Suggestion: Re-work mass fabricator/UU Matter

    This idea was prompted by a discussion going on elsewhere in the forum, so credit to Bluehorazon for sparking the idea and getting me thinking about the specifics of it.


    As of right now, once a player has enough of an energy surplus and scrap surplus to produce a mass fabricator and keep it running and supplied with scrap full time, they've pretty much got it made. A couple hundred solar panels, a wind farm, a reactor, and a cobblestone generator, and you can just sit back and watch the UU matter roll in, then produce as many diamonds as you want from that! Or you can craft the whole quantum suit! Or...well, then what?


    Now, bear in mind that the mass fabricator is essentially creating matter from energy. This takes it out of the realm of science and quite healthily into the realm of SCIENCE! And when you're playing around with the laws of physics...things should not always be cut and dry.


    I propose that we add a bit of a "mad scientist" feel to mass fabrication. For example, you let the mass fabricator run, and instead of producing UU matter, which can then be used with a reliable recipe to create whatever you want, after a certain amount of time it produces something random. The amount of energy consumed should be proportional to the item created, so if it creates a block of wood it should do so after only eating maybe a thousand EU, but if it creates an iridium ore, it should consume millions. If left to it's own devices, this continues, for as long as the thing is powered...every once in a while, it spits out something random. Or, some random event occurs...like, for example, one of the ideas that Bluehorazon had given would be for a dozen chickens randomly appear out of nowhere, because the mass fabricator randomly created them. Or a freak snowstorm in an otherwise temperate biome. Or, in a rare event, a nether portal is opened nearby, or perhaps just a rift big enough to let a single ghast loose to wreak havoc in your factory. Who said SCIENCE was totally safe?


    Now, the mass fabricator's UI could also have an input slot. This input slot could be filled by an item that you've previously acquired before, making it sort of a "target" item. Putting something in the target slot would greatly increase the chances of the mass fabricator replicating that item for you, at the standard energy cost of the item. However, it could still potentially freak out and give you a random item, or a random event, because when dealing with weird science, nothing should ever be certain.


    Now, the kicker. This would allow for truly "secret" recipes, something that a crafting guide plugin could not teach you how to make. You could potentially add new and interesting things to the game, and the only means of acquiring these things are to play around with your mad scientist's toy and see what happens!


    This would give players a reason to build mass fabricators, a reason to keep them running, a reason to make sure they're well enclosed and defended, remove the tedium that starts to set in once you have a few stacks of UU matter crafted, make quantum equipment harder to get and therefore a more attractive (and well-deserved) goal, and give a way to add truly secret stuff into IC2 that can't just be plugged into a workbench in a certain recipe and give the same results every time. In short, it would make the endgame of IC2 a lot more entertaining, because even with a full workshop of advanced machines and several nuclear plants operating, you'd still have something to do, because who knows when you might discover something you've never seen before that's been hidden in the depths of IC2's bag of tricks?

    You just reminded me of the thing i was suggesting: the chemistry into brewing stand. Like dirt instead of bottle and stone brewed in you get gravel. Thats still sounds bad as its "brewing" stand, but anyway, thats just an idea.


    Anyway, total randowness seems bad idea, as getting dirt and cacti for building THAT advanced machine...I would better make a recycler and farm diamonds, slime and cakes from those boxes.


    But we could do smthing same here, but using the UU-matter machine: like, putting random things into it makes random things
    Like, we have it like a crafting grid, and if we long grass into the center of the grid, and dirt on the side, well have a grass block.
    Or putting a raw chicken and feather would spawn a chicken...
    Just makeing it feel like a mixing machine where you put smthing+smthing+EU and get a random thing.


    That would still bring every item into the game, but mixing everything with everything sounds like a nice realization of the idea with chemistry.


    I actually really like this idea. A lot. In fact, this is how I want the Matter Generator to work in the mod.

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    Alblaka in a Lightning Rod suggestion thread...[/size]

    Basically reliability is a good thing. But how reliable could a machine be that touches upon the creation of the universe itself (because basically the mass-fabricator does what happened directly after the big bang).


    I laughed about the church wanting to stop the large collider in Genf because it may create tiny black holes. Actually even if our sun turns into a black hole (no panic, it won't) this won't kill us... we would still die but the lack of heat will kill us not the black-hole. The gravity of a black-hole isn't stronger then the gravity of the star it was before becoming a black-hole.


    So the reason why the massfabricator should do such things is because it could easily make fun of such things. Actually people are afraid of black-holes but not of an army of killer-chickens. Getting killed by a chicken is tousend times more likely then getting killed by a blackhole. So if our massfabricator creates chickens it actually does something likely compared to creating a black-hole^^.


    The problem is that the mass-fabricator is a somehow expensive machine and it shouldn't be destroyed by the funny things that might happen. And of course there shouldn't be much trouble of implementing such.


    So the Mass-Fabricator could run upon periods. As long as it runs it consumes power (a lot of). I don't know how long it takes to reaches 1.000.000 EU with 512EU/t (I could calculate it, but it's unimportant). But let's say 10mins. So after 10mins, the Mass-Fab has a power-level of 1. At this point there could happen 3 things.


    1. It could do nothing and accumulate more energy.


    2. A random "accident" may happen (for example chickens might spawn next and on top of the mass-fab^^). This will decrease the power-level by 1 (in this case to 0)


    3. It could produce an item which only needs on UUM actually (or more then 1 item in certain situations like cobblestone).


    Actually it works the same as bevor, but instead of producing UUM it will increase it's power-level. This will make it less reliable, because you first need to accumulate enough power-levels for certain materials (I guess 7 for iridium-ore and 9 for diamonds). But it might be the ultimate energy-dump without being totally overpowered. Of course it would make it almost impossible to create a quantum suit, because you need 40 pieces of iridium ore which are more likely to be created then diamonds, but reaching power-level 7 and actually creating iridium ore would most likely not happen 40 times in a row.


    Well, you might use the mass-fab like a nuclear-power plant with it's own pieces which determines what you create (like some kind of mass-collider, so you need to build a ring, and the size determines the output). Basically the mass-fab could get some love. Someone could of course make an addon, but since it would be inferior to the official-massfab most people won't use it.