I see your point. As long as an MFE has one single pixel on it other than the dot for power, ill be happy.
or did they get rid of mfes? lol
Not sure, the entire power changes in IC2 totally confuse me. I think a MFSE is equivalent to the old MFSU.
I have been giving a lot of thought about what you need in a tech environment. Being a sandbox, it can be done, if you can find someone to make those changes. Needs a bit more then config tweaks.
Firstly, by restricting yourself to IC2 with GregTech for your needs, you are depriving yourself of other mods and the fun that can be gained from them. Most of those mods are designed around the minecraft simple recipes approach, a few crafting steps, and not overly expensive. While some of these mods have configs that allow for slightly more expensive recipes, they are not expensive enough for your tastes.
The base problem then is the excessive resources you can gain with vanilla, so it's vanilla that needs to change, not the mods.
Let's start with Ores. Did you know, in default minecraft, there's a maximum potential of 160 Iron Ore blocks per chunk and 320 Coal Ore blocks? Thats a lot, but due to how the generation works, you'll get around 50-75% of that in reality.
One option is to reduce the ore generation. That will slow things down across all mods, and require more power generation for any form of automated mining. The down side is that the world is going to be pretty empty underground.
The other option, which I jokingly suggested somewhere but is in fact a good alternative, is to make it that Ores are smelted into nuggets. Every mod then in effect has 9x the ore requirements to before, and also then 9x the power requirements to cook those ores (due to nuggets>ingots). That's quite a major change. Those potential 160 Iron Ore would then turn into 17 ingots! That makes ore processing vital and requires a nugget to ingot processing system, and drastically increases the value of any ingots found on mobs/dungeon loot. Down side to that is you need a modder to be able to make this change, not only to vanilla, but to all other mods ores too.
Next, the Flora and Fauna. Even with minecrafts accelerated timescale, of 24 hours = 20 minutes game time, trees and plants grow insanely fast. Minecraftopia doesn't suffer from deforestation as a result, and it's inhabitants never starve (for long)!
While you wouldn't want realistic growing times, extending the growing time of all flora would drastically change things. If a tree took 7 real days to grow, that's 8 minecraft days (I think). You'll be needing all that coal ore until you can scrape up the resources for renewable sources such as solar, wind turbines, bio-systems. The effect of bonemeal would also have to be reduced even further.
You can still have automated tree farms, but you'll need 6-7 large fields all running to match what you can get from one.
With the Fauna, longer duration between breeding and slower child growth would hamper your progress.
Hunger Overhaul can adjust Flora and Fauna, plus a lot of extra stuff I don't personally care for. Used it for a while on our server. Didn't notice that much difference in crop or tree growth (although the configs did say it should have taken longer), but did notice that babies took a lot longer to grow - down side to that is more entities around, so potential for lag.
