Reasonable Item repair

I might be coming from very slight minority of players but frankly speaking i detest permanent stuff.

It devalues the tool cost, it strips the player from daily or weekly "quests" (depending on his activity) to rebuild a certain tool. It makes daily engame life much more boring. True some might consider that a hassle, but without huge project in mind all that is usually left to do for established industrialist is...to start over again.

As such here in the concept: allow config option (to silence the resulting outcry) to have tools and specific items to break on use.


Chance of occurrence:


The chance of breaking can be calculated using two methods:
- grace period after craft/previous repair which is followed by small % chance check on X amount of uses.
grace period might start as very long and deteriorate after so many repair cycles providing the need for players to rebuild tools, while at the same time player will be certain that the tool they just crafted wont break 5 minutes into the cave.


- linear progression on how many uses the tool had, with chance of breaking either triggered on specific amount of uses, has X% after specific amount of uses, or has growing % chance that correlates to total times used.
item repair would then subtract the certain amount from the total times used.
this would allow players to repair item up to brand new status


Effect of breaking


Changes in tool state can also be shown in name change by adding different adjective: "New" "Proven" "Used" "Heavily used" "Broken" "Sparking" "Short-circuited" "FUBAR"


When the tool is broken it is NOT useless: When break chance succeeds tool will either acquire certain debuff (slower speed, reduced battery, leaky battery, bigger energy usage) or it will trigger event ( player electrocution, aerial explosion (e.g. fuel jet pack), loss of charge in battery, poison, significant decrease in tool durability). Details of the accident printed to player's chat.

As the player continues to operate faulty equipment the debuffs accumulate or the chance of specific events happening would slowly increase prompting player to either make a new tool or repair old one.

Repairing


Repair could be initiated either through block (repair station) or item (tool box/ repair kit etc)


This will open up GUI somewhat similar to the forge, the difference is, when player places a broken item in first slot MC will randomly select 1 item from the it's crafting recipe and designate it as the broken part, the player would then need to supplement that part in order to fix the tool.


Usage of the item crafting recipe would allow repair to be balanced without too much coding. (e.g. simple drill would probably need a reinforced iron bar, circuit, or a battery; diamond drill would need a diamond or a normal drill for repair)


repair cost can be done two ways:
- repair block might use EU, or portable repair toolkit as "fuel" costing it durability
- portable toolkit can be used as mobile repair at the expense of increased durability loss during repair.
- portable toolkit is not rechargeable/fixable

Increased cost of consecutive repair can be waived since after few repairs player would effectively replaced the old tool with new, parts wise.

Additional implementations


Many are blissfully unaware, but IC2 and its addons are the leaders in cheapest energy production among most of the popular mods.


Reason being; free energy. No matter how big a boiler is or how efficient fuel factory, they cant compete with solars, windmills, watermills, and by some extent geothermals. reason being is fuel/energy ratio. while other generators have at least some form of fuel the three ones mentioned above have none, making their ratio 0, which would always be infinitely more efficient fuel wise that any other means of energy generation.


That is why IC2 dominated the energy market not only among other mods, but within itself as well. on each nuclear reactor built there are thousands of solars constructed, while geos can hold their ground with a mystcraft or railcraft crutch, coal generators are crying in the corner forgotten forever after 1 hour of playtime.

As such If there are no plans on energy re-balance similar to nuclear rewrite I would suggest another configurable addition, that would have similar mechanic presented above applied all free sources of energy.


The mechanic should be severely simplified so servers don't keel over.


either 2 state or 3 state: 2 state would have these generators either working or broken, with broken one having distinct visual cues, and outputting 0 energy. 3 state would have "partially broken" state in between with normal energy production but visual cues to show imminent collapse.


while player tools durability would change on usage ratio, generators would age every X amount of seconds, to prevent tick loss. Perhaps stagger age checks between different generator types so they wont all check at once.


Another thing to consider...breaking pumps when they are pumping lava....but thats BC side to tackle...

Well tools would certainly loose some value but not so much.

Especially if the grace period is significant and would mean that player would only see the onset of wear within RL days (in case of new items maybe even longer than a week) of use, not hours. Even then the first onset would be something like "your drill lost 25% of its charge". With batpack equipped, players wont even notice that difference. Or half a heart zap. After that there will be few mode days of normal usage until something happens again. This could be implemented by adding small grace period after each failure perhaps to signify more cautious usage by wary player.

