that we all experienced the first time we booted up the game. And the choice of minimap is a very careful and deliberate decision to help foster that.

That's why I was trying so hard to avoid CoFH to do worldgen, in addition to ending up using four mods just to get oregen to work properly instead of just one, which seems like some sort of crime to me.

Also, for some reason, the chunk boundaries from F3+G (which most mods that display chunk boundaries seem to use) aren't displaying properly, however after ten hours of attempting to diagnose the issue, it is still a mystery to me. Part of this is exasperated by the fact that once the chunk boundaries vanish, they will never come back, even if you disable all the mods in the pack and play purely vanilla with just Forge loaded! I have NFC what is causing this, and it took some hunting to find a mod which would display them properly. Which is a shame, I was hoping Dynamic Surroundings would be my solution, but it seems not, since it also uses the F3+G debug to display chunk boundaries. It will still display light levels, at least. So there's that. And it overhauls the sounds so they are more immersive. Might just dump it, though.

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Working on using Primal Core instead of BWM to provide the early game experience I'm looking for. We'll see how this works out.

 

[Golrith]

Working on using Primal Core instead of BWM to provide the early game experience I'm looking for. We'll see how this works out.

If it's the same mod, don't use the crafting table system of hitting something with a rock. Found that quite tedius in SevTech.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

If it's the same mod, don't use the crafting table system of hitting something with a rock. Found that quite tedius in SevTech.

Thankfully, Primal Tech - responsible for the Work Stump and other things - is not the same as PrimalCore.

 

[Golrith]

Thankfully, Primal Tech - responsible for the Work Stump and other things - is not the same as PrimalCore.

That's good, got confused with Primal This and Primal That

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Having to work with the worldgen from Primal Core. It is... not as user friendly as I would like. Specifically, trying to keep it from spawning ores where I don't want it to. Geolosys is already spawning ores where I want them, including all the ores that are specific to PrimalCore (like Zinc).

But yea... NOT going to be including Primal Tech, just using Primal Core.

Sadly, BWM looks like it is getting cut. While a good idea initially, I liked the concept of transitioning from hand power to crankshaft water/air power, it just... isn't doing well. The problem is that the saw blade is fairly early in the BWM tech tree, and how you create slabs. And slabs are needed for any of the early shaft-based power generation. Which makes me a very sad panda. Basically, even if I were to replace the iron in the saw blade for bronze, it would push shaft power too far up the tech tree to be used for very long.

However, I am going to be including animal power as an option, so you can start harnessing horses to chop your wood for you fairly early on.

 

[Cptqrk]

If you are looking at using Primal Core, have you seen the addon for it called Kitsu's Forgecraft? May be what you are looking for for early game.

https://sites.google.com/view/forgecraft/

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

If you are looking at using Primal Core, have you seen the addon for it called Kitsu's Forgecraft? May be what you are looking for for early game.

https://sites.google.com/view/forgecraft/

That looks interesting, now if only they had a link to download it on their website...

 

[LordPINE]

Here's a curseforge link: https://minecraft.curseforge.com/pr...aft?gameCategorySlug=mc-mods&projectID=226013

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Re-introduced BWM. Changed the saw recipe to require knapped flint from Primal Core. Now the tech tree looks a LOT better. Things are starting to come together for the early game.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

Oh wow! Cool, good choice

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Oh wow! Cool, good choice

PrimalCore also introduced a fairly primitive (and low durability) hand saw that can also make slabs, so it isn't as absolutely critical to build a BWM sawmill to progress within its tech tree. Currently playtesting, I may just leave the BWM saw alone now, and let it be iron-tier automation for later.

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

PrimalCore also introduced a fairly primitive (and low durability) hand saw that can also make slabs, so it isn't as absolutely critical to build a BWM sawmill to progress within its tech tree. Currently playtesting, I may just leave the BWM saw alone now, and let it be iron-tier automation for later.

Ah I see! That works too actually, that makes even more sense really!

Not going to lie, I know there's a few people watching this eagerly, and excited about what you're doing - myself included!

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Hmmm... so Primal Core has 'Bog Iron' which you can turn into iron nuggets pretty early on. It's not mass iron, but it is surface-level iron with a fairly easy (if time intensive) means of generation. Disable bog iron generation, or just shrug it off? I'll need to see precisely what you can make with it and see if it is a shortcut/exploit or if I don't need to worry about it. Generally, it's going to be Steel that will be the electrical power gateway, so without the blast furnace, it still won't be able to bypass a whole tier... I might allow it.

 

[KingTriaxx]

Maybe have it turn into Pig Iron from Tinkers? Give it a unique recipe for turning into a pick head or sword blade. That gives a slightly more powerful weapon to smooth out the power curve, without jumping iron tier. (Plus free bacon.)

 

[GamerwithnoGame]

It might be a neat thing to have. Like Railcraft's poor ores, you're unlikely to be swimming in the stuff because of them, but they could help. I didn't actually realise Bog Iron was a real thing until now!

 

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Using Kitsu's Forgecraft for early smelting and making of bronze in a crucible. Makes sense to me, not too difficult to set up (just requires a furnace and some adobe which is just mud and thatch for the crucible). I may push this back, requiring something to make the adobe with, as this is just a little bit *too* early-game for my taste.

Might leave in Kitsu's Forgecraft for the early production of steel, since it is a manual process which is kind of a pain in the arse to do, and you do it one piece at a time.

Once you use this process to set up your initial bronze and steel, you can then produce the Immersive Engineering machines to make it run faster and in batches.

I'm also going to see if I can use the Kitsu's Forgecraft forged tool head pieces to count as TiCon head pieces so that you literally forge your tool head for metal tool heads. This would be an awesome way to avoid the Smeltery entirely.