ABO still exists. Additional Pipes still exists. Just use gates which listen to redstone signals. Counters? Hmm.
What would YOU change about BuildCraft?
- Thread starter asiekierka
- Start date
ABO still exists. Additional Pipes still exists. Just use gates which listen to redstone signals. Counters? Hmm.
Currently, you can use just a gate action. Note: Currently.
Ah, OK great - thanks Asie!
I suggest the counters thing just because it could make specific deployment of items through pipes that bit easier, without needing to rely on things like ProjectRed stuff or RedNet; I don't know if it would be of use to many people, but may be of interest?
Ah, OK great - thanks Asie!
I suggest the counters thing just because it could make specific deployment of items through pipes that bit easier, without needing to rely on things like ProjectRed stuff or RedNet; I don't know if it would be of use to many people, but may be of interest?
Here's a fun fact: Emzuli pipes were added specifically for that reason. You can have four presets of items or lists in one of them, controlled via pipe wire. (Also, BC pipes, with BCCompat, support RedLogic (6.3.x+, off by default until 7.0) and BluePower (7.0.x+) bundled cabling.)
EDIT: Oh, you mean specific AMOUNT of items. Uh. That's... Uh.
You can also set up a gate on an iron pipe to send things in a specific direction. Which technically means you could set it up to change the pipe to sending things back down the same path?
I'm not as heavy as BuildCraft user, nor was I during its height, but there are a few things that come to mind :
* Documentation. I don't expect a Lexica BuildCraftia, but there are more tools available for in-game documentation now than there were before. Even if you don't include the full recipes on paper, at least giving people an idea of what things exist and what don't would help a huge amount. A list of the engine types and fuels the handle, and lists of each type of pipe and their primary characteristic, and one of the major machines could come in a fairly small page count. Useful both for people coming to the mod fresh, and for those who're returning to see the new stuff. It's possible to overdo in-game documentation and just swamp people (Reika's mods!) but I think you're way too far on the other end of the spectrum right now. As a short-term fix, expanding on tooltips alone could help with the more specialized piping like Emerald/Lazuli/Dialazuli.
This is a particularly severe issue for BuildCraft because the online wikis range heavily in quality, and in many cases are out-of-date.
* Smoother progression curve. Kinesis pipes already handle this reasonably well, but item pipes and especially item pipe engines don't really follow a normal progression path. There are very few blocks that can produce enough material to need or even want Stirling or Combustion Engines attached to wooden item pipes, and most (all but Enderchest?) of those auto-eject items. As a result, item pipe engines go directly from wooden engines to the autarchic gates, and the lowest-level Autarchic Gate requires serious power and diamond infrastructure, and Ender Pearls that BuildCraft doesn't make any easier to gather. Adding upgrades to wooden engines that allow for more compact builds before the laser table would probably smooth this out, even if they can't do any logic or internal redstone power.
As a lesser matter, there also aren't many BuildCraft machines that match the fluid pipe curve as its established, either in BuildCraft alone or in the BC + RC + Forestry ecosystem. Devices tend to take much less than stone fluid pipes can handle, or require multiple gold pipe hookups. It might be intended to operate like the Kinesis progression curve, where higher-tier piping makes up a backbone for a spoke-based distribution system, but the lack of feedback for an overpressured fluid pipe means it's harder to troubleshoot than Kinesis pipes.
* Quick-and-dirty fluid transport. Oil's really hard to make into a usable form in BuildCraft without a portable tank equivalent, because unless the oil patch is very close to a base or quarry location it's simply too much of a pain to exploit it. It is much, much easier and more effective to move a batch of charcoal than to refine a few buckets of Fuel. Other mods include fluid transport, but many overrun base BuildCraft functionality (ThermalExpansion most obviously) at the same time.
* Documentation. I don't expect a Lexica BuildCraftia, but there are more tools available for in-game documentation now than there were before. Even if you don't include the full recipes on paper, at least giving people an idea of what things exist and what don't would help a huge amount. A list of the engine types and fuels the handle, and lists of each type of pipe and their primary characteristic, and one of the major machines could come in a fairly small page count. Useful both for people coming to the mod fresh, and for those who're returning to see the new stuff. It's possible to overdo in-game documentation and just swamp people (Reika's mods!) but I think you're way too far on the other end of the spectrum right now. As a short-term fix, expanding on tooltips alone could help with the more specialized piping like Emerald/Lazuli/Dialazuli.
This is a particularly severe issue for BuildCraft because the online wikis range heavily in quality, and in many cases are out-of-date.
