Posts by SegFaulter

Many people say that Gregtech is a bad mod because "it makes everything difficult" or "it makes you have to <this or that or some other thing> a lot", or whatever like that. They say it takes you forever to progress in the game, and once you have progressed there isn't enough reward. Those people are actually wrong, but they don't see how they are wrong.

Using Gregtech only chances a few vanilla features, usually for balance (logs -> wood -> sticks) or fixing stupid things in the game that are the product of developers' lack of knowledge about the real world (trinitrotoluene -> TNT, gunpowder -> powderbarrel). This may appear to "make the game difficult for no reason" in the perceptions of some shallow-minded people; but it actually increases the reward you get for building machines, since your sawmill is more efficient in producing wood products (relative to the the efficiency of your bear-hands), and TNT is a product of advanced chemical engineering.

What really makes the game difficult, is the complexity of the crafting recipes, but this is entirely due to how the crafting system works. When crafting, most of the time is used to move items around in the inventory, while making the item is nearly instant. You also have to remember the exact pattern for the recipe, or use NEI to look-up the recipe. This system is a "bottleneck", as you end up spending much more time moving items into the crafting grid than the time it takes to produce the item from its components by clicking on it.

If this system were replaced by one much like that in the "mobile version' of Minecraft, wherein you get a list of stuff which you can craft instead of a 3x3 grid to place items, you could craft machines a lot faster, by first having the necessary materials and simply clicking on the list-entries for each component, until you have all of the components for the machine's recipe to appear, which is then clicked just once to produce it. However, almost every mod using the existing crafting interface would either break or become deprecated, since the "grid method" would be totally replaced by the "list method". Existing recipes could still work, but they would all be translated to a shapeless form; also, multiple similar recipes could exist, either taking the same ingredients or producing the same item from different ingredients, without the problems caused by those recipes when the existing system is used (they would simply have a different list-entry in the list, instead of overwriting whatever recipe previously used that exact pattern of ingredients)

If the game has included a list-style crafting system before Forge existed, Gregtech wouldn't be "walked on" so much, since it would be much easier to craft anything regardless of what materials it uses.

Note that "crafting something" and "gaining the resources with which to craft something later" are distinct and should not be treated as the same. Sure it is more difficult to gather resources - but these are the resources which you use to produce machines and devices which would be overpowered if it were easy to produce all of the stuff used to make them. The reward is greater if it does something which you can't do with your bear-hands, but it is not so much if it is cheap to create or you could already manually do its processes as efficient as it does them. What good is it to get to the "end of the game" in a few days, having powered jetpack suit, laser rifle, rocket gun, missile base, automatic frame quarry miner and all of that, and then realize that you don't really have anything else to do except build houses (which nobody will use) or destroy stuff for no reason? (with GregTech, you can always try to fill that Ultimate Battery or construct a more efficient ore processing factory)

Note also that "bear-hands" is intended, and not "bare-hands", because bare-hands could not rip wood logs into acceptably-formed planks and rip said planks into acceptably-formed sticks, whereas bear-hands would be somewhat more effective at such a task.

Everyone knows how Greg likes to regularly do a total rewrite of Gregtech, which causes you to have to delete your worlds because all the stuff is missing or changed too much. I love this unofficial port because it allows me to continue updating to newer versions without having to delete all of my progress "just to have the new Railcraft electric locomotives" for example. Thank you for saving all of that time for us in the future, which would otherwise be wasted rebuilding our everything and in waiting for Greg to finally getting around to adding basic machines to the new and improved GregTech 47 (or whatever edition number ends up being the label for the only edition which is updated to be compatible with the latest Minecraft version)

I should also mention that the platinum ore texture is either missing or the name is not aligned to what the code references. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like:

This isn't a huge game-breaking problem, but it sure does make platinum ore look "interesting"

Thermal Expansion 2 itemducts are pretty good for sinking the outputs of several machines into a single inventory - similar to buildcraft pipes, but much better.

Applied Energistics basically turns items into energy, instantly transporting them to storage drives when coming into the network and capable of re-materializing items whenever and wherever they are needed. Inventories are connected to the network with export/import buses, storage buses, and interfaces. You can include the addon Extra Cells for fluid integration with any applied energistics network, so you can get water/lava/fuel wherever it is needed.

