IC2 Expermental Feature Discussion

I tried once, but I did not like it... =(

Quote from Martititi

By reading your post, I find arguments I can agree with, but...
You know, in IC2, you begin by being a cave man that melts iron ore to iron ingots.
Then, he has the idea of making a hammer, and produces plates.
These plates are useful: he can make a box strong enough for the components inside not to be pushed away.
The fact is that you end the game by using the "laws" of quantum mechanics to have an armor that can:

(snip)

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The caveman can already make a piston out of stone and a bit of iron. Realism in crafting was never Minecraft's strong suit, and never will be. Clickery and tedium just for more fancy looking recipes is a bad exchange in my books.

Considering Computercraft, Buildcraft & co: normally I'd just set up a Logistics pipes crafting grid and be done with this stuff. This is not working atm, so I have to do without. The Forestry Workbench works wonders, too. However this made me think: if I need another mod to bypass tedium created with this mod, why did IC even change its recipes to what they are now?

This guy summarized my thoughts perfecty: http://www.reddit.com/r/feedth…l_craft_is_no_longer_fun/
EDIT: okay, not perfectly, on reread he's a lot more vitriolic than me

Also, see the comment by UberNube below that reddit entry:

Quote

Yep. A lot of modders and a depressingly large number of players seem to equate difficulty with tedium. If a mod is too easy, make it require 10 times longer to do anything and call it balanced.
That isn't fun. It's just tedious.

The same goes for modders that try to add complexity by making every single process take dozens of steps involving lots of intermediate items. Again, it isn't fun. It's just tedious.

What modders should be doing is adding real complexity. Rather than adding single-use blocks and crafting-only items, make lots of multi-purpose blocks which need to be combined together in specific ways to produce the same results. I don't mean multi-block structures either, since those are just another type of tediuous crafting - I mean things like redstone, CC turtles, pipes, conveyor belts, power systems, spinning blades, heater elements, mirrors, etc.

Honestly I can say without a shadow of a doubt that simple redstone in vanilla minecraft is far more complex than the whole of IC. It is complex, not because it requires a fuckton of steps to do the most trivial of things, but because you can create so many different devices out of very few parts. It's an intellectual challenge rather than a patience challenge.

The changes made to IC are like raising the price of Lego in an attempt to make it more fun to play with. "Kids are completing models too quickly, so we're going to make it harder (and hence more fun) by making them spend longer saving their pocket money to buy each one." It's the worst possible solution to the problem.

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WORD!

Erm... sarcasm? If not, please clarify

Well, I'll still give it a further try, and be thankful for the devs maintaining the mod. But to be sure I'll keep away from GregTech. After all I've heard that would most certainly not be my cup of tea.

Quote from SpwnX

Definetely not. You would be terrified with the amount of crafting steps, which includes all sorts of tools to make components which are used for other components which then are used for a machine.

I like that, i like even more the tought that i can automate all that with a factory, making all the manufacture process something done in the press of a button.

Yup! And that's why I like to combine it with computercraft and other mods. =)

more steps\tiers != better as long as they not going to make things more simple at later stages.

Hi, i can't repair LZH condensators with lapislazuli (or the red ones with redstone), is it a bug or i am trying the wrong way? thanks

did you try the items or the blocks? I'm pretty sure it takes blocks of Lapis or RS to recharge them.

Quote from Kye_Duo

did you try the items or the blocks? I'm pretty sure it takes blocks of Lapis or RS to recharge them.

I tried with both and it doesn't work either

SO what about 10K coolant? Whats the recipe for those?

10K coolant cells have a new recipe. It's a lot more complex...

You'll need to macerate several lapis into lapis dust. Next you'll need a canning machine in Fluid Enrich mode. Fill the canning machine with water or distilled water and add the lapis dust. Using distilled water reduces the lapis cost, but distilled water requires a boiler and a condenser (or a turbine :P). Once the canning machine creates Coolant, you'll have to get it into a cell which is unfortunately difficult with the Canning Machine GUI. I'd recommend using a second Canning Machine in Fill Cell mode, and then move the coolant from the first canning machine to the second, either with pipes or fluid ejector upgrades or whatever. Once you've got a cell of Coolant, you can surround it with the tin plates to get a 10k coolant cell. Or alternatively you can use the coolant in the new reactor.

Quote from Yesus777

I tried with both and it doesn't work either

Have you tried Lapis Dust?

This shouldn't have to be a guessing game. NEI plugins for 1.7.10 is nowhere in sight, and the lack of recipes either on the wiki or in NEI is making IC2x nearly impossible to use. Someone on the dev team should at least publish a list or diagram of all the recipes for all the machines so that others can do their respective parts.

Quote from ipatrol

This shouldn't have to be a guessing game. NEI plugins for 1.7.10 is nowhere in sight, and the lack of recipes either on the wiki or in NEI is making IC2x nearly impossible to use. Someone on the dev team should at least publish a list or diagram of all the recipes for all the machines so that others can do their respective parts.

crafting guide works for everything i can see

I would love to know a bit more about how the UU matter recipe list is/was generated. FYI, you can find the list in the ic2 jar file under assets/ic2/config/uu_scan_values.ini. Mine says "created Mar 16, 2014 4:36:06 PM" The only post from player about this that I can see is about a page back in this thread.

Quote from Player

The UU-values are all just automatically generated right now, except iridium. When considering the overall average as if using a huge quarry, 2 clay balls are about as hard to get as a diamond. You can use the IC2 config to use whatever value you feel appropriate, iron is about 100.

The EU cost is currently not being displayed.

