Posts by inwerno

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 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!

I'm not 100% sure, but I think this fits here best:

I just began playing around with IC2 Experimental after some absence from MC; and got mixed feelings:

Machines look a lot nicer now with basic textures. Lead batteries / CESU also looks like a very interesting addition, and the new modular ore refining chain seems fun to use and automate. (albeit it being nothing new, Thermal Expansion's looks a lot like this, but that's fine)

But, however... in game i'm now at the point of making my first set of electric tools, and the recipes are just tedious. I don't know how anyone got the idea that making them more complicated was a good idea. Iron Plates and casings are cool, a good alternative to the double-smelting from before, but... coils? Power sources? Motors? Really? Why?

IMHO the more complicated recipes add nothing to the game. Even the circuits / batteries from before were kind of annoying, but these were just 3 crafting table recipes and were memorized quickly. Now even tin and copper needs to be hammered (click), cut into cables (click), or processed via metal former (wait).

The only challenge this adds to the game is slightly intransparent material requirements, looking more stuff up in recipe books and doing more clickery.
Not my kind of fun, and I guess I'm not the only one who thinks so.

EDIT (P.S.) The flaws of the recipe chain become apparent when you compare it to railcraft's recipes: Railcraft also uses some special components (steel, rails, plates), but these have to be achieved first by building something. When you have them "unlocked" these become cheap basic components which are useful to produce and store in bulk, and then useful in many recipes. (refined iron / iron plates quality for that too). The IC components are specialized stuff and too expensive to mass produce and store until you are set up really well.

EDIT2: Okay, found the "random rants" thread. Shutting up now

Recycling 3 tons of cobblestone - 1 bag of scrap. Recycling 1 diamond - 16 bags of scrap. Must have been one big diamond.

Yes, I suggest exactly that. (Note: but from a field that also costs just about 1/5!) Why is that terrible? Please explain your reasoning.

They just seem too small to me as they are now. The big areas needed are a viable problem of solar energy generation in RL. If you had to use similar big areas to generate power in IC, you'd have to cover all your roofs, or use a big desert area, and actually worry about how to get your energy to the MFSU... I would love such a challenge (it's only a small one, but hey ^^). At the moment they're just... boring. I hope I'm not the only one who feels this way

IMHO Solar is meant to be be balanced by space used. That's why something like compact solars isn't included in standard IC2. It seems to me the balance doesn't work at the moment, so compact solars has to be used by server admins to lessen the lag caused by solarspam. Increasing the area used by solar decreases the convenience of the generator, that's where its main advantage lies at the moment.

Quote from narc

Well, the (IC2) painters themselves already should refill automatically from inventory (I do seem to recall that being in a change log a few versions back), so just using the toolbox, you'd basically have that already.

Wooot! This must be a 1.108 thing then... used the painter quite often lately. Thanks, I'll have a look...

EDIT: Derp. Autorefill "mode". This should really be on the wiki page...

Cropnalyzer simplification sounds good, I've actually waited for SeedManager update to start breeding crops because I don't like this clickfest.

AFAIK Greg's Lighting creates luminescent air blocks in a column below the floodlights. So, while it simulates sunlight, it should melt ice.

What I don't get about this discussion: If one were to code a combination of "solar controller block" which emits energy for all connected "panels" (not the standard ones, I mean new ones which only serve to provide area to the controller), you wouldn't have to check for sunlight for every connected panel every time. As I understand, at the moment panels check for light every second?
Have this contraption randomly pick one panel every second and check this one for sunlight. If no sunlight even on this single panel - no energy from the whole system (till the next successful lightcheck).
Probability will adjust the overall output of this system over time (since especially solars are made to be placed and left alone). Have the controller register and save connected panels, so it doesn't have to parse its surroundings for panels every time. Give the controller a range of, let's say 16 blocks - this way it could cover 256 panels at the cpu time of a single one. Uses a bit more memory, though...?
But this sounds to me as if this should massively reduce the lag caused by a big solar array...

EDIT: In addtion, one could use such a system to balance the solars better... make the additional panels cheaper than standard solars (for example, 1/5 of the cost) but have them output comparably less (about 1/4). This way you get a reward for using them (efficiency!), but have to pay with big areas and nifty cabling..

Actually, the painter thing sounds like an idea for an extra "painting kit" item. Costs the equivalent of 16 painters (and some storage), and can be switched through the colours (leftclick?, since painting is rightclick). Has a storage for each color (I don't mean "item storage", more like 16 stored values of how much paint is left from each colour) and refills this automatically using dyes from the inventory... I would love one of those when painting a CF house

@nicol: 9 food is enough to regenerate, but you can still eat if you want. But if it's just bugged, oh well...