LogisticsPipes is a useful Buildcraft addon great for automated factories and on-demand crafting; it gives very advanced control for extracting items, routing them to the right place, and putting them in the right inventories, most notable for the ability to route all items for several separate inventories through a single pipeline, without any items going to the wrong place or not reaching the destination. Applied Energistics was originally created as a mod to complement the functionality of logisticspipes networks, and both connect very well to achieve some amazing results.

That's pretty much all there is, except for EnderIO (lets you put multiple pipes/conduits in the same block, but that can only be used practically if you have other mods with item/fluid/energy pipes to connect the stuff) and a few other mods which happen to add their own pipes/tubes/conduits for convenience when the user does not want to install other mods for that (like Mekanism)

Community-driven guide for How to Use the Internet (satire)

"Guidelines" should be written in the form: <#>. <guideline text...> and should only consist of a few sentences at most.

Only use the next numbers, which come after the ones already used, but not skipping any. Post up to 3 guide-lines per reply.

I'll start with a few:

1. Always use an alias; specifically, a good alias that is cool and easy to remember. Numbers are recommended, but optional.

2. State significant or important facts/information in the form "Every pro knows <insert statement here>".

3. Only troll if you can make a statement that seems legit until thoroughly and scientifically investigated.

Quote from McAztec

Buildcraft pipes with gates set on pulse and a few other settings can be used to pull out empty (or full) crystals or any other EU storage item and transfer them. As for the enderchest, the EnderStorage's EnderChests are best suited for this because they link together based on matching colour paterns, but I think those are the ones you meant, if not I reccomend them instead.

Yes I always use ChickenBones's EnderStorage Ender Chests because they have the color-coding feature and are compatible with pipes, unlike the vanilla enderchest

I thought electrolyzed water was transferable through pipes, as it is a fluid. Oh well, that means now the best way to transfer power between dimensions would be to charge lapotron crystals in the MFSU, automatically pull them out when full and cart them off to an ender chest, pull out the filled crystals in the base or wherever and pop them into an MFSU to drain them, then send the drained ones back through the same ender chest, to be taken out at the charging station and recharged. You would need some way to selectively extract the crystals based on how full they are.

Power can be transferred from anywhere in any dimension to anywhere in any dimension with enderchests transporting charge carriers (most efficient), endertanks transporting a fluid carrying energy (steam or electrolyzed water) and returning water (or whatever fluid you're using, in the energy-lacking state - if any other really exists), or just Thermal Expansion tesseracts if you're okay with 25% loss.
For a laser transmitting power back, it should be designed to calculate a direct line of sight to the receiver in the overworld from the laser transmitter in the Space dimension, plus some huge distance between. It can be calculated somewhat trivially; by first getting the hypotenuse of a triangle formed by the X-distance difference and the Z-distance difference between the transmitter/receiver, then getting the hypotenuse of a triangle formed by the cosmic distance compensated Y-difference between the transmitter/receiver and the hypotenuse of the previous triangle - which is exactly the cosmic distance compensated distance between the transmitter and receiver.
Using stuff from those calculations and a decent laser beam entity, you can make both the transmitter and receiver "shoot" the beam towards eachother, for the purpose of making it look like a single beam in two separate dimensions, and for burning players/mobs that go through the beam. If for any reason a block passes between the beam, it should be burned with the energy currently being transferred through the beam, which may be enough to cause an instantaneous explosion damaging other blocks and releasing fire. The receiver block should be the only block capable of absorbing the beam, so if a block nearby is exploded and the receiver is broken in the explosion, the beam should extend in the direction opposite where it was started from (the exact location of the receiver), burning through blocks at a rate relative to the energy being transmitted.
Laser beam burning through bedrock should be configurable; but if it's made possible, it would be nice to create a "lava flooding" effect to occur as soon as the bedrock is broken - the beam must then be sustained in order to vaporize the lava and prevent it from flooding the whole world, until the hole can be sealed off with a strong enough material.
The laser transmitter could also be used as a weapon, if the owner of it decides not to link it to a receiver - a location in the overworld dimension or the space dimension must be selected, but it would be simpler than looking up the receiver in a list before establishing a connection in order to begin transmission (although it would require some advanced logic, to determine where exactly along the beam-line to begin burning blocks, and if there's enough receivers in the way along the path, they should receive the beam and convert it into power instead of being destroyed - which would be even more complex). It would also be possible for the laser transmitter for power to be an upgraded model of a laser beam transmitter that's just a weapon.

