IC2 Expermental Feature Discussion

4.5 million, he said. Blocks. TO make the scrap required.

Or a 260x260 quarry, approximately. Which would require about 17 days to hit bedrock running at the new full speed.

Also, I have no idea what a universal macerator is. That's not in stock IC.

Why does IC require other mods to function as intended? That's completely loony.

Quote from SpwnX

scrap and energy are still very easy to generate in massive amounts, even for those who doesnt play 24 h per day.
Use your mind and reactors for quick power, then overclocked recyclers for quick scrap.

Oh, i can build plenty of reactors and overclocked recyclers no problem. After all, IC2 has very generous worldgen. I have tons of resources.

What I do not have are blocks I can recycle. At this point, cobblestone is more valuable than iron ore. I have considered breaking my metal bars into nuggets and throwing those into the recycler. But after doing the math, I figured that my entire diamond chest full or ingots would make next to zero difference in the grand scheme of things. You just need so. many. blocks.

And before you say "go use machine X from mod Y to do Z":
- What if you do not have mod Y installed?
- What if you do have it, but no enderchests for long-distance mass transport that some solutions (like quarries) will require?
- What if you don't want to lag your server out with a 1000+ entity vanilla chicken farm... one for every single player, in fact?

The point is that IC2 demands a resource amount that IC2 itself cannot supply. There is no method in this mod, natively, to generate that much scrap. That's a major design flaw. I'll be the first to call out classic IC2 for making uu-matter too cheap to obtain, but a 360-fold increase (which is what it is if you do not use scrap) seems a tiny bit harsh, no? Even GregTech seems "quick and dirt-cheap" compared to that... especially since it offers methods besides the matter fab to obtain iridium.

Quote from Chocohead

Make scrap better

I was thinking along those lines too, actually. How about the following?

- Since this is the time for big revamps, get rid of the sixfold bonus on amplifier. Nobody wants to divide 10 by 6 all the time. Make it a fivefold bonus (yes, I know this makes scrap worse, but bear with me).
- Multiply the amount of amplifier gained per piece of scrap or scrapbox by 4. That means 20k/180k instead of 5k/45k.
- Reduce the uu-matter cost of iridium from 42 buckets to 32 buckets. Diamonds could probably also use a reduction from 20 to 16. Overall, tighten up the spread of prices by bringing the larger numbers down. This compensates the reduced amplifier bonus.

Here's a comparison of the effects these changes will have:

Classic:
166,667 EU + 34 scrap per uu-matter (~272 recycled blocks, +12,240 EU)
1,166,667 EU + 234 scrap per iridium ore (~1,872 recycled blocks, +84,240 EU)
46,666,667 EU + 9,334 scrap per quantum suit (~74,672 recycled blocks, +420,030 EU)
OR
1,000,000 EU per UU-matter
7,000,000 EU per iridium ore
280,000,000 EU per quantum suit

Current:
1,666,667 EU + 334 scrap per uu-matter (~2,672 recycled blocks, +120,240 EU)
71,000,000 EU + 14,000 scrap per iridium ore (~112,000 recycled blocks, +5,040,000 EU)
2,839,999,999 EU + 560,000 scrap per quantum suit (~4,480,000 recycled blocks, +201,600,000 EU)
OR
10,000,000 EU per UU-matter
420,000,000 EU per iridium ore
16,800,000,000 EU per quantum suit

Proposed:
2,000,000 EU + 100 scrap per uu-matter (~800 recycled blocks, +36,000 EU)
65,000,000 EU + 3,200 scrap per iridium ore (25,600 recycled blocks, +1,152,000 EU)
2,600,000,000 EU + 128,000 scrap per quantum suit (1,024,000 recycled blocks, +46,080,000 EU)
OR
10,000,000 EU per UU-matter
321,000,000 EU per iridium ore
12,840,000,000 EU per quantum suit

Mind you, this still does not solve the issue that IC2 alone will hardly ever be able to provide that kind of recycleable block count within the ca. 3 month lifespan of the average Minecraft world (maybe unless you plant a square kilometer full of cropstick wheat, melons or pumpkins that you will have to manually harvest around the clock for days on end, or if you take a diamond drill to an entire desert biome, again manually). However, it's now more realistic to do without scrap - or, more importantly, with partial scrap supply. Scrap use is down by about 77%; energy use with scrap is almost the same, but without scrap it is down by about 24%.