Ah, thanks for the clarification

Sand, like in duplicating glitch sand? I thought that doesn't work anymore?

I'm not really sure if I want this to be implemented, if it's not already there. It should be possible for a plant to grow without artificial fertilizer (since there's nutrition in the soil) or hydration (rain, groundwater). I don't know how the crop mechanics work at the moment... for this to be balanced (and not just annoying) there should be a natural replenishment of nutrition and hydration in the soil (based on biome? is it already working this way?) and a variable demand based on plant and growth stage.

So if you harvest a plant only once in a while, there should be no ill effects, but when growing demanding high-tier plants (especially with high-bred growth/gain) or when harvesting all the time the plants should depend on artificial nutrition (like most modern agriculture). But since getting new seed bags is such a hassle because of the necessary anti-weed-babysitting having your advanced plants die when you're away would be really frustrating.

Hello fellow downtrodden workslaves happy employees of Apertura Agriculture!

I've recently planted some simple plants (dandelions, tulips, sugarcane) and harvested them manually over and over without giving them any fertilizer or hydration. Since these plants are easily replaced, I didn't care at all what happened to them and was quite curious if they'd ever wither because of this. And it seems... they don't. Now I've set up an automatic farm (using mistaqur's forestry plugin) and got a chest full of dyes from my flowers... until the harvesting machine went out of fuel. But the plants keep on growing...

So, my question: has anybody else tried this? Did someone's plants die of malnutrition?

I've done this at sea level in a forest biome (so, no special precautions, just ensured 3 dirt blocks are below each farmland), and it seems a really comfortable way to do some first farming. Sugar cane for example grows way faster on the IC-cropsticks than the vanilla version, and it can drop multiple canes on harvesting.

What about the higher tiers? Now that seedmanager has updated, I really want to test this with some advanced crops, but maybe I'm not the first...

Silty: You can go down to 2 if you don't want to waste space: Plant 5 apart, wait till the trees have grown, remove the leaves and gather the saplings (cut down + replant if you get too few resin holes), and after you got your 5*5 grid grown you can plant between them at 2 distance. No leaves wasted. Looks ugly but is very effective.

Time really depends on your other used mods. Using Buildcraft and building a filler-based cobblegen powered by Transformers electric engine... a decent lava lake is all you need to get enough energy, geogens are cheap, so i estimate about 5-6 hours? Could be way off though, got no experience in this regard, I tend to take my time playing

I've got to agree with Magus though. Doing a contest on this seems very silly. But congrats on first place on the leaderboard, though

Hint hint, craft the boots, boostjumps are fun

Also: I'm one of these idiots who wear the solar helmet. Not because of the energy, just for the lulz. Quantum helmet as standard headwear is very annoying to me, because I can't eat anything wearing this. Replenishing food via Qhelm costs quite an amount of energy (which isn't an issue), and reloading the helm is annoying. Carrying a stack of something to eat (with high saturation) is far less hassle. So, solar helm, because I can Gives me a reason to build automated farms, ranches and slaughterhouses.

(Hmm, 60 spm (steaks per minute) seems a bit overengineered...)

I seem to remember that the Qhelm once replenished the food bar just up to 9... meat thingies. Don't know why it doesn't anymore...

I want to pose a bit too

Just thought someone might be interested or even a bit inspired. My singleplayer world, using IC2 + Buildcraft + Railcraft + Forestry + Portalgun (well, I have it installed, I'm not "using" it yet) as my main mods.

I want some older industrial feel in my world, and add mods only from time to time (only recently added Railcraft and later Forestry) when I want to try something new. I miss Redpower badly. Thaumcraft and Mystcraft seem very nice, I just didn't try them out yet.

Picture description!

