What would YOU change about BuildCraft?

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GreenZombie

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is it possible to add the option of having the filler drop the blocks it mines when clearing, but add a higher cost?
you could open the GUI and select a checkbox and the filler would drop the blocks it mines.

Actually. When it comes to the filler. This has been the deal breaker for me. I can't use it for building projects until it returns the blocks harvested.
 
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ScottulusMaximus

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1. Make the filler much much faster when clearing(still rather slow when attached to a Redstone Energy Cell) and keep it NOT dropping blocks, it's there to clear areas fast and not mine. You want blocks go manual.
2. Sort out the flying red blocks, absolutely eats my FPS.
3. Get rid of facades and use micro-blocks. 5 different pipe covering systems in Infinity(for example) is just retarded(blah blah blah performance problems, I'm sure the 5 devs and LexManos could've sorted this issue if they worked together and not just did their own thing)...
4. Gates, get the gates working for everything possible, advanced gates that can detect different parts of an inventory(input, output, slag etc on machines), wireless gates, engine control gates that'll activate when an energy storage is below a certain % and shut off when above a certain %, just more gates;)
5. Add more things that make MC come "alive" such as the quarry arm or wavy arms on the refinery... Things that move, things that blink etc etc. The first time I saw a quarry arm I sat and watched it for 30min thinking it was the coolest thing ever.
 
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asiekierka

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1. Make the filler much much faster when clearing(still rather slow when attached to a Redstone Energy Cell) and keep it NOT dropping blocks, it's there to clear areas fast and not mine. You want blocks go manual.
2. Sort out the flying red blocks, absolutely eats my FPS.
3. Get rid of facades and use micro-blocks. 5 different pipe covering systems in Infinity(for example) is just retarded(blah blah blah performance problems, I'm sure the 5 devs and LexManos could've sorted this issue if they worked together and not just did their own thing)...
4. Gates, get the gates working for everything possible, advanced gates that can detect different parts of an inventory(input, output, slag etc on machines), wireless gates, engine control gates that'll activate when an energy storage is below a certain % and shut off when above a certain %, just more gates;)
5. Add more things that make MC come "alive" such as the quarry arm or wavy arms on the refinery... Things that move, things that blink etc etc. The first time I saw a quarry arm I sat and watched it for 30min thinking it was the coolest thing ever.

1. It already does one block per tick tops
2. Fixed in 6.4.5 coming out soon
3. No. We support Immibis Microblocks and cannot support FMP without a rewrite which would add another dependency. Besides, phased facades that change look on pipe wire signal is something FMP or Immibis would make hard, if not impossible (added in 6.0.x).

The issue with microblocks is that each system makes different tradeoffs - FMP trades code complexity for power, IM trades power for automatic patching and integration, etc.
4. Too advanced is too far. SFM fills that niche, not us.
5. Working on it!
 

ScottulusMaximus

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1. It already does one block per tick tops
2. Fixed in 6.4.5 coming out soon
3. No. We support Immibis Microblocks and cannot support FMP without a rewrite which would add another dependency. Besides, phased facades that change look on pipe wire signal is something FMP or Immibis would make hard, if not impossible (added in 6.0.x).

The issue with microblocks is that each system makes different tradeoffs - FMP trades code complexity for power, IM trades power for automatic patching and integration, etc.
4. Too advanced is too far. SFM fills that niche, not us.
5. Working on it!

1. Ok understood, maybe then drop it's power use so you can get the 1 block per tick when being powered by a Redstone Cell, would like a filler to be mobile and very fast. The Filler's only job is to make a tedious job easier, make it easy to use.
2. Schweet
3. No comment :/
4. You should fill this niche. People don't want to learn SFM, give them an option to use something intuitive and more "minecrafty"
5. Schweet
 

GreenZombie

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1. Make the filler much much faster when clearing(still rather slow when attached to a Redstone Energy Cell) and keep it NOT dropping blocks, it's there to clear areas fast and not mine. You want blocks go manual.
.

I (would) use the filler to tear down buildings as well as build things up. I would like my materials back. tyvm.

If I could change just one thing about buildcraft, it would be to remove the (petty) focus on trivialities like balance being the driving focus for deciding how items like the filler are allowed to work, and instead consider how to add features that would help builders on projects that are many hundreds of blocks on a side.

Can robots roam 100's of meters? Make inventories much (much) larger. Improve area selection to something more usable than markers (that is not that awful 3rd person view that I saw Space Toad demonstrate for the urbanist) - which CAN mark areas larger than 64m per side.
 
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asiekierka

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1. Ok understood, maybe then drop it's power use so you can get the 1 block per tick when being powered by a Redstone Cell, would like a filler to be mobile and very fast. The Filler's only job is to make a tedious job easier, make it easy to use.
2. Schweet
3. No comment :/
4. You should fill this niche. People don't want to learn SFM, give them an option to use something intuitive and more "minecrafty"
5. Schweet

1. It depends on the hardness of the block you're breaking - but you're right, it eats a bit too much power ATM.
3. We are not forcing FMP on our users, not in a thousand suns.
4. If you add tons of functions, you get feature creep and it stops being intuitive.
 

asiekierka

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I (would) use the filler to tear down buildings as well as build things up. I would like my materials back. tyvm.