There is plenty of potential involved, in what could be made out of the idea.

It would be very useful, but also a little OP because it's faster. It should be configurable, like other features, so that server owners can make it have less OP-ness if they desire.

My new base

"Sorry for the necropost; there was no sense in making a new topic when this one was still on the first page"

Would be interesting if the contents of an Egg could be removed from the shell, stored as liquid, and processed elsewhere into eatable food items. Basically the eggs would be "shelled" in a shelling machine, which yields a specific amount of blended egg paste into the internal tank. Egg paste could be piped out and stored (like any other fluid), or sent into a liquid cooking machine capable of turning the egg paste into solid eatable food items (scrambled eggs). Cheese could also be mixed in to increase the volume while using slightly less egg paste, either via a mixture of egg paste and cheese to be fed into the cooking machine (to make scrambled cheese eggs), or the cheese could be added in solid form into the egg paste via an item slot for additives in the cooking machine.
A process of mixing exotic materials (ender pearl dust) into the egg paste via an additives slot in the cooking machine could be used to cause special effects when the eatable scrambled egg item is consumed.

It would probably not be a good idea to process the egg paste into solid scrambled egg via the crucible, because solid scrambled egg is not a liquid material, and a mostly useless item output slot would have to be added. Pouring egg paste into the crucible (when it is warm enough to cook egg paste) should result in the solidified egg material building up on the inside of the crucible, where it would then have to be scraped out with a scraping tool, in order for the crucible to be useable again. If care is not taken to remove the cooked egg material and the crucible is hot enough to make fire, it would dry out the cooked egg material into a non-edible form, oxidize/charcoal itself and (eventually) catch fire, setting ablaze any nearby flammable blocks.

The liquid cooking machine would have to be advanced enough to actively mix the material as it cooks, in order to promote even cooking and prevent adherence to the inside of the cooking chamber (still-cooking -> crispification -> charcoalization -> fire)

You can set down a Chunkloader to keep active the chunks around a pump, and pump the nether lava into the Overworld with an ender tank or a tesseract. Another option is to make frequent trips to the nether with a few portable tanks, and use them to convey the lava from the nether to the overworld.
Or, you could pump water into the nether through the endertank or a tesseract, use it in the generation process with the lava, and feed the power directly into an energy tesseract or IDSU, for use in all dimensions - however, you would not have the large supply of lava available in the overworld, and water would be depleted quickly (unless you are using the aqueous accumulators in a high-output setup, instead of simply pumping water out of a nearby ocean).

It would require changes to the API to handle making UUM in liquid and solid form, thus it would make sense to be configured such that only one method is used (by the only one machine which produces UUM, and the one that uses it)
However, due to the range of options made available with the replicator and pattern storage, it may be better to make code for the API that would allow solid UUM to be used in the replicator. Perhaps the UUM could still be produced as a liquid, but it would be transformed into solid UUM when there is enough to make one lump, and in the replicator one lump of UUM would put some amount of UUM into the storage (display would be modified to have a bar-meter instead of a tank-meter)
Crafting recipes with UUM lumps could be a separate configuration option

How about File:*name* grid 48 for 48x48 images, File:*name* grid 32 for 32x32 images, and so on, like so.
For files not used in crafting grid display, name could be File:*name* 48 for 48x48 images, etc.

For example:
would be named RE_Battery_Grid_32
would be named Reactor_Chamber_Grid_32

...among other useless equipment that serves no purpose other than being totally overpowered...

Quote from hoho

Such as fully-configurable nuclear plants and crop breeding?
Oh, you were simply talking about OP ways of generating stuff out of nothing/cheap items. My bad

Also, IC2 is under massive development and not feature-complete. It makes no sense to criticize half-finished features as if they were fully developed.

Not everyone gets pleasure out of watching virtual plants grow and hoping for a mutation. And nothing I have suggested is more overpowered than a water mill, so long as it is configured properly. A machine generating energy from redstone would take significantly longer to "burn" it, and would only produce a few more EU, although enough to make it feasible for one's initial energy needs. And the life-force generator would be even more logical than watermills, which generate energy from something that does not move and is inert. You have simply failed to think about that, and have instead chosen to attack my proposal, which is an absurdly foolish thing to do. Grow up.