* Smoother progression curve. Kinesis pipes already handle this reasonably well, but item pipes and especially item pipe engines don't really follow a normal progression path. There are very few blocks that can produce enough material to need or even want Stirling or Combustion Engines attached to wooden item pipes, and most (all but Enderchest?) of those auto-eject items. As a result, item pipe engines go directly from wooden engines to the autarchic gates, and the lowest-level Autarchic Gate requires serious power and diamond infrastructure, and Ender Pearls that BuildCraft doesn't make any easier to gather. Adding upgrades to wooden engines that allow for more compact builds before the laser table would probably smooth this out, even if they can't do any logic or internal redstone power.
As a lesser matter, there also aren't many BuildCraft machines that match the fluid pipe curve as its established, either in BuildCraft alone or in the BC + RC + Forestry ecosystem. Devices tend to take much less than stone fluid pipes can handle, or require multiple gold pipe hookups. It might be intended to operate like the Kinesis progression curve, where higher-tier piping makes up a backbone for a spoke-based distribution system, but the lack of feedback for an overpressured fluid pipe means it's harder to troubleshoot than Kinesis pipes.
* Quick-and-dirty fluid transport. Oil's really hard to make into a usable form in BuildCraft without a portable tank equivalent, because unless the oil patch is very close to a base or quarry location it's simply too much of a pain to exploit it. It is much, much easier and more effective to move a batch of charcoal than to refine a few buckets of Fuel. Other mods include fluid transport, but many overrun base BuildCraft functionality (ThermalExpansion most obviously) at the same time.
1. We're working on it.
2. Nice note - keep in mind, though, that redstone engines go faster as they heat up. If you want a low-tier autarchic gate, you can use a stirling engine powered on a stack of paper - though I might buff it a bit in 7.
3. Even nicer note. Have you tried RailCraft?
Point, and one option I'd not have thought about. They still need redstone signal and their own block space, though, right? I was thinking something that'd merge the wooden engine and the wooden pipe into a single block, perhaps at significant metal or redstone cost. It's not so much the autarchic gate's power level that people need while progressing, so much as the space, especially since it's hard to change a base layout later if you build around three-block-per-wooden-pipe stuff.
A bit, though it's one of those mods that it's easy to overlook a lot of content. Assume you're referencing Tank Carts? They aren't a terrible option, and they're one I'd not thought about in the BC ecosystem. Like wax capsules they depend on a pretty hefty amount of infrastructure, although unlike them at least they're pretty easy to redeploy for other purposes. Will have to try it out.
I always connected Kinesis pipes/TE equivalent's to my extraction pipes. (Can't recall if this is a default behavior.) Then run a single Stirling engine down them, completely separate from the main power source. So then it sucks items out of an entire bank of furnaces or what have you. More power than a redstone engine, less expensive than an autarchic.
Not too much infrastructure. Mostly iron and redstone and the coal coke you'll make when you generate creosote. Don't even require steel unless you make a train. If you use the nether creatively, you can even avoid most booster tracks.
Not too much infrastructure. Mostly iron and redstone and the coal coke you'll make when you generate creosote. Don't even require steel unless you make a train. If you use the nether creatively, you can even avoid most booster tracks.
Hum, I'm surprised I can't seem to find this information anywhere on mod-buildcraft.com either. Seems like they're working on that as well.
From looking into the code it's at least:
AppleMilkTea, BluePower, Carpenter's Blocks, Thermal Dynamics, EnderIO, Forestry, Iron Chest, MFR, Minetweaker, Forge Multipart, NEI, RedLogic, ProjectRed, Waila, Witchery.
But I probably missed some.
The pipes look a bit too gradient-y, IMO. And I still think 32x textures are a bad default. (Fine in 32x texture packs, but out-of-place in vanilla Minecraft)Also, experiments!
I seem to recall a bug back from vanilla 1.4 or earlier where items near the edge of the loaded area wouldn't tick, so wouldn't increment their despawn time counter, but pipes in the same area would still spit out items. That's the only issue I've actually experienced with item entities causing lag.
I don't know what would happen if you fixed this (making them tick), and a pipe shoots an item across the loaded area border. Items crossing into unloaded chunks and dropped by pipes should probably just be deleted.
Just to be extra-annoying, replace the coal ore with the water, and fill in caves with water, maybe?
That way it's more of a last resort thing that "uses up" that area (like a quarry for oil, although quarries aren't a last resort). You'd probably want to run it far away from civilization.
On the other hand, that would make griefing easy, so if you do that, make sure it's configurable.
(Yes, I just triple-posted, because I wanted to reply to three entirely separate posts)
I think pipes could use the added detail, theres not much you can do with a few pixels.
You can't do anything nice in 8 pixels. We tried. All pipe mods I've seen use 32x textures to get an effective resolution of 16x on the pipe. What we plan to do in the final version is what CyanideX calls Hybrid (16x texture with tiny 32x details) - we simply can't make them look good on 8x pipes.
What would be IDEAL is if you can use gates to read certain amounts of items in it, so instead of only being able to read "is there cobble or not", you also have the option to read "is there 3 cobble in the chest", meaning that it will not activate if there are less than 3.