And after some time player will start getting debuffs, which would be quite unpleasurable. At that point he would have a choice: either pay 1 item of possibly 9 (for example paying 1 glowstone for electric jetpack) or craft new one. I would be inclined to assume that majority of players will choose to pay 1 item especially if there will be no repercussions from extensive repair (since we are not just repairing we are replacing broken parts).

As such there will exist an item turnout in the game (which currently doesn't once player gets energy tools/armour and green energy) without devaluing them too much. Note however that currently they are rather valuable - even if players will need to remake the drill after first break they would still do it simply because how more valuable it is compared to enchanted diamond picks.

Remember S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - new weapons were brought far inbetween, with majority being repaired on site using available tools. Bullets are energy and used as often, Repair is repair and used rarely and when needed.

I saw the other thread too, and initially intended to necro it with my own suggestion, but it felt like my approach was different enough. But multiple machine breakage is welcomed as well.

The main purpose of this is twofold:

1) it makes the industrial complexes..."Alive" I guess.

At the moment everything I do in Railcraft, TE, or Rp2 is usually a continuous action which spans over days. My industrial complexes work in pulses of intense action and then stops to a halt again. Although this is mainly exacerbated by Overclocker upgrades, necessity of complex check up would add to everyday routine as well as introduce a growing necessity of player access to critical points.

2) it will add a soft cap on machine proliferation per player.

One of my personal gripes with IC2 at the moment is the proliferation of massive generator fields, that people build. With introduction of machine breakup players would be forced to have a decision on their hands - to use massive arrays of free energy generators that require maintenance, or opt towards more compact and easy for maintenance, but less "free" energy generation.

This, however, would require significant energy rebalance:

- More generators need to be implemented that rely on fuel and not on free energy. Advanced coal power plants (steam turbines covered by railcraft). Something that would hopefully work as a multiblock structure, than array of identical structures. This would make fixing less of a hassle compared to fields of solar panels.

- Scale down energy storage, or introduce storage "tax". Energy should flow from source to destination, where batteries work as buffers to offset irregular output of energy systems. Current system helps little and encourages afk player behavior.

- Limit the Overclockers or redesign them. Hopefully IC2 can have up to 3 separate modifications of specific machine:

Starter machine that uses little energy and slow, but balanced;

Advanced machine designed for speed at the cost of efficiency;

Advanced machine designed for efficiency at the cost of speed;

To prevent additional confusion starter machine could remain as the current one, with upgrade slots removed. Advanced machine would be either multiblock built, where custom block selection would allow players to specify the appropriate upgrade.


- Another great possibility would be to use nuclear reactor puzzle system as a method to upgrade machines: have them use reactor GUI with hardcoded heat source slots inside. depending on the speed of the machine more heat sources would be generated. the source generation should be random to prevent easy copy-paste from the internet, but non-destructive, so players wouldn't feel like they are being punished. as such mildly overclocked machines would be able to be balanced by adding heatsinks and coolants where needed, but if you ridiculously overclock the machine the amount of heat sources would be so heavy that one will be forced to limit the usage of the machine or maybe create a designated cooling reactor and cycle cooling cells back and forth using advanced piping.


- At the same time as mentioned above - free energy sources need to take a hit in terms of energy production. Or let players designate output. Nerfed output would age machines at normal rate, current output would introduce accelerated wear, and maybe allow possibility to overclock generators to boost energy generation at the expense of very fast breakage.


- Major note is to prevent automated fixing of the machinery/tools. This should be achieved by the fact that toolkit alone is never enough to fix the broken part - player will always need a replacement.




I know these measures might seem harsh, but IC2 is an old mod...it still relies on aged concepts and frankly holds the ground against other mods only due to the cheapness of the recipes. This should not be the case. IC2 should have its own niche retaken back to stay competitive....




...We need the rebalance.

Grinder tiers would be useless, as long as there is "last forever" type.

It will obsolete all other grinders, and would cause unnecessary complaints from people complaining that their "normal" grinder now needs iridium to operate.

Only thing that might allow players to consider the finite version are additional item rewards. Time efficiency is reduced to nil by overclockers thus becoming an issue of one time material cost; similarly the EU efficiency with easily accessible free EU generators.

This is however reiteration of the repair idea: just the item/time price of repair is substituted by item/time price of crafting finite addons for machines. As such it could be easily used similarly to the proposition I've outlined above. With only slight differences.