First picture: This is my peninsula. A forest biome about 3/4 surrounded by ocean, which I found quite nice (also I spawned there ^^). I wanted to take things slowly and actually build factory buildings around my machines this time, upgrading and adding new buildings from time to time, to get a "growing settlement" thing going. Buildings, from left to right: Apiarist's house (Forestry bee collection, some machines to process honey + stuff). This was my first workshop with basic IC-machines and generator once, but I converted it recently. In the background - the steel works. Contains Railcraft stuff, coke ovens, blast furnace, rolling machines, boiler... steam-powered, everything for making rails. In front of this: the main workshop. With ore processing facilities, autocrafting grid, and a big vault of chests in the basement beyond. Peeking out behind it are the tanks of the geothermal power plant (BC tanks, didn't have railcraft when I built this). Then - at the front - my beachhouse. The first building I did, just a bed and some storage, also library + enchanting table in the basement. Behind this, a forestry wheat farm. Behind this is my second workshop - it once contained IC- machines, now forestry stuff and a bed if I don't feel like walking to the beach after work To the far right in the background are the barn (some cows and sheep), oh, and before that a cactus farm.

Second picture: The workshops and the geothermal power plant (out of order at the moment). I really like the brick texture, and don't very much like construction foam except the gray ones, but I wanted some color in my world. So I made a custom texture pack using a bit of the Painterly Pack (dirt and grass, also glass and wool) and retextured the CF to be colored bricks. So all the "brick" buildings are actually CF
Protruding out of the main workshop is the laser lab for buildcraft gates and stuff, since these things are dangerous. Can't have a stray beam cutting any machines inside the main building.. (No, not really. You know, just make-believe ^^).

Third picture: Everything from the other side, to get a better look at the steel works. I really like how this one has turned out. Though the inside needs some work. Moar powah! Oh, and forestry peat bog and tree farm.

Fourth picture: Control floor of the main workshop. Crafting grid galore. Guess I could neaten this one up a bit too, some walkways for maintenance... hmmm. Ah well, admire this mess please. At leat it works good

Fifth and last: Industrial mining with style! I always wanted an excuse to have carts in my mines, and railcraft gives these. A line of miners gets emptied by a chestcart... energy usually got supplied by batbox cart, but it doesn't work now somehow (since IC2 1.107). Guess railcraft has to adapt to the new energynet code first. So geothermal power has to do for now.

Everything is a work in progress of course. The steel works will be getting some nice chimneys for example, and I want to build a biomass power plant and a high speed railway to the next NPC village and the end portal, and a IC farm in the skies over the next swamp biome, and a railway to this of course too, and some IC flower fields (had those but removed them to make room for the wheat farm), and offshore oil rigs and a refinery and ... ah well.

What you didn't see: a reactor in the basement of the main workshop. An automatic subway supply system for all the forestry farms (and semiautomatic for the steel works). And an ugly but effective mob farm in the skies over the ocean. And the upper end of the big black cable leading to the wind power plant. But it's all there, I assure you

I hope you like it! Comments or criticism (or ideas!) below please

Yeah, the filler is kind of annoying that way...

But what happens if you give the wells enough energy to let them try to drill into bedrock (good luck, wells) while the filler cuts of...
ah, waitaminute. You still got to collect the pipes. Damn, I want redpower updated badly... Although you maybe could suck the dropping pipes out of the air with powered obsidian pipes, but this method feels very crude yours seems better.

Damn, I'm not right.

Well then, try my buffer-chest-method. This way the supplier doesn't get any cells to overstuff the reactor with until the refill is complete... but I'll have to do a test if I can reproduce your bug. As i said, my method worked for me for many game hours.

EDIT:
TheBard: I tried. Set up a reactor for testing, 2 chambers (above and below), connected supplier + extractor chassis to main chamber, set supplier to provide 4 depleted isotope cells. Connected to crafting table with crafting pipe making depleted isotope cells out of coaldust and near-depleted cells, which I provided in a chest nearby. Filled reactor with 1 uranium and 4 depleted isotope cells (the ones you get from Not Enough Items, 1 tick before reenrichment). Switch on and... re-enriched cells fly out, new depleted isotope cells go in. Just 4, too. Ended up in the wrong place, of course, since the reactor was empty except for the uranium, but well. Everything works just fine. What version of Minecraft/IC2/Logipipes are you using?
I had a bug some days ago where one filled RE Battery in my crafting grid messed up all the recipes using (empty) batteries, so I guess strange things can happen with logipipes...

EDIT2, again TheBard:

Could this be a timing issue on your part? I mean maybe your supplier pipe delivers the depleted cells faster than the extractor makes room for them, so new ones get spilled. I had this problem with my earlier builds and had to lengthen the pipe transporting the new cells in artificially so the extractor gets enough time... now of course extractor MkII (and MkIII if all else fails) are available, which are much faster, but I remember this being an issue. And I don't see you explicitly mentioning Extractor MkII or faster here, so maybe... (just a stab in the dark)

EDIT3, fixed typo