My assumption here is that Player has run some sort of analysis on a minecraft world to count up blocks and measure their relative rarity, using cobblestone as a basis. Is this correct? Would this process be able to occur ingame (at runtime) instead, so that blocks added by other mods would be included? How big of an area is "scanned" to generate these values? Does it exclude things like villages? It seems a bit unfair that iridium costs 120mB of UU, but a single carrot costs nearly 50,000!

Thanks

EDIT: I'm dense. You can run the scan yourself using "/ic2 uu-world-scan <small|medium|large>", as clearly written in the log file. Will uu-recipes defined in the ic2.ini config file override the world scan?

UU matter feedback: Since IC2E started the EU cost of UU matter has increased overall, but is still kinda reasonable, especially considering the increased availability of EU with the new reactors. The scrap cost of UU matter has increased as well, but it hasn't become any easier to create. Right now I think the scrap-cost of uu matter is too high, and practically encourages players to make cobble-gen scrap farms that can cause lots of server lag.

Firstly some background numbers, for those who don't already know:
- Recycling a block has a 1-in-8 chance to produce scrap.
- Without scrap, it costs 1 million EU per 1mB of UU. Expensive, but not absurd. IMO Not very many things are "worth" using UU for at this price
- Each piece of scrap adds 5000 "amplifier". The amplifier buffer is consumed at the same rate as the EU input.
- Each point of amplifier adds 5 "bonus" EU when consumed. Thus each piece of scrap adds 25000EU worth of progress.
- Therefore to produce 1mB with scrap, it costs 166,666 EU and 166,666 points of amplifier, or ~34 scrap.
- The combined progress is effectively 6 (1 + 5) times the default speed.
- Using 512EU/t as a baseline (the default voltage of the mass fab, although I suspect most people use 2048EU/t), it takes only 16.2 seconds to produce 1 mB of UU with scrap.
- So at 512EU/t, a piece of scrap will last a little less than 10 ticks (0.5 seconds). To put it another way, you have to recycle about 16 items per second to keep up. At 2048EU/t, that goes up to about a stack per second.

Obviously, it's all but impossible for someone to actually mine at 16 blocks per second. You cannot keep a mass fab continuously fed with scrap by hand-mining alone. But what about stockpiling all that cobble you pick up and only running the fab periodically? Let's take Iridium for example.

1 piece of iridium costs 120mB of UU. Therefore it costs 120M EU without scrap, but only 20M EU if you add in 4000 pieces of scrap. That's roughly 32,000 blocks put into a recycler. To put that in perspective, that's 500 stacks of 64, or about 9.1 double chests. The cheapest thing you can make with iridium takes 8 pieces. Nobody "naturally" comes by 74 doublechests worth of excess cobble. Just storing it all would be a nightmare.

That amount of junk can only be feasibly acquired by quarries, auto-miners, cobble-gen farms, or wood-to-sticks autocrafters, etc.If I want to abstain from silly immersion-breaking lag-creating recycler contraptions, I basically have to pay full price for my UU, and there aren't many things that feel "worth" spending UU at full price. I know I could tweak the UU balance value in the IC2.ini config, but what I really want is to be able to enjoy the idea of using scrap. I want to set up a small recycler plant and feed it with "naturally" acquired junk. I want the scrap bonus speed to be slow enough that having an absurd amount of scrap isn't any more helpful than just a little.

In summary, I want:
1) scrap to last a lot longer. I'm thinking 10 or 20 times longer (ie 100,000 points of Amplifier each). At 2048EU/t this would still only last 2.5 seconds each.
2) scrap to provide much less of a speedup. I'd be pleased with a "bonus" of 0.25 or 0.5 EU per Amplifier. Enough that the speed-up is definitely noticeable, but not necessary.
The above two changes would yield about the same amount of overall EU per scrap in the end.

Am I alone in feeling this way?

try recycling the stuff from a mob farm that is 4 layers at 63x63. I can not only keep up, i can turn them into scrap boxes and over come the mass fab, even with a TF upgrade in it. This is using MOC to boost the mob loot types, but you get the point.
lag ain't bad from it. use BC pipes to pick everything up. MFFS interdiction matrix to kill every thing. It is 1.6.4 but, one word. QUARRY. many mods add a strip mining quarry, BC included.

Quote from Kye_Duo

try recycling the stuff from a mob farm that is 4 layers at 63x63. I can not only keep up, i can turn them into scrap boxes and over come the mass fab, even with a TF upgrade in it. This is using MOC to boost the mob loot types, but you get the point.
lag ain't bad from it. use BC pipes to pick everything up. MFFS interdiction matrix to kill every thing. It is 1.6.4 but, one word. QUARRY. many mods add a strip mining quarry, BC included.

Trust me, I'm more than capable of finding ways to obtain 8 scrap per second. I've done it all, from mob farms to quarries of every kind to arrays of Igneous Extruders with Factorization Routers. I don't want to anymore. I happen to enjoy caving and mining manually, and I already have excessive amounts of ore. If I were to start a quarry now, it would be for the sole purpose of getting scrap. I would be recycling everything from the quarry, except maybe diamonds. That seems kinda absurd and wasteful to me. The changes I'm looking for would allow me to have "useful" scrap at a small scale, without feeling obliged to make massive amounts of it.

I'm hoping that by providing feedback, Player will take a moment to consider if the speed of the scrap system needs to be changed, since it has been the same since early IC2. Even if he decides to leave things as is, I'd be super happy if the Amplification values and the Bonus multiplier were put into the config file so anybody could tweak them. Or maybe take a page from Gregtech and allow certain kinds of dust to be used as super amplifier.