Regarding "massive development", there has been no stable release since 1.5.2. It makes no sense to release a feature that is not finished; that would be akin to making a generator mod which adds a generator that consumes fuel, but is missing a GUI and does not generate power. If the developers really intend not to drop the IC2 project, they should fix the stuff that is broken, finish the unfinished (but partially present) features, organize/balance things, and release a stable build that we all have been waiting ages for. Whether or not it contains every feature they want to add just yet does not matter; there can be updates in the future. The people want IC2, not some "experiment" that may crash, fail, have game-breaking bugs, or even corrupt their world.

If there isn't a stable release made soon, serious/popular mod-packers may begin to reconsider including a buggy "experiment" IC2 when they update to 1.6.*/1.7.*, as the bugs and unfinished features would make the pack users unhappy, and may make them consider using a different pack. Sure, IC2 is cool/popular, and some people might stop using their pack because the mod-packer dropped IC2, but it would be best in the long run for the pack, as there would be no annoying bugs or unfinished/unbalanced things. I don't want this to happen to IC2; nobody does. So instead of trying to incite arguments and flamewars, try doing something useful with your time and help the devs release a stable/alpha/beta/whatever "official" version. You are now considering making an argument that I should do just that and help the devs; but it would be for naught, because I have made a decision that will not permit that. I am no longer going to have anything to do with Minecraft and its mods for a while, until everything is organized and fixed. Instead, I will contribute to Minetest and make mods for it. I already have some ideas, and are going to work on those until I fall asleep on my keyboard or something. And thus I really don't care if you reply to this, or what you reply to this, because I will never see the reply, and eventually this thread will be forgotten/archived, most likely long before my return.

For the adjective issue, how about "Enhanced"?
I also have some ideas for the naming of tier 5 machines (Not any of the basic machines though, I'm out of ideas already):
Centrifuge: Cyclic Separator C-360
Electrolyzer: Molecular Disintegrator E-4908
Rock Breaker: Cryogenic Magma Solidifier R-8200
Scrapboxinator: Trash Sifter S-5800
Crop Harvestor: Kush Collector K-420
Thermal Centrifuge: Blaze Sweatshop T-6350
Ore Washer: Repurposed Laundry-Washer I-360
Do those sound good?

The problem is not really in the difficulty or challenge, but rather in the requirement of grinding for several hours to get the necessary resources to advance a bit and a lack of interesting and exotic features.
If there was added more ways of getting power that are more exotic and interesting, players would have more options for power generation and thus would be able to find something that suits their needs. For example, a generator that makes energy from redstone several times more efficiently would be very useful for those who live underground. Another generator could obtain small amounts of energy from the life force radiated from all things living, with no negative effects on the environment, just like a solar panel or a windmill, which would be useful for those who enjoy working with plants and animals.
There should also be added something to fix the energy net, like the old packet system, because the current system would scare people away easily, and is very difficult to use when the number of machines connected to energy storage > 1. Instead of a packet system, there could be a fluid "fuel cell"-like system, based on the electrolysis and reaction of special fluids (water/electrolyzed water) to transmit huge amounts of power without voltage issues. The only issue would be the amount of fluid that can move though tubes/pipes/whatever, which can be solved by either making better pipes or by converting to an indutrial-grade energy network.
These and other creative additions/editions are sure to fix the current issues with people not finding interest in IC2, but the rest of the creativity is up to you(all).

When I was slicing up watermelons in my farm, I was thinking of storing the food in cans. Then, I remembered how tedious it is to eat a can full of stuff every few seconds. So then I thought about MREs, but trashed that idea too. Now, I have come up with an idea for an high-tier food processing/storage device and containers. Instead of canning food items directly into cans, the proposed device would pulverize them into a slush, which can be pumped out and stored elsewhere, or piped directly into a canning machine, that would put the food-slush into cans. Due to the nature of the device that makes the slush, more food can be stored per can, so the filled cans would have to be different than the current filled cans, or a different container would be used.
What do you think?

Maybe a nugget or something could be (thermal) centrifuged out of about a stack of endstone. Then, that would be used to make a larger piece of iridium, which would be scanned and replicated.

Seeing that it isn't melting the stone, this might not be a bug.