Posts by Almanorek

    But that's only because the addon is set up in such a way that gaining access to iridium gives you access to all of the mod's tech. I really hate to be this blunt about it, but it's poor design. UU-Matter could be broken up into varieties, or tiers. I'm not talking about getting the stuff earlier, I'm talking about balancing the mod so that you receive your 'upgrades' in a staggered fashion, just like most of the major tech mods already do. Finding copper on the surface doesn't obsolete everything in vanilla Minecraft.

    Tier I --> Circuit + Machine + cable + generator + basic things
    Tier II --> Tier I + Advanced Machines, Advanced circuits, Lapis, Glowdust, energy crystal, carbon plate, advanced alloy.
    Tier III --> Tier II + Lapotron
    Tier IV and more --> Tier III + Iridium. I don't anything here that isn't logic. That's meant to be like that, because it's a way of adding tons of hours playing before reaching any endgame.

    The problem is that you need iridium before you can get iridium. It's like if you couldn't burn sticky resin in a furnace and the only source of rubber before you made an extractor was as a rare drop from Endermen.


    And there's clear wiggle room in the tiers. Making an energy crystal is significantly easier than making an MFE, (Of course. An MFE needs four energy crystals.) but the energy crystal is still a functioning item.


    I tried charting out how to make a lightning rod, and this is how far I got before I gave up:


    The Energyflow Circuit is nothing but a component and it still requires an iridium plate.
    No complaints about the Highly Advanced Machine.
    The Energyorb would be fine if it weren't a component.
    And the Superconductor needs two plates and can't even be placed without crafting it further.


    I can't really make any use of these things on their own. I either make the Lightning Rod in one shot or I sit on a huge pile of materials.


    Compare to the Mass Fabricator, where each ingredient has several other independent uses.

    V2.06a:
    Added Industrial Electrolyzer, crafted of Extractor, Magnetizer, IC²-Electrolyzer, Tier-IV-Circuitry and Aluminium or Refined Iron
    Moved tons of Recipes from the Centriuge to the ~10 times faster Electrolyzer.
    Electrolyzer accepts MV btw.


    After skimming through the new recipe list, I'm still just seeing a lot of making things that only exist to make new things. I count 54 dusts, and so few of them have any practical applications. I encourage more low-tier items, but, I'm not getting anything useful out of them. The so called platinum dust isn't even included, which was a bit of a let down.


    To respond to your reply, you really can't keep justifying your balance decisions with 'but you can change it in the config'. What you're doing isn't hard, it's arbitrarily tedious and labor-intensive. From what I can tell, there's a consensus that the addon's content is too inaccessible.


    And yes, powerful devices warrant iridium, but the problem is that they're all powerful. Players are split into two tech levels. They either have iridium, and have everything, or they don't, and have your two low-class machines.


    The only thing that really bothered me was this:

    Quote

    Thats intended or incomplete. Be happy that you have those Resources, when i add more Stuff later.

    I don't know how you meant for this to look, but it comes off to me as really condescending.


    On the bright side, this:

    Quote

    An OV-Scanner can help you much, as its Value for it is 10.

    This is actually useful advice. I intend on trying this out and seeing how things go.


    EDIT: My mistake, I thought the scanner outputted the highest block value. Knowing the value of the area is useless when I'm looking for a single type of material.

    So, I've had this addon installed on my server for a few days, and my first reaction is that it's conceptually amazing. I love what the Industrial Centrifuge does, as well as the Fusion Reactor. Except, I've never gotten the chance to use the Fusion Reactor. Or the Lightning Rod. Or the Matter Fabricator, for that matter. And that leads to my major issue with the addon: You require iridium to get iridium. Every single possible pathway into the addon (UU-Matter generation to craft iridium, using the Fusion Reactor to create iridium, or using the Lightning Rod to generate enough power to strip-mine quickly enough to find iridium) is cut off until iridium is initially obtained, the starting amount being 5 plates, meaning 10 ores (20 if you neglect to use one of the grinders.) need to be found. If a 64x64 quarry finds 3 ores on average, you'd need to run four such quarries from start to finish, something that could take days unless you had them all running simultaneously.


    This is terrible design for a few reasons.
    1. You act under the assumption that the player has Buildcraft. While it's a reasonable assumption, your only prerequisites for using the addon are IndustrialCraft, and by extension, Forge. Anything that can't be found in IndustrialCraft needs to independently exist in your mod.
    2. The steep requirement for iridium makes it one of the most difficult materials to obtain in any mod I've ever used. You've not only made it a key ingredient in most of your recipes, but also even harder to get. Something so fundamental should be relatively easy to obtain (See: Sticky resin) while the more powerful devices should require the rare materials. (This is why regular batteries aren't made of diamonds.)
    3. That leads to my next point. All of your machines exist on the same level. I see no reason to pick the Fusion Reactor over the Lightning Rod, or vice-versa. I guess my decision would really be based on whether I have more Deuterium/Tritium/Helium cells, or if I have a consistent way of creating lightning. The idea of a Lightning Rod is great, but the effort invested into getting one up and running simply isn't worth it to me, who hasn't seen it in action. An LV, MV, and HV version would go far to encourage me to investiage the technology, as would simpler Fusion Reactors that simply fuse hydrogen into molecular hydrogen, or maybe helium.
    4. Conversely, your Industrial Centrifuge is incredibly easy to obtain. From a design perspective, it's clearly the entry-block into the mod, just as the iron furnace is the entry block to IndustrialCraft. However, all it does it consume my cells and junk materials, and after a really long time, it pops out some other junk materials, and new, strange materials that I have no idea how to use. The only thing I'm really getting out of it are new sources of fuel, but honestly the time they take to make makes them feel more like a novelty, and the fact that there are future uses for them makes me hesitant to use what I have.
    5. I've seen somewhat similar complaints to these before, and you wave away the big one, the fact that iridium is so rare, by saying that the rarity is configurable. However, this is a poor argument. Whenever Game Informer, for example, receives a game to review, they play the game on the normal/medium difficulty. The reason for this is that this is the default difficulty, just like the values you set in your config are the default settings. This is the way that you choose to present your mod to the community. Changing it for myself is, to me, cheating. It's no different than me adding items to my inventory via NEI.


    So, my suggestions:


    1. Make iridium, not necessarily more common in spawning, but more obtainable. Add different ways to get it. Maybe have a dust that centrifuges into a small amount of iridium dust, a stack of which is compressed to become a single iridium ore. Spending days managing quarries is simply not acceptable, and it becomes all-or-nothing luck.
    2. Make iridium more visually distinct than the myriad of other light gray ores, and make sure that if it spawns in a chunk, it's visible if possible.
    3. Allow your Industrial Centrifuge to be a gateway to additional parts of a mod. In the Matter Fabricator's recipe, the only thing the Industrial Centrifuge does for me is get chrome and aluminum ingots. Meanwhile I have a chest filled with two dozen different by-products that have no use until I get highly advanced machines.
    4. Break your machines up into multiple tiers. Let the lower tiers not require any iridium.
    5. Generally make your mod less soul-crushing. The 'ooh, I want to make that' moment was ripped out of me when I checked what I needed to make a machine. And then checked what I needed to make those parts. And so on. Crafting complexity is great, but those intermediate parts better do something, or they're just an excuse to use up tons of expensive materials.


    I need to emphasize one important fact: I love the idea of your mod. I'd probably love the mod too if I could utilize it. I know I must be coming off as abrasive and extremely critical, but it's, as cheesy as it sounds, only because I know that there's so much potential here, and I know you can achieve that potential.