If I could change just one thing about buildcraft, it would be to remove the (petty) focus on trivialities like balance being the driving focus for deciding how items like the filler are allowed to work, and instead consider how to add features that would help builders on projects that are many hundreds of blocks on a side.

Can robots roam 100's of meters? Make inventories much (much) larger. Improve area selection to something more usable than markers (that is not that awful 3rd person view that I saw Space Toad demonstrate for the urbanist) - which CAN mark areas larger than 64m per side.

Balance is important to keeping gameplay exciting and interesting, but it should not be overdone. Robots can roam as far as your chunkloaders let you. Inventories are more than large enough. Bigger markers require that BuildCraft becomes more optimized first.
 

ScottulusMaximus

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1. It depends on the hardness of the block you're breaking - but you're right, it eats a bit too much power ATM.
3. We are not forcing FMP on our users, not in a thousand suns.
4. If you add tons of functions, you get feature creep and it stops being intuitive.

1. Ok cool, slight adjustment needed and I'm happy.
3. Haha not the source of the "No comment", but leave it here or you'll get ranted at.
4. It can stay intuitive, the main thing I've always wanted is a gate ability that says if greater than x% but less than y%(for both energy and items) emit signal.
 

GreenZombie

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Balance is important to keeping gameplay exciting and interesting, but it should not be overdone.

Then figure out how to balance the filler such that I get my stuff back when I use it to dismantle structures. Please.

Robots can roam as far as your chunkloaders let you.

Nice. I still havn't tried them as the base items are too flawed (for my purposes) to even think they might work.

Inventories are more than large enough.

They are not. The filler for example has a 9x3 inventory that holds 27 stacks of material. For reference the WTC towers were 64x64m, meaning that when I built a replica, I needed a full 64 stacks of material just to fill in the floor of one floor.

Bigger markers require that BuildCraft becomes more optimized first.

I built, as a base, a "city" that was 200m on a side. And a base that was set in a 64x64m high rise. Buildcraft was frustratingly close to being able to help, but petty limitations ultimately made it useless for its stated purpose: Building.
 
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asiekierka

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They are not. The filler for example has a 9x3 inventory that holds 27 stacks of material. For reference the WTC towers were 64x64m, meaning that when I built a replica, I needed a full 64 stacks of material just to fill in the floor of one floor.

I built, as a base, a "city" that was 200m on a side. And a base that was set in a 64x64m high rise. Buildcraft was frustratingly close to being able to help, but petty limitations ultimately made it useless for its stated purpose: Building.

1. What are pipes used for?
2. Petty? I'd rather have petty limitations than massive lag issues; QuarryPlus adds what you want, but people have complained about its stability for YEARS.
 

GreenZombie

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1. What are pipes used for?
2. Petty? I'd rather have petty limitations than massive lag issues; QuarryPlus adds what you want, but people have complained about its stability for YEARS.

The size limitation of 64 per side I could actually work with. Just break the work up into small units.

The "petty" limitations refer to the descision for fillers to not drop harvested blocks, the limitations of the MJ power system, especially WRT portable batteries, and the expectation that "pipes" are how to deal with a requirement for more than 27 stacks of material.

In the context of buildcraft being a set of tools to assist minecraft builders:

The filler would, ideally, be a single block that could be moved easilly around a building site to tear down existing structures, and rapidly construct floors, platforms, fill volumes etc.

With the adoption of RF at least a tesseract from TE can be used to easilly power a filler that is moved often. However, the lack of (silk touch) enabled retrieval of existing building blocks renders the tear down use... useless. And supplying additional materials - via pipes - to a filler is unworkable - 100's of meters of additional pipe would potentially have to be run per filler move, and as the pipes don't have a logistic function, and gates can't compute blocks "in flight", it seems a lot of effort to run the pipe wires and signalling required to keep a filler topped up.

All of which means, ironically, that buildcraft can at the moment only practically be used for very small / limited building projects.

I am going to experiment with the urbanist today and see if it can help me build at the scale I would like to. But, urbanist investigations pending, at the moment buildcraft makes me sad as it does 90% of what is needed in a "build"-craft mod. But then stops short due to shortsighted concerns and technical limitations.
 
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ratchet freak

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Allow people to put the machine block in the middle of the area they defined instead of forcing you to put it in the corner.

