Posts by Chocohead

  • Any way to speed up Thermal Centrifuge heating?

    The heating is a constant rate which effectively blocks the recipe from processing until it hits the minimum value, so doesn't take into account things like upgrades. You can force it to maintain the maximum heat value by giving it a redstone signal, but there isn't any way to make it heat faster as it stands. Giving it HU has been considered for a long time, but no one ever settled on numbers.

  • Uranium re-enrichment in experimental?

    Plutonium (more importantly MOX) acts as a more logical recycling route than the breeders did, there in an incentive to run reactors for it compared to breeders that could have near depleted uranium cells crafted directly. There's a bit more reliable realism in the process too as you always know you'll get plutonium from spent fuel rods over the 25% chance of uranium cells flipping to depleted isotopes. Currently Lithium -> Tritium acts like the old breeders did for the sake of having a conversion process but whether that stays or not will depend on a couple of other factors.

  • Industrial Clean-up

    You certainly can do unstable steam reactor designs, you just have to pulse it more carefully to avoid over saturating the coolant. Especially with MOX where the heat can easily run out of control above 50%. To provide coolant is to only provide uranium to normal reactors after all, there is more in it than that.

    To say not much more was added beyond the reactor itself is both naive and wrong. The outside stuff is very much part of the whole design too, IC2 has always lent itself towards bigger factory setups rather than compact single blocks, hence you have everything that needs to be outside the reactor to gain power from it. Kinetic and Heat both remain juniors to EU as it stands yet they provide future alternatives which EU alone struggles beyond bigger numbers. There is a certain amount of optional planning to do with designs as well to best maximise heat production for superheated steam => maximum efficiency rather than the much less efficient stirling generators.


    Reactor components have always had a limiting factor of how interesting they can be alone when people will copy the most effective/common designs anyway. If there is more to the reactor than what is inside it, automation or not, blind copying is at least a little harder and so people might think about what works out best for how their base is laid out too rather than merely what the guide they're following did. In theory at least, people can still cut corners if they want.

  • Industrial Clean-up

    Quote from ShumnayaBulka

    Guess what I was trying to say. Nothing exciting/different (in a good way) was added.

    There were exciting things like the steam reactors, just without a concrete description of how they're meant to work setups based on experimenting had no guarantee of working after updates (a couple of which did indeed break existing setups). Things would probably be more exciting if people had an idea how they worked as it opens them up more as an option without the hours of trying it out in creative first, and it would've made the changes between versions easier to understand.

  • [IC2 Exp][1.10.x] Advanced Solar Panels v4.0.4 - Hey I remember that!

    So it is. I think it's from a capitalisation issue within the assets, so shouldn't be too hard to fix once I get time.

  • Industrial Clean-up

    Quote from ShumnayaBulka

    If actions of "completely change things several times" brought only "things would not really work anymore", that's one epic fail, what else can I say...

    The point was things changing so that anyone using them how they used to stopped working, not that changing things broke them generally. The moral of the story is that people don't restart worlds all that often but do seem to jump for new things if they seem exciting/different.

  • Industrial Clean-up

    Quote from ShumnayaBulka

    Servers are getting wiped, players start playing from a scratch, broken setups can be dismantled and rebuilded. With it's content amount and reputation, IC2 have quite some weight to ask for recreating a world, if you get what I mean. After all, it's IC2 Experimental, for such title you guys sure lack spirit of adventure (of experimentation) on your way. I'm not that full of myself to deny reasons behind it (not a dev), but try to stop treating the mod like a president's daugther for once.

    Whilst we certainly could, all you have to do is look back a couple of years to when we did. With 1.6 and especially 1.7 (when experimental was first a thing) there were several times where things completely changed and would not really work anymore. Sure some people would restart or rebuild their things, but for many people it just puts them off ever making it in the first place if there is the chance it will all need rebuilding sometime later. Playing Russian roulette updating is not the most fun thing to do either, already seen several mods which have crash issues from being updated along side other mods/Forge (something IC2 at least has avoided).


    Part of the changes in build 93 open the possibility of keeping the old blocks with new ones placing differently at least, never tried it for potentially three way tile entity resolving though.

  • Industrial Clean-up

    There's been 53 builds since the original post (5 more than the existing 48 up to that point), and many of those have had features in rather than just bug fixes. So you know, it's not like we haven't tried at all. Doing some of the suggestions are limited by not breaking existing setups too, others not so much :whistling:


    Release versions have reasonable changelogs now at least, speaking of which we could probably do with another soon.

  • Skeletons continuously spawning with quantum armor?

    On average only 10% of zombies and skeletons will get special armour, with only 10% of those being quantum. If you're seeing them all over either you're especially unlucky or something very strange is happening. Neither the nano nor quantum armour is charged either (from memory it doesn't properly protect non-player mobs even when it is) so all you're battling against is the inherent protection of diamondish protection. Whilst that certainly makes them tougher, they should be killable without hundreds of hits.

  • Change Ore processing to give more benefits to adding ore Washer and Thermal Centrifuge

    Nerfing the macerator opens up the possibility of pushing people away from the ore processing chain completely, there isn't much of an incentive to make two machines (one of which needing a water supply) when another mod's single one can also double ores with by-products. Your logic is certainly true how things would ideally work, but compared to other mods the macerator isn't cheap to make (nor especially simple with different the crafting components) so it just has being incredibly simple to use and fairly cheap to run. From the context of deciding what to make, unless you are IC2 inclined to be producing EU people might rule out the macerator even as is. When IC2 is the only option of course this changes, but this is a minority case of when IC2 is available (probably less so in terms of when it actually gets used but that's another problem).


    The ore washing plant and thermal centrifuge have to offer something extra to justify being used rather than merely making the macerator alone a worse option. Like you mentioned for silver and especially for uranium they are necessarily when you've got IC2, and I don't think any other mod has replicated the thermal centrifuge's mixed uranium output yet either. Beyond that only the thermal centrifuge has other practical uses like for getting more CF powder directly without needing an ore washing plant too, but even these are limited beyond what you need the products for. Boosting their ore output would be a reasonable excuse to add some more expensive things at higher tiers (thus counterbalancing more OP production), but that doesn't get around them functioning as glorified macerators.

    The thermal centrifuge has really needed to be connected to the heat system in some way for a long time, but without real heat pipes of any form there isn't anything creative that could be done with them (other than just needing both EU and HU at the same time). The ore washing plant could be connected to the kinetic system to tumble the ore inside as an excuse, but again there aren't axles so that would just be needing EU and KU. Perhaps these avenues at least could prompt them to do more (any suggestions what? ;)).


    That's my point of view of it at least, hard to gauge opinion of the wider player base when you don't really see most of it any more.

  • Suggestion: [Steel shouldn't be in steel oredictionary]

    How other mods choose to make things is something we can never control, but steel is normally something that is at least above the most basic tier. Taking Railcraft or Immersive Engineering the requirements to make their steel are more in line with IC2's own for example, compared to Thermal Expansion that is considerably easier (but even then it's not immediate). Steel isn't vital to the IC2 tech tree too; it provides useful things like rotors but most things don't need it, so alone shortcutting steel doesn't progress you too much further.

    At the end of the day it is easier to settle for it being potentially easier and it can be MineTweaker'd out if it becomes a particular issue to overall balance so that normally if people do go with RC or IE they can use their existing blast furnaces. People complained after all when it was refined iron but worked functionally to steel, so maybe you can't win either way ;)