Quote from SpwnX

IC, like all other tech mods are designed to work BEST when with other tech mods, like BC, RC, forestry, GT...

@universal macerator : GregTech block, answering Chocohead's question.

Want a stupid block (cobble) generator using only IC²? Use the miner alongside vanilla cobble generators. I just said, use your mind :3

I have been using my mind. I devised an I think really quite cute (yet large) egg farm for the purpose. Which I already mentioned. It's a stupid small drop in the EU bucket.

You're suggesting using miners. Can you do the math on the EU and time required to mine, say, one million blocks with X number of regular or diamond miners? I think if you do you won't be willing to defend that idea.

I propose to adjust iridium ore to require 25200 recycled blocks and change nothing with regard to amount of UUM used to provide iridium or diamonds. Apart from that, nice suggestion.

Quote from Chocohead

Make scrap better

So I have to apologize, I thought you were telling us to get better at making scrap and I snapped at you.

Quote

Personally, i really don't care much about the scrap problem, you can always make more and more farms of any crap you can think of.

The problem is scrap's value is so tiny now relative to the amount of power required that no reasonable number of farms matters. Also making scrap farms requires a large investment of time and a certain knowledge of game mechanics that beginners often don't have. IC is supposed to be about enriching the minecraft world with technology, not seeing how hard you can exploit game mechanics.

Holy crap this quote system sucks

Quote from Kuudere

IC is supposed to be about enriching the minecraft world with technology, not seeing how hard you can exploit game mechanics.

Pretty much this. Block generators, next to mob grinders, are among the most uninspired and immersion-breaking things a player can build. In my humble opinion.

Not to mention that the very reason you can even do this is the reason we're having this discussion in the first place. If a thing like a cobble generator never existed in Minecraft, the entire concept of recyclers might have developed very differently. At bare minimum, we'd be talking about massively different numbers here. It's bad enough that mod devs have to account for exploits involving block generators in their creations; we don't need mods starting to make them a requirement.

Quote from SirusKing

Isn't Scraps only use always been UU? Also, Note, the UU EU rate is customizable in the config. Don't like it? Change it. Also note, that in the future, Nuclear reactors and other generators are going to be much much more powerful.

Scraps can also be used to make scrapboxes. But I don't like gambling.

Quote from SirusKing

Especially when you have a 100000% chance to get a wooden hoe

Or with GregTech, a 10000000% chance to get scrap.

Quote from NDospark320

Scraps can also be used to make scrapboxes. But I don't like gambling.

but since you can use scrapboxes in the mass fab just like scrap, it is a denser storage method

Indeed, the energy requirement isn't an issue. It's the fact that You don't have enough blocks to process to make recycling even worth doing. Unless you intentionally go out of your way to conjure recyclable materials from this air, it's completely irrelevant whether you recycle or not. It's not going to make a difference in your iridium production. I tore up the landscape all around my base with quarries, and the third piece of iridium I completed just yesterday was still made without any scrap at all because you need entire biomes worth of stuff for it.

Of course, there's another possible solution: if conjuring recyclable materials out of this air is the intended approach, then the whole system can be simplified a great deal. Simply skip the block part entirely and let the recycler conjure scrap out of thin air. Allow it to run continuously on power alone, without block input, and still let it spit out a piece of scrap in 1/8th of the cases. It's a solution independent from the presence of other mods, it's much more friendly to your tickrate and/or surrounding landscape, and it completely preserves the status quo without locking people who don't play with specific modpacks out of the endgame. (If they can find any iridium to scan in the first place, that is.)

perhaps the replicator should be made a touch unstable when you try to replicate radioactive matter like uranium and plutonium. Give it like a 1% chance to spit out iridium ore as well. That would give people the chance of getting it without having to strip mine entire areas just for the chests out of the dungeons.

Instead of boosting scrap why not allow using other boosters similarly to how GT had? More rare stuff -> higher boost. Perhaps something like gravel would equal scrap, iron ingots would be 10x better, gold 50x, diamonds 200x etc (I'm using random values, of course). This can be achieved either by directly allowing to use those in massfab or by making the recycler spit out scrap amounts depending on what is fed into it.