The default quarry has the machine in the middle but any other size requires the block to be facing the corner.
 

glepet1962

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I love Open Blocks' Building Guide and use it often because I like to build non square stuff. I'd like to see Buildcraft have something similar only take it farther by having the robots actually place the blocks for you. The more robots employed the faster your structure gets built. Attach designated inventories that the robots draw from and have a gui that you can set different block types per levels.
Seems more a wishlist item but I think that would be cool.
 

asiekierka

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Allow people to put the machine block in the middle of the area they defined instead of forcing you to put it in the corner.

The default quarry has the machine in the middle but any other size requires the block to be facing the corner.

Done.

I love Open Blocks' Building Guide and use it often because I like to build non square stuff. I'd like to see Buildcraft have something similar only take it farther by having the robots actually place the blocks for you. The more robots employed the faster your structure gets built. Attach designated inventories that the robots draw from and have a gui that you can set different block types per levels.
Seems more a wishlist item but I think that would be cool.

We already have Builder robots which build schematics in exactly this way.
 
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Kerazi

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I love Open Blocks' Building Guide and use it often because I like to build non square stuff. I'd like to see Buildcraft have something similar only take it farther by having the robots actually place the blocks for you. The more robots employed the faster your structure gets built. Attach designated inventories that the robots draw from and have a gui that you can set different block types per levels.
Seems more a wishlist item but I think that would be cool.
It would be cool to create a template from the Builder's Guide. Like Shift-Clicking a Builder's Guide with a Blank Template would store the current Builder's Guide configuration in the Template. Although I think one problem with the Builder's Guide is many shapes appear above and below the guide, so a "dome" is really a sphere.

Can Builders/Robots be configured to only replace air blocks?
 

epidemia78

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I dont see how it could be so hard to fix up the pipe textures. Ive looked at them, they are just lines. Lines that look like they were drawn in mspaint. Ya dont even need any artistic skills to fix that. And the diagonal lines look especially bad. Personally I think pipes are just too small to add enough detail to with 16x16 textures but its possible to make them look okay-ish like Thermal Dynamics. And I assume it was Spacetoad who came up with the original design and animation of the engines. We need more of that. Maybe higher outputting engines arent needed with vanilla buildcraft but thats a niche audience right there. You could implement higher tier engines that require Thermal Expansion materials to build so that we could have animated engine rooms without suffering with a measly output. Or more uses for the refinery to produce high tier fuels that can compete with the other guys. I guess you need to put Buildcraft through the refinery once or twice.

More cross mod interaction would be nice too. Let the refinery be used as an alternative to making some other mod's materials like gelid cryotheum or whatever.
 

asiekierka

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I dont see how it could be so hard to fix up the pipe textures. Ive looked at them, they are just lines. Lines that look like they were drawn in mspaint. Ya dont even need any artistic skills to fix that. And the diagonal lines look especially bad. Personally I think pipes are just too small to add enough detail to with 16x16 textures but its possible to make them look okay-ish like Thermal Dynamics. And I assume it was Spacetoad who came up with the original design and animation of the engines. We need more of that. Maybe higher outputting engines arent needed with vanilla buildcraft but thats a niche audience right there. You could implement higher tier engines that require Thermal Expansion materials to build so that we could have animated engine rooms without suffering with a measly output. Or more uses for the refinery to produce high tier fuels that can compete with the other guys. I guess you need to put Buildcraft through the refinery once or twice.

More cross mod interaction would be nice too. Let the refinery be used as an alternative to making some other mod's materials like gelid cryotheum or whatever.


1. The pipe textures? They either come off looking like Thermal Dynamics ducts or the lines become too thick and it's harder to see the items in them.
2. That "niche audience" is pretty much the main audience I'm targetting.
3. I'd rather not add recipes for other mod things to BC itself, that'd affect their balance.
 

epidemia78

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1. The pipe textures? They either come off looking like Thermal Dynamics ducts or the lines become too thick and it's harder to see the items in them.
2. That "niche audience" is pretty much the main audience I'm targetting.
3. I'd rather not add recipes for other mod things to BC itself, that'd affect their balance.


Well, you did say you wanted to see what the other side would do if they were in charge. I would work to integrate it into the whole TE/AE/Tinkers/Thaumcraft world. Those mods are absolutely essential in my opinion. I would work at making BC essential as well.
 

Golrith

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Not too much that could be done with the textures, for a transparent pipe you need to trace the outline, doesn't leave much room for artistic creativity without obscuring the transparent areas.

I personally use a 64x texture from Battered Old Stuff for the pipes textures, and scale wise, they still take up the same out of texture space, just there's more detail. Perhaps scale up the pipe textures to 32x and add some shading/noise so the pipes are not just a solid single colour?

Example from BoS:
pipeItemsStone.png


One difference is that some of the diagonals angles have been rotated, guess that's to make better tiling?

If you want to use it, I just whipped this up from scratch at 32x (not tested in game, it's the stone pipe texture) using same design principles that BoS uses
pipeItemsStone32.png
 

abculatter_2

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I would undo the transfer to RF. I liked MJ, it was a power system that required at least a little thought and planning...
RF is just too simple.